Proper-28-chester.md

Homily November 18:

St. Mark’s, Chester 11 am
Proper 28

The end times

We have entered into a peculiar time in the church year, at least it always strikes me that way, when we are approaching the last of a year-long sequence but the world around us is in some other place. It is in a mode of buying and selling. It is in a partying mode.
Next Sunday is the last Sunday of the church year. It often happens that the readings we are hearing today occur just before Thanksgiving day as it does this year. Sometimes Thanksgiving is later and we would hear lessons for the last Sunday of the church year. Those lessons all have a theme having to do with the end-times, apocalyptic occurances, the big picture.
The Thanksgiving readings, of course, reflect the tone of the day and are completely about thanksgiving for all the gifts that God has given us. It’s a day about gratitude. Often this Sunday appropriates such a tone.
By design the gospels of the Sundays leading up to the last Sunday of the church year are designed to evoke a very different kind of awareness. They are apocalyptic readings or evoke images. They are intended to give us a sense of the ultimate importance of the moment in which we live because we do not know the times or the seasons of when the end will come.
In the year – shall we say 30 – of the common area, many ordinary people might have looked around themselves in Palestine and seen that the trend of events pointed towards some kind of calamity. The Romans soon crush the tiny vassal state of Judea. Those who were sensitive to what was going on around them at the time might well have imagined that the most impressive building for thousands of miles around, the Temple of Jerusalem, might well soon come tumbling down during that climactic time.
The disciples looked around themselves, and they saw the majestic Temple before them, and they were awestruck. Maybe they gave thanks for such a monument to God. But Jesus looked at them and said, “Look now because the time is fast approaching when all those stones will be brought down to the ground and carried away.”

Hannah

The lectionary of the church year in its ending and in its beginning of the first couple of Sundays in Advent, leads us to pray and reflect not about the festivities we may see going on around us, the controversies that however important do not set our eyes and hearts on eternity. The lectionary at this time of year invites us to turn away from the facade we see going on around us and to look into the heart of things. There we see a laser-like attention to the things of lasting value. There we see what some might call an apocalyptic landscape looming.
Seeing that apocalyptic vision, one would be understanding if not forgiving for those who would like to just drink it away. I regularly hear comedians on TV, as they review the events of the day, exclaiming that the only sane thing to do now is just to have a stiff drink.
Hannah was in such a state in the opening of first Samuel that we hear in our first reading today.
She was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord, and wept bitterly.
She was at the end of her rope as the saying goes. But she was caught up in the spirit of the Lord not in the spirit of the bitterness around her. The priest Eli couldn’t see it. He presumed she was just drinking too much.
It was, of course, her deep relationship with God that led to her troubled spirit and her open weeping.
We know because we have heard the narrative before, again and again really, but we heard it in particular all throughout the early part of this church year, last winter. It is the story of Samuel who chose the first kings of Israel. Then the litany of kings with the great king David standing above them all. The one we follow, the Lord Jesus, is counted as a descendent of David. His relationship to the anointed one gives him the title we know Jesus by, the Messiah, or in Greek, the Christ.

Focus on Time

For me the clearest way I can think of this concern for end-times that I hear and read today and for the next few weeks, particularly in the gospel, is to imagine it as a kind of focusing of our attention. In the way a magnifying glass focuses and concentrates and intensifies the light that shines into it. The Spirit want us to intensify and focus on this moment and place in which we live.
It is the only time we will ever have, now. What has been and what will be out of what we have left behind and what we are becoming.
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
So begins one of the poems of T.S. Eliot’s *Four Quartets, *one of the greatest religious poems in the English language. 1 In this section he reflects on how fragile our life is. He marvels at the continuous flow of birth to maturity and then to decay and death – only to find the seeds of re-birth.
The beautiful poem ends with a reversal of the opening:
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel (large seabirds) and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

Mystical Time

For me the words are mystical. For me this time of year enters not into the cacophony, the noise that surounds us, but into the stillness new beginnings. It is a time rather when God and God’s presence enters into my life in unsuspecting ways. It is the time of year for remembering over and over again that what we experience as endings, as catastrophes, are often as not the very building blocks of a new beginning.
It is not a magical time. I leave the magic to the ad men who run our online and on-ground commerce. It is a time when the sun seems submerged in murky water. And we end up forgetting that it is out of murky water that life emerges.
It is a time for slowing down when all around us screams hurry up.
Apocalyptic literature has always been produced during times when catastrophes seem to be all about us. Apocalyptic visions are not meant to scare but to reassure. Apocalyptic literatures cries out from the mountain tops, “all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”
The so-called holiday season is upon us. Don’t be seduced. Don’t worry about running to catch up. Don’t worry about how to get it all done, how to pay for it all in the end. Don’t worry about the invitation lists or the packages needing wrapped. Don’t worry.
Eliot’s poem sequence ends:
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Appendix 2

  • Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life
  • “drunken” Hannah before the priest Elkanah
  • Every priest stands day after day at his service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins.
  • since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus,
  • Jesus began to say to them, "Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, 'I am he! and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars,

  1. "“In my beginning is my end.” This line opens “East Coker,” the second section of T.S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece, Four Quartets. It is followed by a haunting, elegiac reflection on the fragile and transitory nature of life as seen in the cycle of life and death in nature. What is the meaning of our short lives? What hope is man given in this passing world? In whom shall we trust for our salvation? cwr ↩︎
  2. (lectionary) ↩︎

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