November 14, 2010

XXV Pentecost (28c)
Lk 21.5-19
14 November 2010
Fr. Patrick Allen

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It's not surprising that often times two persons of differing temperaments, talents, and convictions can perceive the world – or any given object, event, or movement in the world – in differing and even contradictory ways.  So a couple weeks ago, those of you who are Republicans were generally pleased with the election results,  believing they were the harbingers of a return to common sense and moral probity.  On the other hand, those of you who are Democrats – not so much.  Again, not surprising. 

But it is perhaps a bit surprising when two persons of very similar temperaments, talents, and convictions have differing perceptions of the same object.  So, for example, here are two statements from two eminent philosophers, near contemporaries of one another, both faithful and devout Catholics, and both self-consciously and avowedly heirs of the intellectual tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas:

• History has somewhat falsified our perspective..., tending as it does to present the past as a succession of wars, interrupted by periods of peace about which there is little to say.  Yet it is in its periods of peace that a nation accumulates riches of all kinds . . . Perhaps history needs to be rewritten. (Servais Pinckaers, O.P.)
• Our poor world's history is a history of war, not a history of peace.  It is a history of a few oases of peace surrounded by an immense dessert of war, not a history of an immense sea of peace troubled by occasional storms of war. (Peter Kreeft)

Upon consideration of human history, the one says it is about peace, and the other says it is about war.  Well, which is right?  I don't know, and if I had an opinion, who would care? And, to be fair, these two philosophers are coming at the matter from slightly different angles.

But whether we understand war to be history's dominant theme or merely a dissonant interlude, it is, as our Lord warns us in this morning's Gospel lesson, very much part of humanity's common lot and a fact of life for which Jesus urges his disciples to prepare.

As they walk through Jerusalem, Jesus' disciples are astounded by the magnificence of the Temple, how it was adorned with noble stones and offerings.  But Jesus tells them that the day is coming when there shall not be left here one stone upon another.  And we know that day came just forty years later at the hands of four Roman legions.  When the disciples then inquire about this inconceivable destruction of the very center of their national, ethnic, and religious identity, Jesus warns them that there will be more to come: 

When you hear of wars and tumults, do not be terrified; for this must first take place...  Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes and in various places famines and pestilences; and there will be terrors and great signs in the heavens, and persecution...  This will be a time to bear testimony... By your endurance you will gain your lives.

Tumults and wars, pestilence and famine.  How do we face up to such a history? 

You may have heard earlier this year of a new psychiatric malady that became known as "Avatar Depression Syndrome" – in which some folks after viewing of James Cameron's blockbuster film Avatar are so overcome by the disjunction between the natural peace and beauty of the fictional but so lushly portrayed planet "Pandora" and the greedy, cruel, and Earth- and Pandora-despoiling human race that they become actually depressed and in some cases even suicidal.  Which we might be tempted to dismiss as just a little but silly, because after all, it's just a movie – a movie made by the same man who inflicted Titanic and Piranha Part 2: The Spawning on the world.  But I spoke just a couple weeks ago with a woman whose son had told her that he thought the world such a horrible place that he would not consider bringing children into it, and I've spoken on other occasions to other young people who have felt the same way, and long before Avatar.  The poet Philip Larkin bitterly distilled this same despair and view of the world:

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Famines and pestilence, wars and tumults.  That is the history our Lord has told us to expect, and not just to face up to, much less to escape from – but bravely to live in to:  This will be a time for you to bear testimony...  By your endurance you will gain your lives.

And how can we do that?  Where is there strength for endurance?  We can endure when we remember that the same one who told us to expect this history is the same one who, of his own love and for us men and for our salvation, entered in to this history.  He is the One who, as St. Paul said, "did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men" (Phil 2.6,7). 

And here he is in Jerusalem, walking into, yielding himself up to, the ravening maw of that history – which is our history, mine and yours.  And ours in the very real sense that we are involved and complicit in it:  pestilence and famines, tumults and wars are, after all, only our own petty hatreds and jealousies, our own wastefulness and greediness writ large.  And here is Jesus, in Jerusalem, to give himself up to the cross we have prepared for him.

So you see, the Christian Gospel does not give us a new way to think about or explain away this history; it does not give us a set of disciplines by which we can, in our own personal spheres, overcome and transcend this history; it certainly does not urge us to war to establish our own preferred version of the Kingdom of God in history. 

The Christian Gospel is instead a story – the love story of God in Christ entering into history to transform it from the inside.  It is the story of a particular man fulfilling the call of our humanity by giving himself up to a particular death on a particular Friday afternoon on a particular hill outside Jerusalem, and then it is the story of Resurrection.  It is the story of death losing its hold, of this man, of this Jesus, walking out of his own tomb. To be a Christian is to be united by faith and baptism to that death and to that resurrection.  And so the Christian life is a life marked by hope – and Christian hope is the application of the Resurrection to our actual circumstances – to our history and to our future.

I have been hitting the "wars and tumults" theme pretty hard, but of course we may be thankful that most of us, in our own place and time, live largely free of these things, though especially in this Veteran's Day week, we remember that we are not completely so.  And certainly when Jesus mentions famines and persecution we may heave our collective sigh of relief.  But of course, when the foundation stones of this parish were laid and then dedicated, just 155 years ago the other day, there certainly were tumults and at least the rumors of war, and shortly thereafter, civil and bitter war itself come right to this little peninsula. 

We ourselves may live in relative peace and prosperity, but we have this history nonetheless.  Perhaps not persecutions, but we have our biopsies and MRI's, drunk drivers and depression.  But we also have Christ crucified and risen.  We have Christ's good vanquishing our evil (cf Rom 12.21).  And so this is, in other words, our own time for bearing testimony, a time for lives of peace and generosity, for lives marked by a sure and certain, a lively and life-giving hope. 

When Jesus says that it is a time for bearing testimony, the implication of course is that while this faith and hope may be – and must be – personal, and intensely so, it is also necessarily public and visible in its consequences – so much so that, as St. Peter says, we "ought always to be ready to give an account for the hope that is in us" (1 Pt 3.15).  Peter is assuming that the lives of those who have been baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus will be so marked by hope – so markedly weird – that our neighbors will see in our lives things they cannot understand and want to know what is going on; they will want to know why. 

They will see hearts and homes opened to the lonely, wallets opened for the poor.  They will see bruised cheeks turned, enemies forgiven, and families reconciled.  They will even see us fruitful and multiplying, raising children in the nurture and admonition and joy of the Lord.  And they will see us "even at the grave make our song:  Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!"

We bear testimony now as we bring these two beautiful children, Virginia Jayne and Isabella Juliana to the font of life, the font of hope, to be joined now and forever to their Savior Jesus – buried with him by baptism..., in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, they too might walk in newness of life" (Rm 6.4).

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