The End of the World

And here it comes!

The Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary  Time

AKA a Sunday after Pentecost in certain Christian Traditions

But, however you may call it, here comes the final "Green Sunday" of the current liturgical year.

And this, in almost every mainstream Christian tradition is the weekend when we hear those wondrous words. You know the ones. They are all about such neat happenings like stars falling from the sky and sun and moon no longer giving their light and famines and earthquakes and all sorts of other exciting happenings.

And when these words are finished being set out before us, this year from the Gospel of Mark next year we will get to enjoy Luke and last year we embraced Matthew's version, well, when these words are set out before us, we will conclude with the declaration, ""The Gospel of the Lord."

And we will respond with our "Thanks be to God!"

Gospel, by the way, means Good News!

So, stars falling, sun dimming, earthquakes rumbling and famines famishing - all Good News!

Well, chances are that in many (most) churches throughout the United States, we will simply give that response and close our books and maybe even our minds.

We certainly do not have to worry about stuff like that, do we?

After all, that is about the End of the World and who knows when that will come and it hasn't come in all these years, so why worry now? Just listen, and then respond with our words of gratitude.

Unless . . . 

What if these words of Jesus are echoing often repeated biblical words - words about not just a time when all will end but times when the world as we know it will end?

What if Jesus, like prophets of old, was telling us that we should expect that there will be times when the world as we know it will come to an end? It would in fact seem to be truly Good News if we were being told in advance that such times of endings will come and they will have the potential for being times of blessing. They will challenge us and invite us to reexamine what has been and they will give us the opportunity to make new and different and better.

What if these words were telling us to expect  a time such as we have been having since March, 2020,  a time that, while seeming to ease presently, has actually brought about an ending of the world as we once knew it?

Consider all that we have been living through in recent months. We have literally seen the world shut down. The Mighty United States was brought low, not just in that far away place of Afghanistan but right here in our own land with businesses shut, education virtual and emergency rooms overcrowded and thousands of lives ended.

Together with that we have been experiencing our view of history and of all humankind questioned and challenged by the resurfacing of an awareness of the -isms that haunt us and even still shape so many of us and our customs and institutions. We have been brought face to face with the need for some radical change.

To all of this we have seen flood-causing rains tearing through the streets of our cities and the basements of our homes, ravaging flames eradicating whole neighborhoods. Choose to ignore or choose to face, nature itself is raging against us.

The litany goes on.

And truly these are days when the sun and moon have been darkened and the stars have been falling from the sky.

But when Jesus and the prophets before Him spoke of those days of world-ending events, they spoke to a people of faith, a people who believed in God who truly is ever in command. Jesus spoke to a people who knew from experience the wonder and depth of God's love for them, a love that would not let go of them but rather a love that would guide them through those dark, ending times into a new and better time.

To fully embrace these words and to fully enter into this most turbulent and cathartic time of our today, we need to be that people of faith, that people who can listen to the Voice of the Lord, read the signs of this time and embrace the call to do better, to be better.

Of course it is always possible to ignore the possibility of God at work. It is possible to refuse any Divine invitation. We can choose to simply go back to the "good old days."

Or we can choose to grow and in that growing to commit ourselves to building better and being better.

After all, Jesus has called us to be citizens, not of any kingdom of this world but rather of the Kingdom of God.

And we are not there yet!

“Getting vaccinated is a simple yet profound way to care for one another, especially the most vulnerable,”  - Pope Francis