25th
Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, Proper 28
November
18, 2012
The
Reverend Dr. Brent Was
“Beware that no one leads you astray.”
I do not think that the precipitous
fall from grace of CIA director David Petreaus is one of the signs that Jesus
was talking about in this, St. Mark’s Little
Apocalypse, but it is worth making comment on. It amazes me that so many are shocked that
the moral character of the director of the CIA has come into question. He was the director of the CIA; his job was
to skirt the outer limits of morality under the cover of darkness in the violent
defense of a specific group of people: us.
He ran the drone war. He ran the
secret prisons across the globe. He
declined to take responsibility when 27 CIA operatives were convicted in abstentia
in the courts of our ally Italy for kidnapping a man and shipping him to Egypt
where he was brutally tortured. And
before this, as a soldier, his vocation was to kill people, or more accurately
as an officer, to get 19 year olds to kill people. I had that same job once. And yet what outrages us, what forces his
resignation is that he had sex with someone other than his wife? If we were to put this on a hierarchy of sin,
I’d rather that he had a lot more sex with a lot more biographers and killed a
lot fewer people. I suppose if you are
going to betray an oath before God to a spouse you are probably more likely to
betray an oath to a nation, so this revelation of impropriety is operationally
relevant, but still. We should have been
outraged by this man’s conduct in the world way before he betrayed his wife. Truly, if this by all accounts great man had dedicated his talents to
alleviating poverty, eradicating malaria or to some other common good, he would
have gotten much further in his mission to make this world safer, freer and
more secure for Americans as well as for everyone else. His fall is no great loss for our nation, I
do grieve, though for him and his family, Ms. Broadwell and her young children
and husband. Terrible all around.
I don’t think this is one of the signs
Jesus was talking about. I don’t think
the General was one of those leading us astray, not intentionally, at
least. He was pretty central in the
rumors and conduct of wars, of kingdoms rising against kingdoms, nations
against nations. I don’t think the CIA
can cause earthquakes (that is the natural gas company’s fracking
operations.) I am not all conspiracy
crazy. All of this stuff is and
true. True like Marcus Borg says when he
uses the term post-critical naïveté,
which means, “I don’t know if it happened this way, but I know this story is
true.” Just like today’s gospel, St.
Mark’s Little Apocalypse.
I just want to be clear why I bring up such a thing as
this, something so current-eventy, so newsworthy at church. My understanding of the mission and purpose
of Christ’s church is all wrapped up in why I think speaking about a disgraced
public figure on Sunday morning is not only appropriate, but is important if
not necessary. We gather here week in,
week out, to pray together. That is what
this is, the Mass, a form of common prayer.
Prayer is a practice, a practice, as our Catechism teaches us, that is
all about responding to God. This
practice of responding to God together deepens, complexifies, enriches, makes
stronger our relationship not only with God, but with each other and the world
we live in. One of the primary fruits of
a life of prayer together is learning to make meaning of the world and our
relationships with the world. Being here
together in a Holy community, saying, singing, proclaiming Holy words,
orienting our beings on the Holy Sacrament… these are beautiful things, but in
and of themselves are valueless, if not dangerously and narcissistically
distracting, if they do not help us live in the world in a way more in line
with God’s will, more in line with the true nature of things. Making meaning, discerning the will of God,
discerning our part in the vast interdependent web of existence… if being here
does not help you, motivate you, enable you to bring all of your faculties to
bear on how you live in the world, how you conduct your business, your
classroom, your family, your political life, your money, if being here doesn’t
inform that, if not define that, your kind of missing the point of the
religious life. Certainly the religious
life Jesus Christ leads us on is one straddling eternity and the present
moment, the finite and the infinite, the now and the forever. Our public and private lives, our religious
life, our professional life, our family life… there is no delineation of these
spheres, no separation, no boundaries.
Our whole lives are a seamless continuum in the eyes of God, therefore
our religious life, the meaning we make through our religious life has to inform how we live in the world.
It has to inform the choices we make, the leaders we select, the society we
aspire to. So following the advice of
Karl Barth, perhaps the greatest theologian of the 20th century, I
preach with the Gospel in one hand and the newspaper in the other. The always and everywhere illuminating the
here and now.
Today’s passage, St. Mark’s Little Apocalypse is a case in point of
the always and everywhere illuminating the here and now. What does the word apocalypse mean? ______ Revelation.
And what does that mean? ____ Right,
making known that which was unknown, particularly in the case of a divine
disclosure of knowledge or wisdom.
Apocalypse has popularly come to mean the revelation of something to do
with the end times, but more accurately, what is revealed are mysteries of the
future or mysteries of the heavenly realm. In this passage, the 13th
Chapter of St. Mark’s good news to us, what mysteries are being revealed?
Remember where St. Mark and his
community were in history. They were in
the time of a major insurrection against Roman imperial hegemony that would end
in 70 with desolating sacrilege descending upon the Temple. What a time.
How terrifying. What Jesus is
saying is that, yes, terrible things are happening, but this is not the end,
not yet, it is just the very beginning and you have to be prepared for the long
haul. Then the rest of Chapter 13 goes
into pretty close detail about the terrible trails and tribulations that the
faithful will suffer in these times, but Jesus’ primary warning is “Beware that
no one lead you astray.” So what is he
talking about?
Wars, famines, earthquakes… these are
generic embodiments of all Jewish apocalyptic literature, so they could be just
that, poetic references to the future state of things heavenly and
otherwise. There is also the real
possibility that what was being discussed here were contemporaneous
events. Wars, rumors of wars… Roman
legions, 5,000 man fighting units moved around Palestine then. Would there be a siege? Are they leaving? A terrible famine blanketed the eastern
Mediterranean in the 50s, certainly leaving a deep impression on St. Mark and
his community, that famine would have been an abiding memory. And earthquakes? In 60, an earthquake devastated Laodicia, a
city in Asia Minor mentioned by Paul.
Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 62.
50s.
60. 62. The war of 66 – 70. These dates are all well after the death of
Jesus Christ… So either He was speaking
purely metaphorically, His prophecy was dead on accurate, or, and what most
scholars more or less agree on, these words, the Little Apocalypse of St. Mark are not the actual words of Jesus
Christ but were crafted by St. Mark in the spirit
of the teaching of Jesus Christ. The words “do not be alarmed,” is a
translation of a Greek word meaning literally “to avoid precipitous
action.” In this time, yes, there were
many messianic, apocalyptic figures running around Israel, our own Lord and
Savior and his herald St. John the Baptist among them. There were also insurrectionists, rebel
leaders recruiting heavily for those rumored wars to end all wars with the
imperial forces. Barrabas, the man freed
in Jesus’ stead by Pilate; he may have been one of these. Judas Iscariot, our unfortunate anti-hero, he
is associated with the Zealots, a violent movement of extreme religiously
motivated rebels; I have an image of 1st century jihadists in my
mind.
So St. Mark, with all of this swirling
about, rebellion, famine, darkened skies from a distant volcano in his not so
distant past, with Jesus Christ on his mind, in his heart and through his pen,
he begins to make meaning of the world.
He expresses his understanding of Jesus Christ’s message to not be a
call to armed insurrection against Empire and her collaborationist allies, but
of non-violent resistance to those same dark forces. In the words of Mark scholar Ched Meyers,
“Mark prepares the reader for a discourse not of revolutionary triumphalism,
but of suffering and tribulation.
Against rebel eschatology, Mark pits the death/life paradox of his own
narrative symbols and the politics of non-violence.”
Be it the authentic words of Our Lord
and Savior, or the spirit of that Savior inhabiting the words of St. Mark, what
is clear is that meaning of the movements of the world, the actual day to day
movements of the world, making meaning of those, that is a religious
imperative. Poverty, disease, violence,
corruption, disingenuous religious leadership, injustice of all forms and
offering models of life as corrections to life in a broken world; this is what
Jesus preached. He did not preach in
abstracts but in the concrete realities that he experienced as a landless
peasant in the occupied territories of 1st century Palestine. (Israel.
Rome. Some things don’t
change. God bless the people of Gaza and
forgive the people of Israel in this, yet another terrible hour). This is the body and blood of our shared
existence that Jesus Christ demands we take deeply into ourselves; demands that
we make meaning of; demands we do something about; demands we be something
different. “This is but the beginning of
the birthpangs.” AMEN
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