William H. Willimon - "An Earth-Shattering Event" (December 6, 1998)
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| - | And every year on this Sunday in Advent, | 0:05 |
| John the Baptist cries, people get ready. | 0:09 | |
| Your world is about to be rocked. | 0:13 | |
| Do you want your world to be rocked? | 0:19 | |
| The economy is doing well, the president's | 0:22 | |
| job approval ratings are up, and so maybe you just, | 0:25 | |
| you don't want a world rocked. | 0:29 | |
| I remind you that exams are only a week away, | 0:33 | |
| and in December the night gets longer, | 0:38 | |
| and today means that your death is one day closer | 0:42 | |
| and it does feel, | 0:46 | |
| in modern life at times, as if our lives | 0:49 | |
| are in the grip of some kind of nameless, faceless power. | 0:54 | |
| People, your world is about to be rocked. | 1:02 | |
| What we've got here in the scripture that you | 1:08 | |
| have just heard read, Old and New testament, | 1:10 | |
| is Bible talk about the future, apocalyptic. | 1:15 | |
| Can you say, apocalyptic? | 1:20 | |
| It's poetic biblical talk about the future. | 1:22 | |
| At least, that's what I always thought. | 1:29 | |
| I've always thought of | 1:31 | |
| apocalyptic as the bible's way | 1:34 | |
| of talking about tomorrow. | 1:38 | |
| The bible is just full of apocalyptic. | 1:42 | |
| The beginning of this century, Albert Schweitzer, | 1:45 | |
| rocked the church with his quest for the historical Jesus. | 1:49 | |
| Schweitzer said that Jesus, like many Jews of his day, | 1:54 | |
| thought the world would end in great cataclysm soon. | 1:57 | |
| Obviously, Jesus' predictions were wrong. | 2:04 | |
| Didn't happen. | 2:08 | |
| So Schweitzer says that Jesus died | 2:10 | |
| as a disappointed failure of an apocalyptic prophet. | 2:13 | |
| The world didn't end when the Romans burned down the temple | 2:19 | |
| in AD 60, it was just one more in a long story | 2:23 | |
| of injustice against God's people. | 2:27 | |
| The world just rumbled right along. | 2:30 | |
| Jesus' predictions about the end were wrong. | 2:32 | |
| Last Sunday's preacher reminded us about all the times | 2:39 | |
| the church has gotten all worked up, | 2:43 | |
| and usually, toward the end of a century, | 2:45 | |
| or the beginning of a new one, | 2:47 | |
| in thinking the world was coming to an end. | 2:50 | |
| The church was wrong. | 2:53 | |
| It's embarrassing. | 2:56 | |
| Most of the New testament is preoccupied with the problem | 2:59 | |
| of the delay of the end, of the future. | 3:04 | |
| Paul told fellow Christians of his day, | 3:09 | |
| don't get married 'cause the end is coming quickly. | 3:12 | |
| Why entangle yourself with florists and caterers | 3:17 | |
| and all those arrangements when the world is going to end | 3:20 | |
| very soon anyway, but it didn't. | 3:23 | |
| So what now? | 3:29 | |
| Maybe the problem | 3:32 | |
| with apocalyptic lies in our modern, flat-footed reading. | 3:35 | |
| We've taken this imaginative, thick language | 3:42 | |
| of Jewish apocalyptic and we've rendered it down | 3:46 | |
| into dull prose. | 3:50 | |
| When we read Jesus saying something like | 3:52 | |
| the sun and the moon shall be darkened, | 3:54 | |
| and the stars shall not give their light. | 3:56 | |
| We think the next line is going to be | 4:02 | |
| and the rest of North Carolina will have | 4:03 | |
| scattered sunshine and intermittent showers. | 4:05 | |
| We read Isaiah, the wolf shall lie down | 4:09 | |
| with the lamb, and we expect to read, | 4:13 | |
| and the lamb disappeared during lunch. | 4:15 | |
| What are contemporary Christians to do with apocalyptic? | 4:19 | |
| Scholar N.T. Wright who has preached from this chapel, | 4:26 | |
| says that apocalyptic language in the Bible | 4:31 | |
| is language which is not so much making a claim | 4:36 | |
| about the future, but is making a claim about | 4:38 | |
| now. | 4:44 | |
| About, in his words, earth-shattering events now. | 4:46 | |
| We strain for language to describe | 4:55 | |
| earth-shattering events when this world seems to tilt | 4:57 | |
| on its axis and everything crumbles | 5:02 | |
| and something new is born. | 5:05 | |
| In my generation, the Vietnam War | 5:08 | |
| was an earth-shattering event. | 5:12 | |
| No buildings toppled in Washington, | 5:16 | |
| there were no fissures in the pavement, | 5:18 | |
| but still if you were there in that time, | 5:19 | |
| it felt like something was being shaken. | 5:23 | |
| An earth-shattering event is usually more | 5:28 | |
| disruptive even than an earthquake. | 5:33 | |
| Though when we say earth-shattering event, | 5:36 | |
| we're speaking in metaphor. | 5:39 | |
| Our choir is singing Messiah this weekend, | 5:43 | |
| and I remember the alumnus who told me, as a Duke student, | 5:47 | |
| he emerged from the chapel on a Sunday afternoon, | 5:50 | |
| after hearing Messiah and he walked out | 5:53 | |
| and there on the quad he noticed everybody huddled around | 5:59 | |
| automobiles, listening to car radios, | 6:02 | |
| and he asked his fellow students what's going on? | 6:05 | |
| And somebody said, the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor. | 6:08 | |
| And he said it was just like my whole world | 6:15 | |
| crumbled in that moment. | 6:20 | |
| Well, the chapel was still standing, | 6:25 | |
| but the world had been shaken. | 6:28 | |
| When Isaiah the prophet speaks of wolves lying | 6:35 | |
| down with lambs, he speaks in metaphor | 6:38 | |
| of earth-shattering events. | 6:42 | |
| Isaiah spoke in poetry, because poetry is always better | 6:45 | |
| than prose, energetic language pushed to the limit. | 6:49 | |
| He could've put it more prosaically, | 6:55 | |
| he could've said, God's people are badly oppressed, | 6:57 | |
| yet God will soon help us, and when this happens, | 6:59 | |
| it will be a justice producing moment in which God's people | 7:02 | |
| will at last be vindicated. | 7:06 | |
| Instead, he did it in poetry. | 7:09 | |
| Because only poetry has power to move, | 7:13 | |
| to shatter, to tear down, to reveal, to uncover, | 7:16 | |
| and thereby rebuild the world. | 7:19 | |
| That's what apocalyptic means. | 7:24 | |
| To reveal, to uncover. | 7:26 | |
| So, when we read about the son of man coming with | 7:30 | |
| winnowing fork in hand, and coming with fire | 7:34 | |
| to burn away all impurity, | 7:37 | |
| we're not reading about events which might take place | 7:40 | |
| at some other time and place, | 7:42 | |
| we're reading about earth-shattering events, | 7:46 | |
| which take place here in earthly, political, | 7:50 | |
| military, economic events now. | 7:54 | |
| This poetic language is not meant to be some kind of code, | 7:58 | |
| to hide things from us, but rather, it's meant to be | 8:03 | |
| the bible's way of revealing and uncovering | 8:06 | |
| the true significance of the time in which we live, | 8:10 | |
| now. | 8:14 | |
| Because it's hard to interpret the time in which we live. | 8:18 | |
| As I preach to you on Sunday morning, | 8:26 | |
| I always preach to you under the recognition | 8:28 | |
| that many of you get your news | 8:30 | |
| from the Durham Morning Herald, so that means | 8:33 | |
| you wouldn't know news if you got it. | 8:35 | |
| It takes some astuteness | 8:40 | |
| for God's people to know what time is it. | 8:46 | |
| When the civil rights bill was signed, | 8:53 | |
| one of our senators said this is the great watershed | 8:56 | |
| of our age, a sign that a new day is dawning. | 9:00 | |
| He wasn't referring to wastewater treatment in Washington, | 9:07 | |
| or predicting that tomorrow the sun would rise | 9:10 | |
| in a weird way, | 9:12 | |
| he was attempting to state the deep truth | 9:15 | |
| of what a lot of people thought was just another | 9:20 | |
| bill making its way through the senate. | 9:22 | |
| A piece of legislation. | 9:25 | |
| He was more perceptive to see a sign of a flood. | 9:29 | |
| A great wave, a sun rising. | 9:34 | |
| So when we speak of end of the world, | 9:39 | |
| when Jesus speaks of the end of the world, | 9:44 | |
| he does not mean that the world's going to stop turning | 9:46 | |
| tomorrow, rather that we're about to see the end | 9:50 | |
| of the way the present world is run today. | 9:55 | |
| Apocalyptic is the way Christians struggle | 10:02 | |
| to speak about what's really going on today. | 10:05 | |
| And who's in charge, and where things are heading. | 10:09 | |
| All those who think they're in charge, | 10:15 | |
| all those in charge of the old world, | 10:18 | |
| the generals, the politicians, the priests, | 10:21 | |
| the professors, who profit from the present order, | 10:24 | |
| who live off the status quo, they're about to be dislodged | 10:28 | |
| by something called kingdom of God. | 10:33 | |
| Expect a visible earthly change in the news. | 10:38 | |
| Earth-shaking events in which God's will will finally | 10:43 | |
| be done on heaven as on earth as we pray. | 10:46 | |
| This appears to be what Jesus expected. | 10:53 | |
| A vast, political economic turnaround, | 10:56 | |
| which he spoke about as the end, when at last | 11:01 | |
| the kingdom of God would be revealed in fullness. | 11:05 | |
| Mary sang about it in her Magnificat | 11:10 | |
| at the beginning of Luke. | 11:13 | |
| My soul magnifies the Lord because he's | 11:16 | |
| put down the mighty from their thrones, | 11:18 | |
| and he's lifted up those who are on the bottom. | 11:21 | |
| Jesus taught about it in so many of his parables: | 11:25 | |
| "The kingdom of God is like..." He was trying | 11:28 | |
| to bring it to speech. | 11:31 | |
| John the Baptist spoke of it when he announced | 11:33 | |
| the arrival of Christ, repent, people. | 11:35 | |
| Get ready, do a U-turn, the kingdom of God is coming. | 11:38 | |
| Get ready to be purified by God. | 11:42 | |
| Jesus announced the kingdom of God is now. | 11:45 | |
| The acceptable year of the Lord has come | 11:49 | |
| he announced during his first sermon in Nazareth. | 11:53 | |
| The time has come to come on and join up | 11:56 | |
| with the God movement, | 12:00 | |
| and he began partying ahead of time, | 12:02 | |
| with outcasts and sinners, he went on and started | 12:07 | |
| healing the sick. | 12:10 | |
| He went on and delivered people of demons, | 12:11 | |
| and he went on and started forgiving sins, | 12:13 | |
| even though the time didn't seem quite right, | 12:16 | |
| all as a foretaste that an old world was ending | 12:19 | |
| and a new was beginning. | 12:21 | |
| Jesus, was he wrong? | 12:24 | |
| Jesus didn't raise an army. | 12:30 | |
| He didn't run the Romans out of Palestine | 12:33 | |
| as many expected. | 12:35 | |
| He was crucified a criminal, not crowned a king. | 12:39 | |
| But after his death and resurrection, | 12:45 | |
| the church realized | 12:47 | |
| the end has already occurred. | 12:51 | |
| Oh, maybe not in the way some of us believed, | 12:54 | |
| but the end, that is an earth-shattering event, | 12:56 | |
| happened, it happened in the death | 13:01 | |
| and resurrection of Jesus. | 13:03 | |
| That was the end of the world. | 13:06 | |
| In Jesus' death, the world, the old world at last | 13:10 | |
| was shown what it was made out of. | 13:15 | |
| All the hopes of the world, the visions of the future | 13:18 | |
| based on politics or economics, the UN, Amway, IBM, USA, | 13:21 | |
| all those were unmasked as ways that lead to | 13:26 | |
| the death of God on a cross. | 13:31 | |
| The kingdoms of this world pulled out all their stops, | 13:34 | |
| and did their best, and they ended up | 13:37 | |
| nailing Jesus to a cross. | 13:40 | |
| And there they got defeated. | 13:44 | |
| Jesus submitted to the world as it is. | 13:46 | |
| And unmasked and defeated in his resurrection the old world. | 13:50 | |
| The world ended at Calvary, and a new world began | 13:56 | |
| taking shape. | 14:01 | |
| Oh, they didn't know it at Rome. | 14:05 | |
| The people in power are always the last to get the news | 14:08 | |
| about the new world in these stories. | 14:11 | |
| But as Jesus' people gathered about the table, | 14:15 | |
| and did something as peaceful as breaking bread | 14:20 | |
| and drinking wine and singing music, | 14:22 | |
| an old world began to crack open. | 14:27 | |
| A new world began, | 14:30 | |
| and these people stood up | 14:33 | |
| with the body and blood of Christ and said to the old world | 14:37 | |
| you don't have us any longer. | 14:41 | |
| The world thought it defeated Jesus on Good Friday, | 14:46 | |
| but God defeated the world on Easter. | 14:48 | |
| Never again would we be able to have faith | 14:54 | |
| in any tomorrow produced exclusively by us. | 14:57 | |
| Forever we would believe in God's power | 15:02 | |
| to give us a future that's worth having. | 15:04 | |
| So we have to gather Sunday after Sunday, | 15:09 | |
| and particularly in Advent, | 15:11 | |
| to get our heads straight about who sits on the throne. | 15:14 | |
| And where the world is headed. | 15:20 | |
| When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, | 15:24 | |
| President Truman was on a ship after a conference | 15:28 | |
| in Europe, and he was handed a note by a sailor, | 15:31 | |
| and Truman turned around after reading the note, | 15:34 | |
| turned around to some sailors there and he announced to them | 15:36 | |
| that the bomb had been successfully dropped on Japan | 15:41 | |
| and he said to the sailors there, | 15:47 | |
| this is the greatest news in the history of the world. | 15:51 | |
| This was the greatest of all earth-shattering events. | 15:58 | |
| Christians believe Truman was wrong. | 16:04 | |
| Down through the ages, wise men and sages, | 16:08 | |
| kings, politicians, generals, believed they were | 16:12 | |
| the initiators of earth-shattering events. | 16:17 | |
| In reality, they were only taking their place | 16:21 | |
| in the long and not too eventful procession | 16:24 | |
| of violence and death, of hate and destruction | 16:29 | |
| which the world calls history, | 16:33 | |
| but which we learn to call Calvary. | 16:37 | |
| Sunday is a celebration in bread and wine, | 16:42 | |
| a victory party that the world has no longer got us. | 16:48 | |
| In Jesus, the world is, | 16:56 | |
| will be brought to an end | 17:00 | |
| so that God's kingdom can come now, | 17:03 | |
| and forever and ever. | 17:08 | |
| Amen. | 17:12 |
