End Times
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
November 13, 2011
Reading:
Jane Rzepka, “The End Is Near,” From Zip Lines to
Hosaphones, Boston: Skinner House, 2011, pp. 97-99.
The end is near. At least that's the talk among end-time fundamentalists. What with the best-selling Left Behind series of books and talk of the rapture on the Internet, religious liberals, once again, are out of the loop.
If I were focused on popularity, I, too, might dwell more on endings. Maybe not the Big Ending, but the little ones: the end of summer, love relationships gone by, friendships ebbing away, paychecks stopped, or good health or home life declining to nothing. Ended. Surely we do live with endings and loss and certain death, and were I the minister at another kind of church, I might make "endings" my focus. But that's not our way as Unitarian Universalists.
We are known as optimists. We are the people who say, this life, being alive right now, has value. The beginnings are the thing, not the endings. Armageddon is not the crowning glory for us. Heaven's a little unreliable in our view, and death is no reward. Other religions can have their endings, their prophecies, their rapture, their Apocalypse; we're in it for the present tense. We're going to cast our vote for life, capital "L" life, right here and now.
So then. What sense does it make to title a Unitarian Universalist column "The End Is Near"? It all hinges on this small reality: the word end has two meanings. The first, of course, is "the end, it's over, finis." But think about the second meaning, the word end as "meaning," or "goal," or "purpose," the way we use it in the phrase "the means to an end," or in the case of the Oxford English Dictionary's example, "to eat and sleep supinely is the end [the goal, the purpose] of human blessing." Or the famous quote by one of Unitarianism's founders, William Ellery Channing, who said, "The great end in religious instruction is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own." Now that's the kind of end Unitarian Universalists can relate to.
We choose our "great end." As Unitarian Universalists, we take the bull by the horns and create meaning for ourselves, and purpose. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who died over a decade ago, made this very point his claim to fame. Trying to cope with life in the concentration camps, Frankl, as many of you remember, came to the conclusion that above all, one must create meaning in life, no matter how dismal the circumstances. His most famous book, Man's Search for Meaning, is still in print in twenty-six languages.
We each have the chance to create meaning for ourselves, in some small way, right now. The ends, we hope, are near. What do we want our lives to look like? What's important? Maybe we plant bulbs for beauty down the road. Maybe this is the season to re-establish regular ties with relatives or, on the other hand, to sever those connections that are destructive. It might be the time to take ballroom dancing lessons, or take on the local manifestations of the Religious Right, or help out with the textile drive. Maybe this is the month to create the wise and wacky website, or to take a quiet bath once a week without fail for a little regrouping, or finally to join the Peace Corps. We create meaningful lives, or if not meaningful lives, then meaningful moments. We choose. That is our way as Unitarian Universalists. We draw the ends near.
Sermon: End Times -Rev. Paul Sprecher
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about End Times recently, partly because of the course on the Dead Sea Scrolls I participated in teaching during October and partly because of the book we’re reading in our adult education classes, The Tenth Parallel. Both of these are steeped in apocalyptic foreboding, one from the time of Jesus, the other from today. These expectations resonate with me in part because I grew up in a religious context in which prophesies about the End Times and the imminence of the Second Coming of Jesus were all around me. Those experiences have led me to study and think about End Times for much of my life.
Many eras, including our own, have experienced a heightening of the sense that the end is near, that the terminus of history is almost at hand. Such times tend to call forth prophets, doomsayers and messiahs, including Sabbatai Zevi (1626-1676). Max Dimont tells his story this way:
Of all the [Jewish messiahs arising in the early modern era], Sabbatai was the most interesting, the most complex, and the most important to Jewish history. He appeared at a time when Europe was lying prostrate after the Thirty Years’ War, when Christian and Jew alike were sick unto their souls of all the carnage. [There was a widespread belief in both Christian and Jewish circles that the End Times would begin in 1666.] When Sabbatai Zevi proclaimed his messiahship it seemed like an answer to everyone’s prayers. Over a million Jews, from every stratum of society, rich man, poor man, scholar, and worker, from Turkey to England, all hailed him as the long-awaited deliverer.
Sabbatai was born in Smyrna, Turkey, where his father was a broker to an English merchant. Sabbatai was sent to the finest schools, was fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. In early life he came under the influence of the Kabala, and early began to exhibit those signs which today would be diagnosed as paranoia but then were signs of holiness. He heard voices from heaven ordering him to redeem Israel…. and people flocked to his tent to hear the new gospel.
Sabbatai’s evangelistic itinerary took him to Egypt … [and then ]
to Palestine, where the masses hysterically adored him as the messiah. The rabbis felt it was time to take action and excommunicated him. Sabbatai returned to Turkey, where he was joyfully welcomed by the Jews as the saviour. There was also a rumor of a Jewish army hanging around in Arabia waiting for the messiah to give the order to unleash it against the Turks. Sabbatai fell for this rumor. He announced he would march against Constantinople to depose the sultan. The sultan, not knowing what to do with this madman, and fearful of making him a martyr by executing him, threw him into prison. Here, thousands upon thousands came to visit Sabbatai, who from his prison held court and spread his influence. Alarmed, the sultan gave him a choice between death or conversion to Mohammedanism and freedom. Sabbatai chose conversion and freedom.
The conversion shook the Sabbatean movement to its foundation but did not kill it. Confirmed Kabalists merely said this was precisely what the Kabala had prophesied, that the messiah would be “good within and bad without.” But the converted Sabbatai could not stop playing his role as Jewish messiah, and as the movement showed every sign of gaining new strength the sultan threw him back into prison, where he was kept until he died.[i]
We may scoff a little on hearing this story about Sabbatai, a charismatic manic-depressive with paranoid tendencies who managed to seduce over a million gullible Jews into becoming his followers, even when he made seemingly incomprehensible choices. The problem is that End Times thinking is very much with us today as well. Messianic expectations have put fundamentalist Jews, Christians and Muslims on a collision course in Jerusalem, one of the most volatile spots in the world. Each of the three faiths that trace their founding to the patriarch Abraham have their own particular and conflicting story about what will happen when human history reaches its end, and in each tradition there are many who believe that the end will come within their own lifetimes. My own interest and concern are heightened in as I anticipate our Interfaith trip to Israel next April.
Jesus near the end of his life first told the Christian story. He predicted that the great temple in Jerusalem would be completely destroyed (as indeed it was, about 40 years after his death). The story in the gospel of Matthew [24:4-8] continues:
When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, ‘Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’ Jesus answered them, saying … “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”
Wars, rumors of wars, famines and earthquakes in various places have been occurring throughout human history, but globalization has enabled us to receive news of such events wherever in the world they occur. It certainly seems like we hear about more such disasters than we did in the past, and it is perhaps not surprising that twenty percent of Christians in America believe that the Second Coming will happen during their own lifetime. The Christian story of End Times is elaborated in the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelations, which tells a story of horrific clashes between God – as represented by Jesus Christ – and Satan and his allies, the Beast and the Anti-Christ. The cosmic battle reported there wipes out a significant part of the population of the earth and causes untold suffering to those who survive. Ultimately, though, it brings about the establishment of the New Jerusalem, the fulfillment of all the hopes and dreams of the ages.
I’ve been aware since I was quite young that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was regarded in our church as the beginning of the final countdown to the Second Coming and the final battle between good and evil. Israel plays a key role in this account, because Jesus cannot return until the Jewish state encompasses the entire land of Palestine and the Temple has again been rebuilt in Jerusalem. I was acutely aware that conflict in Jerusalem could be a portent of the End; and I listened for news of the Middle East wherever I could find it, one of the reasons I have developed a lifelong habit of reading the newspaper every day. It seemed to me then that my life might depend on it.
Many believe that the new temple will need to be purified by means of the sacrifice of a perfect red heifer as is prescribed in the book of Numbers in the Jewish Bible, so some American cattlemen are collaborating with orthodox Jews in Israel to breed such a perfect heifer. In light of these beliefs, many conservative Christian leaders – Jim Hagee, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell until his death, and many others – offer absolute support to the government of Israel and urge that not an inch of land be turned over to Palestinian control under any circumstances. This would, of course, make the establishment of a state for the Palestinian people impossible.
Fundamentalist Jews have a parallel narrative of the end times. As we learned in the story of Sabbatai Zevi from the 1660’s, the Jewish expectation of the coming of the Messiah and the Messianic Age has sometimes seemed to be at. An earlier such fulfillment seemed to be at hand when some of the rabbis and other religious leaders acclaimed Simon Bar Kokhba as the messiah in 132 C.E. Kokhba led a Jewish army against the Romans to drive them out of the land. The army was completely destroyed, and “By some accounts, nine-tenths of Judea’s Jews died in battle or from starvation and disease.”[ii] As a result of a number of such failed messiahs, Jewish leaders have historically been very cautious about proclaiming that the Messiah is at hand. For some, though, the founding of the state of Israel and especially the victory in the 1967 war seemed to open the possibility that the End Times and the messiah were near indeed. The settler movement that started soon after the 1967 War had as its purpose setting claim to the entire land of Palestine by gradually taking over and expanding outposts. Gershom Gorenberg in his book The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount tells their story this way:
The settlers’ ideology was messianism: The creation of Israel fulfilled prophecy, and the conquest of the West Bank was another step toward final redemption. They claimed to know God’s program for history, and their place in it. For the most extreme, that hubris freed them of all moral constraints: In the mid-eighties, a group of settlers was arrested and convicted of terrorist acts against Palestinians and of plotting to destroy the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine at the center of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. A central member of the group, Yehudah Etzion, told me after his release that “we saw ourselves as God’s messengers, asking what He would want us to do.”[iii]
Like the fundamentalist Christians, these fundamentalist Jews believed they must build a third temple on the site of the earlier temples and consecrate it with the sacrifice of a perfect red heifer to enable the Messiah to manifest himself and usher in the End Times. The major impediment to achieving their purpose was the unfortunate fact that two of sites most sacred to Muslims – the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock – were already on the temple mount and would have to be destroyed to make way for the new temple.
The necessity of building the new temple on the site of the existing Muslim sites inspired a number of attempts to destroy those sites. One of the first occurred in 1969 when Dennis Michael Rohan set a fire inside the Mosque that required sixteen fire trucks many hours to douse the flames. The fire destroyed significant parts of the roof.[iv] In 1984 fanatical Jews were preparing to expedite the coming of the Messiah by attaching high-powered explosives to the pillars of the Dome of the Rock when they were arrested for attaching powerful bombs to the bottom of five buses owned by an Arab company – a terrorist attack that would have been the most destructive in all of Israel and Palestine up to that point.[v] A number of other attempts to destroy the Muslim holy places were made over the years, including one that involved burrowing under the Temple Mount to set explosives under the sites. I’m acutely aware as I prepare for our trip to the Holy Land that this potential for violence and provocation continues into the present.
While the fundamentalist Christians and the Jews had the objective of rebuilding the Temple in common, their expectations of what would happen next were radically different. The Jews expected the Messiah to destroy their enemies, give them the entire land of Palestine to the farthest limits promised to Abraham, and usher in a period of complete peace when, as Isaiah the prophet had foretold, lions would lie down with lambs and swords would be beaten into plowshares. The story the Fundamentalist Christians tell about the End Times doesn’t end so well for the Jews. Their version of the story says that 144,000 Jews will convert to Christianity and the rest will be slaughtered as foretold in the book of Revelation.
Not too surprisingly, fundamentalist Muslims the End Times would unfold in a different way. Gorenberg recounts one version:
Like its Jewish and Christian counterparts, [Islamic fundamentalists] portray present-day events as the opening scenes of a Last Days drama. In large degree, the Islamic story is a negative of the Christian one. It explains Jewish successes as supernatural—but as demonic, not divine[vi]
While I grew up acutely aware of the fundamentalist Christian story of how the End Times will play out – and soon! – I am now deeply aware of the danger posed by these competing fantasies about the future of the Middle East. The idea that humans must take action to bring about the final apocalyptic struggle is especially dangerous, because each of these three faiths includes fanatics with their own visions of The End whose outcome is the destruction of the other two faiths.
So how do we make sense of these fantastical expectations, and above all how can we as religious liberals help to lessen the dangers they arouse? One step is to understand these stories and to expose them to the light of public discussion so that they can be broadly understood. More than that, our gospel of Universalism is diametrically opposed to fantasies of the End Times that invoke a wrathful God to take our side against all the others. Our theology expresses belief in the God of Love, a God whose purposes do not include the utter destruction of this creation and of everyone who does not share one or another particular belief system. End Times fantasies are compelling to their believers, but we believe that the world will not end as they hope and expect, just as it has not ended in all the previous eras when some believed that the End Times were at hand. Above all, we believe that we have work to do in combating attempts to bring about destruction in the name of religion and in promoting peace instead.
William Butler Yeats captured the apocalyptic mood represented in these diametrically opposed but eerily similar visions of End Times in his poem “The Second Coming,” written just after the carnage of World War I:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The ending is not foreordained. Our future does not require the enormous violence imagined by the fundamentalists of the three Abrahamic faiths. We as religious liberals believe that the fate of the world and of humanity is in our hands, that our task is the repair of the world, healing the broken parts, handing on a world that will continue for generations, and from that I, at least, draw great comfort. We religious liberals do not expect The End to come in our lifetimes, but we do believe that we are responsible for tending this web of life of which we are all a part. As Jane Rzepka says in our reading, we are optimists, and we believe that our great ends include living in and for this earth, saving it rather than destroying it, finding fulfillment right here rather than awaiting some imagined idyllic time on the other side of unimaginable destruction.
May we hold fast to that vision and do what we can in our own living to bring it to pass. The alternative is to give way to despair. We would not have it so.
Amen, and Blessed Be.