|
|
||
HOME
|
|
The Apocalypse is Following Me AroundMay 13, 2007
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon
OK, you knew I
would have to start with an interfaith joke. So here goes:
Two guys who are sitting on a train and one says to the other “I’ve
got a great joke for you. These
two Jewish guys are walking down the street…” And his friend
interrupts him and says, “Why does every joke always have to be about two
Jews? I’m offended!” And the first guy
says, “OK, OK. These two
Episcopalians are walking down the street going to their nephew’s bar
mitzvah…” My friends, it’s
a great pleasure to be here at St. Philip’s this morning as part of our
pulpit exchange on this warm weekend—a weekend of interfaith warmth, as well
as We share many things—most, perhaps. We are surely both created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, and our values are so similar. It is a commonality we should celebrate. We both share traditions immersed in deep education, and that brings me to a funny story. In any given week I teach at least 4 or 5 different Adult Education Academy at courses at Temple Emanu-El—everything from Torah Study to Jewish mysticism to theology to Adult Bar and Bat Mitzvah—and frankly, I enjoy the teaching as much as anything I do. The true meaning of the Hebrew word Torah, which is so often defined as “Law”, is actually instruction or teaching, and it is an essential truth of Judaism—and perhaps all religion—that we are here in this world to learn and grow. Learning together is the greatest Jewish commandment, the ultimate mitzvah, in a way. And I do love both to learn and to teach. Usually each season, in addition to my normal course load
of standard classes like Intermediate Judaism and book groups and such, I try
to teach a class on something that captures the Zeitgiest, that might be of
most urgent and compelling interest to my congregation and community.
The subject varies, depending on just what seems to be the hottest
topic or text at the time. Last
summer I taught the Jewish approach to the question of immigration; in other
seasons it has been the Jewish attitude towards war and peace, or personal and
political ethics, or even life after death in Jewish thought.
Last winter I team-taught a mini-class on water usage in Jewish
tradition and contemporary Ah, but this spring was different. This spring I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that our society had become fixated on the question of the Apocalypse, and that it would be very interesting to explore the end of days prophecies in Jewish tradition. After all, everyone thinks that the whole notion of an Apocalypse and Judgment Day and even life after death is essentially Christian. Yet almost all of it is derived from Jewish sources and ideas. What an interesting, even a noble project: instead of leaving the Apocalypse in the hands of the makers of the Left Behind series, I could reclaim the end of days for us! I called the class “The End of the World as We Know It”, ripping off an REM song from the 1980’s, put it in our course catalogue and our ads, and started preparing for it. Well, I must confess, that having closely studied the Jewish sources on the ketz yamim, the end of days, and explored the particulars of the Apocalypse in our ancient and powerful tradition, I can say with great confidence that there is a great deal of the end of days in Jewish texts, that the Apocalypse is probably an original Jewish idea—or one borrowed from the Persians 2500 years ago, perhaps—and the end of the world motif is very much in evidence in the prophetic period and on through the destruction of the 2nd Temple by the Romans in the year 70. In fact, there is even more apocalyptic material in Judaism than I ever suspected, and it continues on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in the dark period of the Bar Cochba revolt and its suppression in the 2nd century, and it infused a great deal of weird and wild writing and thinking in a period of confusion and tribulation. And having immersed myself in the subject and taught it for eight weeks, I can tell you that my basic response to teaching this class, and to all of this apocalyptic material is—yech. I mean, it’s just awful stuff, viscerally disgusting, filled with horrible and gruesome texts. The more I studied it the less I liked it; the more of it I read the more unpleasant, fearsome and, frankly, offensive it seemed. Judaism has always been a faith and practice system that advocates a kind of pragmatic idealism, living ethically in this world, using belief and prayer and law to push us towards morality in the world that we know and inhabit, rather than focusing on the end of all things or on heavenly promises for the by-and-by or the world to come. And this end of days stuff was just—well, horrible, with lots of vivid descriptions of things both physical and emotional that keep you up at night, fear woven into theology. OK, perhaps we Jews did invent the Apocalypse, but how about if w just let the Christians have it already… I mean, who needs it? You see, usually, I love to explore new areas and odd ideas in depth, but the deeper you go into this stuff, the more awful it becomes. Darkness, smoke, fire, ash, death, destruction, demonic possession, starvation, earthquakes and pestilence, horrible judgment, terrible things happening to everyone, sin and torment—well, I’m not proud of this fact, but after six weeks of this I had had enough of fear and terror and I actually tried to pretend that the class was over, but my students would have none of it. We want the rest of course, they said—you owe us two more classes! And so I was forced, against my will and better judgment, to complete the syllabus of gore, fear, destruction, and desolation. Phew, I thought, at the end of it all… We had finally destroyed the earth and I could go back to teaching things I enjoy teaching, which is nearly everything else in Jewish tradition. No more apocalypse anytime soon. And then I received this most gracious invitation from John Kitagawa and Greg Foraker to exchange pulpits, and to preach at St. Philip’s in the Hills on a sunny Sunday in May, and we shared our respective scriptural readings for this weekend. And I received in my email the following list of passages from the Episcopal tradition for this Sunday, six weeks after Easter: Joel 2:21-27… Revelation 21:22 - 22:5… Psalm 67… John 14:23-29 Something struck me about the first two of these books. The prophet Joel, from our Hebrew Bible—what many Christians still call the Old Testament—is rather obscure in Jewish tradition, and is read in our liturgy only occasionally and even then only a small section. But it is particularly important in the apocalyptical imagination, for Joel spells out how a great shofar, a ram’s horn will herald the coming time of destruction and darkness, and he then delineates some of the awful things that will happen on the great Day of Judgment. It is a prophecy singularly focused on fear. Oh, no, I thought—the apocalypse if following me around! It’s chasing me to St. Philip’s! And then the next passage is from the book of Revelation—well Revelation is of course the Ur-text of all apocalyptic stuff nowadays, the mother source of so much that is wild and weird and end of days and times oriented in our society. Revelations, for most folks, is about Judgment Day, and the end of days, and so on. And of course John has his moments of, shall we say, stringent harshness in his gospel, too. Great. The Apocalypse again. Oh boy. This is what they want me to preach about on Mother’s Day? The Apocalypse seems to be following me around… I began to think of an ancient cartoon character from the long defunct strip Lil’ Abner, Joe Btfsplk, who walked around with a cloud over his head, inadvertently causing destruction and bad luck to everyone around him. Here I was, the Jewish horseman of the Apocalypse, bringing darkness into the lives of Episcopalian mothers on that most important of all Hallmark holidays. Well, all is not truly bleak, of course, and it turns out that the textual selections for this Sunday are not the ones that they might have been from these particular books of Scripture. The Joel selection in fact, begins with the statement “Do not fear” and concludes by twice saying that “no one shall make you afraid or ashamed.” “gili usimchi ki higdil Adonai la’asot it says in Hebrew: be glad and rejoice, for the Lord has done great things! In fact, it a lovely, pastoral passage, so appropriate for the springtime, filled with images of rejoicing flowers and plants, of fruit trees and harvest motifs, of plenty to eat and joy in the land. And just after our official ending we have a famous sentence, “Your youth shall dream dreams and your old shall see visions”, a prophetic promise of Divine flow and blessing. It is the kind of lovely, gentle, and abundant prophecy, so gracious and generous, that it makes you think that religion is really just about beauty and kindness. And the section from Revelation is not one of fire and
brimstone at all but of light and life, of everlasting day caused by the light
of God. It begins with the shining
city on the hill, that has not need of sun or moon to shine—Revelation here
echoes the prophet Isaiah—for God illuminates it.
And after a beautiful section of pastoral bliss, also filled with fruit
and harvest, this passage concludes with light as well, “5And there will be
no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be
their light, and they will reign for ever and ever. And the John selection, too, is upbeat, focusing, as John does not always, on love and peace. The Psalm for today, too, is positive and mildly pastoral, promises of God’s grace and presence—echoing the Priestly benediction of the Book of Numbers, by the way—and concluding “God will bless us; and all the ends of the earth will fear Him.” So all of my Apocalyptic fears were unfounded… All is grace and beauty and harvesting God’s love here at St. Philip’s. Thank God. As Robert Browning put it, “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.” Or is it really? The truth is that Browning meant that line, from his long poem Pippa Passes, as a kind of moral commentary. The singer of the phrase “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world,” was an exploited child worker, an orphan who knew that all was not right with the world—but who chose to keep faith, and preserve her own belief in God and the power of moral action and divine favor. Similarly, each of these beautiful selections today in its own scriptural context, is far from the unambiguously optimistic selection it seems. Each is a kind of textual message of beauty wrestled from ugliness, of love and blessing rescued from an environment of fear and terror, of the unfounded belief in good ultimately triumphing over the obvious reality of failure and evil. The section we read from Joel actually concludes a long Apocalyptic passage on permanent darkness, on consuming fire and horrible destruction. Joel is telling the Israelites not to fear because, well, there is much to be afraid of. And Revelation is actually just balancing out the earlier prophecies of eternal darkness and bleak destruction by promising the light of God will shine into that awful darkness. And John is noting that lots of folks just won’t get it, and they will exist without love or peace. And even the lovely Psalm we have for today concludes with the words v’yiru oto ko afsei arets—the ends of the earth will fear God. What gives? Is this upbeat material merely a gloss on more serious and severe matters? Is it just the veneer that hides the dark underbelly of apocalyptic truth? Are we really all just going down into bleak darkness? I believe that this seeming dichotomy, this tension between the promises of divine retribution and the verses of light and joy that follow them, illustrate a fundamental divide in the ways we see our own lives. We are motivated—most of us, nearly all of us—by just two things: fear—and love. And the passages for today, while focusing on love, begin with the underlying motivation of fear. The truth is that most of us are motivated primarily by our fears. We get our work done out of the fear of failure. We do it well out of a fear of embarrassment. We hide our sins and errors because we are afraid of exposure. We spend most of our lives looking over our shoulders at something large gaining on us—and that thing is a manifestation of fear. It is fear that drives most of us to succeed. We see this in small, petty things as well as larger, more meaningful ones. We drive our cars only just a little over the posted limit out of fear of speeding tickets. We file our taxes out of fear of the IRS. We change our diets out of fear of heart attacks or strokes or cancer—or obesity. We install security systems out of fear of intruders. We make many of the choices that affect our lives out of a fundamental emotion of fear. Some fears are, of course
irrational. I’m reminded of
Jerry Seinfeld’s comment that, according to studies, the number one fear in Fear can seem beneficial at times. Fear helps us limit the things we shouldn’t be doing in he first place—out of fear of exposure, or embarrassment, or humiliation. Sometimes we limit ourselves out of the fear of the loss of relationships or status. Fear as a motivation can be powerful. But fear is also temporary. What we fear in the moment can be swallowed up by other, quite different fears. Our fear of shame may be overturned by our fear of poverty. Our fear of embarrassment can be overcome by our fear of loss of status. Our fear of doing the wrong thing can be outweighed by our need to be accepted. So what do you fear? What fears control your life? What fears limit and control your life? Fear motivates everyone, to some degree—fear of embarrassment, fear of being wrong, fear of failure, fear of being refused. Sometimes even fear of success. Fear motivates—but erratically, and with rapidly diminishing returns. And fear can also paralyze us. Where real transformation is required, fear of change often prevents any movement at all. What is that light bulb joke? How many Episcopalians does it take to change a lightbulb? Eight—one to change the lightbulb and seven to say they liked the old one better… What our readings today teach us—what true religion really teaches us—is that fear is not the most powerful or effective of motivations. In fact, it is not what ought to motivate us most. What we learn—from Robert Browning, from Joel, from Revelation and John and Psalms, and eventually from our own hearts—is that love is indeed greater than fear, that in the face of truly fearsome motivations and events love and light can emerge and create goodness and holiness in our lives. And so—and this is the heart of the matter—think about what it is you truly love. Who do you really love? What matters most to you? What do you really value above all else? So, what do you love? Deciding this can take some time—or no time at all. For most of us, we really do love our family members—especially, today, our moms. We love some of our friends. We love some places, and some ideas. Find those people and those things, get them in mind, and keep them there.
Next, decide to commit to what you love. Really commit to it. To make it the most important thing in your life. Because the truth is, it is the most important thing in your life. Make that love, that ahavah, as we say in Hebrew, the source of the strength you need to change. Because when you make that choice to commit to what you love, to truly commit, then positive change is easy. When we make that commitment to love, we also make a commitment to change what needs to be changed for the sake of that love. Choose to make what you love the most important thing in your life, and act as though that were true. Do not be distracted from that course. Simply make that your most important priority. Make that the heart of your actions. Make the truth of that love the guide for your actions. As each of our readings today teaches… Poet Michael Leunig explains that: There are only two feelings. Love and fear. There only two languages. Love and fear. There are only two activities. Love and fear. There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks, two results. Love and fear. Love and fear. On this Sunday, on this Mother’s Day, in this coming week, and every day, we can learn that, even in the face of fear, love can and will triumph. And that we, through our actions and our attitudes, can make this a world of love, respect, and holiness. So may it be God’s will—and so may it be our will. Amen.
|
