“The Lord is my light and my salvation!” cries the Psalmist. “Whom shall I fear?”
“The Lord is the stronghold of my life,” he continues, “of whom shall I be afraid?”
The statement “do not be afraid” and all of its combinations – as it has been endlessly pointed out by almost every Christian inspirational author – is one of the most repetitious refrains in the Bible. There are countless assurances that fear is not necessary, that we shouldn’t feel fear…the list is endless. Yet, we still fear almost everything. From the littlest things to the biggest.
“Whom shall I fear?” crowed the Psalmist.
Well, the end of the world, for one. For another thing, every one else. Trust me. It’s on TV.
These days you can choose your apocalypse – and it makes for great viewing. Your world can end by roasting from the inside out, and you can survive it by making it to the Himalayas where ships are waiting. A new movie coming out suggest that the world will end in angels, as God sends forth an army to wipe the world clean of the stain of humanity.
OR, it can end in asteroids, freezing, pollution, climate change, or my personal favorite: zombies. Evil, stinky, zombies.
The end of the world has captured our cultural imaginations for as long as anyone can remember; it’s not a new phenomena. People have poured over esoteric texts, gone blind seeking word patterns or hidden messages, exhausted their intellects, capabilities, and self-respect trying to claim to everyone else that they know when the world’s going to end, and in particular, with a kind of juicy enthusiasm, who’s going to get killed in divinely terrific ways. These visions are intended to instill fear into the listener.
There’s always the post-apocalyptic visions, too – the ones that are designed to make us be afraid of everyone who’s so bad that Jesus doesn’t like them. The hugely popular and theologically bankrupt Left Behind series. A certain kind of popular theology lends itself to imagining what will happen to everyone God doesn’t like when God is angry.
It forms a shield between individuals, as well, in its depiction of the victims of tragedy as deserving of their fate, and therefore insulates them from the agony of identifying too closely with the wounded, mourning, homeless, and hungry fellow human beings. This is how people like Pat Robertson can declare the earthquake in Haiti to be the fault of the Haitians themselves – because their theology demands that God be directly responsible for all things, even horrible natural disasters. In their theology, there are only puppets in the hands of a vengeful God.
When you think of it, really, that sort of thinking is perpetuated all through disaster movies. There’s the deserving few left after the disaster, but they’re at the mercy of completely nasty humans who wish even more death and destruction on them. I suppose, stylistically, it makes a story of redemption, or tragedy, that much more poignant.
I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in bits and pieces; I confess that I didn’t have the tenacity to read it from cover to cover. The story of Man, who is trying to survive in a vicious post-apocalyptic world and protect his son Boy, while foraging for food and avoiding roving gangs of cannibals was not attractive reading for me. But there’s a scene in the movie that caught my eye, one that’s not in the book. Man and Boy take refuge in a shattered church; the fire between them offers some small light and heat beneath a looming, bright cross.
It shows a luminous love between a father who would sacrifice everything for his son, in a place where worship has been absent for years. Even in this time, the cross still speaks – not with eloquent wisdom, but with power.
The cross tells us of peace in a shattered world, abiding hope in hopeless times, and of love that transcends even the bonds of death.
In Haiti, a student at Wartburg Seminary was killed in the earthquake. As the buildings began to fall, he, his wife, and his cousin were at an school for boys. They became separated, and he was buried under a pile of collapsed concrete. Running out after the shaking stopped, his wife and cousin could here him singing, singing that ended after he sang out “God’s peace to us, we pray.”
The scenes of devastation in Haiti are endlessly described as ‘apocalyptic’. Prosperity gospel preachers the world over are calling it Haiti’s own fault, and even as we are stunned at the stories of death and destruction in Haiti we will still go and spend our money to look at movies of death and destruction. To look at an apocalypse to see who survives.
But paint a picture of an apocalypse where everyone lives forever, and you’ll see the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Our apocalypse – our revelation, as the word means in Greek – began with the death of Jesus Christ, and we live it out in his resurrection. We live in revelation, the very time of the Word made flesh: marked with the cross of Christ through our baptism, brought through death, and living in the promise of eternal life.
Christ comes and seeks us out, chooses us. Calls us from our lives saying simply, “follow me.” And we are led out into the same world of suffering and pain, anger and despair, but also we led into a world of unimaginable grace, mercy, and love, for all of the children of God.
Into our own revelation, we sing out “God’s peace to us, we pray.”
And the people of God respond, Amen.
