Easter 7 May 8, 2016
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor “What if Time
Has No Beginning and No End?”
Revelation 22:12-14,
16-17, 20-21 12“See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me,
to repay according to everyone’s work. 13I am the Alpha and the
Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” 14Blessed
are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of
life and may enter the city by the gates. 16“It is I, Jesus,
who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root
and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.” 17The
Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let everyone who hears say, “Come.” And
let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life
as a gift.
20The one who testifies to these things says,
“Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! 21The grace
of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.
They say that there are two
kinds of people in the world. There are those who divide the world into two
groups and then there are those that don’t. It is more than just a little bit
of an over simplification but if you will allow me a bit of license, you can
generally say that religions can be divided into two groups.
Western religions tend to
believe that time is linear, that the world had a beginning and it will have an
end. We are born, we live, we die and then we face a final judgement. The earth
itself was created, will spend a few years under the sun and then will come to
a cataclysmic end.
Eastern religions tend to
believe that time is circular, constantly being reborn, renewed, or
reincarnated. You can look at nature and draw either conclusion fairly
convincingly. Every spring, the earth seems to literally be reborn from the
apparent death of winter. Every day, the sun both rises and sets. A great deal
of life is cyclical. But our existential experience of life is rather more
linear.
That is, we are only young
once, and it seems to me that it was for a very short time a long long time
ago. Those of us who have loved pets have had to watch the life cycle of our
dogs, cats, or horses play out much more quickly than our human lives. Some
breeds of dogs can go from being puppies to dying of old age, beset with arthritis
and gray hair in the course of a single decade.
Traditional Christians have a
somewhat blended view of time. They often accept, quite literally, the Genesis
account of the creation of the world and of life, and they accept the
Revelation’s apocalyptic view of the final judgement and the end of the world
has we have known it. However, the end of the world is just the beginning of an
eternal straight line of time that goes on forever.
The Apostle Paul had a very
rigid view of existence as having certain periods of time, governed first by
the Jewish law and now under the reign of the risen Christ whom Paul and many
of his associates clearly believed would be coming back to earth within their
own lifetimes to bring the final chapter of world history to a close.
The early church produced many
apocalyptic books, of which our book of Revelation is only one. In the end of
the first century, when both Jews and Christians were being slaughtered by the
Roman empire, this world seemed to be beyond redemption. There was no mere
reform or renewal that would be enough. They were ready for this world to end
and an entirely new world to begin.
At many times in history, when
wars or economic hardship made it seem like the world is beyond being
effectively reformed, religious people tend to cast their hopes on a total
reboot… that this current world order will meet a cataclysmic end and an
entirely new world order will emgere.
Over the past 12 years I have
made a lot of trips to Nicaragua working with the relief NGO, the Rainbow
Network. I love the people of rural Nicaragua. I have tremendous empathy with
them in their poverty and in the challenges they face. But the most frustrating
thing about my Central American friends is the fact that they live in a jungle
where fruit trees grow easily, many just volunteer to spout up in the jungle,
but almost no one ever plants any.
In one village where I
frequently visit, Las Rosas, in the Matagalpa region, there is one lady who
lives in a shack on top of a hill surrounded by lime and lemon trees, she has
oranges and grapefruit, and avocados, and bananas, as well as a garden with
beans and squash. And many of the people in the village I talk to will say,
“Boy that Lucy sure is lucky.” And I keep saying, “It wasn’t luck. She planted
those trees years ago and look how healthy her children are!” And they will
reply, “Yeah, she is really lucky.”
Now there are two reasons why
these people who live in a very fertile jungle area are always in danger of
starvation. The first is that they are the product of two hundred years of
virtual slavery in which European descendants came and bought their land and
forced the inhabitants to work on their coffee plantations. They are ten generations deep in not knowing
how to grow edible crops.
They grow coffee to be sold at
market by the plantation owners. The land owners pay the workers with rice and
beans. So, that is one issue: the villagers don’t own the shacks where they
live and they have been trained to eat what is given to them and they have forgotten
how to grow their own food.
But there is another reason and
is that their agriculture based indigenous religions were replaced with
Catholicism that taught them to be obedient to their masters and to their
government and in return they would get to go to heaven. In the past century,
American Protestant evangelicals have swooped in and the ones that have been
successful were the ones that taught them that this world is coming to an end
and a new world, a heavenly world, is where they should invest their hope.
Nine out of ten sermons
delivered in the rural churches is about the claim that we read from the book
of Revelation this morning, that Jesus is coming back, probably before the next
month, and so planting a tree that won’t bear fruit for a few years is a waste
of time. Maybe even planting beans is a waste of time.
There are times when it seems
like religion simply doesn’t matter. It doesn’t seem to have much of an impact
on people’s behaviors. It seems like most people can go to church and recite
creeds about Iron Age mythologies but they go back to their jobs as chemists,
engineers, biologists, architects, and economists and appear to have been
unaffected by stories about a flat earth, a talking snake, or threats of a
coming apocalyptic end of the world.
But I can tell you that this
kind of magical thinking has influenced our culture, the culture of Central and
South America, and the culture of the Middle East. If you believe that this
world is slated to be replaced in the near future, you may take little or no
interest in changing anything, from slavery to poverty to the actual
malnutrition of your own children.
If you believe that this world
will eventually be destroyed and replaced by a heavenly Kingdom, then you might
be willing to totally destroy the environment for short term profits from strip
mining and burning coal, to burning down rain forests, and genetically
modifying all of our food.
And if your religion appears to
have been given a perpetual second tier status in the world by super powers,
then blowing yourself up or even blowing up your own country in the process of
both gaining superiority and gaining personal eternal salvation starts to make
sense.
The evangelical imperative of
progressive religion is to help the world reject this linear view of time that
teaches that there is an eternal world somewhere that matters much more than
this world matters. As long as Muslims, Catholics, Evangelicals and
Fundamentalists keep beating the drum that says that this world doesn’t matter because
it is temporary and the world to come is all that matters, then we end up with
a tacit acceptance of poverty, warfare, the destruction of the environment, a
perpetually impoverished majority and a forever smug aristocracy that can’t
quite believe that most people are so gullible as to keep allowing them to get
away with murder.
I never get tired of the very
succinct way that Voltaire summed it up: Those who can persuade you to believe
in absurdities can convince you to commit atrocities.
I don’t want to begrudge anyone
a belief in life after death if that is their personal choice but what I beg of
Jews, Christians, and Muslims is to get your head out of the clouds and look at
what you know is real. Based only on what we can see and know, all of eternity
is here so you do not gain a glorious eternal life by dying in a war, you
simply destroy your own existence while destroying the existence of others.
God is not going to bring about
an apocalyptic end to life on this planet but we can! We can bring an apocalypse
through nuclear war, pollution, and exhaustion of the planet’s resources.
Our faith should unite us, not
divide us. Our faith should inspire us to work for justice, to sacrifice for
compassion, to strive to make the plight of the poor our own, not lull us into
complacency!
I believe that if we can
convince our generation to stop believing in absurdities that we have a chance
of getting them to stop committing atrocities. Surely God knows it is about
time that we got this right.
