Apocalypse When?. Jerry L. Sumney
And because we believe that promise, it has an effect on the here and now, so that in our proclamation, in our worship, in our service, in our work for justice and peace, we are actually participating in the coming of God’s realm. We are part of Christ’s work of bringing the realm of God into the world—even when it seems the world is falling apart around us.
Thus, it is through Jesus the Christ that past, present, and future come together. And we experience that mysterious convergence through the rituals of the liturgy where we read from ancient Scriptures, preach, and partake in ancient rituals (such as baptism and communion) that have been with us for thousands of years. As Hebrews 1:12 states: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.” The question for preachers and their listeners, however, is how to live in these “last days” when suffering seems to be increasing on scales of magnitude that are overwhelming.
“It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel _______”(fill in the blank)16
“We are moving fast—nose-diving—toward ecological catastrophe and/or nuclear Armageddon. If we cannot pull out of this nose-dive the short term future can evaporate at any moment.”17 So warned feminist psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein in 1989. She continued: “And to pull out of it—to avert the death of living earthly reality—means mustering a huge, miraculous spurt of human growth and change: fast change; change within persons and within intimate groups, and change in the nature of the larger societal units (cultural, economic, political and regional) on whose level the developments we call historic take place.”18
Voices within the secular realm have joined in the clarion call for action in the face of impending apocalyptic doom. Thomas Friedman’s book, Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How it can Renew America, attempted to tap into the can-do spirit of American ingenuity to avert the disastrous trifecta of global warming, the demands of the global economy, and human overpopulation.19 Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit called for a “global Marshall Plan” to respond to the global environmental crisis and even evoked religious language. “We have had a warning of the fate that awaits if we ‘bow before the accomplished fact.’ God and history will remember our judgment,” he solemnly intoned.20 Nearly thirty years later at the time of this writing, climate scientists have estimated that the time remaining is terrifyingly short for humans to radically curtail carbon emissions before a cascade of catastrophic events threatens all life on this planet.
In many ways Creation itself is already in the eschaton. This is especially true for the strip-mined mountains, decimated forests, and other devastated areas of Earth for whom “the end” has already happened. The preacher working from an eco-hermeneutical reading of Revelation might consider Earth and Earth’s other-than-human creatures as “hearers” of the sermon even if they are not present per se in the human congregation. Because, in fact, the “end of the world” has already come to pass for countless extinct species whose history has come to an end at the hands of human beings. Doomsday has come and gone for the North American Passenger Pigeon, Australian Toolache Wallaby, Indian Arunchal Hopea Tree, and St. Helena Olive, not to mention untold numbers of plant and animal species whose final dying members passed into oblivion unnoticed and unmourned by human eyes.
And what of the impending apocalypse for the hundreds of plant and animal species currently facing threatened or imminent extinction? Countless species languish in prisons of shrinking habitat, poisoned waters, and diminishing food supplies. We have ghettoized Creation, delineating by way of concrete and metal boundaries where greenery, fur, and feathers can and cannot live, blocking them into increasingly smaller areas of living that isolate and cramp them in what had once been vast and free-ranging bioscapes. Meanwhile, human suffering from the effects of climate disruption manifests in catastrophic storms, rising sea levels engulfing homes, droughts and blighted crops, wildfires raging through entire communities, and wars over diminishing resources.
This means that when we read John of Patmos’s vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Revelation, we can see that this is not some otherworldly portent of impending doom. They represent real human riders subjugating animals, ecosystems, and humans (especially those of color and those in poverty) in the service of conquest, war, famine, and death. Humans may delight in (and profit from) the publishing success of apocalyptic fiction such as the Left Behind series. But Earth watches the drama unfold in real time, its future uncertain, save for the knowledge that suffering is happening right now and will continue to happen for generations to come. Thus, the preacher’s proclamation about the certainty of God’s presence, care, and desire for justice is all the more necessary.
Not Our First Apocalyptic Rodeo
While the writers of apocalyptic texts did not face the global scale of environmental, socioeconomic, cultural, military, and institutional pressures that, for us, seem to have reached their breaking point, they did face their own version of a cataclysmic collision of these forces. Sumney’s descriptions of the circumstances faced by the oppressed people to whom these apocalyptic texts were written will be found throughout this book. As we will see, whether at the mercy of ancient rulers or our current neoliberal-industrial-capitalistic-military complex, those caught in the totality of empire find themselves desperate for release. We can understand, then, the need to turn to apocalyptic texts and the feelings that these texts want to address—hopelessness, panic, foreboding, frustration, helplessness, and perhaps even suicidal despair. These are the feelings that the preacher will need to be aware of when crafting sermons that address biblical passages about end times and the coming of divine judgment.
Yet the preacher will also recognize that not all people experience these feelings. Some try to numb them through artificial, chemical, or technological escapes. Others just appear to be happily oblivious—especially if their positions of privilege within the empire are comfortably (if temporarily) maintained. Thus, the preacher will likely face a congregation whose folks are not in agreement about the state of the world. Some will resist sermons that courageously and prophetically name what is happening. Others may have already given up hope. But there will also be those who are looking to the Word of God for something, anything, that helps them make sense of the chaos and disintegration that they see happening around them. The sermon can help create meaning by pointing to the ancient wisdom of these apocalyptic texts and drawing out implications for what we face today.
Even those who are comfortable—or comfortably numb—with the state of the world cannot deny that the culture itself is littered with “texts” that depict apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic futures. There is a plethora of books, movies, television shows, graphic novels, and video games that traffic in the images and story lines of end-of-the-world scenarios. The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, Divergent by Veronica Roth, and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood; movies such as Blade Runner, Mad Max, The Matrix, and the animated WALL-E; video games like Call of Duty, Half Life, and Fall Out; television shows such as The Last Man on Earth; comics like The Walking Dead (also a television series)—all of them present a vision of the future that eerily echoes biblical themes and scenes from apocalyptic texts.
For preachers, these cultural texts cut both ways. On the one hand, one need only refer to a popular scene from one of these movies or books for contemporary hearers to tune in with recognition. Threatening skies, zombies roaming the streets, anarchy, mayhem, violence, desolation, and shortages of food and water in contemporary literature and movies seem to be lifted right from Daniel 9 or the book of Revelation (minus the zombies). But the preponderance of these modern dystopias presents two serious barriers for Christians to hear the biblical texts. First, in nearly all of these dystopias, evil wins. In fact, it appears that the genres themselves inadvertently create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The character Nix in the movie Tomorrowland explains why the messages of doom can backfire:
[I believed] the only way to stop [the annihilation] was to show it. To scare people straight. Because what reasonable human being wouldn’t be galvanized by the potential destruction of everything they’ve ever known or loved? To save civilization, I would show its collapse. But how