Sifting through Signs

 A Sermon preached by Dean Thomas Breidenthal on November 16, 2003

Readings: Daniel 12: 1-3; Mark 13: 1-8

Just over a week ago many of us braved the cold, mid-Autumn evening air to watch a perfect lunar eclipse. I must admit I am a pushover when it comes to this kind of thing. Last summer, I climbed the hill to the Graduate College night after night, just so I could get a clear view of Mars. The other night, I half expected to have to walk a ways to catch the full moon in shadow, but when I walked out the back door, there it was. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it as the circle of darkness slowly crawled across the golden face of the moon – very slowly, as it turned out, much to my family’s annoyance, as we had a house guest and everyone but me was focused on the wonderful dinner we had just sat down to. But how could you help but gaze at the sight – especially when the eclipse was total, and the darkness covering the moon became suffused with redness? I suddenly understood better the famous imagery in Joel’s prophecy of the last day: “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will turn to blood” (Joel 2:31).

As we approach the beginning of Advent – only two weeks away – the Church’s thoughts turn toward the end of time. As in today’s readings from Daniel and Mark, the readings we hear will focus our attention forward to Christ’s final victory, and their tone will be increasingly apocalyptic.

Apocalyptic literature is all about signs and portents. The sun darkened, the moon turned to blood – eclipses and earthquakes and cataclysms all signal the final showdown between good and evil, light and dark.  Yet when Jesus’ disciples ask him what will be the sign that the last battle is beginning, he seems to tell them not to worry about signs, but to tend to their own business:  they are to remain faithful, ready to let the Holy Spirit speak for them.  They are to “keep awake,” for they do not know when the master is coming (Mark 13: 35).  In other words, perhaps they shouldn’t be looking for signs at all.

These days, eclipses don’t impress us much, since we possess a  post-enlightenment understanding of the natural world. We have come to expect famine and war and earthquakes, indeed, some have become experts in getting relief to the victims of disasters.  Certainly, to us “rational” creatures, the rhythms of the natural world,  the frequency of all kinds of disasters, and humanity’s habits of cruelty to one another are not signs of anything:  they are just the way things are. Nevertheless, the apocalyptic imagination is perhaps less foreign to us now than it was before September 11, 2001 and the world events that have followed on its heels. We are  all living with  the high anxiety that became our companion that day, and which continues to accompany is this weekend as we hear of new casualties in Iraq, Jewish worshippers mown down in Istanbul, and a shattered Ramadan in Riyadh.

So perhaps we can see ourselves in the disciples’ question. Perhaps, if we are honest, we see that we too are tempted to seek what Jesus is warning us against: safety and certainty at any cost. If that is the case, then we too are well-placed to fall prey to the false messiahs he predicts will come their way: “Many will come in my name, and saying ‘I am he’” (Mark 13: 6). He is suggesting that his closest disciples – precisely because they are inclined to indulge their apocalyptic fantasies, precisely because they are therefore opening themselves to a high degree of anxiety – are in danger of seeking false security in spiritual agendas and modes of thinking that masquerade as Jesus’ own teaching but in fact  lead them very far from their original trust in him.

Perhaps you know the story about the man who refused to let God take care of him on God’s own terms.  A dam broke, and as word spread throughout the valley below, people hurried to save themselves.  But one man refused to leave his house. “God will take care of me,” he said.  Just before the flood waters reached his house, his neighbors urged him to hop in to their waiting car and flee, but he stayed put.  When the water began to fill his house, he climbed up onto the roof.  Soon a young man in a boat rowed by and urged him to jump in.  “No,” the man replied. “God will take care of me.” So he stuck to his roof, and the boat headed off. Finally, as the waters began to lap at the top of the roof, a helicopter approached, and a rope was lowered.  “Grab on and we’ll haul you up,” the pilot shouted.  But the man refused. “God will take care of me,” he said.  Finally, the flood covered the house, and as the man began swimming madly to stay afloat, he cried out to God, “Why didn’t you save me?”  A voice from heaven answered, ”I sent you a car, a boat and a helicopter.  What else do you want?”

Surely the lesson here is that this man didn’t trust God at all:  he had a plan for his rescue, and stuck to that plan despite evidence that it wasn’t working.  God sent him the evidence of God’s care and love for him, but, because he insisted on the implementation of his own plan, he ignored that evidence.

Let me push this a little further.  This man’s piety, his loyalty to God, and his insistence on being an example of pure faith and unassailable lifestyle get in his own way – indeed, they get in God’s way. His rejection of help from his neighbors looks like radical trust in God, but in fact it is a cover for his own prideful assumption that he knows better than God what constitutes a legitimate path to safety and new life. He may have started out as a new believer open in every way to the movement of God’s spirit in his heart, but he has ended up as an old believer who cares only about his own theological point of view and his own credentials as a Christian.

Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood.  Many of us here today, myself included, have worked hard to integrate our faith with intellectual integrity.  We study, we listen with a critical ear and look with a critical eye;  we analyze the sacred texts, and want to be sure that we can give a reason for the faith that is in us. Nothing wrong with that – it’s a wonderful and life-giving enterprise, and bears within it the opportunity to live faithful, loving lives. Using our heads is not a spiritual problem. The problem comes when we refuse to accept God’s immediate action in our lives until we have decided how that action fits into our own preconceived and often non-negotiable framework for interpreting God’s action in the world. When we do this, we substitute a false messiah for the living God.

Let me hazard one example of this problem. Often we seek ethical certainty around particular issues as a substitute for the moral vision we already have been vouchsafed in our encounter with Jesus Christ. When the world around is falling apart, we lose our tolerance for moral ambiguity. We want rules first and principles second. We want decisions now, not protracted discussion. We are not patient with irresolution, and we find it hard to see the difference between moral relativism and a provisional suspension of judgment.

The Christian community has been plagued by this sort of impatience from the beginning.  The basis of the Christian moral life is obvious: we are to embrace our connection to every other human being, and love the stranger and the enemy just as much as we love ourselves and those closest to us. But how that should play out in the arena of personal choice and public policy is not so obvious. Sincere followers of Jesus have debated for two thousand years about the place of sexuality in our lives; the proper role, if any, of private property in a just society; and whether or not it is permissible for a Christian to bear arms. These are legitimate questions, and our struggle to answer them can help us become clearer about the implications of our own encounter with Jesus Christ. But our answers cannot substitute for that encounter, and our own moral certainty about any given moral issues cannot and must not become a litmus test to decide who has really accepted Jesus Christ and who has not.

Am I suggesting that moral certainty is bad? Certainly not. But it becomes bad if it keeps us from putting our whole faith in the living, loving God, and if it is achieved at the cost of openness to the living spirit of Christ. If we embrace moral certainty to the exclusion of God’s possibly-surprising will for us, we will, like the man on his roof, simply have gotten in God’s way as God tries to help us. 

In the final analysis, when the disciples ask Jesus what will constitute the sign that the end is near, they demonstrate their failure to perceive that the sign has already been given to them. Jesus himself is that sign. He is God’s word for us:  a righteous word demanding repentance for our cruelty to one another; an atoning word offering forgiveness and peace unilaterally and with no strings attached; a word of invitation, summoning us to a life of discipleship, wherever that may lead.  This word does, indeed, portend the end of the world as we know it, since to experience the judgment of Christ, to be the beneficiary of the cross of Christ, and to hear Christ’s call to follow him is to stand at the brink of a new world. As Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5: 17).This word is all the certainty that we are given, but it is all the certainty that we need.

The image of the flood is all too real these days. If you’re like me, the temptation is to close ranks, to minimize the grey areas, to leave as little as possible to chance and, above all, to have a plan. That’s good advice as far as worldly goals go, but it is very bad for our relationship with Jesus Christ. Seeking the wrong kind of certainty from our religious faith is like demanding that God rescue us on our own terms rather than on God’s terms. That kind of arrogance distances us from the living presence of God’s spirit in our lives; it also distances us from the world of real people all around us, in whom, despite the grim global picture, God is truly at work for good.

It is not wrong to look for signs, but less us look for the right signs, and let us look in the right places. Wherever God has touched us with the assurance of forgiveness and the impulse to generosity – that is where we are sure to find, again and again, Christ, who is God’s signature, written on our hearts. Wherever the neighbor meets us with the offer of help or a demand for help, there we are sure to find the face of God, redeeming the human community from within. God is not far from us. The signs are everywhere to be seen. Let us read them and be strengthened for the work that lies ahead.

Amen.