Letting Go of the Rules and Raising the Kid We Actually Have: (a jaunty little sermon about the apocalypse)

The Rev. Brad Sullivan
Lord of the Streets, Houston
November 17, 2024
Proper 28
Daniel 12:1-3
Psalm 16
Mark 13:1-8

So, having kids is kind of a crazy thing. We had our first over 16 years ago, and as much preparation as we put into having that little guy, it was still the absolute end of one age and the beginning of another once he was born. On the one hand, the instant I held him for the first time, I felt this burst of love suddenly happen inside of me. I loved him and found him more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen. At the same time, when the nurses said it was time for us to leave the hospital and go home with our baby boy, I thought they must be joking and that they might should be held liable for gross negligence for leaving us with this baby, when they obviously knew what they were doing, and we obviously didn’t.

Being at home with our infant son, we quickly found that freedom and time to rest without responsibility was gone. There were times I’d look on with nostalgic jealousy at our non-babied friends, thinking, “whatever happened to that life?”, while still loving our son more than anything.

Yes, having a child was the end of an age for my wife and me and the beginning of another age. We prepared, we read books, we got lots of unasked-for advice from lots of well-meaning people, and I remembered how my parents raised me, so I had some idea of what to do. We tried out all of the parenting techniques we knew and had learned. Some of it worked. Some of it really, really didn’t, and I found that raising this kid was a lot different than my parents raising me. The stuff they did with me, it didn’t work with him. 

That gave me a lot of anxiety because raising my son wasn’t going according to the rules I knew. So eventually, I had to let get go of some of those child-rearing rules and learn to raise this particular child. I had to trust him to be who he was, even if who he was didn’t fit into parenting rules that I knew. 

I bring this up because when Jesus talked about the end of one age and the coming of a new age, he talked about violent upheaval and he called all of that violent upheaval, “birthpangs.” “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.” He paints a pretty frightening picture talking about wars and rumors of wars, but he likens the whole thing to giving birth. 

The whole giving birth process kinda sucks. Painful, body stretching in ways it just doesn’t fully snap back from, the baby kinda violently thrust out of its comfortable, safe home into this crazy world of ours…and then there’s new life. One age has ended, and a new age begins with new life. 

Daniel spoke of new life at the end of the ages in his prophecy which we heard today. “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Again, part of that sounds awesome, part of it, kind of less awesome. Daniel writes of the end of the life that we know and the beginning of some new kind of life. 

What will that be like? What exactly does Daniel mean? Well, the most honest answer is, “we don’t exactly know,” but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to figure it all out. Looking at the passages from Daniel and looking at other parts of scripture which describe life after this life, the church and various groups within the church have come up with all sorts of explanations and rules. Explanations of what life after death will be like, and rules about how to end up with everlasting life, not everlasting contempt. 

You’ve got to believe in Jesus in just the right way or be baptized in just the right way. You’ve got to be among God’s elect, or you’ve got to choose Jesus. You’ve got to make sure you don’t backslide, or if you do, you’ve got to make sure to repent before you die. Many churches have gotten pretty exact in describing exactly how the eternal life rules work so folks can be assured that they have eternal life because they believe in Jesus and have done all these things. 

The problem with all of these explanations and rules is that they are based in fear and anxiety. The idea of being raised to everlasting contempt sounds awful, and we should take that judgment seriously. We should take seriously the cruelty and injustice, the selfishness and violence that lead to everlasting contempt. We should take seriously God’s call to turn from cruelty and injustice. We should take seriously God’s call to turn from selfishness and violence. 

What we might shouldn’t do is make absolute doctrine and rules about how precisely to avoid being raised to shame and everlasting contempt. The rules and doctrine may help alleviate our fear of God’s judgment, but what happens is, we end up with our faith in rules and doctrine, rather than faith in God. Having some notion of doctrine around the end times is fine, but eventually we’ve got to just put our trust in God. Let our anxieties go, give our anxieties to God, not to doctrine and rules, and trust God with any new age to come.

The same is true for what Jesus taught. Countless ages have come and gone since Jesus said these words about the end of the age, and every time, folks have said that the end of their age was the one Jesus was talking about. Folks have looked to many descriptions of the end times in the Bible, and they’ve picked them apart and analyzed them, and they’ve said quite confidently, “See! It’s all happening now. This is the end Jesus was talking about!” Well, so far, everyone who has said that has been wrong. There have been many ages of humanity that have come and gone in the last 2000 years, and none of them have been the end that Jesus was talking about. 

We’ve got lots of images and texts to analyze to try to figure out which end of an age will be the end Jesus was talking about, and the only thing we know for certain is that we’re never going to know, and we’re going to be wrong every time. Jesus said that he didn’t even know when that end was going to be, and we think we’re going to figure it out? 

That not knowing can leave us with a bit of anxiety…so we naturally try to figure it out, get right with God before the end, etc. Again, that ends up placing our faith in rules and doctrine before our faith in God. 

Like rules and advice for parenting, it’s helpful, but eventually you’ve got to learn to parent the kid you’ve got. 

Having some notion of doctrine around the end times is fine, but eventually we’ve got to just put our trust in God. Let our anxieties go, give our anxieties to God, not to doctrine and rules, and trust God with any new age to come, trusting that whatever else the new age of God’s ultimate kingdom will be, it will be an age of new life. Like a baby being born, the new age of life fully lived in God’s kingdom will be the end of the life we know, and this new life will more beautiful and more beloved than anything we have ever known. 

Hollow

Inspired by T.S. Elliot's poem, "The Hollow Men" (https://allpoetry.com/the-hollow-men), "Hollow" follows the idea, "this is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper," I looked at three aspects of life which can end with a whimper: our relationships, our lives, and our wars.

Looking especially at our wars, I wrote, "knowing once the bombs stop falling, for an ending we'll be calling, crawling on with nothing but a whimper."

I'd say this feels particularly relevant today, but when has it not felt relevant?

"To Hell with this, I'm gonna live!"

The Rev. Brad Sullivan
Lord of the Streets
January 21, 2024
3^rd after Epiphany, Year B
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Psalm 62:6-14
Mark 1:14-20 

“To Hell with this, I’m gonna live!”

One of my favorite movies is Serenity, which y’all’ve heard me talk about before. It’s a sci-fi film, many centuries in the future, with a rather sinister galactic government over all the planets and the good guys, a crew of 8 people living on a space freighter, doing various legal and not quite legal jobs. On the ship, you have the captain and others, including the ship’s mechanic, Kaylee, and the ship’s doctor, Simon. Kaylee has had a crush on Simon since they met, and it has gone unrequited for a long time.

So, at one point in the movie, the whole crew is about to be attacked by a hoard of vicious creatures, and things are not looking good for our plucky band of heroes. The captain and a couple of good fighters look like they have things pretty well handled, but everyone else, including Kaylee and Simon…they don’t really have a clue what they’re doing. Assuming they are all going to die, Simon finally professes his love for Kaylee. At that moment, she goes from terrified and fumbling with her weapon to cocking her gun and saying, “To Hell with this! I’m gonna live!”

In Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, Paul wrote, assuming that they weren’t all about to die, but that their lives were about to be drastically changed by the second coming of Jesus. Like many in the early church, Paul seems to have believed that Jesus would be coming again within their lifetimes. So, he was telling the church to act accordingly, as though the present form of the world was passing away. Paul was obviously not entirely accurate with that belief, as we see the world is still turning as it was back in the first century.

His advice to the church, however, was still sound. Far from giving up on everything, throwing up their hands and saying, “Well, I guess nothing much matters anymore,” Paul’s message was a little bit more of Kaylee’s “To Hell with this! I’m gonna live!”

Whether Jesus’ return and the fullness of God’s kingdom comes today, or in another couple thousand years, or even further off than that, the Kingdom of God has still come near, and so we get to live. The Kingdom of God is all around us, alive and well in thousands and millions of ways, all the time, every day.  God’s kingdom is alive and well even in things as simple as marriage and relationships, in joy and sorrow, in buying stuff, and in regular old dealings with the world.

Paul was writing about these things as though the world were about to end, and so he said, for those who had wives to live as though they had none. I can think that might mean, “don’t have kids” because, why would you if the world was about to end. There are all kinds of ways that if you were married, you could live as though you weren’t, some of those probably more helpful than others.

Thinking of marriage as it has been in some times and places, we can think of ancient times and of wives as not being owned by their husbands but there being a bit of a possessive aspect to that relationship. In that sense, it seems like Paul was saying, “Husbands, you can let go of your wives a little bit, rather than holding them as possessions. You can be equals as it is in God’s kingdom, equals without being given in marriage, as it is in the resurrection.”

The same seems true of the rest of Paul’s advice on how to live. Hold on lightly to possessions. They won’t go with you when this life is over, and we have to spend time in our lives working in order to get the money to buy possessions, so we’re literally spending our lives to get possessions. Paul raises a good question, then. How much of your life do you really want to give up in acquiring stuff?

Those who are mourning and rejoicing, Paul said, be as though you were not. Ok, we can’t just not be sad or not be joyful, nor would it be helpful to, but we can, again, hold on lightly to those times of mourning and rejoicing. Times of rejoicing will come to an end, and it’s ok when they do. We continue on, and there is still much beauty in life, even in times when we’re not particularly rejoicing. Times of mourning too, don’t have to last forever. We can after a time of sorrow, give that person or dream that we’ve lost over to God, and we let person go, let that dream go, let that life that we had go.

There is still plenty of life after mourning and sorrow when we are open to receiving it.

Hold on lightly. Even though The End may not come right away, it could come at any moment, and an end may also come at any moment. So, hold on lovingly but lightly. Holdin on with a tight grip is living in fear: fear of losing, anger at having lost, attacking any who seem like a threat. To that tight gripped, fearful life, Paul is teaching us to say, “To Hell with this; I’m gonna live!”

The end or an end may come at any time, so hold on lightly. By holding on lightly, we get to love people without possessing them.

By holding on lightly, we get to possess our things but with an open hand.

By holding on lightly, we get to open our hands to receive the beauty of the world and people around us.

Receiving the beauty of the world and people around us, and holding on lightly, we get to receive both joy and sorrow and not hold on to them forever, because there’s far too much living to do to be stuck fearfully clinging to people and stuff and even life itself.

There’s far too much life to live to waste time clinging to things in fear.

We’ve got a baptism today, and “To Hell with this, I’m gonna live,” is not exactly in the baptismal covenant, but it probably should be. What do we say at the beginning? I renounce Satan and all spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God. I renounce all evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. I renounce all sinful desires which draw me from the love of God. Then, I turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as my savior. I put my whole trust in his grace and love. I promise to follow and obey him as my Lord.

If that’s not saying, “To Hell with this, I’m gonna live,” I don’t know what is.

We’re declaring in our baptism that we’re gonna live. We’re declaring that we’re going to hold on lightly to the world around us and seek to love, rather than possess. We’re declaring that we’re going to mess up and that we’re even going to hold on to those screw ups lightly. Then, when we do mess up, we’re declaring that we’re going to ask God’s help to turn around again, to open up our hands, to let go of what we’re possessing and to receive from God the beauty of this life once again.

That’s the life of Baptism, the Way of Jesus, the life of the kingdom of God, for the kingdom of God is all around us, all the time. It may be tomorrow, or centuries, or millennia from now before Jesus comes and fully brings about God kingdom. However long or short it is, in the meantime, we get to live. However imperfectly it may be, we get to live God’s kingdom in our lives right now. Rather than wasting time clinging to fear, we get to open our hands and live.