Apocalypse - Rev Allister Lane
READINGS: JEREMIAH 31: 31-34 AND 2 PETER 3: 1-15A
Jeremiah’s prophecy begins’ The days are surely coming…’ - it’s about looking ahead to the future.
And the signs are promising (literally):
“I will make a new covenant…” says the Lord.
To understand this promise about the future, we need to understand what was Jeremiah’s context in his present. The people of Israel are a tiny nation of people tossed about by the power-plays of the superpowers of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon.
Let’s be clear what Jeremiah is saying: Jeremiah is not analysing the fluctuating dominance of each of these imperial superpowers to assess Israel’s fate; he is looking much further over the horizon.
What is it that Jeremiah glimpses over the horizon? Jeremiah is used by God to provide one of the clearest glimpses of the radically different age that will be initiated in the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
What do you think Jeremiah’s original hearers imagined? Could they have imagined how God would fulfil these promises in the life of a single person? As Soren Kierkegaard observed,
Life can only be understood backwards; …but it must be lived forwards.
Wondering how people in Jeremiah’s time (and Jeremiah himself) understood this prophesy offers us two things today:
encourages humility in us as we wonder how God’s promises will work out in the future ahead of us, and
it should also foster deep trust and hope.
God has made promises in the past, and these have been fulfilled. This is the foundation of our trust and our hope.
We have a Mission Statement that expresses our purpose to
…live and share Christ’s hope for our world.
What is this ‘hope’? Our hope is not based on our own abilities to decipher obscure signs. Our hope is not based on future historical events going in our favour.
Our hope is much closer and greater. Closer (to us) and greater (than what we can see). We know this because Jesus promises relationship with us:
I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.(John 15:15)
I’ll bring us back to think about our hope for the future, but for a moment just consider our situation we’re in right now…The promise Jeremiah shared is what we get to enjoy right now.
In Jeremiah’s day the law of God was something taught. Every person had to learn the law of God and follow that law. The promise Jeremiah shared was that but one day the experience will be fundamentally different; God will bring an inside-out transformation.
I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord.
The intentions of God’s law (the desire for a community rooted in love) is ‘written on our hearts’.[1]
Have you ever thought what you word or image you’d choose, if you got a tattoo…? People sometimes choose words or symbols they associate with causes they care about tattooed on their skin. This shows passion and commitment.
But how much greater is the passion and commitment shown by God, who ‘writes on our hearts’; sharing the greatest ‘cause’ of all with us, in a way that God’s desires become part of us.
So, this hope Jeremiah shared created expectation. The hope-filled expectation was for a new era with greater intimacy between creation and Creator. And this anticipated hope was fulfilled in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.
What about for us? With the hope we have (through knowing Jesus) …what are our expectations? What do we eagerly anticipate?
Our expectations will inform our perspective on life. And they will shape our priorities and lifestyle.
The wonderful promise in our current time is that Jesus calls us ‘friends’ and makes known to us the will of God. That means we are able to discern what God is doing – and join in!
The St John’s Session is currently exploring in a deeper way what it means to discern God’s will together. We are doing this specifically as a leadership group of the Church, but discerning God’s will in our lives is something we are all encouraged to do!
The promise we have – directly from Jesus – is that he makes know to us the will of God. We have considered
the foundation of hope we have (in knowing Jesus)
and the expectations that gives us.
To consider our expectations is to (necessarily) imagine the future. And, as you imagine the future, I wonder if the word ‘apocalypse’ come to mind…?
What does the word ‘apocalypse’ mean? The writer Rob Bell describes two kinds of ‘apocalypse’…
First is a sudden end of the world because of some unexpected and catastrophic event (earthquake or tsunami – we know about those recently! Or a meteorite hitting the planet). This type of event has been portrayed on more than a few blockbuster movies with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson!
There are also divine versions of this kind of apocalypse – unexpected and catastrophic judgement from God who is annoyed at the mess we’ve made. This kind of apocalypse (the end of the world) is out of our control. It happens to us.
The second kind of apocalypse is the kind we bring on ourselves. It is the result of our own actions:
deforestation,
burning fossil fuels
polluting of rivers and seas
dumping of plastics, etc.
This is the kind of apocalypse we can control, but we’ve ignored the evidence, laughed off the warnings, and haven’t make the inconvenient changes to live more sustainably.
Weirdly, some people devote a lot of energy worrying about the first kind of apocalypse (the kind we can’t control) and not enough energy for the kind we can control.
Imagine if we could redirect some of that energy away from worrying about the dramatic Hollywood catastrophe, toward a deeper relationship with creation, creatures and the Creator; to drawing closer to God, loving our neighbour and (every day) celebrating the gift of creation?
Actually there is a third kind of ‘apocalypse’… The word ‘apocalypse’ literally means ‘uncovering’ or ‘disclosing’.
An apocalypse means things are revealed for what they actually are. Just like we heard in our New Testament reading from Peter:
the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed (v10)
This ‘day of God’ the Bible speaks about is disclosure of everything as it is meant to be. Everything is put right, restored, and fulfilled. It is not an ominous prediction but a joyful, hope-full anticipation for the future of the world.
And our hopeful anticipation, that is in harmony with God’s intended purposes, is like a participation in the future now.
So when Peter writes:
lead lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God (v11&12)
…this is an apocalyptic statement. It uncovers and discloses how things really are.
Do you hear that? We are told: the way we live can hasten the future that is promised. We can participate in the bringing about of the new world (God’s future).
A true apocalypse isn’t something to be feared. (Because of God’s promises in Jesus) our hopeful anticipation of the future is something to be celebrated – and already something we can move closer to, with ‘lives of holiness and godliness’.
May our cry join with all creation, as we pray:
Come Lord Jesus! Come! (Rev 22:20)
[1] see Ezekiel 11:19-20 and 2 Corinthians 3