In the End

Since this is the second Sunday of November, Stewardship Sunday, I want to begin with a little parable that involves money.

A little Hassidic parable goes like this: The Rabbi had become exhausted by the people’s many questions. Exasperated by his people’s inability to think for themselves, the rabbi set up a booth with a sign: “Any Two Questions Answered for $100. The first day, one of the wealthiest men in the congregation showed up. He paid his money and then asked, “Rabbi, isn’t one hundred dollars rather a lot for the answers to two questions?” “Yes,” said the rabbi. “And what is your second question?” (Candles in the Dark, 37).

One point the parable makes is that answers to religious questions, whatever they are, are not easily forthcoming. In the Jewish tradition, Moses was the first to decry the incessant complaints and questionings of the people, asking God, “Why don’t you let me die, so that I can be relieved of their misery?” And here, in Mark’s Gospel, much later in the Jewish tradition, Jesus gets more than one question fired at him by the disciples. When will the end be? What are the signs and the portents that the end has come? And if you have read further into the 13^th chapter of this Gospel, you know the questions and predictions about the end times just keep coming.

Those questions come because, naturally, since Jesus has just predicted that the temple would be torn down and turned into ruins, the disciples would like to know exactly when this will happen. The disciples, being good Jews, know that it won’t be the first time the temple has been destroyed. The one where Jesus walked, commonly called Herod’s Temple, was built upon the ruins of two others: Solomon’s Temple and Zerubbabel’s Temple. So, Jesus’s prediction of the temple’s demise was not without precedent in Jewish history.

And if you trust that Jesus is a prophet sent from God, then why not believe that he may just know what he is talking about? But the thought of losing the temple was bad news in the ears of faithful Jews. Just as the World Trade Towers in New York City symbolized the central American values of corporate wealth and free market capitalism, so the temple symbolized both the transcendence of God and national unity for Israel. We’re talking a major shock to national pride and religious devotion if the temple falls. Of course, it did fall, not long after the time of Jesus, destroyed by the Romans who supposedly blamed its destruction on the Christians.

Today, the site where the three temples once stood is the Muslim shrine called the Dome of the Rock. And, not only is that sacred site now heavily guarded and heavily contested in the ongoing Jewish-Palestinian conflict, but views of the end times advanced by various Christian fundamentalists often allude to destruction of the Dome of the Rock and the reestablishment of the temple as a prelude to the coming of the Messiah, an odd view for any Christian to take but a view, especially since 9/11, that has pushed Christian conservatives to pressure the White House and Congress to give even more aid to Israel since a militarily strong Israel is vital to the still hoped for reconstruction of the temple and vital to the continued subjugation of the Palestinian and other suspect peoples.

It seems like such an innocuous comment this one unnamed disciple made to Jesus as they exited the temple after watching that poor widow cast her paltry coins into the temple coiffures. “Look, teacher, “what large stones and what large buildings.” Upon which Jesus launched into his prophetic tirade about the coming destruction of the temple and the birthpangs of a new beginning, what also has become known as the Apocalypse.

And thus it is, today, that you can go to the website entitled “raptureready.com” and view the Rapture Index, also known as the “Dow Jones Industrial Average of End Time Activity.” This index tracks earthquakes, floods, plagues, crime, false prophets and economic measurements like unemployment that add to instability and unrest and which thereby ease the coming of the Antichrist, whose appearance is part of a cryptic series of signs and portents that will precede the rapture and the end of the world as we know it. Those who live with this view of the end as the centerpiece of their belief system have developed a whole lexicon of terms, codes and symbols that sensationalize current political events as a way to entice the uninitiated into adopting this eschatology of a coming rapture and the violent coming of the end.

I am reminded of what the pastor of the writer Kathleen Norris once said to her when she was trying to teach a Women’s Circle at her church on the topic of the antichrist. “Each of us acts as an Antichrist,” he said, “whenever we hear the gospel and do not do it.” (Amazing Grace, 15). Which sounds to me like a much better definition of the antichrist than some others I’ve read about. Of course, exactly, what the gospel is is the sticky point, is it not?

According to a Time Magazine poll in 2002, 59% of Christians believe that the prophecies recorded in the Book of Revelation will come true. That same Time article, in addition to giving me a good laugh in its reporting of the creation of the Rapture Index, also reported an interview which didn’t make me laugh, an interview with Thomas Tewell, who is the senior minister at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in midtown Manhattan, hardly a hothouse of apocalyptic fervor. The Reverend said: “I would go for years without anyone asking about the End Times,” he said, but since Sept. 11, hardcore, crusty, cynical New York lawyers and stockbrokers who are not moved by anything are saying “Is the world going to end?” “Are all the events of the Bible coming true.” They want to get right with God. I’ve never seen anything like it in my 30 years of ministry” (Time Magazine, July 1, 2002, via Tom Rostee)
It is easy to think of questions about the end as esoteric, or as questions only the poor, the marginalized, the disenfranchised, the un-affluent would ponder and pray over. Scholars will tell you that many religious movements have their origins indeveloping a system of beliefs that can account for the end times. And not just Christianity. The themes of some of the most popular movies in our day take as their leit motif the theme of the final battle between good and evil. The Lord of the Ring trilogy or the various renditions of the Matrix movie or the dark movie Apocalypse Now are examples. And, if God’s coming judgment is just around the corner, then the real life martyrdom practiced by a suicide bomber has a very special appeal and promise.

The historian knows that talk about the end times is nothing new. Every age has had those who have retreated to the mountaintop to wait for the end or have gone to war thinking thereby to bring the end a little closer. But there is something almost eerie about the intensity with which so many today pursue knowledge about the end.

Whether so much talk in our world today about the end times is on target, misguided, or even irrelevant, you might want to ask your favorite religious authority sometime, and for a hundred dollars, maybe you’ll even get a answer!

But I don’t have any good answers, except that we should take Jesus seriously when he says in Mark 13 “to beware that no leads you astray” and “don’t be alarmed when you hear of wars and rumors of wars . . . for the end is still to come,” a saying that I find particularly hard to stomach. But, the bottom line Jesus is trying to get across is that God’s timing is never the same as human timing, and the sooner we can adjust to that truth, the sooner, I believe, anyway, God will accomplish what needs to be accomplished in the world and in our lives.

Which, in a roundabout sort of way, gets me back to the real topic for today: Stewardship and the whole question of what God is doing in you and me and us and in the world because of us.

What if, in the end, not so much the end of the world, but at the end of your life, you knew you had only a month to live? What would you do with your time?

• Would you finish up important matters at work?
  
• Would you travel to a place you always wanted to go?
  
• Would you pray more, go to church more, do that generous act you always wanted to do for others?
  
• Would you find ways to leave a mark on the world?
  
• Would you reconcile a fractured friendship (Mary W. Anderson, Christian Century, 11/1/03, 19)
  

If you answered yes to any of these things, what you are saying is that in your last days you would try to be a better steward of all the things God has given you in this life – friendships and familiy, a church to call home, resources to travel, work to do. In the intensity of the last days, our last month, the assumption is that we would live better, be better, do better, be more generous, be more focused on the most important things in life.

It is amazing how the threat of the end, that is death, focuses our attention as nothing else can. One writer says, “for some reason we human beings seem to learn best how to love when we’re a bit broken, when our plans fall apart, when our myths of self-sufficiency and goodness and safety are shattered. Apocalypse is meant to bring us to our senses, allowing us a sobering, and usually painful, glimpse of what is possible in the new life we build from the ashes of the old.” (Amazing Grace, 321).

Or, here’s another “what if.” What if we discovered that Bethel only had one month to live? I would want all the members of the congregation to be together, if only for one precious Sunday. I don’t know where I’d put them, but maybe like Eutychus, they could sit in the window sill and maybe we would have worship and fellowship through the night that went until the break of a new day. If our Bethel time were almost over, I bet our inactive or barely active members and friends would find a way to join us. End times have that kind of power.

If the end were near, we would have an amazing opportunity to decide what to do with all the real estate, cash, and furnishings, setting aside the Presbytery’s role for just a moment. What would we do with all of our assets – this land, the old pulpit, the tons of bells and choir music? More to the point on this Stewardship Sunday, what would be done with all of the financial assets – all of the savings accounts and the endowment funds and the cash reserves? There wouldn’t be time to fight about it. We’d have to focus fast and get priorities right. Would the priority be to build a nice expensive monument and commemorate what was, or would the decision be to invest everything into some new ministry where none currently exists, a chance to take the light out from under the proverbial bush and truly let it shine? Just what would we want our final legacy to be?

I’ve been in the Church business for a while. I know that the collective weight of the institution keeps the Church from being what the church has been created to be. But why is it so hard to consider radical kinds of stewardship whether we have a month or a hundred years to live? If we take the Bible seriously, of all things, we are supposed to be a people of the end times, we are supposed to live as if each day were our last, for history from God’s perspective always begins at the end.

Now, I know hypothetical stewardship scenarios don’t pay the bills or repair the building or empower mission. Yes, there is an impractical dimension to thinking about the nearness of the end when we have no way of knowing, really, just how close or distant the end might be.

I could put my whole paycheck in the offering plate, but then, what if the credit card bill comes after all and I decide I still need electricity and my kids decide they still like to eat? Living as if it is the end would be irresponsible on my part.

Jesus calls us to do both: to live with the intensity of the last days while yet living our regular, ordinary lives. Not an easy thing but that’s what we’re called to do. Stewardship, however you slice or dice that word, is one very important measure of how we then live.

In the end, if we take the little story of the widow and her two coins from Mark’s Gospel seriously, in the end, we are supposed to be dependent on God, and on God alone. That’s the message of the end times. That’s what she did. Whether she was an old or young widow, I don’t know, but in that day, to be a widow was to have nothing, since a woman without a husband usually meant permanent poverty. There were no rich widows in that culture. “To be widowed,” as one commentator says, “meant not only losing someone you may have loved, but more tragically, it also meant that you were losing the one on whom you were totally dependent” (Mary W. Anderson, “Widow’s Walk”).

We can imagine that the two coins, worth a _ penny each, were all she had. I suspect she knew that two pennies were not going to move her from welfare to work. She had to depend on something else. Unlike each of us with our money, in whatever amount it is, we see our money as a symbol of independence and freedom to do what we want to do, to go where we want to go. But for her, as she dropped those two copper coins into the temple coiffures, that act of devotion declared her utter and complete --- not independence -- but dependence on God.

In the end, the Bible tells us to model our lives, not on the rich and famous, but on the generosity of a poor widow whom we would normally overlook.

In the end, what does the Bible tell you to do?

Copyright © 2003 - 2007 Stanley Marc Sherrod All Rights Reserved