Avoiding the apocalypse

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal Church on November 18, 2008

You know that the church year is coming to an end because we talking about the world coming to an end with Malachi warning that “the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble” Then Jesus says “The time is near! – there will be wars, and earthquakes and famines and plagues.” These are all signs of the end of the world as we know.

This kind of “the end is near” language has been around for a long time – Malachi’s words come to us from three thousand years ago. He and his fellow prophets, Amos, Isaiah, Micah, and others, warned the powers that be with such predictions. They saw the powerful and they saw those that the powerful were supposed to protect and help. They saw a discrepancy that they couldn’t reconcile between God’s justice and that of the world and thought that it could only be resolved by cataclysm. They were right in that it takes a whole lot to wrest power away from those that have it.

What all of the prophets and Jesus knew is that justice is God’s bottom line. Abraham Heschel says this in his most important book on the Prophets; “Justice is not an ancient custom, a human convention, a value, but a transcendent demand, freighted with divine concern. It is not only a relationship between man and man it is an act involving God, a divine need…It is not one of His ways, but in all His ways.” The prophets more than believed this, they knew it, they felt it, they lived for it. But they looked around and it wasn’t what they saw.

Again from Rabbi Abraham Heschel; “The prophets were shocked not only by acts of injustice on the part of scoundrels but also by the perversion of justice on the part of notables.” In the Torah, Israel had a blueprint for a just and righteous society but it was being ignored by those in power. There was no justice or righteousness.

The ideas of justice and righteousness are necessarily intertwined. Heschel says, “Righteousness goes beyond justice. Justice is strict and exact, giving a person his due. Righteousness implies benevolence, kindness, generosity. Justice may be legal, righteousness is associated with a burning compassion for the oppressed.” Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the 20^th century’s great theologians said “Justice was not equal justice but a bias in favor or the poor. What a concept.

Rabbi Heschel goes on “The prophet’s preoccupation with justice and righteousness has it root in a powerful awareness of injustice. That justice is a good thing, a fine goal, even a supreme ideal, is commonly accepted. What is lacking is a sense of the monstrosity of injustice…the prophets were remorseless in their unveiling of injustice and oppression, in their comprehension of social, political and religious evils.” No wonder most of the prophets ended up dead.

“Justice is scarce, injustice is exceedingly common.” That is why the prophets expected God to do something about. If you understand that God wants justice and righteousness and there is none, and if you understand that God is powerful, then you assume that eventually God will do something powerful about the injustice that you see all around you. In the eyes of the prophet – that sensitive social critic – injustice creates a need for the apocalypse. The apocalypse will bring about the reversals – the proud and haughty and powerful thrown down and the meek and lowly lifted up.

How might we avert such a catastrophe? We have tried various systems of laws, various forms of government, various religious teaching and yet we still have a world in which laws are passed to allow corporations to do business with little consequence when people suffer from their processes or products. We have a world in which Alex Rodriguez will be paid in incomprehensible amount to play a game for six months out of the year while ordinary folks can’t afford their asthma medicine. It’s enough to make a prophet’s head explode! The dire visions of the prophets will come true and not because of God throwing lightening bolts at us from above but because injustice will destroy us. Martin Luther King was absolutely right when he said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere.” Happy contented people do not become terrorists.

Is it expecting too much of us to get it? Is it expecting too much of us demand that our common lives be ordered in such a way that the least among us are protected and cared for, that the environment is respected and worth making a few sacrifices? What is stopping us? I’ve been reading Ken Wilbur’s Up From Eden a book about human evolution and in it he talks about how we as a species have developed, from a species that was barely aware of how different we are from the other animals to one capable of profound thought and an ability for deep reflection. What makes us different from the other animals is not our opposable thumbs, but our consciousness. We are the only bit of creation that contemplates its own existence. Consciousness is more than being awake and aware, it is everything about how we perceive and process information and how we react to it. It involves our brains and our souls. The more we learn about consciousness, the more we understand what holds us back from justice and righteousness, not that we are incapable of them but they are certainly not our first response.

The prophets did not know what we know now about the human animal. We have been given the capacity of self-awareness and that consciousness has allowed us to evolve – we know the consequences of our actions and we can choose better. The ills around us are products of unevolved thinking and decisions. we will be able to evolve and the world will not need to end in cataclysm because we will learn how to make better choices. It will take time but we can and will evolve into just beings.

It takes a lot of work to make love and compassion for others your guiding principle, particularly those with whom you have historic enmity. Your brain makes connections and sets your thoughts and reactions in motion before you even know it. So to have a thought that is different from self-oriented, preconceived reactions, you must stop and reason with yourself. Funny but we don’t always do that and so the world chugs along in such a way that makes prophets rail until we stop and decide to think and do things differently. Free will – that great divine gift – is our ability to anticipate the consequence of our thoughts and actions. We have the free will to choose justice and righteousness.

We are approaching the season of Advent – the time of preparation for the miracle child. And I mean miracle child because it is the Christ mind that came into the world in a child that gives us the ability to overcome our business as usual kind of thinking. In Jesus, more of the Divine will is available to us than ever before. In him we accept our destiny as God’s means to bring about justice and righteousness. In him, we make our lives examples of thanksgiving instead of grasping, we make our hearts temples of love instead of fear. In him we can make our world one of peace and sharing. In him we can turn to the prophets and say “thank you, we’ll take it from here.”