As we journey into Advent our liturgical readings will take us deeper and deeper into portents and portents of portents, into the surreal and the potentially scary. As we go home in the evenings (or perhaps as we walk out the door if we have our smartphones attuned to media feeds) we will receive news reports of portents and portents of portents, taking us into the surreal twilight realms of the potentially scary and even apocalyptic.
Back in another pocket of time, another apocalyptic moment, when (as I said recently in a sermon) Khrushchev and Kennedy were glaring at each other across the Bay of Pigs, civilization was also dwelling in a twilight world, under the potential shadow of a nuclear winter, waiting with bated breath and tightened zippers.
Tightened zippers? Bob Dylan memorably wrote at the time
You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurl’d
Fear to bring children
Into this world.
They were dark times and there really was a sense that procreation of new generations should be off the agenda, that this was endgame in Orwellian times, and humanity was subsiding into the deepest of doo doos.
Dylan himself has produced nearly as many children as I have since then, so I guess he overcame his sense of apocalyptic despair. Yet we would be fools, as our pockets vibrate with the latest news from Aleppo or Fotokol, not to wonder what world we are giving our tamariki and mokopuna. Is there a future, either in terms of clashing religions, ecological destruction, or economic collapse?
The weird and wonderful biblical language of portents and portents of portents, or earthquakes and famines and insurrections, is not about Syria, Turkey, Russia, no matter what the idiot fringes of Christian distortion may proclaim. It is about ever thus and ever will be thus, from the time the first amoeba crawled out of the primeval swamp until the time the last human dodo, alone and frightened, curls up in a foetal ball beneath a dead tree.
But it does not end with that. It ends with hope, ends with the radical in-break of an unimaginable New Heavens and New Earth, of Hope with a capital H. Another prophetic (and love -struck) song-writer writes of having “self deception tattooed like a flag across my back / holding hands with war-mongers I feel I’ve been betrayed.” That is what our brothers and sisters who set out in hope to flee apocalyptic scenes may feel—and what any of us could feel one day if our small safe worlds were to turn to custard and to bombs. “I advertise the scars of middle classness like a shiny piece of junk mail” continues that prophetic vision of Greg Arnold. If our small comfort zones of routine and sameness, nostalgia and myopia were all we were to cling to then the readings of the next few weeks would be no more than a clanging gong or a clashing cymbal.
If though our comfort is based in the radical promise of Jesus, present in word and sacrament, reaching out to us from God’s eternity future, then we can look our descendants in the eye, however scary the world becomes (and it will) and whisper the words of Jesus-hope: “I go before you into Galilee.”
