Apocalypse When?. Jerry L. Sumney
homiletician, my commitment to preaching both Law and Gospel will likely be evident in many of the sermons. Martin Luther taught that God’s Law drives us to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Gospel without the Law leads to pablum and what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.”25 But Law without Gospel leads to despair, fear, and hopelessness. Therefore, the Law-Gospel dialectic will be helpful for preaching about apocalyptic texts so that we are forthright about both individual and systemic sin but also the necessity and sureness of God’s response of justice, grace, mercy, reconciliation, and a “new creation.”
My homiletic is also strongly influenced by what John McClure identifies as a liberation theology approach to preaching, which develops “a profound awareness of Christ incarnate in the pain and suffering of the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, the shamed, the shunned, the outcast, the abused, or the disenfranchised.”26 I extend this liberation theology to include an ecotheological orientation for preaching that moves to expand our awareness beyond the human community to embrace the other-than-human community of Earth-kin and Earth itself. Including these voices at the homiletical “round table” (to use McClure’s and Lucy Atkinson Rose’s phrase) arises out of, and is a natural extension of, the gospel’s concern with “the least of these” and the good news about the coming of God’s new creation. In the preacher’s proclamation of grace within a sermon about apocalyptic texts, “God’s will and power are identified not with what socially is but with what will be.”27
Consider, for example, passages such as Isaiah 65:17–19, 2 Corinthians 5:17, and Revelation 21:15, each of which contain either the phrase “new heaven and new earth” or “new creation.” A sermon about this theme will proclaim hope as “an absolutely fundamental theological category [because] anticipation of a new future grounded in faith in God conditions and motivates life,” says McClure. “The Christian life is one of hope, consciousness-raising, learning from and suffering with the oppressed (in order to come close to Christ), hope for and involvement in the work of social transformation, and joy in the present, rooted in faith’s hope for and vision of the future.”28 We’ll explore this theme of hope and new creation more fully throughout the book.
Having traced the contours of the complexities that accompany preaching about apocalyptic texts, we can establish some parameters for apocalyptic preaching. A sermon that preaches both “law” about our crisis as well as “gospel” proclaiming God’s grace in the midst of our failures finds a way to do three things. First, the sermon will honor the intrinsic value of God’s Creation, inclusive of humanity. Second, the sermon will realistically state the dilemmas in which we find ourselves today and offer prophetic critique in order to participate in God’s transformative justice. Third, the sermon will look to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ for clues as to how we as the church might creatively live into the proleptic vision of Christ’s return that leads to hope, restoration, and community.
Fundamentally, we hope that this book will bolster the confidence of the preacher to undertake apocalyptic preaching in the first place. As Philip Quanbeck notes, when it comes to preaching about apocalyptic passages in the Bible:
The temptation is to avoid those texts altogether. The infrequent appearance of Revelation in the Revised Common Lectionary aids in that conspiracy of silence. If, however, there is something central to Christian theology in those apocalyptic texts, those texts need to be proclaimed. If the lectionary is not going to help, the preacher needs to do something intentional, such as a sermon series on apocalyptic texts. These texts cannot be left to the Christian fringe.29
We agree with Quanbeck’s assertion that preachers must address apocalyptic texts in their sermons. Apocalyptic preaching attempts to answer the question, how shall we live in this space in between the already and the not yet?30 How shall we sojourn in this “becoming” time and space that is so precariously perched upon the abyss? The fact is that chaos does bring pain and destruction with it. The “birth pangs” described by Paul in Romans 8 may be heralding a new creation, but the woman in travail must learn how to push through the pain and violent upheaval. Ideally, she will have midwives to coach her along, remind her to breathe, and guide the emergence of the new creation. Perhaps that is one role for the preacher—to serve as a midwife for God’s people and Earth longing for the birth of the new creation.
This means that when we are preaching apocalyptic texts, we are on a kind of frontier, a liminal place between the Divine and the people. Thus we have a very important job, which is to help people keep God’s horizon in sight. There is a tension between the immediate time and the eschatological time always coming to us from the horizon. As people are so caught up in the hurriedness and scatteredness of everyday profane living, the worship service and preaching help to bring the horizon of holiness back into our focus. The liturgy and sermon help to reorient us in time and to step back into that journey towards the eternal. God’s horizon of holiness keeps calling to us.
As worship leaders and preachers, we hold these two edges together—the past and the present time—while also looking toward that horizon of the eschatological future. The poet David Whyte speaks of the “generous surprise” that comes to us in good literature and art, and, I would add, in worship services and preaching.31 This generous surprise brings us into a new world, but also a world that is familiar to us. It is the paradox of the crucified body resurrected—bearing the scars yet transformed by God’s power and grace into new life. This is what apocalyptic preaching can do. It can guide us into a world where we are changed when we come into this generous surprise. Apocalyptic preaching invites transformation, and transformation happens primarily to those who are paying attention. The more deeply we attend to what is being revealed to us, the more our hearts are broken and our minds are resolved to act. You as a worship leader and preacher are the one who can help to communicate this to your congregation and to a world that is desperately in need of vision.
The challenge, Catherine Keller says, is “how to begin. Again. Amidst every kind of loss.”32 Preaching apocalyptic texts proclaims that it is God’s love that hovers and dances, breathes and laughs as the ruach-spirit upon the abyss. It is love that submerges and reemerges from the depths. It is love that creates. It is love that becomes one of us in this powerful, fragile humanity. “[T]o love is to bear with the chaos.”33 Love attends the crucifixion and does not look away. Love brings balm and burial spices to the tomb of a crucified Earth. And love stands in the garden, gasping in wide-eyed recognition of the stranger, our teacher the Rabbi—the beloved new creation calling our name.
9. Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then, 14.
10. Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then, 14.
11. Rossing, “The World is About to Turn,” 141.
12. Rossing, “The World is About to Turn,” 141.
13. Rossing, “The World is About to Turn,” 141.
14. I make the decision to capitalize the word Creation so as to denote the level of respect I am affording the other-than-human world as a subject rather than object. I do the same with the term Earth when addressing it as an entity (as opposed to lowercase earth, which is a synonym of soil). Capitalizing the term indicates that this is an entity with a name, and that the entity is worthy of such.
15. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, ch. 4.
16. The song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” is a song by the band R.E.M. released on their 1987 album Document.
17. Dinnerstein,