The end

The church year operates on a different cycle than the calendar year.   Think of it like Rosh Hashanah, or Chinese New Year, these events that let you know that there are other ways of marking a revolution around the sun, that are not based on our traditional calendar that we view as normative now.  This last year, Rosh Hashanah bridged September and October, while Chinese New Year was in February.  The church observes its new year on the first Sunday in Advent, where the church year begins anew.

But the celebration of the church new year is always preceded with what the book of common prayer calls "the Sunday next before Advent."  You could also call it the last Sunday in the church year, but that lacks the same gravitas as the method mentioned above.  Gravitas is important for this conversation, because unlike other celebrations of new years, the church year is preceded by a discussion not of the end of the church year, but a discussion of the end of everything.

The church seasons are cyclical, to be sure.  Advent moves into Christmas which moves into Epiphany, and the calendar continues from there.  And every time we get to the end of the church year, the new church year begins, just like clockwork.  But there is a significant difference, because this is not a cycle in perpetuity.  This is a cycle that has written into it the idea that one day this cycle will end.  That is, what we think of as a permanent cycle of back and forth, in and out, day into day, is concluding, wrapping up eventually.  We are on a cycle now, of seasons and successive ages, but that isn't eternal.  Before we talk about the coming of the king of kings as a baby in a manger, we end up talking about his return.  And that ends everything.

To understand this further, you have to understand that the universe that we live in had a definite beginning, and will surely have a definite end as well.  This is a topic that has not always been too terribly well considered by the secular world, who have resisted it for some time.  Sure, now we know about the Big Bang Theory, but there was a time in which that kind of theory was resisted, sometimes heavily, by the scientific world.  The scientists of the time (not universally, but certainly including some well known ones) pushed back against the idea of the Big Bang, precisely because it suggested creation.  It suggested that everything we see around us can be tied back to a single, creation moment, before which nothing could be known.  This was known not as the Big Bang theory at its inception, but as "The hypothesis of the primeval atom." And this theory, before it was taken seriously by Hubble, Einstein, or anyone else was discovered by this guy:

Does his shirt look familiar to you?  It should, if you're reading this blog.  That's Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest, soldier, and physicist who worked in the Vatican observatory.  And it was his calculations that drew the entire universe back to creation.  At the time, the scientific community believed that the universe simply had always existed, would always exist, and that there was no creation moment required.  Once Lemaitre had proposed his hypothesis, all that changed, and the world had to deal with the fact that the math checked out, and that there was nothing, then there was a lot of something.

I mention this because that's what the last Sunday of the church year reminds us of; not only that God made everything, which he did, but that the forms of this world are passing away.  This universe won't always be here.  It, by itself, is not eternal, it does not endure forever and ever, and both science and faith agree on that point.  Where they disagree, however, is what they have to say about the beginning and the end.  

In the faith, we believe that the universe began when God made the heavens and the earth, way back in the book of Genesis.  We believe also that the universe will have an end, and we think about it and ponder it every time the church year draws to a close.  Sure, the seasons, the years, it's all cyclical for now, but it's not an eternal cycle.  Eventually, Christ returns, and the cycle ceases.  When the director stands on stage to thank the cast and crew, the play is over, and cannot begin again.  That world is gone, and a new one begins.  As Christians, we believe in what the Bible says, that there will be a new heaven, and a new earth, for the flawed, broken ones will pass away and be gone.  And that means that the world that is running out of gas, where it will run out of heat, run out of time, will all be gone eventually, though nobody knows when.  But you're not basing your hope on the temporal universe that you see around you.  You're basing it on the fact that there is a force, a God who made the universe, who existed before it, and who will exist after it is gone.  Everything else becomes ultimately meaningless, because as much fun as you're having now, on a long enough timeline , everyone's life expectancy drops to zero.  

The thief on the cross next to Jesus of Nazareth got that time was running out.  He wasn't talking about a long timeline, he was talking about a very limited one indeed.  A couple of hours, maybe, then it's lights out.  When he reached out to Jesus, he did so as someone understanding maybe not that the universe was ending, but that his time in it was.  And his plea to Jesus was to say 'Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.'  Your kingdom which is not of this world, which is not tied to the world that we have that is falling apart, grinding down, and wearing out.  Your kingdom which is outside of time and space and which is the only hope I have left.  For a modern, enlightened, scientific people who have the ability to look forward in time, to contemplate not only our own mortality, but to contemplate the eventual heat death of the universe, we have to figure out which kingdom we want to be a part of.  The kingdom of this world which is rapidly drawing to a close, or the kingdom that is not of this world, that exists outside it and is not subject to its rules.  The last Sunday in the church year gives us time to contemplate that, the presence of the cycle, and the fact that when the cycle draws to a close, it is He who makes the world who will still be around once it is gone.  He remembered that thief, and the promise that he made to the thief is the same as he makes to us - that we will be with him in Paradise.

All Saints

There are some things that become unavoidable if you live long enough.

All of a sudden, one day, your suit that you bought gets used a lot less for weddings, and a lot more for funerals.  All of a sudden, you notice that people your age have died.  They're not supposed to do that, are they?  That's for old people!  And then, one by one, the members of the generation older than yours start to pass away as well, and then, as may surprise you, an uncle or aunt somewhere dies, and you realize that you're now the older generation.  The generation older than yours is all gone now.

This is all quite shocking, and happens to most of us, once again, if you live long enough.  The longer you live, the more you will tend to outlive your peer group, to the point that no matter what a great guy someone is, if they're an octogenarian or better when they die, they're not going to fill the church up too much for their funeral.  A 17 year old who dies certainly will.  Now, this is because the older you get, the more people that you know and love die.  Death is a fact of life.

This is why a Christian celebration like All Saints' Day becomes more important as you get older.  For the younger person, it is intensely important to hear and know what Christ does for you - how he forgives sins, how he promises life everlasting, how he divides your sins from you as far as east is from the west, all that good stuff.  And this is all good and true, of course, but to be honest, there are  other things to consider on a day like All Saints' Day. And this is the one day where I don't talk about what God has done for you.  I talk about what God has done for them.

Them? Who?  You know who.  You know who because you have been told at some point, somewhere, that someone you love has been taken to the hospital, and it's not looking good.  You may have been pulled out of a hospital room by a doctor into the hallway for 'the conversation,' in which the talk has moved from treatment to comfort.  You may have spent hours at a bedside in a hospice, listening to machines beep until they stop beeping.  And you very probably have gone to a funeral.  You have walked into the church where there have been baptisms  and weddings, but now the tears are of sadness, because a loved one is not coming back.  You may have walked out to a graveside on a crisp autumn afternoon, and had the funeral director give you a flower from the arrangement on the casket right before it is lowered down into the ground, and then gone from sight forever.  You may have had the responsibility of placing the urn into the ground or into its niche, which is the last act of earthly service you can provide for that person, and then that space is sealed, and there is nothing left that you can do.  If you haven't had any of these experiences yet, you will. Just give it enough time.

And this is why we speak the way we do on this day.  This is why we have the sorts of conversations that we do around this day, in this space, because what God does for you is important, but so is what God has done for them. This needs to be a major guiding force for you, it needs to be a major consideration more now than ever.  Honestly, it's always better to deal with an issue before it becomes a crisis.  It's good to look at your roof before it rains.  It's good to deal with your blood pressure before your heart attack.  And it's good to think about what God does for those whom you love and cherish before they're gone.

Maybe you will, maybe you won't, but in all the ins and outs of life, you need to think about and consider the line from the middle of the beatitudes, where Jesus says 'blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.'  Well, how on earth is that supposed to happen? Honestly, I don't think we really truly consider this that often, but the only real comfort that you can get from the world when someone dies is to be told that they lived a good life, and they were a good friend.  But that will make you feel worse if it's true!  If it is true that someone you love lived a truly good life, that they worked hard, were a wonderful husband or father, wife or mother, friend, aunt, whatever, you'll just feel worse to hear that.  The best you can hope for is that you will eventually forget how great they were.

Or, you can turn to the one who gives peace as the world does not give.  Who forgives sins, and covers over unrighteousness. You can turn to the one who binds up the wounded, and who promises resurrection, and life everlasting.  And that is real, genuine comfort.  It's comfort that does not go away, and it works better the better the person is.  If you have someone who is genuinely good, who was a good person whom you loved and cherished, then the reality of the resurrection will be actually better and sweeter the more that is true.  And Christ knows this.  This is why the resurrection is the major point of the Christian faith, because all these humans on earth are unique, and cannot be replaced. The comparison that I made on Sunday was that although each person is unique, they all go into that great cloud of witnesses, just like a snowbank is made of a great pile of snowflakes, indistinguishable until you extract just one and realize that it is fully unique.  And for every single person about whom you have said that you would give up anything to see them again one more time, Christ did give up anything, in fact everything.  He gave up everything that he had for that solution to manifest and to be made real.  The cross of Christ was where that issue was fully and finally resolved, and life was guaranteed not for a while, but sealed for eternity.

So on All Saints' Day, we face these losses with confidence, with strength, and with vigor, remembering what we forget for most of the year.  We usually think about what Jesus does for us, but something of supreme importance for us to remember is what Christ does for them too.

Boo!

Happy Halloween everyone!

But if you're a Lutheran, the 31st of October has other meanings, you know.  It's the day when someone knocked on a door, with a hammer, and instead of getting candy, he brought down the corruption of the church.  The moment that Dr. Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church was a big moment.  It was the moment which began the reformation, but it was not the be all and end all of the movement.  What you need to know is that Dr. Luther did not go out of his way to start anything known as a reformation that day.  Do you know what he came to do? He came to dispute about the sale of indulgences.  

Go ahead and read all 95 of the theses.  I'll wait.  Most people, of course, haven't read them, and there's a good reason why not, which is the same reason that most of us don't read the book of Leviticus that often either - because it deals with something that is not so much of a pressing concern for us these days at all.  Luther's theses are there to dispute about indulgences and the sales thereof.  This seems like a minor issue, of course, since the last time you heard anyone talk about the sale of indulgences was probably 365 days ago.  But Dr. Luther, in nailing the theses to the door actually did something far more profound than just nailing a document or getting the sale of indulgences stopped.

The point that I have made before is that you can't pop part of a balloon.  If you blow a balloon up nice and big, then stick a pin in it, the whole thing blows out.  You don't just lose part of it.  In the same way, what Dr. Luther did was to poke a hole into one particular part of church teaching; the sale of indulgences.  What that did was to pop the whole thing.  He did so by nailing the theses to the balloon of church teaching, understanding that these people worshiped God with their lips, but their hearts were far from him. This wasn't really about the sale of indulgences, though it first appeared to be, rather it was about where the church gets its teachings and authority from.

In the Gospel reading, we heard from Jesus saying to those who were around him that if they would continue in his word, they would know the truth, and the truth would set them free.  Now, they fought him on that one, refusing to just say that his word was truth.  Instead, they fought him, pushed back, insisted that they didn't have to follow his word, and that, you know, their own rules were probably just as important as the word of God.  That happens so fast, and so regularly, that we almost don't even notice anymore.  Think of who it was who opposed Jesus the harshest, and realize that it was the Pharisees, the chief priests, the scribes and the teachers of the law.  In other words, the people who should have known the word of God the best. If you skip ahead to those who opposed Dr. Luther the most, it wasn't the Turks, you know . It was the Catholic church of the day, the Bishops, the Pope, the curates who all had the scriptures, and who all in theory should have known better.  Which they did not.  They did what people tend to do, which is to worship God with their lips, but to have their hearts far from him.  They value the traditions of men instead of the laws of God.  This is why the Jews in the New Testament opposed Christ, who is God in flesh.  They did so because Jesus was leading them back to the old morality, the old morality that didn't change ever.  But they kicked against him.  Do you remember the time where he made mud and placed it on the blind man's eyes?  He was immediately targeted by the Pharisees for having not kept the sabbath.  What did Jesus do to break the Sabbath?  Like a rogue, he combined solid and liquid ingredients which is very much not allowed according to the Mishna, which is the oral law.  And once you start having oral laws, you can have the position that although you follow God and his commands, well, you can only understand them through the lens of human rules which all of a sudden override the word of God.  Things like how on the sabbath you can't combine solid and liquid ingredients, or pluck a strawberry.  You can't pick up your bed and walk, you can't start or extinguish a fire.   

And you can't get married as a priest.  And you can't read the Bible in your own language.  

Stop me if you've heard this one, but this seems a lot like history repeating itself.  When Dr. Martin went to the Wittenberg Castle Church, it wasn't to start a new branch of the faith, or even to inaugurate the reformation.  But he essentially had to, because his position was going to lead there anyway.  His position of saying that the faith of the church had to follow what Jesus says in John 8, that we have to continue in the word to know the truth, and the truth will set us free.  But that isn't new.  It's old.  But our desire to veer away from it comes up every 500 years, you know.  You're on the same cycle you've always been on.  There are reasons why there are dozens of denominations out there who all claim some modicum of spiritual truth, but who say vastly different things. How is that possible? Some consult the word, others do not.  That's how they veered away from the truth 200 years ago, 500 years ago, and today.  But the injunction of Jesus stands.  If you continue in his word, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.