(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Christmas Apocalypse, originally shared on December 31, 2020. It was the seventy-seventh video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
It’s
still Christmas (we’re on day 7 out of 12 today), we’ve left our Christmas lights
on and our decorations up. Who cares if our neighbors think we’re lazy. It’s
also New Year Eve. Please do not go out tonight. Our hospitals are approaching
chaos of apocalyptic proportions. Ambulances are circling hospitals literally
waiting for someone to die so that a bed becomes available. Please don’t make
it make it worse. We are also between the two advents, the first coming of
Christ and the second coming. Things are likely going to get worse, short term.
But, our long term prospects are out of this world. Today, we’re going to talk
about God’s promises, and how they can give you the perspective you need to
face what’s coming with hope and confidence.
Manny Castro was a member of the church I
served in San Dimas, until he and his wife and daughter moved to Missouri for
his wife’s work.
He was in the Navy when a friend of his
wanted to try-out for the Navy Seals. He talked a reluctant Manny into going
with him. His friend didn’t make it, but Manny did.
He was a funny guy and always ready to help.
We had a huge crew of volunteers painting the exterior church walls with a
sprayer and the trim with brushes one year.
I was on a tall extension ladder painting
the trim above the main entrance to the old worship building. I had one leg on
the ladder and the other stretching out so that I could reach a missed spot
without having to move the ladder. The ladder and I shook as I stretched
further-out. Many laughed and said, “That’s MY pastor.” and stood where he
could catch me if I fell.
He was an active member of the Red Cross
and, when there was a disaster anywhere in the country, he was there to serve.
He loved his dog, Leather. One year, Leather
was riding on our church’s 4th of July Parade float someone from the
crowd yelled, “Look, a Lutheran dog.” That stuck. One day, Manny was riding
down the freeway with Leather in the car and he suddenly realized that he was
in the car-pool lane, which realized that he had thought was OK because he and
Leather were both in the car.
He grew a goatee and had it when he and his
family left for Missouri. On his family’s last Sunday with us before they left,
at the “Farewell and Godspeed” luncheon we threw for them, we grabbed each
other’s beard and smiled for the camera.
Manny died of COVID-19 the day before
yesterday, one death among the hundreds of thousands that went before him, but
tragic in so many ways, not the least of which was that he contracted the virus
at his church.
The congregation celebrated its 50th
anniversary just before Thanksgiving. Manny wanted to go, to support the
church. They took all the precautions. In retrospect, though, they are sorry
that they went ahead with the service. No one intended this to happen.
His wife and daughter, who were at the
center of his life, contracted the same strain and recovered. Manny did not.
There is not a shred of doubt in my mind that Manny would totally have rather
had it this way, than the other way around.
Manny’s no longer suffering, and even as we
mourn, we rejoice in the victory of the cross, the promise that because Jesus
Christ lives, we shall live also, that death has no more dominion over us who
are bound to Christ and to one another by faith and baptism for eternity.
It’s also a time to remember a story I’ve
told before, that Manny liked, about the guy who was sitting in his home
one day when a Red Cross worker pounded on his door, yelling “The dam has broken.
Get out! Get out now! We’ll help you.”
He replied, “Oh, thank
you very much but I’m a Christian. I know that God will take care of me. I’ll
be fine.” And the Red cross worker finally left and went on to the next house.
The waters came and
flooded the first floor of his house, so that he had to move up to the second
floor. A guy in a rowboat came by and said, “Hop in, buddy. I’ll get you out of
here.”
“Oh, thank you,” the man
said. “But I’m a Christian. I know that God won’t let anything harm me.” The
man in the rowboat finally went on to other houses.
The waters continued to rise,
and the man had to crawl onto his roof. A helicopter flew over and the crew
spotted the man on his roof. They dropped a rope ladder and shouted, “Climb up
and we’ll get you out of here. The waters are rising. This is your last
chance!”.
“Thanks for coming, but
I’ll be fine. My faith is strong. I know God will take care of me,” he shouted.
The water kept rising
and pretty soon the rose over the house and over the man, and he drowned.
When he arrived at the
gates of heaven, dripping wet, he immediately demanded to be taken to the
throne of Grace. “That’s kind of an unusual request but, OK.” St. Peter said.
He stomped through the
throne room into God’s presence and whined, “You promised me! You said that
you’d always be with me, no matter what. What happened?”
“What do you mean,” God
said. “I sent you a Red Cross worker, a rowboat and a helicopter.”
Manny’s
death was just one, but it hit with the force of a catastrophe if you cared
about him, as do the deaths of anyone we care about.
That it happened during the Christmas season reminds us that God became
human flesh, fully God and fully human being, to rescue us, because the world
is not the way it’s supposed to be. It got messed up from the beginning, and
still gets messed up every time human beings believe that there is a way to be
like God, think that they know better than God, and that they could do a better
job of being God than God.
God has given us researchers, medical professionals, and civil
leadership, and we ignore the simple things that would give us the best chance of
living. God has come in Jesus Christ, offers us the gift of faith, a living
relationship with the living God, in order to live the abundant lives that we
were created to live, and we ignore the good news and its implications for our
lives.
Just like from the beginning, in the Garden of Eden, we know what to do,
but we seek our own interests over other’s interests, and that’s why things are
the way they are.
Yet, God has not given up on us. God continues to offer himself for you.
God will one day come to bring all those whom he has saved to be with him
forever. That’s the second advent, the one that is coming. In our creeds, we
say of Jesus that, “He will
come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have
no end.
We long for that day, when everything will be changed. Restored. As St.
John writes in the last book of the Bible, Revelation, the 21st chapter:
*Revelation 21:1-4
That is the apocalypse, written in a style of apocalyptic writing found
many places in the Bible.
Christmas
reminds us that, in anticipation of a coming apocalypse, when there will be
great suffering, followed by the final judgement, that Jesus was born to die
for us, and is coming again. When will that happen?
I went to worship on Christmas Day at Redeemer Lutheran Church in the
old city section of Jerusalem when I was in college and did a term abroad. We
had some excitement. A guy stood up in the middle of the pastor’s sermon and
shouted, “Jesus has returned! He has been reincarnated and is now a 12-year-old
boy living in India”. In case you are
not a Lutheran, just so you know, things like this do not normally happen in
Lutheran churches. Someone else stood up and said, “He is not! Jesus taught
that we should always be ready, because no one knows when the final judgement
will come.” Finally, things settled down and the Christmas Day worship service
went on. What is important is what has already happened and is now unfolding
for us.
The worship still goes on, but we are still called to be ready. I heard someone
say that he lives every day as if it was his last. “That’s why I never do
laundry. Because who wants to do laundry on the last day of their life?”
How different will 2021 be from 2020? Who knows, but whatever comes, we
are called to keep our focus on God and to be ready.
Meanwhile, we live to serve others sacrificially, in response to what
Jesus, God made flesh, did for us on the cross. We do what we can to keep one another
healthy. We serve the poor, not to keep them poor, but to provide the
circumstances, both individually and systemically, in which they can move out
of poverty in a way that is an expression of the already here but not yet
realized Reign of God.
Our
stage in this pandemic, is just like our stage in the history of salvation. We
are now living between the two advents, the two comings, between the first
coming in Bethlehem, and the second coming to judge the world. We live in the
present, leaning toward the apocalypse, after which Jesus comes to bring his
perfect reign to those who believe and are baptized. Just like in this pandemic,
“There’s light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still in the tunnel.”
And, just as Christmas celebrates that God kept his promise after 1,000
years and came as the messiah, the Christ, to deliver the world from sin,
death, and all the powers that defy God, and that he abides with us in the Holy
Spirit, the streams of living water that never end, we can live with confidence
that God will keep his promise to come again after 2,000 years in the Second coming,
to save us.
“Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”
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