Corporate and personal

 There's a board game that I got for my birthday the year before last, called Nemesis. You don't have to know too much about it, save that it is one of those secret role games. At the start of the game, everyone appears as though they're on the same team, but as the game develops, people may or may not stay on that team. You are dealt two objective cards at the start of the game, and when you discover your first alien, you have to ditch one of those two objectives, and keep the other, thereby deciding which of those objectives is going to be how you win.

The objectives are divided into two categories: Personal and corporate. One of those will be a thing that you have to do for your own personal wellbeing, and the other is what you do for the bigger picture; for the team, for the company, for whatever. 

Now, I bring this up to you because of the interesting apocalypse that Jesus brings up in the Gospel reading - he moves from talking to the daughters of Jerusalem, to talking to the thieves on the cross. And that move is a move from a corporate apocalypse to a personal one. That corporate apocalypse is the apocalypse where everything ends. The sky rolls back like a scroll, the sun is like sackcloth, and the moon as blood. Dogs and cats living together in peace and harmony, mass hysteria. That's the one that you think of when you think of apocalypse, right? How Jesus comes back to judge the living and the dead. Everything finishes and wraps up, and it's all over. That's the corporate apocalypse, because it hits everyone, all at once, and nobody is spared.

Of course, there is a personal apocalypse too, you know. And the reading that we had from Sunday is jarring that way - the two thieves on the cross are not exactly all that concerned at that moment about the corporate apocalypse. It's not a big deal for you to work through exactly when the end of all things is going to roll around, if you're going to be dead in a few hours anyway. That is, unless the entire apocalypse is going to happen in the next 90 minutes, it's not going to matter too much. Jesus essentially gets two requests from the two men. The one says to him 'if you're the son of God, take yourself off this cross, and take us down with you.' Now, that's a request to get off the cross, yes, but to step back into the world that is leading you back to the same place. By stepping back into the world, you're not avoiding the personal apocalypse forever; you're delaying it for a while. There's a zero percent chance that stepping down off that cross grants you immortality permanently. But, that fear of the personal apocalypse is enough to drive you off that cross, and back into the world. In other words, you're not ready to die, but honestly, when will you be?

What's the right time for you, in your opinion. What's the right time for you to wrap it all up, to say 'yes, I'm good now. That's enough time. It's enough time with my family and friends, I've seen all I want to see, I think I'm good now.' Sadly, the one thief wanted to delay the personal apocalypse, but of course, even if you do, the corporate one is coming for you.

But what the other thief is asking for is a removal from the system altogether. He's well aware that escaping the apocalypse on the cross is not an escape forever, but just a delay. The fun is going to find you eventually anyway. There's no long term escape, nothing permanent while you're still in the system. Instead, he asked Jesus to remember him, when He comes into His kingdom. That request is one to not just get you off the cross for a few years, but to get you out of the problem permanently, eternally. 

I'm going to go back to this scene from the movie Tremors. The cast are in a bad state, and are going to have to get out of it by throwing a bomb the way they want to run. But they only have one more bomb, enough to get them to the rocks that they were sitting on, but not enough to get them to safety. The conversation between them was that even if they could get back to the rocks, they'd die of thirst in three days. You're going to have to come up with a better solution than that.

Ultimately, if you're looking to avoid the apocalypse completely, not just delay it for a while, you're going to look to not just get back to the rocks, but to make the problem to away altogether by killing the graboids. If you're looking to avoid being lost eternally, you're going to look towards Jesus bringing you into his kingdom, where rust and rot don't corrupt or destroy. Where the scarcity of this life is not something that can eat in. Where the apocalypse won't despoil nor ruin. If you're going to escape, you're going to have to escape completely.

Reform

 Back in the 1990s, there was a political party in this great nation of ours called the Reform Party, brought to you by Preston Manning. Of course, I didn't understand much about politics back then, still don't to be honest, but I was aware of it as a political force. That party long ago merged with other right of centre parties, but it still seems like it's around, like a movement in your peripheral vision. Gone when you look straight at it, but almost visible in the background.

Reform for us in the church, though, always brings up Reformation, which is the festival that defines us as Lutheran Christians. For Luther did not seek or want to bring about a new faith, a new religion or anything like that, he sought to reform what was already there. And in reforming it, it was an effort to save and rescue what was good, and to abandon what had gone bad. And you know, you can get a lot more done that way than by pretending that everything is all good all the time.

For if you pretend that something is all good and needs no help, then you're going to find out very rapidly that the rot is going to spread. Unchecked problems lead to more problems, you know, and the more unchecked the problems are, the more of a problem they're going to be. Rot is rarely confined, you know. Decay does not understand limits. Once rot and heresy and false teaching begin to appear, they don't tend to leave on their own accord. Pretending that there are no problems to be addressed leads to the rot spreading and growing, and a reformation requires an admission that things are not the way they should be. 

A long long time ago, in web 1.0, there was a website that I went to called dieoff. It is long since gone now, partially because its prediction of the end of the world by 2010 did not manifest in the slightest. But the quote that the website presented was this one from Thomas Hardy 

We have to be prepared to look at the worst if we are to go towards the better. And in the case of Dr. Luther, it was an examination of the worst, to look fully at the rot that had gotten in in order to come out on the other side better. What was the worst? The church had lurched into non-Biblical teaching. And that church had to be reformed, not eliminated or forgotten. What was bad had to be removed, in order that what was good could be retained. And this process of reformation is a bigger picture of what happens in the individual Christian. For we, for the most part, do not live our lives strictly according to Biblical teaching, though we should. We do not do only what the Bible requires nor suggests. Instead, we frequently go against the word of God. We do what pleases us. As Christians, we should live according to the principles of scripture, but elect not to. And every week, we traipse back to the sanctuary of God's house, and make a simple demand - as the church was reformed, so too ought we to be. We have had a look at the worst, our scheming, gossip, unclean living and so on. We have had a deep glimpse at the rot, and you know what, we don't like it. That's why we come to church and say to God fully and clearly 'yeah, I did some things I don't like and am not proud of.' And that's when God, the real one, forgives those sins, strips them away, and leaves you behind.

Back in the days of dieoff, I was actually frightened by the concept of forgiveness of sins. Really. What I was frightened about was the notion that Jesus would actually take my sins away, as far as the east was from the west, and that I would get Ookpiked. In case you don't know, from Dennis Lee's book 'Alligator Pie,' there was a poem about the Ookpik, and it goes thusly.

Ookpik

An Ookpik is nothing but hair.
If you shave him, he isn't there.

He's never locked in the zoo.
He lives in a warm igloo.

He can whistle and dance on the walls.
He can dance on Niagra Falls.

He has nothing at all on his mind.
If you scratch him, he wags his behind.

He dances from morning to night.
Then he blinks. that turns out the light.

That concept of there being nothing left once the shaving was done was how I thought about my sin. If Jesus can take it away, and he does, then what's left? Is there anything left at all? And when Luther and his contemporaries looked at the church at the time, a similar thought must have occurred to them - if we remove all the rot and disaster, what's left? What's left indeed. But they did, and when they did, they discovered that there is still beauty, truth, joy and wonder left. What was there from the first place, brought out from underneath all the rot and decay, and presented as it should have been from the beginning.

You too, if you are to be reformed, once all the rot is gone, the sin and shame, is there anything left? You bet there is. And what's left is you, the You that God shed his blood to redeem.