Opening Prayer: Leon Hooper SJ
Welcome to our celebration of the collapse of time, the “End Time,” the definitive End of Time (ET. Pun intended) that we – year to year – evoke during the shortest days of our solar year. Whether or not those Ends are to be politically delivered or apocalyptically delivered (by warrior, politician, or guardian angel) doesn’t actually seem to be the point of End Time praying. What we are after is the perfection and termination of time.
The readings for our prayer this morning emerged from four very different communities, communities that offer us four distinct moral images of when and how God has previously been forced, by our human weakness and meanness, to remake what we have done to the heaven and earth that God originally created.
Our psalm images our God fulfilling the kingdom of justice: the Lord comes to rule the people with fairness. Justice will reign. It is the most positive and real image of an end times that we pray this day.
Our reading from Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians is a bit more twitchy. He is having to deal with some folks who are already perfect. They judge themselves as already living in heaven, of themselves being heaven. And they are the most boring of the folks we hear of this day.
If you want an End Times that is less boring, you might want to pay close attention to the end times foreseen by Malachi and by Luke, and possibly by Jesus. Their visions are never dull. And actually can be fun. Check out not losing a hair on your head but losing your head.
In these readings, God reaches to us, the God to whom we bring our hopes, wondering how our wondering might be graced.
Our current encounters with mother nature and human politics are making it easier to find images with which to clothe some of these end time images. We can simply tune in to the Weather Channel or any news channel. We have had elections – or are having our elections. We are enduring a hurricane. We suffer our usual gun deaths. We pray with those who have gone before us, we pray Lord have Mercy.
Lord our God, once again we bring our collective and individual imaginations to the meal to which you call us, for bread that will be broken, and spirits unleashed that will draw us into the life that you share with the one you call Father and Spirit. Hold us, draw us, strengthen us to know you as you know us. Let us be brave enough to see you face to face.
1st Reading: Malachi 4: 1-2
2nd Reading: Thessalonians 3: 7-12
Gospel: Luke 21: 5-19
Homily: Leon Hooper SJ
As we began our prayer, I mentioned that our four readings, although they each tag a notion of the end or fulfillment of time, reflect broad ranges of commitments and values, usually agreed to by an identifiable group or by a people at large. We the People. By these common commitments we form the common goods that we are or are not. And these images of what we should be, of what we will end up as, change, sometimes rapidly.
For example, when I was four years old, living in Salt Lake City, I was aware that most households were centered on a monogamous couple who, in those days, were not serially changeable. Male divorce was a no-no. But I was also aware of a couple-three families in our area that were made up of two wives and one husband. When I returned to Salt Lake several years later, divorce was more possible, even woman-initiated divorce. But also, by then, polygamy was mostly hidden in deep forests.
The “heavens” of cosmological fame also have been, in our lifetimes open to ethical and religious revision. When we were children, we could wander out into the back yard and be both frightened and fascinated by the twinkling of the stars. (In those days you could directly see stars.) Now we spend $10 billion to hold in our hands the light from those stars. To hold that light and to pass it on. If we really let that light sink in, we will find it to be both terrifying and gorgeous beyond our imaginings.
Last week NASA published contrasting pictures of a part of a dwarf galaxy. The one taken by Hubble was dusty and badly focused; the one by Webb is clear and betrays 1000 times more stars than can be picked up by Hubble. At least 1000 times more gorgeous than the earlier one.
Both our ability to see and our sensitivity to what we see is challenged.
But then what of conscious life in those smashing stars and galaxies. What End Times does our God offer them? We are built to demand answers to such challenges. God is responsible to answer for such.
Which, unfortunately, gets me to something I should mention to you folks. Some of you have noticed that two of my faults have been increasingly imposing themselves on my dealings with you.
One is an increasingly foggy mind, the kind that starts a declarative statement, then….” And then forgets where the statement is going, getting muddled in the dusty synapses in my head.
Four years ago, I complained about increasing forgetfulness. So, I was offered enrolment in Medstar’s memory clinic. We laid down a base line, four years ago. Last month we ran a cognitional comparison. The resulting comparison looks pretty on a graph, but suggests some cognitive deterioration. But more to the point, it suggests retirement. And when I retire, I will be north of Baltimore.
So be it.
The end of the liturgical year tries` to pound it in: (1) last week that our individual futures belong to God, (2) in this week’s readings that our collective future belong to that same God, and (3) next week on the feast of Christ the King that the church is eternally God’s.
One last word on the awfulness of some of the Apocalyptic lit: Next time you encounter judgment and falling stars, try reading Revelations 20 and 21. End Times can be gorgeous. And non-brutal.