"Not Safe, But Good"
A dozen years ago, I gave the address to the students, at the beginning of the school year, at Nanjing Seminary in China. We learned quickly, in the middle of summer, why Nanjing is called ‘the oven of China.’ The students were almost all young and evangelical. We started the morning with a patriotic word and song from someone from the Party. Though the Church, as in the early centuries, does all it can to be good citizens, though the relationship is always fraught. In fact I was told that the seminary could teach little theology, as this seemed to have more risk of political agitation. Better, the officials thought, to stick to the Bible- it was safer. But that is surely a mistake, isn’t it? The Word of God seems safe, grown over with moss or dust, but Amos tells us that it can be like a lion jumping out of a thicket, or like a jolt of electricity coming from the ark in II Samuel. The novelist Annie Dillard makes the point recently in writing that people attending church should be required to wear crash helmets, or be given life preservers by the ushers! The Word of God, like C.S. Lewis’ lion, is not safe, but is good.
This morning I have for you one point, historical really, I want you to remember, and so to wrestle with. It is an example of awakening to the fact that the Bible is not safe, nor comfortable. It happened a little more than a century ago, and one figure it is associated with is Albert Schweitzer. He was a great scholar of Bach, and a doctor who toiled for years in a jungle hospital in west Africa. But he also turned his mind to the New Testament. What he realized was that scholars had domesticated the Bible. They had made it safe and familiar. God was supposed to be building the Kingdom through cultural progress of Western society. But this idea had, as Schweitzer said, fallen to pieces, and whatever remained was blown to bits in the trenches of Word War I. Jesus was in fact a figure far stranger, coming, said Schweitzer, as ‘one unknown.’ He was first and foremost, the prophet of the end-time, of God’s sudden arrival on the last day, an arrival bound up with Jesus’ own person in a startling way.
It is fair to say that all New Testament scholarship since Schweitzer (and others) has emphasized just this point: the writers of the New Testament share with other Jews of the first century the expectation of the end of the world! Theology calls that ‘eschatology,’ which means ‘the study of the last things,’ which are, personally for each of us, death, judgment, heaven and hell, but in the New Testament, the end of conclusion of all things. Listen to Luke 11: ‘if I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.’ There are many debates about the New Testament, but the assumption, the background, the horizon, for every single verse is the coming of the Lord to bring in the end of all things and the beginning of the Kingdom of God. And that was, and is, a surprise.
But what exactly does that mean, in the New Testament, and also, on this confirmation Sunday, in our lives as followers of Jesus? The ‘end’ we speak of can mean three things, and each matters for us. Each meaning has within in the edge which this way of hearing the Gospel should have. The first is the end, by which I mean, the goal, which is found in the death and resurrection of Jesus. He is the end of the old world, and the dawn of the new. He is the hinge of history, He himself. The first reading, from the second chapter of the prophet Isaiah, written a full seven centuries before Jesus, tells us what that culmination looks like. The nations, no longer divided and enslaved by sin, come to his most gracious rule, as the Collect says. Zion is the goal of the pilgrimage, the site of the sacrifice, the home of God’s law and word, and all of these are summed up in Jesus. In these he unites by his self-giving and his authority as the Risen, the nations otherwise warring. This results in the Shalom, the peace, the Shabbat eternal, which we were all created for. That rest is found, even as we journey, in Him, as the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds us.
Second the end of which the New Testament speaks, means a change in our lives, a conversion, which is to say a turning. That is what the epistle reading from the 13th chapter of Romans is talking about. Something must die and something must come to live in us. We are to be ‘watchful,’ and so that is the theme of Advent as a whole. What is entailed. In that? We wait on the Lord’s time. He come unexpectedly. We live in the dark but can see the first signs of dawn. We need armor for life in this dying world is dangerous. We must be disciplined, as we throw overboard quarrels and anger and things that bind us, whatever they may be. We have to be sober, in whatever sense that takes for you. The end of all things must take place in your heart and can only take place by God’s initiative, by grace.
And what then is the third sense that the New Testament’s ‘end’ might take? The simplest to understand may be the hardest for us moderns to accept. Things will actually come to an end. The eschaton, the conclusion, is also akin to history. It will happen. It is not the same as environmental night or winter, but akin to it. A sifting will take place. The ordinary process will be disrupted. There will be another, greater flood, followed by the new covenant of which Jeremiah spoke, and which Jesus, about die, initiated us by the new Passover meal we reenact every Sunday.
Finally, what does all this mean in the lives of those about to be confirmed, and for those of us already confirmed? A century ago, scholars woke up to a central theme of the New Testament, hidden in plain sight, the return of the Lord. We too are summoned anew this Advent to just such an awakening, implying as it does that we walk about spiritually asleep a lot of the time. As I have suggested, this awakening is threefold, in how we think about Jesus, personally in how we grapple with uncertainty and indeterminacy in our lives, and finally how we make our peace with time. But we can welcome, and we can be grateful, for this awakening, this shaking, this restoration to our right minds and hearts, because it means the prince of peace stands at our door, really his, and knocks. Amen.
