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Age to Come

OUR VISION OF THE FUTURE IS WHAT SHAPES US HERE AND NOW

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A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California

22nd Sunday After Pentecost, November 10, 2019

Proper 27C: Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38.

I read recently that in the ancient language of the Assyrians and Babylonians, looking at the past was phrased as looking in front of you; looking at the future was looking behind you. It’s the reverse of our English usage, but it makes a certain sense. You can look at what’s already happened. The future is always something of a mystery to us until the day it turns into the past. 

That doesn’t keep us from imagining the future, of course. Maybe it will be just more of what we already know and experience. Maybe it will be a time of surprises, good or bad. Probably some of each! In any case, our interest in the future isn’t just a matter of idle speculation. What we expect of the future has a lot to say about how we live our lives in the present. A boring future is one thing. A foreboding one another. A future with an element of hope yet another. And a hopeful vision of the future is what all our readings this morning are about.

Sometimes the future vision is quite specific and immediate. Haggai kindly dated his prophecies for us to the year 520 BC. That was just eighteen years after a group of exiled Jews had returned to Jerusalem, with the encouragement of the Persian emperor, to rebuild the city. They’d built homes for themselves, but the centerpiece of that city was still missing: the temple still lay in ruins. It was Paris without Notre Dame, London without Big Ben, Washington D.C. without the Capitol.

But this group of settlers—relatively few in number—were daunted. They couldn’t see how to move ahead until Haggai gave them a picture of new and splendid future. He addressed his prophesy to all of them, particularly to their two leaders, Zerubbabel, a Davidic prince who was governor of what was now the Persian province of Judah, and Joshua the son of Jehozadak, who, as chief priest, was the religious authority for the community.

Haggai starts by admitting that the situation is discouraging: “Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?” He tells the people to take courage. And holds up a promise for the future: 

For thus says the Lord of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth . . . the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor. . . . 

It sounds extravagant, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t inconceivable. What he was predicting was that Jerusalem would once again become a great pilgrimage site. People would come from far and wide to worship there and they would bring their gifts and Jerusalem would become rich once again. And, indeed, with a few brief lapses, Haggai’s prophecy has proven true ever since. It’s still true today, when Jerusalem is a holy place for not one, but three religions.

None of this subsequent history would have been possible, had not those few returned refugees found the courage to embark on a seemingly hopeless task. Haggai’s vision of the future made the present different. It offered them hope. It helped them achieve things they hadn’t thought possible.

In our reading from Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, we get a different picture of how present and future may interconnect. According to Acts of the Apostles, the church at Thessalonica had experienced persecutions almost from the moment of its founding (Acts 17:1-10). Here were people who had embraced a vision of the future that would culminate in “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him.” But now, they’re growing uncertain. Life, for this community, has been difficult. And divergent speculations about the coming of Jesus leave people confused. 

Some people are even saying that “the Day of the Lord is already here.” That must have left people thinking, “Then, you mean this is all there is? This is as good—as holy, as joyous— as it’s going to get?” Would that mean that their faith and hope and endurance were all wasted? Some must have thought so, for Paul takes great pains to sketch out a more complex vision of the future. It doesn’t move in a straight line. The day of the Lord will indeed come, but not before the future first takes a turn in the opposite direction. Things will get worse before they get better. It will get very dark before it gets light. 

For the Thessalonian Christians, then, the immediate future isn’t about some great project, like rebuilding the temple. They don’t have the power to change the world around them. But they do still have a hope and therefore they have the power to maintain the beloved community, the community of trust and hope and love. That’s no small achievement in any era, including our own. It’s about hanging on through thick and thin, maintaining the primacy of love in a society that thinks things like power and wealth are more important. Paul urges them, “So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm. . .”

So, we’ve heard Haggai offering a vision of the future that helped people to build in the present. And we’ve had Paul offering up a very steely-eyed vision of a future that still holds hope, but only after an intermediate period of trials and tribulations, and he offers that vision to help people to hold firm by what is good and true. And, finally, our reading from the Gospel of Luke opens up the biggest question of all about the future. What kind of future comes after death?

Now, the Scriptures have no single, simple answer to that question. The scriptures of the Old Testament don’t even have much interest in it. And the scriptures of the New Testament use a variety of images in speaking of it. 

And if I look around the world today, I find no unanimity about it either inside or outside the church. For myself, I’ve never had much trouble with the idea of the resurrection. My whole life seems to have been full of resurrections, small and great, and there’s no obvious reason why that pattern should cease with the death of the body. But I’ve also known devout Christians who don’t believe in the resurrection at all, who feel that one life is quite enough for anyone. And just to complicate matters a bit further, I read this week a short blurb in The Christian Century (11/26/2019) about a long-term British study of atheists and agnostics which reported that “about three-fourths of the atheists and nine out of ten agnostics are open to supernatural phenomena, including astrology, the existence of supernatural beings, and life after death.” So human beings, Christian or not, are basically all over the map about this topic. 

The Sadducees, in our gospel this morning, objected to the idea of resurrection because it could create an anomaly, a situation that the Torah specifically forbids. A man was not allowed to marry his brother’s wife except under the specific condition of the brother’s having died without an heir, in which case, the next brother in line is obliged to do so. In the resurrection, however, the woman could not be the wife of one of the younger brothers, because that would violate the prohibition on marrying the wife of a living brother. But she couldn’t return to being the wife of the eldest brother, because the Torah specifically forbids a man to remarry a former wife who has been married to another man in the interim. 

But Jesus objects that they are imagining the future as simply a continuation of the present. But the future is inevitably different. Jesus doesn’t try to map it out in detail. He simply says that in the age to come people will not die and there is therefore no occasion to produce heirs and no need for marriage. In the age to come, we are no longer described as son of this person or daughter of that person. Each of us is there in our own right. Every person is equally present to God. Every person! God is the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and they are alive to God. And we, too, will be alive to God in the age to come—this remote future hidden from us in this world.

And if we will be alive to God in the age to come, what does that say about who and what we are here and now? It makes each and every one of us a person of extraordinary importance here and now, a person beloved and strengthened by that love. It places each and every one of us in friendship with God, here, now, and always. 

Paul put it this way in his Epistle to Romans:

We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. (Rom. 14:7-8)

And if our future is a life of communion with God, so is our present. It is a life of trust and hope and love. Our vision of the age to come is what makes us who are now as Christians, as saints, as people who live in the here and now with generosity and courage and joy. Perhaps we may have the opportunity to do great tings, like the returned exiles of Haggai’s day. Perhaps we may encounter times when we can only hunker down and hold firm against the corruptions and temptations of the world around us, like the Thessalonian Christians of Paul’s time. But in every age, we can and will be shaped by this assurance from Jesus: “God is not God of the dead but of the living, for to him all are alive.” Yes, you and I. Yes, now and always.

THE JOURNEY FROM ONE AGE TO ANOTHER

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Sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Berkeley

FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER, May 19, 2019

Year C: Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

We’ve heard four wonderful readings from scripture this morning. And I want to begin with our Psalm, a great celebration the wonders of this world. We often think of the Bible as focusing only on humanity. But actually it begins with the creation of the whole great world around us. We human beings only come tagging along on Day 6. As science, too, would agree, the world did just fine without us for a very long time. 

The Psalm is a great, all-embracing hymn: it calls on every part of the world to sing God’s praises, starting with angels, sun, moon, stars. Then it moves down to the earth: sea monsters in the deeps of the sea, lightning, hail, snow, fog, mountains, forests, animals of every kind—and, bringing up the rear, us. We’re part of something much greater—the whole universe, praising God by its very existence. And we, too, are invited to add our voices, puny though they me be when compared to all the rest.

It’s all about the beauty and wonder of this world we live in. But we know that this beauty and wonder are admixed with other things as well. For one thing, the beauty of the creation stands alongside its vulnerability to destruction by human carelessness and greed. And in other ways, too, this is a world of sorrows as well as joys. We live in an age when, for some of us, human life has become more secure against things like famine and plague; but others are suffering severely. And none of us is spared the reality of deep disappointments, tears, pain, our own failings, and, ultimately, death. 

And we seem to be entering on an era in which the forces of destruction are renewing their influence. The demonic powers of hate and greed seem to be gaining renewed power. I don’t mean to take anything away from the praise and delight of our Psalm: I suspect everyone here has felt the joy and gratitude this Psalm gives voice to. But we have to admit that it stands alongside the other aspect of this world: the sorrows of our life. Neither reality erases the other. Both are part of our experience, and our Psalm voices the one side superbly well.

Then, in our reading from Revelation, we heard these words: “the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.'” But this doesn’t mean a rejection of the wonders of the first creation. Like Eden and like the world around us now, the New Jerusalem needs and rejoices in its trees and its river. But there’s one great change from old creation to new—the absence of anguish:

Death will be no more; 

mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

. . . . . . 

God will wipe away every tear from <your> eyes.

The Age to Come, as seen by John, is the same world that the Psalmist rejoiced in—with the exception that it is a world at last fully capable of unalloyed joy. Joy—that most elusive and unpredictable of human goods; not simple happiness, but elation, the state of being raised above ourselves in delight. 

And this comes about, we are told, because God has decided to make God’s home among mortals. God will be unfailingly present. God will wipe the tears from every eye. To the thirsty God “will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.”

Beautiful images. Powerful images. And, of course, images are the only language we have for talking about this New Creation, this Age to Come. We don’t live in it yet. Our human languages don’t have words for it. But when we reach deep inside ourselves, we know what we’re seeking: a life where suffering and grief no longer haunt us, where we can drink the pure water of life from the spring, where we know unalloyed joy. 

We don’t live in that Age, but can experience something of it even in this age—moments of the Age to Come breaking into our lives here and now. And we may sense that these are the moments when we are most truly ourselves. It’s not surprising that people have, for millennia, worked to live their lives in ways that point forward to this truly human existence. For it is not a question of simply waiting on the Age to Come to be revealed in full. The Age to Come is something we want to experience, in whatever degree possible, here and now as well. We want to live under that banner, in communities that acknowledge its values. But it can be hard for us to discern the path.

Peter offers us the perfect example: he had a very uncomfortable time discerning his path. The Holy Spirit had to twist his arm with that vision. And then twist it again. And then, just to make sure, twist it a third time. She told him that he would have to give up his revulsion for Gentiles, his revulsion at the idea of eating with unclean people—maybe eating unclean food. She prepared him to understand Cornelius’s totally unexpected message and risk the newness and strangeness of the Age to Come.

Cornelius was a “God-fearer,” a Gentile who found himself attracted to the faith of Israel. But he was also a Roman officer, who could not undertake to become Jewish. He was suspended between two communities that tended to despise each other. Romans looked down on Jews as a subject people. Jews, for their part, would not so much as eat in a gentile house because the food offered would not be pure. Cornelius had friendly relationships with the Jewish community. But we know from our own times that such friendly relationships are often fragile and dependent on the public mood. Just a few decades after this story, Jews and Romans would once again be at war with each other. 

And here’s Peter, under divine duress, going off to Caesarea with no idea what this is all about. He enters Cornelius’s house, stays there, eats there. And, finally, swept away by God’s generosity in pouring the Spirit out on this foreign household, he sees that, in God’s eyes, he and they belong to the same human family. And he acknowledges that by sharing with them the gift of baptism. It was one of those moments of surprise and elation that we call “joy.” It was the Life of the Age to Come breaking in on Peter’s own time and place and creating something new, a community where the barriers between people could and did fall. 

And, yes, there were other people in the Christian community for whom it was simply too shocking. They coiuldn’t accept it till Peter managed to convey to them something of the wonder and joy of that event. Luke tells us that their objections were overcome “and they praised God, saying, ‘Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.'” They, too, came to see that the Age to Come is at work here and now, working to reshape us and the world we live in.

Jesus summed it up just a few words. He acknowledged that there is no simple way to step directly from This Age into the Age to Come. “Where I am going,” he says to his disciples, “you cannot come.” They will have to go on living in This Age, even while longing for the Age to Come. But he also gives them a clear direction about how to find and travel the road thither: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” 

And, as Peter later learned to his astonishment, Jesus meant more than just “Love your fellow disciples, love your co-religionists, love the people in your little world.” Peter learned that he might have to find ways to love even people he had dreaded and avoided and thought ill of. We step from this Age to the Age to Come when we begin to figure out how to live in a loving way here and now. 

Daunting prospect—right?—trying to live with love in the difficult world we find ourselves in just now. And we fall down a lot. But sometimes, by the grace of God—perhaps even a little arm-twisting from God—we take a step forward; we learn what it is like to be citizens of the Age to Come in our own times. We enter the joy of this world: the wonders of the skies and the earth, of sea monsters and land animals and people of all sorts, even those very different from ourselves. We work for a world more truly humane, more deeply in accord with God’s love. And we practice loving one another, knowing that God loves us all and is waiting to wipe away the tears from all eyes and to offer us a glass of clear, cold water from the spring of life. 

That’s the vision toward which we hope to move. 

God foster us on the journey!