Epiphany V - Sunday February 5th, 2006
(by Rev. Glenn Brown)
A heritage is not just history; it is the story of its meaning to you today.
I sometimes wonder whether it is preferable to live with the daily excitement that comes with really expecting something new, or the culmination of effort, at a particular time in the near or distant future, or whether it is preferable to just do whatever comes to mind because there isn’t anything in particular that makes one aspect of the future more important than another. I don’t know whether it is more or less stressful to have something to look forward to, or to have no particular future in mind. But having something to look forward to was certainly a part of the times of Jesus and the early Church.
The expectation of John the Baptist were dark. He, like many others of his time and place, expected the very end of time soon. Was he excited? Definitely! Worried? Definitely! He believed that people of his time had to make an immediate decision to change their ways and make themselves ready for final judgment, for the end of the world was near. If we take his message to be a literal one, then clearly John was wrong, for the world and history have not ended. If we take his message to be a metaphysical one, well, he may be right – perhaps one is judged finally upon the time of death, and, none of us knowing the time of our death, we are well cautioned to repent now and live right for however long is measured out to us. We have every reason to believe that John’s expectation was quite literal and immediate, and that the early Church continued to hold that expectation for quite a while. And we are sure that this expectation was shared by many. There was more to it: the understanding that from the beginning God had been working out a Plan, had been working with people and creation toward a definite purpose. That was quite exciting, the idea that the whole of history has a purpose and a sense of fulfillment.
I’m not sure that our society today has any expectations of the future, nor any real sense of direction or purpose in the past. This difference from the time of our beginning as the Church, has its consequences. I think that the effects would be the same whether we were to look at all Creation, or just your life. So let’s take the personal route.
How far back in your own history can you look, and find something that anchors your sense of self? Do you have the sense that who your great-grandparents were has something to do with who you are, or why you live here rather than in Alberta, for example? Do you have the sense that where you are is the result of your totally free choice, or do you feel you were “led” to some extent? Do you feel that everything was your choice, or that there is some destiny in your past?
If the latter, how great is your destiny? Do you feel that who you are now is the wonderful culmination of everything your great-grandparents, your grandparents, and your parents, worked for? Do you have a torch to pass on to those who follow? A heritage? Something so grand that those who follow you will feel that you as well as your forbearers worked so that they may be where they are? Or is it that each generation had their lives, somewhat affected by their recent forbearers, and you have your life, and your children will have theirs, and so on, but there is no real sense of destiny or long-term purpose.
If your sense is the first, then to understand the Biblical culture you need to add the sense that the family purpose and destiny, part of the cultural and national purpose and destiny, had been going on through all history, and that God had been there at the beginning and present all throughout, right up until today. Is that your sense? Then you are well tuned to the Bible.
If your sense is the second, then the Biblical expectations and excitement will be very difficult to grasp. Even if you have the sense of forbearers, but not all the way back in history, then you will still have difficulty grasping the feelings of Biblical times and Biblical stories.
Do you have the sense that God knew you from having watched your bones take shape in your mother’s womb? And that God has had a continuing interest in you ever since? That you personally were wanted by God? Then you are in tune with the Biblical perception. If not, if your sense of God is of One yet to be discovered, of One who has been irrelevant until such time as you discovered God for yourself, then you will find it difficult to grasp the Biblical perception.
You can see immediately that if you haven’t the Biblical perception of your past, you will have great difficulty getting excited about the future – can the future possibly be leading up to something if there has been no particular purpose to the past?
Now I am going to assume that most people here do not share the Biblical perception of the past nor of the future, and I will explore with you the question, if we do not fundamentally look at history and future the same way as the Bible, if we do not have that strong sense of heritage, what are we to make of our religion?
Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that when Jesus and later, Paul, began spreading the Gospel to people outside their own ethnic and spiritual histories, they did two things for us: they made it unnecessary for us to adopt the heritage; and they made it possible for us to accept the heritage as well, should we choose. The earliest church quickly chose to inherit the heritage as well, and so our continuing interest in not only the New Testament, but also the Old.
And so, if we today choose to ignore the heritage, we probably do not look forward to a time of ultimate fulfillment, when the world will actually get it right, we will all worship the real God with the result that we treat ourselves and each other and all creation with the respect and love and care that God wills. And we probably regard the past as a quilt pattern of golden eras and tragic mistakes and horror. With the heritage, we can look down the road behind us and see where humanity went off course. Without heritage, we look in the same direction, but see no road and only scattered events. Now my question is, how far behind you can you see such a scene, or how close can such a scene be to you before you must find a road in order to stave off a sense of chaos?
I and friends who are of the same age, beginning to bury our parents, sometimes find ourselves thinking, “I would really like my children to know more about who I am and who I have been than I know about my parents. It is time to write an autobiography about what my life and times have been like. Probably this doesn’t matter to them now, but it will, later on. I’d like them to know me.” We get to used to thinking of our kids’ potentials, of their future, that we sometimes do not bring their pasts to bear so they can perceive the importance, the heritage. We do, we tend to move forward with our kids, and we look in awe at the seemingly limitless possibilities that lie in their futures. Possibilities that are so limitless that we probably don’t look for what ultimate fulfillment might be, because we hesitate to imagine what it might be for them. Let alone for us. Let alone for the world.
So we easily slide into the theology of the end times, when we die and go to heaven. Too much Christianity takes that as the whole focus of the religion. That’s what’s wrong! There is this huge gap between the Old Testament heritage of the wonderful days that are coming, and contemporary Christianity’s emphasis on heaven. What Jesus preached was/is the Kingdom of Heaven which is present with us now and which stands ready to enable us to do the wonderful things so longed for in the Old Testament heritage. And you know what? We don’t believe it! Because, as I’ve quoted before, “The dominant theologies of the moment…undercut Jesus, muffle his hard words, deaden his call, and in the end silence him.”
Maybe it is because we are a people without a heritage that this is so.
I want to return to a theme which I have promoted from time, the theme of building some myth in our society. Partly because the dominant society in our culture bases almost all its mythology on heroes of wars, it is difficult for us to see a model for national myth in the absence of war. And yet we are accomplishing wonderful things. I’m just not sure that we envision wonderful things yet to come, and we don’t weave stories which bind our current accomplishments together with our future.
For that matter, we are not even good at reading the signs of the impending disasters. There is little sign that in Canada, or anywhere else, we are going to follow John the Baptist’s injunctions to repent, to turn around, to change our ways so as to avoid the terrible consequences of AIDS in Africa and climate change world wide. We don’t really take the future seriously, either for good or for ill, because we do not hold a heritage that expects things in the future. It may be that we see God in the past; I think we don’t see God in the future. So thoroughly has science convinced us that all that we have and all that we are is quite accidental and inconsequential in an indifferent universe.
You know why I keep offering the faith formation groups? Because it is important to choose your expectations so that you will know what to believe.
Now, you may ask, so what about judgment day? Is this not really what the Bible points to for our future? In answer, I ask that you look again at Jesus. He certainly believed in it, but his ministry was not based on the proposition, get ready for judgment which will happen soon. It was a) get ready for judgment because it may happen any time, even after a very long wait; and b) it is none of your business when it will happen. Secondly, I invite you to consider the fact that it has been 2,000 years since Jesus’ time. Isn’t it time that we consider that God may have no intention of ending things? We individually will end, and have our time of judgment, and, as always, that may happen at any time, so it’s best to cultivate our faith in order to be saved from eternal death. But there is definitely time to get things right, to give up giving up and asking what can we possibly do? There is much to do, and the result of worshipping God is supposed to be doing it, with the expectation that ultimately wonderful things can be achieved in our lifetimes and in the future!
So, let me invite you to worship God and work for the future, as wonderful as we can possibly imagine it!
