At age forty, I left corporate America to follow the call to ministry.
I was well educated, having been steeped in a refined broth of rationalism and critical reasoning, read all the appropriate European authors, perched my fanny on the erudite ruins at Delphi, and stumbled wide-eyed through Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem holocaust memorial. I was experienced as a world traveler who had skied the Alps, gone elbow to elbow with Chinese businessmen for platefuls of ugly fish in Kuala Lumpur restaurants, and lived amongst the “lost Woodstock generation” who shuffled around the west side of Greenwich Village in their Birkenstocks, avoiding exposure to the sun. I was even married with three young kids, the youngest a mumbo-jumbo yacking, couscous tossing extrovert.
I was ready for anything and knew it. What’s more, I knew that I knew it.
In seminary, professors work hard to relieve students of all their goofball, folkloric misconceptions about why and what we believe. They teach you that the Bible doesn’t really say what you think it says unless you’ve personally translated the old papyrus scrolls from the original Greek or Hebrew for yourself, dissected the grammar, and consulted all the scholars who’ve spent devoted and low paid lifetimes figuring out things like whether Paul actually wrote the letter to the Ephesians or if it was written by a follower or even an impostor.
Now I was really ready, theologically and Biblically locked and loaded.
And then began my hospital pastoral care rotation, clinical field work that could burn the corn-based wax shine off Helen of Troy’s golden apple. This is where you face the test of learning whether you can render all that theological and Biblical understanding into something meaningful in people’s lives. People who don’t care about the Greek or the Hebrew or the authorship of the letter to the Ephesians.
People who just want some answers.
The nurse administrator who ran the desk on the blood and organ diseases floor was sharp as a tack. Her smooth, perfect skin was somewhere between the color of maple syrup and green tea and her eyes never quite rose above the horizon of her reading glasses. She could see people like me coming before we’d even driven into the parking garage or waived our newly laminated security badges for the first time. She could eradicate that waxy shine from your golden apple faster than battery acid.
I introduced myself and asked for a patient list.
“Whatcha bring me?” she monotoned without looking up from her paperwork. There were several lists sitting on her desk.
“I, I beg your pardon? I’m sorry. Do you mean some kind of authorization or something?”
“I mean a muffin or a latte or something. But you don’t appear to have anything like that. Do you? No treat, no list.”
I stammered something unintelligible as she took a long drag off a diet soda.
“Go down this hall to room 41. Start there and work back. Pay attention.” She finished these gruff instructions by skewing her lower jaw slightly sideways and poking her tongue against her molars in a kind of disgusted way. I started down the hall.
Something I didn’t know about a diabetes patient on welfare is that either the person has feet or doesn’t and entering room 41, I immediately noticed that the sheets at the foot of the bed were curiously flat up to the knees. I swallowed and stepped forward to greet Irene with some sort of empathy not found in the doctrines of either Calvin or Luther. I was trying not to gaff and say something stupid like “How are you feeling?” or “I’m the chaplain today, is there something I can do for you?”
I spoke her name and asked where she was from. I asked about her family. I asked about her home and how she had gotten to the hospital. I asked when she might be released. I asked anything I could in order to avoid talking about her medical condition and her missing limbs. She was eighty-nine and lived in a small town in the mountains north of our city, had no children, a brother in a distant state, and no other family.
After a while, I asked if she wished to pray.
“No,” she mumbled weakly, taking long, slow breaths every couple of words. “It’s too late for prayer. I just want to know something. I want you to tell me something chaplain, pastor, whoever you are.”
“Okay,” I responded quietly, reluctantly.
“I just want to know why I’m still here. I’m sick and not gonna get better. Been in here three times this year. All they can do is amputate again.”
I said I was sorry and that she was probably still in the hospital because the doctors still had some hope.
“Those doctors don’t have hope. They’ve got walls full of degrees and microscopes and clean white jackets but they’ve got no hope. Anyway, I don’t want to know why I’m still in the hospital.”
Her eyes moistened and streams of tears silently slid down the sides of her ashen face and into her matted, white hair as she lay flat on her back.
“I want to know what only you can tell me, chaplain, pastor. What you have to tell me. I want to know why Jesus is leavin’ me here this way. Why won’t he just take me to heaven today, to be with my Mama?”
Showing posts with label heaven. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heaven. Show all posts
Friday, April 04, 2008
Monday, August 06, 2007
Unfinished Business
Revelation 21:1-7
Presenting Engagement: life and plans cut short.
Imagine yourself travelling along your life’s journey, working to live out your life’s plans, to live out your hopes and dreams, when suddenly some catastrophic interruption occurs that dashes all those plans, curtails all those hopes and dreams!
I thought about that this week when the interstate bridge over the Mississippi River fell during heavy traffic between Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.
Dozens of automobiles and several busses were travelling on to some particular destination when tragedy struck. They were going home from work. They were going home from school trips. They were going home from summer vacations or just setting off on vacations. They were taxi drivers delivering passengers, truck drivers delivering goods. They were social wokrers going out to help improve the lives of others. Some were simply folks going on an errand on the other side of town.
There were all these people who’s lives were interrupted by catastrophe that resulted in disabling injury or even death. Plans delayed indefinitely. Plans disrupted permanently. Business that now goes unfinished. Busy people in busy moments of play or work or chores whose hopes and dreams for the years to come collapsed with the concrete slabs of a highway bridge, smashing into a swirling river bottom sixty feet below.
I don’t know if the most distressing part of it all is the death and injury or the unfulfilled plans of the accident victims.
Of course, this tragedy reminds me of a number of other disasters involving lives lost during travel. I think of the morbid tragedy of the Titanic. Of airplane incidents. I recall a classmate who perished on an airpalne the summer after our seventh grade year. I recall a college classmate who drowned during a whitewater rafting trip. And we can never forget the victims of 9/11, those who were just arriving at work in the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon and those who had boarded early morning flights on business trips or personal travel. All lives cut short in the middle of plans, hopes and dreams.
The most famous story of such a disaster is probably Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The novel was written in 1927 and was made into a popular movie by the director Quentin Tarrentino several years ago.
Wilder’s novel tells about a fictional bridge collapse in Peru in 1714 in which five people perish. This bridge had been regarded as the finest and most “high tech” bridge in the entire country yet it fell carrying these five people, all on their way to specific destinations, filfilling prescious life plans. Five people living out their hopes and dreams. Five people caught in the middle of their life journeys. Five people whose plans were cut short by disaster.
When asked about the purpose intended in this plot, Wilder revealed that it was a question: is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?[i] In other words, is there some supernatural agent of fate that assigns us each a destiny that we can’t know? Or are we in control?
And that’s really a basic question of life, isn’t it?
I mean, here we are making great plans, hoping and dreaming wonderful things off in the future or working hard to complete dreams and plans that we’ve already imagined and when tragedy strikes from some source outside of our own control we inevitably ask: who controls our destiny? Are our lives just some board game that we play out to fill the time but which ultimately has no purpose at all?
Is the course of life just as Shakespeare described it in the play Hamlet? You know that famous soliloquy where Hamlet says:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Do our dreams signify nothing? Why bother dreaming? Why make any plans at all? Is the invisible hands that controls our fate the hand of God?
Biblical Context: new things.
Now, the Revelation of John is a daunting and even frightening book of the Bible. In parts, God sounds exactly like a deity that exercises supreme power, forestalling all our hopes and dreams, snatching us out of the prime of life or taking us away from our loved ones when God considers the timing to be appropriate.
This apocalyptic vision of John is hard for us to understand in 2007, so many centuries after it was written, so many centuries after the conditions that this prophet John saw all around him. But we misunderstand Biblical prophecy if we assume that the writer was speaking specifically to us, a future audience, about specific conditions that exist long after his times and about which he knew nothing.
So the first thing we have to do is put this prophecy into historical context and that context is an era of persecution of Christians.
In the Greco-Roman world of the late first century, religion was more pluralistic than it is today. There were many authorized gods but chief among them was the Roman Emperor. The authorities considered Christianity to be a criminal conspiracy because Christians exclusively worshipped one God and that god was neither the Emperor nor any of the other divinities in the Roman pantheon. After Rome burned in the year 64, Emperor Nero carried out a state sponsored persecution and for decades afterwards Roman governors executed Christians by political order for refusing to worship those validated gods.
Fearful Christians were even encouraged to turn in their Christian neighbors in return for leniency. All Christians had to walk a very fine line between giving lip service to Rome and living as people of faith.
These were the times in which John lived. Not only were there rumors of Nero’s return, but Christians were being seduced by this pagan culture and failing in their loyalty to Christ and Christ’s revelation.
John was likely an itinerant preacher of Jewish origin, a Jewish convert to Christianity who personally knew the seven congregations to whom he wrote. As a prophet, he wanted to warn these congregations about an apocalyptic retribution against both the pagan seducers and the disloyal, seduced Christians. He wanted to warn them about this very real act of God that might begin at any moment.
John’s predecessors in the rich Hebrew prophetic tradition were visionaries like Ezekiel and Daniel who lived during the time of Babylonian exile and forecast a similar destruction of God’s enemies. For them, Babylon was the archtype of all God’s enemies. Gog and Magog were names Ezekiel gave to nations that tried to usurp, seduce, and consume the Hebrew followers of God. [ii]
So what was John speaking about? John borrows from the visions in his prophetic tradition. And even though John’s revelation reads as a continuous, chronological epic, it is very likely that he compiled separate visions of his own and others into this prophetic account.
Like Daniel and Ezekiel, John refers to Babylon and John’s new Babylon is Rome. But Babylon is more than just a symbol of an evil state, it’s the state of evil. Babylon is the Dark Side, the perennial, cosmic evil empire. This prophecy is cosmic in proportions because while Rome may be the enemy in the late first century, John is claiming that there will always be a Babylon in the life of Christ’s church.
In such violent times, John wants to give the congregations of the seven churches more than a warning not to be seduced into accepting a culture that contradicts Christ’s message. John is giving them, and us, a message of comfort to cling to in times of persecution.
Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
So, if John was speaking to first century Christians, how could his prophecy possibly apply to us?
The thing is that you don’t have to see an apocalyptic vision to appreciate the conflict between Christ’s message of love and the destructive influences of our own times that cause unhappiness, lost identity, and even tragedy.
It isn’t hard to find cultural acceptance of violence as a way of life.
It isn’t hard to recognize the power of elitism that devalues the humanity of those who look or live or speak differently than we do.
It isn’t hard to feel the pull of advertising and marketing that says that a bigger house or a more luxurious car or some other commercial consumption will bring us true happiness.
It isn’t hard to hear the loud, self-righteous voices of narrow moralism or jingoistic patriotism.
In order to make some use of John’s message, you don’t have to see the world in terms of some dualistic struggle between good and evil.
All you have to do is simply consider the world just as it is and compare it to the vision of a new heaven and new earth where God dwells among us and where the river of life refreshes the human spirit.
Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
We go about our lives in this present world, a world filled with tragic possibilities. We go about the business of our hopes and dreams in a world filled with events that cut short our plans. Bridges collapse. Airplanes crash. Automobiles collide. Crime, terrorism, mean spiritedness, racism, cancer, war, infirmity, floods, fires- all these things rob us of robust and precious dreams. These are possibilities in the world as it is.
When confronted with some terrifying, life ending disaster different people will reach different conclusions. Some percentage of the population will claim to see the hand of God in human tragedy. They will say that God is exacting vengace and retribution for personal sins or that God whimsically selects one family to be destroyed by a tornado while sparing another family two doors away. The heavy hand of God is even perceived in the single death of a loved one at any age, death that does not occur from some catastrophic public event.
These people say God takes people out of the midst of life for God’s own mysterious purpose. These people say God has a time and place for the death of every individual and that God will either do the dirty work or will not interfere to save us. There is nothing we can do about it and our plans count for very little.
Theologically, I strongly disagree with that conclusion. And the prophet John disagrees with that conclusion also.
Despite John’s dire warning about divine retribution for false Christians, his revelation is a wonderfully hopeful vision. John agrees with the claim of the great prophet Isaiah. This God, who delivered the Jews out of Egypt, who organized a rabble in the desert of Sinai and gave them a land of promise, this God who raised Christ Jesus from the dead, this God is always doing wonderful new things in our lives. [iii]
John’s vision offers a message of hope and comfort that when we are torn away from this present world a new heaven and a new earth will be revealed. A new thing will be done before our eyes and God will dwell among us, nourishing us with new life.
Conclusion: what’s the point?
Is this just a dream, a far fetched hallucination?
Is it a quaint story that satisfies simple minds?
All who hear John’s revelation must answer these questions for themselves based on faith. It’s up to you. But I know this.
Life matters. Hope abounds in the new things God is doing every day and every step of our journey.
Life counts for something. Hopes and dreams are relevant and worthwhile and life has a purpose even if our plans are cut short by the tragic possibilities of this present world.
Maybe there is a direction and meaning in human life beyond the individual’s own will. Maybe a terrorist’s plot, the failure to inspect and repair a bridge, the failure to prevent a levy from breaking, the failure of a drunk driver to act responsibly, the helter skelter path of a tornado, maybe all these things are the supernatural intervention of inscrutible fate. And yet, life would indeed matter very little if the end of life were not met with a new heaven and a new earth.
Life matters. Hope abounds. Glory be to God. AMEN.
[i] http://www.tcnj.edu/~wilder/works/bridge.html
[ii] Ezekiel 38-39
[iii] Isaiah 43:18-19
Presenting Engagement: life and plans cut short.
Imagine yourself travelling along your life’s journey, working to live out your life’s plans, to live out your hopes and dreams, when suddenly some catastrophic interruption occurs that dashes all those plans, curtails all those hopes and dreams!
I thought about that this week when the interstate bridge over the Mississippi River fell during heavy traffic between Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.
Dozens of automobiles and several busses were travelling on to some particular destination when tragedy struck. They were going home from work. They were going home from school trips. They were going home from summer vacations or just setting off on vacations. They were taxi drivers delivering passengers, truck drivers delivering goods. They were social wokrers going out to help improve the lives of others. Some were simply folks going on an errand on the other side of town.
There were all these people who’s lives were interrupted by catastrophe that resulted in disabling injury or even death. Plans delayed indefinitely. Plans disrupted permanently. Business that now goes unfinished. Busy people in busy moments of play or work or chores whose hopes and dreams for the years to come collapsed with the concrete slabs of a highway bridge, smashing into a swirling river bottom sixty feet below.
I don’t know if the most distressing part of it all is the death and injury or the unfulfilled plans of the accident victims.
Of course, this tragedy reminds me of a number of other disasters involving lives lost during travel. I think of the morbid tragedy of the Titanic. Of airplane incidents. I recall a classmate who perished on an airpalne the summer after our seventh grade year. I recall a college classmate who drowned during a whitewater rafting trip. And we can never forget the victims of 9/11, those who were just arriving at work in the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon and those who had boarded early morning flights on business trips or personal travel. All lives cut short in the middle of plans, hopes and dreams.
The most famous story of such a disaster is probably Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The novel was written in 1927 and was made into a popular movie by the director Quentin Tarrentino several years ago.
Wilder’s novel tells about a fictional bridge collapse in Peru in 1714 in which five people perish. This bridge had been regarded as the finest and most “high tech” bridge in the entire country yet it fell carrying these five people, all on their way to specific destinations, filfilling prescious life plans. Five people living out their hopes and dreams. Five people caught in the middle of their life journeys. Five people whose plans were cut short by disaster.
When asked about the purpose intended in this plot, Wilder revealed that it was a question: is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?[i] In other words, is there some supernatural agent of fate that assigns us each a destiny that we can’t know? Or are we in control?
And that’s really a basic question of life, isn’t it?
I mean, here we are making great plans, hoping and dreaming wonderful things off in the future or working hard to complete dreams and plans that we’ve already imagined and when tragedy strikes from some source outside of our own control we inevitably ask: who controls our destiny? Are our lives just some board game that we play out to fill the time but which ultimately has no purpose at all?
Is the course of life just as Shakespeare described it in the play Hamlet? You know that famous soliloquy where Hamlet says:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Do our dreams signify nothing? Why bother dreaming? Why make any plans at all? Is the invisible hands that controls our fate the hand of God?
Biblical Context: new things.
Now, the Revelation of John is a daunting and even frightening book of the Bible. In parts, God sounds exactly like a deity that exercises supreme power, forestalling all our hopes and dreams, snatching us out of the prime of life or taking us away from our loved ones when God considers the timing to be appropriate.
This apocalyptic vision of John is hard for us to understand in 2007, so many centuries after it was written, so many centuries after the conditions that this prophet John saw all around him. But we misunderstand Biblical prophecy if we assume that the writer was speaking specifically to us, a future audience, about specific conditions that exist long after his times and about which he knew nothing.
So the first thing we have to do is put this prophecy into historical context and that context is an era of persecution of Christians.
In the Greco-Roman world of the late first century, religion was more pluralistic than it is today. There were many authorized gods but chief among them was the Roman Emperor. The authorities considered Christianity to be a criminal conspiracy because Christians exclusively worshipped one God and that god was neither the Emperor nor any of the other divinities in the Roman pantheon. After Rome burned in the year 64, Emperor Nero carried out a state sponsored persecution and for decades afterwards Roman governors executed Christians by political order for refusing to worship those validated gods.
Fearful Christians were even encouraged to turn in their Christian neighbors in return for leniency. All Christians had to walk a very fine line between giving lip service to Rome and living as people of faith.
These were the times in which John lived. Not only were there rumors of Nero’s return, but Christians were being seduced by this pagan culture and failing in their loyalty to Christ and Christ’s revelation.
John was likely an itinerant preacher of Jewish origin, a Jewish convert to Christianity who personally knew the seven congregations to whom he wrote. As a prophet, he wanted to warn these congregations about an apocalyptic retribution against both the pagan seducers and the disloyal, seduced Christians. He wanted to warn them about this very real act of God that might begin at any moment.
John’s predecessors in the rich Hebrew prophetic tradition were visionaries like Ezekiel and Daniel who lived during the time of Babylonian exile and forecast a similar destruction of God’s enemies. For them, Babylon was the archtype of all God’s enemies. Gog and Magog were names Ezekiel gave to nations that tried to usurp, seduce, and consume the Hebrew followers of God. [ii]
So what was John speaking about? John borrows from the visions in his prophetic tradition. And even though John’s revelation reads as a continuous, chronological epic, it is very likely that he compiled separate visions of his own and others into this prophetic account.
Like Daniel and Ezekiel, John refers to Babylon and John’s new Babylon is Rome. But Babylon is more than just a symbol of an evil state, it’s the state of evil. Babylon is the Dark Side, the perennial, cosmic evil empire. This prophecy is cosmic in proportions because while Rome may be the enemy in the late first century, John is claiming that there will always be a Babylon in the life of Christ’s church.
In such violent times, John wants to give the congregations of the seven churches more than a warning not to be seduced into accepting a culture that contradicts Christ’s message. John is giving them, and us, a message of comfort to cling to in times of persecution.
Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
So, if John was speaking to first century Christians, how could his prophecy possibly apply to us?
The thing is that you don’t have to see an apocalyptic vision to appreciate the conflict between Christ’s message of love and the destructive influences of our own times that cause unhappiness, lost identity, and even tragedy.
It isn’t hard to find cultural acceptance of violence as a way of life.
It isn’t hard to recognize the power of elitism that devalues the humanity of those who look or live or speak differently than we do.
It isn’t hard to feel the pull of advertising and marketing that says that a bigger house or a more luxurious car or some other commercial consumption will bring us true happiness.
It isn’t hard to hear the loud, self-righteous voices of narrow moralism or jingoistic patriotism.
In order to make some use of John’s message, you don’t have to see the world in terms of some dualistic struggle between good and evil.
All you have to do is simply consider the world just as it is and compare it to the vision of a new heaven and new earth where God dwells among us and where the river of life refreshes the human spirit.
Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
We go about our lives in this present world, a world filled with tragic possibilities. We go about the business of our hopes and dreams in a world filled with events that cut short our plans. Bridges collapse. Airplanes crash. Automobiles collide. Crime, terrorism, mean spiritedness, racism, cancer, war, infirmity, floods, fires- all these things rob us of robust and precious dreams. These are possibilities in the world as it is.
When confronted with some terrifying, life ending disaster different people will reach different conclusions. Some percentage of the population will claim to see the hand of God in human tragedy. They will say that God is exacting vengace and retribution for personal sins or that God whimsically selects one family to be destroyed by a tornado while sparing another family two doors away. The heavy hand of God is even perceived in the single death of a loved one at any age, death that does not occur from some catastrophic public event.
These people say God takes people out of the midst of life for God’s own mysterious purpose. These people say God has a time and place for the death of every individual and that God will either do the dirty work or will not interfere to save us. There is nothing we can do about it and our plans count for very little.
Theologically, I strongly disagree with that conclusion. And the prophet John disagrees with that conclusion also.
Despite John’s dire warning about divine retribution for false Christians, his revelation is a wonderfully hopeful vision. John agrees with the claim of the great prophet Isaiah. This God, who delivered the Jews out of Egypt, who organized a rabble in the desert of Sinai and gave them a land of promise, this God who raised Christ Jesus from the dead, this God is always doing wonderful new things in our lives. [iii]
John’s vision offers a message of hope and comfort that when we are torn away from this present world a new heaven and a new earth will be revealed. A new thing will be done before our eyes and God will dwell among us, nourishing us with new life.
Conclusion: what’s the point?
Is this just a dream, a far fetched hallucination?
Is it a quaint story that satisfies simple minds?
All who hear John’s revelation must answer these questions for themselves based on faith. It’s up to you. But I know this.
Life matters. Hope abounds in the new things God is doing every day and every step of our journey.
Life counts for something. Hopes and dreams are relevant and worthwhile and life has a purpose even if our plans are cut short by the tragic possibilities of this present world.
Maybe there is a direction and meaning in human life beyond the individual’s own will. Maybe a terrorist’s plot, the failure to inspect and repair a bridge, the failure to prevent a levy from breaking, the failure of a drunk driver to act responsibly, the helter skelter path of a tornado, maybe all these things are the supernatural intervention of inscrutible fate. And yet, life would indeed matter very little if the end of life were not met with a new heaven and a new earth.
Life matters. Hope abounds. Glory be to God. AMEN.
[i] http://www.tcnj.edu/~wilder/works/bridge.html
[ii] Ezekiel 38-39
[iii] Isaiah 43:18-19
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