Here's a written-out version of it. My actual delivery (which is somewhere on video) diverged in several ways. Someday I'll perhaps turn what's below into more of a transcript. But for now, here's an idea of what I wrote:
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"Latter-Day Joy"
I just can't start a church meeting without some kind of song. Can we sing something?
[We sang "We are one in the spirit." I reflected how that song combines elements of hope--"We are one in the Spirit"--with bits of uncertainty--"And we pray that our unity may one day be restored." Add to that the fact the song is in a minor key, and its stirring strength becomes more like somber yearning...]
I had another song in mind, but, since we lack hymnals, I'll just read the words:
Joyful, Joyful we adore thee
God of mercy Lord of love
Hearts unfold like flowers before the
Opening to the sun above
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness
Drive the dark of doubt away
Giver of immortal gladness
Fill us with the light of day.
Confession: I’m terrible at joy.
I’m in a place where the clouds of sin and sadness cover
me with the dark of doubt.
When I read about our global church, I’m hard pressed to feel joy. I feel tired, scared, and depressed. I see deep polarization, sides mostly set and convinced and weary of sniping at each other. I’m afraid of what 2020 will bring.
It feels like the end. It feels like the apocalypse is
nigh—at least for the Methodist Church as we’ve known it. It may be that we are the Latter-Day
Methodists.
This feeling gets reinforced by, well, looking at the
news. Massive problems, rising global temperatures and sea levels, rising
inequality, rising levels of animosity between left and right. I’m afraid of
what 2020 will bring. We may be latter-day Americans, latter-day humans.
The
apocalypse may be nigh.
I’m blessed that in this reality God made me not an
end-times preacher but a professor of theatre history. You’re like, "John,
what’s theatre history?" So glad you asked. The short answer might be, well, it’s
theatre but viewed through a historical lens. A lot of the time, though, it’s
history viewed through a theatrical lens. Where are we in the human historical drama?
The rising action? The Climax? The eleven o’clock showstopping number?
The gift of history is the gift of perspective. When I teach theatre history, I remind students that the terms we use to day for the past—renaissance,
medieval, ancient—weren’t used by people in the times. People in the middle
ages didn’t think of themselves as living in the middle ages. They thought of
themselves as living in the present. Or, more likely, they thought of
themselves as living in the end times. The apocalypse was nigh.
That’s a lesson of theatre history: there’s not just one
drama. There are many.
There have always been apocalypses. Ask the indigenous
people of the Americas or Australia. (I point out to my students that Western
movies from the fifties and sixties with cowboys versus Indians—those are
post-apocalyptic stories, except somehow the victims of apocalypse, the
survivors, get framed as the villains)
There are personal apocalypses. Last month, a friend of
mine from graduate school lost her son, a boy I’d known for almost twenty years since she came to
school with me. He was her only child. She was a single mother. He was in many
ways her whole world.
It is the reality of mortal existence: some world is always ending.
It is the reality of mortal existence: some world is always ending.
The Bible is full of apocalypses great and small. The
world floods. Hagar gets cast out Abraham’s house into the wilderness. Job
loses all his children. Israel splits and goes into exile. Jonah gets swallowed by a big fish. Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt with their toddler. The rebuilt
temple is burned.
Our biblical drama, the story of people of faith, isn’t
the tale of people spared the end times; it’s the story of God accompanying us
through those end times. God meets Hagar in the desert. God walks with the
believers in the firey furnace. God guides Israel in exile. God gives the fish Jonah indigestion.
My father loves the song "Once to Every Man and Nation,"
especially the last verse:
Though the cause of evil flourish
Yet the good alone is strong
Though her portion be the scaffold
And upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future
And behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch upon God’s own
God is in the
shadow. This, too, is reflected in scripture. “If I go up to heaven, you are there,” the Psalmist sings, “If I go to
sheol—to the grave—you are there. . . In God there is no darkness at all, the
night and the day are both alike.”
We echo that divine persistence in that line we’re apt to leave out of the Apostles’
Creed about how Christ "descended into hell." Christ searches out and finds us and meets
us in the darkest, deepest midnights of the soul, the worst parts of our
dramas.
I love how Methodists talk about God as being on the move.
Consider our signature grace: prevenient grace—the grace that goes before us. We usually talk about
prevenient grace in the past tense, how God was active and working with us
before we knew God. But what if that grace persists? What if God is still going
before us? God is already there in the dark of doubt today, God is already
there in the dim unknown of 2020.
I have come to think that God is less
impressed by the end of all things than I am.
I cry out to God from the dark
abyss, "Lord, the nation may be collapsing." And the Comforter comes to me in that
dark place and says, “Yeah, maybe. But I'll be here no matter what."
I cry out to God, "Lord, my church may be ending! My church is splitting!" And God the Holy Spirit comes in
that darkness, enfolds me in love, and whispers gently, “Who’s church is
that, again?”
Age to age, the Triune God was living and powerful before
the United Methodist Church existed. Age to age, the Triune God will be living
and powerful long after there is no longer a thing we recognize as the United
Methodist Church.
There is comfort in this but also challenge. So many of
the verses in scripture about God finding us in sheol, in the grave, in the
darkest places of our lives, the bellies of the fish that swallowed us—so many
of these aren’t comfort stories but exasperation stories. How shall I escape you?
No matter where I go, there you already are. God is the Hound of Heaven,
pursuing us, refusing us the pleasure of an apocalyptic pout.
Lord Jesus spoils the romance of ecclesiastical grief, calls us
out of the grave, bids us pick up our mats and walk.
That’s God’s harshest lesson about apocalypse: Our job in
the apocalypse is the same as our job anywhere. At the end of all things, the
questions Lord Jesus asks of us are precisely the same as the questions he puts
to us every day: are you feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, meeting those
in prison, welcoming the stranger, loving your enemy? The Latter-Day Methodist ought to be identical to the Everyday Methodist.
Thus we experience the comfort and the challenge of
Christ, the prevenient grace that refuses to leave us all alone and refuses to just
leave us alone.
And, lest we forget, apocalypse means revelation—Behold, I
am doing a new thing. Can you not perceive it? What is God revealing to us in
this crisis? What ought we be revealing about God to the world? To our siblings
in Christ? How ought we be the apocalyptic Methodists about whom the world says, "See how they love one another!"
God of the Omega as well as the Alpha, God beyond our dramas, God with us through the apocalypse, guide us. Make us reminders to each other, reminders to all in need, that your grace and love never leave us alone.
May Your joyful music lift us sunward in the triumph song of
life.
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