Rumors

When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed;

This must take place, but the end is still to come.

For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom;

There will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines.

This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

-Mark 13: 7-8

Something happens to me on a regular basis, whenever I do my Pastor thing among a group that doesn't really know me, whether it's at a funeral, a wedding or some community event.  A person comes up to me afterwards and in a sort of conspiratorial tone mumbles something about the "End Times," assuming, I think, that I am a fellow believer in the idea that God is just about done with us and we all ought to be on the watch for the Apocalypse.

I know it's tempting to get swept up in the drama.  We seem to be perpetually at war with someone.  We are burning the Earth instead of caring for her.  People who ought to know better call themselves "chosen," and people proclaiming to follow a crucified Lord are lovey dovey with Caesar and his Empire.  But the reality is that you can find the "Anti-Christ" hard at work in just about any age of humanity.  And there is never really any shortage of people, of varying levels of contact with reality, who will tell you sincerely that "the end is near."

Jesus did make some pretty vivid speeches about being ready, and I take him seriously about that, but I also take him seriously when he says this stuff we're going through is just the birth pangs.  It seems to me that, even from an anthropological perspective, we humans have not yet become what we are meant to be.  If one makes the assumption that we have been created as language-using beings capable of something called reason for some purpose, then there has to be better yet to come.  If you do not believe in a Creator, or at least something like an inherent cause to everything, I suppose you can get away with believing that this is all just "sound and fury, signifying nothing," but that is clearly not where Jesus was coming from.

This is my theological answer to both the sign toting crazies and the conspiratorial "end times" whisperers, as well as to anyone who is tempted to let fear get the best of them: you need to trust that God knows what God is doing.  Ultimately that is the best and only hope we have. A rather popular philosophical feature of what we call Postmodernism is the absence of that trust, which is why I think that the obsession with "end times," and particularly those mid-nineteenth century fever dreams about the "rapture," "the great tribulation," and an incarnation of the "Antichrist," actually have such traction and followings in our increasingly secular, scientific and humanist world. They are a surrender of the high ground of faith and a retreat into the swamp of fear and pessimism.

One of the things I had to do, pretty early on in my journey of faith, was to somehow make peace between the rational experience that I had in the study of sciences and the inner experience I had of a Living God, as Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer (Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for you traditional types). The Living God never, ever told me or even hinted that I needed to take their side over and against all the best of what science had to offer.  For years I sort of expected that it would happen sometime, that God would convict me about my belief in physics and biology the same way God regularly convicts me about how shabby I can be towards other people.

In an annoying bit of consistency, God keeps pushing me on ways I can love people better, even those spooky "end times" whisperers.  Not once has God told me that Darwin was wrong, that nuclear physics was an abomination or even that birth control was a bad thing.  God has insistently told me that I am not loving enough towards my neighbors and that my circle of neighbors needs to get much, much bigger.

So when I hear Jesus say, "Be ready," I also hear him say, "do not be alarmed," and when I am not afraid, I know that what he means by, "be ready," is, "get busy loving people." That is what the Kingdom of God is really about.  The wars and rumors of wars and all the tribulations are really just fits and rages of whatever the Anti-Christ is and they are meant to scare us away from trusting God and loving each other.  It's like one of those villains in Scooby Doo, they masquerade as monsters, but mostly they were just greedy people out to get their way.  When you accept the Kingdom of God for what it is, it can be like that reveal moment where Fred would pull the monster mask off of old Mr. so and so, you realize that there is really nothing to be scared of.