This is the season when the scripture readings rustle and pop with the electricity of rumored apocalypse, the coming of a big finale. We may be squirming in our seats, tired of the hymns, preoccupied by the care label sticking up from the shirt collar of the person in front of us, worried about our mother who is sick, our children that are misbehaving, our world that is perpetually at war, our organizing that is running out of energy.
But the scriptures are talking about great expectations--strange, ancient, and, just maybe, alive.
In the essay "An Expedition to the Pole," from the book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard writes:
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
November 7: Ready and Waiting
Amos 5:18-24, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, Matthew 25:1-13, Psalm 50:7-15
Amos had some nerve. A shepherd, he felt called by God to go to the royal sanctuary at Bethel and preach justice to Israel during an era of prosperity, peace, and military strength. Amaziah, the royal priest, expelled Amos from Bethel (Amos 7:12-13), telling him, in effect, to go back to Judah and prophesy to the sheep. Those in power didn't want to hear it.
Many Israelites took their society's overall security and wealth as a sign that they were in God's favor. This, they thought, was because of their lavish support of the official shrines.
Amos took a different view of things. Where the people saw well-earned prosperity, he proclaimed that the poor were being trampled (Amos 5:11). Where the people saw military might, Amos gave a different word from God: "They do not know how to do right," says the Lord, "those who store up violence and robbery in their strongholds....An adversary shall surround the land, and bring down your defenses from you" (Amos 3:10-11).
Where the people felt assured and self-satisfied in their faith, sure that the "day of the Lord" would mark their vindication against their enemies, Amos saw a day of reckoning. "Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!...It is darkness and not light; as if a person fled from a lion and a bear met them" (Amos 5:18-19).
Most of us can probably see more than a few parallels between the situations Amos was addressing and present-day peace and justice work. The call he articulated--that true piety and devotion to God will produce hands-on righteousness and justice, that true faith doesn't need to be backed up by an army--is the guiding ethic for radical Christians.
The question is, do we also sometimes lose sight of the holy reason for our activism, losing our shrines in a flurry of bumper stickers, petitions, placards, and guilt? In the parable of the 10 maidens in Matthew, the lesson is to be always watching, always prepared, living as if our God may drop in at any time. We are to be expectant, not just for political change or blessings of security or divine vindication (though anything might happen), but for our lamps to be lit by holy fire.
November 14: Buried Treasure
Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18, 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, Matthew 25:14-30, Psalm 76,
It is written in Zephaniah 1:12 that on the day of the Lord, God plans to "punish the people who are thickening upon their lees, those who say in their hearts, 'The Lord will not do good, nor will the Lord do ill.'" What follows in verses 1:12-18 is a detailed description of God's world-destroying fury.
When I was a child, growing up around folks who took such descriptions literally--like they were long-range weather forecasts--such words frightened and worried me. What if somebody I loved was thickening upon their lees (whatever that means) and was thereby doomed? I couldn't figure out why God, who we were taught in Vacation Bible School was the loving father of Jesus, could turn so ugly.
Likewise, the parable of the talents made me nervous. I was raised to consider a good credit rating as bringing a person even closer to godliness than cleanliness. An investment riskier than a passbook savings account was viewed with suspicion. Making money through any method other than sweat and thrift was reckless wheeling and dealing. By those standards, the servant who buried her one talent was wisely cautious, doing her job and doing it well--certainly not deserving of casting into "outer darkness."
This heading-toward-final-judgment part of the liturgical calendar just made it hard for me to sleep at night.
The stated dramatic consequences of "living wrong" in these passages are hard to ignore. But they can draw attention away from the lessons to be had about different ways of living in relation to God who isn't just in the End, or the Beginning, but is along for the ride through the long, bumpy Middle, too.
The choice about such things is left up to us. We can live like God is ineffectual or nonexistent, meaningless to our days and nights. Or we can live like God is important in such a way that we don't dare risk making a mistake--like our lives are fine china on loan from Grandma, and her rage over a broken plate would destroy us.
We can live like what we have--existence, talent, gifts of wit or welding--came from Someone, somewhere, and a new day is a chance to see what it can do and how it can grow. If a few plates get broken, who needs fine china anyway?
How is the world distressed and battered, even threatened with ending, through the belief that God isn't there or doesn't matter? What outer darkness do we create for ourselves out of our fear and the burying of gifts?
November 21: Tagged by Mercy
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24, 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, Matthew 25:31-46, Psalm 23
The scene presented in Matthew of the king presiding over the great judgment is kind of like a college student's nightmare: sitting down for a final exam and finding out that you read the wrong books all semester.
By the prevailing standards of human society, it's not at all predictable that the royal and holy child of God would come to visit in the way that this passage describes. According to this, the Christ is coming every day: a hungry child, an imprisoned rapist, the woman that turns tricks on the corner who's knocking on the door and asking for a sip of cold water on a hot afternoon.
On the other hand, the passage from Ezekiel turns this around, presenting the familiar image of God as a shepherd. This is still about as far from royalty as a person can get, but it does not show God as one of the broken, but rather as seeking them:
As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.--Ezekiel 34:12, 16
The images of final judgment focus on a distribution of justice, but this is not arbitrary. Ultimately, God's justice is measured out according to what we've been looking for. God is coming in the broken body, the broken heart, the broken spirit. And God is seeking us like scattered sheep. We are seeking and being sought. How do we find one another?
Unlike sheep, we don't have ear tags to identify us, and the Christ is not wearing a red carnation in his lapel. The meeting point, the place where we will know that we have found and been found, is mercy, the mercy we give and the mercy we accept.
Julie Polter is associate editor of Sojourners.
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