Hilton Head Island, SC – November 1, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 44:1-9; John 16:25-33
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “In the world you have tribulation, but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. “ – John 16:33b (RSV)
The Babylonian Captivity of the Jews lasted from 587 BCE to 532, or a total of 45 years. In 587 the Babylonians came and conquered the Kingdom of Judah. They took most of the leading citizens with them back to Babylon, which was a great city in what is now Iraq. It was fairly close to the site of Baghdad, which did not exist then, and wouldn’t exist for a thousand years. It seemed like the end of the world to the Israelites.
In 532 BCE Cyrus, the King of the Medes and Persians, came and conquered Babylon. (What can I say; the Middle East has been a seething cauldron of ethnic, political, and military turmoil forever, and probably shall continue like that forever.) Cyrus encountered the thousands of Jews who had been captive slaves there, and he decided to free them. He had no quarrel with the Jews, and he thought he would be spiting the Babylonians to free them, which seemed to him like a good idea. However, not all the Jews did go back to Judah. Thousands stayed in Babylon, and there was a large Jewish community in Iraq up until the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. Most of them fled to Israel in that year, where they and their descendants have lived ever since.
Because there were so many wars in the Middle East from the time of Abraham until well past the time of Jesus, many Jewish religious leaders and intellectuals started to write that they thought the world would fairly soon come to an end. In Greek there is a word for that concept, and it is called the eschaton. That word literally means “the last things,” or the last events that would occur before the world did come to its fiery finale.
Another Greek word described these eschatological writings. They were called apocalyptic writings. The word apocalypsis means “hidden” or “veiled.” If the world was going to end, very big events would happen, but nobody could be exactly certain of when or where or how “The End” would come. Cartoons often show men in long robes on city streets with signs that declare “The End Is Near!” No cartoon sign ever says “The End Is Coming on July 27, 2024,” although there have been many religious leaders in the past couple of centuries who incorrectly predicted precisely when the world would end. Thus far they have all been wrong. The eschaton is too veiled to know exactly when it will occur.
From the standpoint of Jews living between 532 BCE and 135 CE, however, under particular circumstances it looked like and it certainly felt like the end was coming very close. When the Jews who went back to Jerusalem after Cyrus freed them, they found a city and a whole nation in ruins. They rebuilt the city and its temple, but that took several decades, and there were ethnic neighbors and many Jews themselves who opposed the attempt to establish a renewed Jewish kingdom. Besides, they were under the thumb of the Persians after the time of Cyrus. Then Alexander the Great came and conquered Judea in 332 BCE or so, and after that they were under a Syrian general of Alexander and his descendants for the better part of two centuries. Then in 167 BCE they revolted against the Syrians, and set up their own independent Jewish kingdom, which last exactly a hundred years, until the Romans came and conquered them in 67 BCE.
Some of the Old Testament prophets wrote things that sounded vaguely apocalyptic. But then, apocalyptic writings by their very nature are always vague. Their meaning is hidden. It is veiled. Only time can unveil what, specifically, will happen. In the eighth century BCE the prophet Isaiah wrote about something he called “the day of the Lord.” “Wail, for the day of the Lord is near; as destruction from the Almighty it will come! …Behold, the day of the Lord comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the earth a desolation, and to destroy its sinners from it” (Isa. 13:6,9). Was God going to destroy the enemies of Israel, or was He also going to destroy the Israelites? Isaiah never spelled it out clearly, because he did not and could not know when it was coming, or what, specifically, it meant. Two centuries later, the man the scholars call Second Isaiah gave a much more comforting message to Jews who then were in distress in Babylon. “Fear not, be not afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? And you are my witnesses!” (Isa. 44:8)
After Second Isaiah there were two other prophets, Ezekiel and Daniel. Their entire prophetic books were essentially eschatological and apocalyptic. In language that was both fearsome and picturesque, they insisted that grave destruction was coming, both against Israel’s enemies and Israel itself. The last book in the New Testament, which we call The Revelation, was originally called The Apocalypse, The Book of Uncertain Meanings. Many Christians know little of Revelation, because it is not widely read in Catholic or Mainline Protestant services. Those who are familiar with Revelation know that its writer thought The End Was Indeed Near, and many of them also think that.
There were several political and military upheavals over the six centuries from the Babylonian Captivity and the destruction of Judea by the Romans in 70 CE and again in 135 CE because of two major failed Jewish insurrections. These events took a psychological and spiritual toll on a people who had always seen themselves to be God’s Chosen People. How could they be kicked around so much if God had selected them for great things? Things were not looking great. In fact they were looking greatly grim. What was going to happen to them, and when would it happen?
If the four Gospels are even remotely accurate historically, we would have to conclude that whatever else we might consider Jesus to be, in addition to that he was undeniably an apocalyptic preacher. There are several passages with hidden meanings which are scattered throughout the three Synoptic Gospels. The Fourth Gospel also has verses in which Jesus spoke cryptically about what was going to occur in the future. The verses that were read earlier from the 16th chapter of John’s Gospel are examples of mysterious and mystifying words which Jesus spoke to his disciples at the Last Supper.
“I have said this to you in figures,” Jesus said. In other words, some of what he said was deliberately vague. “The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures but tell you plainly of the Father….I came from the Father and have come into the world; again I am leaving the world and am going to the Father” (John 16:25,28). The Synoptic Gospels do not have Jesus saying anything remotely like this at the Last Supper. However, they do include several other apocalyptic passages earlier in their accounts of Jesus’ public ministry. On a number of occasions Jesus clearly indicated that his end and the world’s ending were at hand.
There are millions of Republican voters who believe that if Joe Biden wins the election on Tuesday (or whenever it is decided that the election is actually decided), the world as they have known it will come to an end. There are millions of Democratic voters who believe that if Donald Trump is re-elected, the world as they have known it will absolutely come to an end.
Many pundits, politicians, and ordinary people have declared that the Election of 2020 is the most pivotal in the history of the United States of America --- more so than the Election of 1800, which was an awful, tawdry mess and might have led to a war, but didn’t; or the election of 1860, which resulted indirectly or directly in the Civil War (depending on your point of view); or the elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, or 2016, which resulted in the elections of presidents who received fewer votes than their opponents but who won because they had a majority of the Electoral College votes.
No president ever garners the enthusiastic support of everyone. Some do better than others in that regard, but nobody meets everybody’s idea of the perfect president. And for the past forty years the American electorate has become increasingly polarized, in part because of its presidents. There are many factors which explain this polarization, but nothing in this sermon is to be gained by citing any of them. It is enough simply to observe that probably never in our nation’s history have the two major parties been at a more destructive impasse than we are now.
From the biblical perspective, no election could be the signal for the end of the world, because during biblical times there were no elections anywhere. Not a single writer involved in the production of the Bible would have the slightest idea what “an election” was. The USA was the first nation which became a major democracy. It was founded as a democracy only in1783, when the Treaty of Paris was signed that recognized America as a democracy, or more accurately in 1787, when the Constitution was ratified and we became a highly republican democracy (and I won’t even try to explain what that means).
All the eschatological or apocalyptic writings in the Bible hinted either that God was going to destroy the enemies of the Israelites or Jews because of their sins or that He was going to destroy everybody because everybody was so sinful. Even at that, however, the nature of the Last Things or the Hidden Things was so deliberately diffuse that no one could say for certain what these opaque references might clearly mean.
For a long time the USA has been in trouble to one degree or another, but that didn’t necessarily mean that the whole world was in trouble. And for a long time the outside world seemed to be in trouble, but that didn’t mean the USA was necessarily in trouble. Politics might conceivably contribute slightly to the end of the world, but only slightly. Neither the Eschaton nor the Apocalypse are essentially political. They are theological. If “the end” should come, it certainly won’t be because of the results of the Presidential Election of 2020 in the United States of America. We might be exceptional, but we’re certainly not that exceptional for God to conclude the world must end either because of us or despite us. God’s agenda is infinitely larger than whatever the American electorate might decide in any American election.
No matter how grim the picture might be painted by any of the Old Testament prophets, they all held out hope after their doleful dollups of doom. Jesus also did that. At the end of what he told the disciples at the Last Supper about his imminent death, he ended by saying, “In the world you have tribulation, but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
Be of good cheer. Be of good cheer! Though Jesus was crucified only a few hours after he spoke to the Twelve in the upper room, he was not ultimately defeated, and God most assuredly will not ultimately be defeated. For heaven’s sake, God is God, after all! Even if all life on Planet Earth should shut down because of climate change or an all-out nuclear war or a huge asteroid colliding with us or whatever else, there are surely many thousands or millions of planets in the ever-expanding universe where there are sentient beings as intelligent or far more intelligent than we are. And, as the famous hymn says, “They’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when they’d first begun.” As has often been said by many people in many difficult times, God will not leave Himself without a witness.
And now for a personal confession. Probably most of you don’t need to hear this sermon at all, because you were not worried that the world as you have known it could come to an end just a few days from now. And you are no doubt correct. But I need to hear it. I have truly become increasingly concerned about the state of our nation from the time thirty people from both of our major political parties began jockeying in the primaries nearly six years ago to become their party’s presidential candidate in the 2016 election, and when almost thirty more were doing that in preparation for the 2020 election. In 2016 the eventual victor from one party was expected to be the nominee, and that occurred after a long and sometimes bitter primary battle. In 2016 almost no one predicted the eventual nominee for the other party, although afterwards many people said they had seen it coming all along. In 2020 it was a foregone conclusion who would be the nominee for one party, but not until the South Carolina primary did it become clear who the nominee for the other party would be. And then the pandemic hit.
On the basis of the last six years, we can deduce that the politics of chaos does not edify the nation, its people, or its political parties. All of us have been too strongly attached to positions which refuse to budge. In so doing, we have widened the dangerous gap which exists in the middle between the two sides. Our attitudes toward the “others,” whoever we imagine the others to be, have hardened into stubborn barricades.
In 1737 an Englishman named Alexander Cruden published a biblical concordance. A concordance is a reference book which lists biblical verses in which thousands of key words are used. Most concordances simply list where from Genesis to Revelation these words are found. Alexander Cruden thought that would not be a sufficient reference for preachers such as I, and he listed many three or four word phrases that he thought would be helpful to the clergy and other students of the Bible. My Cruden’s Complete Concordance has been opened so many times that the ratty-looking frequently-taped cover is about to fall off, and the only question now is this: Which will last longer, Cruden or Miller?
For example, Cruden did not just list every time the word “fear” was used, because there are many hundreds of such references. He has listings for “fear of God,” “with fear,” “without fear,” “fear God,” “hear and fear,” “fear him,” and “fear the Lord.” Fear not is the most frequent “fear phrase” in the whole Bible according to the incomparable Mr. Cruden. There are over eighty times throughout scripture where God or someone else says, “Fear not.”
Two days before our national election, I need to hear “fear not.” I need to hear Jesus, whom I believe may well have thought that the world was about to end, say to his disciples, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” Maybe you need to hear that too. Fear not. Be of good cheer. Whatever happens on Tuesday and beyond, we must not abandon hope, and we must keep it firmly in mind that God will not abandon us --- ever.
“The End” could possibly be not far away, but if so, it won’t because of how this election turns out. Furthermore, there are no signs pointing to an immediate world denouement on the basis of anything, no complete “untying” of the laces of social and political cohesion.
Therefore, be of good cheer. Fear not. God will see to it that the world is not overcome. November 3, 2020 will not represent the end of the world. As with everything else in the past, in the future this too shall pass.