Haunted by Doomsday
In the last century or so, our culture has shown an increasing fascination with the doomsday genre. Perhaps you’re familiar with the famous 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. It caused a significant public panic among listeners who actually thought Martians were overtaking our world. Since then, the genre has only proliferated. The list of books and movies is endless: Armageddon, The Day after Tomorrow, 2012, Interstellar, and one of my favorites, The Road. It seems that we love telling stories about the end of the world. Or, maybe “love” is not the right word. Maybe it is more accurate to say that we are haunted by stories about the end of the world. It is a story that we cannot escape. It is the truth visiting us in a dream.
There is a theme that pervades many doomsday stories. Whether the final disaster is ecological or inter-terrestrial or nuclear, the underlying cause is the same. It is we humans who are ultimately responsible. Maybe it is a piece of technology that goes awry and escapes our control and wreaks havoc on all the earth. Maybe it is a disease, and instead of fighting it together, people become suspicious of others and compete for limited resources. Maybe it is warfare, where the desire for control simply grows to astronomical levels and wipes everyone off the face of the earth. In each scenario, we are the common denominator. Our short-sighted, self-seeking tendencies prove to be our undoing. Or, to put it in theological language: our sin kills us.
I wonder if the end of the world is more than a storytelling
device for providing us the vicarious moviegoing thrills of danger and
survival. I wonder if it is not a prophetic expression of a difficult spiritual
truth, namely that we are in danger of destroying ourselves and all creation,
perhaps now more than ever.
Human Conduct, Cosmic
Consequences
If that sounds a bit dramatic, just remember it’s not me—or anyone else today—who said it first. In fact, we find this message regularly in the Old Testament prophets. Over two thousand years ago, they declared that human conduct has cosmic consequences. In other words, how we treat our neighbor somehow has consequences for the trees and the rivers and the birds and the beasts of the field. This is not an obvious, common-sense observation. We like to think that we can contain and control the effects of our behavior. But the prophets tell us that our actions have an unseen, spiritual dimension that often unfolds in very real, unexpected ways.
In today’s passage, God begins with the charge against Judah
that they are “skilled in doing evil” and “do not know how to do good” (Jer
4:22). Elsewhere, God elaborates that their wickedness is not simply a private,
religious misdemeanor but a comprehensive failure to do justice. “Everyone,”
God says, “is greedy for unjust gain,” and therefore they take advantage of the
foreigner, the orphan, and the widow (cf. Jer 6:13; 7:6). But in today’s
passage, after Jeremiah broadcasts God’s accusation of injustice, he shares a
shocking vision that would rival any of our doomsday stories. The first line is
about as end-of-the-world as you could get: “I looked on the earth, and lo, it
was waste and void” (4:23). If that language sounds somehow
familiar, it’s no accident. “Waste” and “void”—tohu va-bohu—are the very
same words used at the beginning of Genesis, when we are told that before
creation the earth was “[waste and] void and darkness covered the face of the
deep” (Gen 1:2). Jeremiah is saying that when he looks into the future, he does
not even see the recognizable forms of creation; he sees only the dark, murky
elements of the chaos that preceded creation. To a modern audience, we might
say that he sees the dark, mysterious nothingness that precedes the Big Bang. Jeremiah
then expands on this image, saying that he cannot see the light that God
created, he cannot see the creatures or vegetation that God created, he cannot
see the natural boundaries between land and water that God created. He cannot
make his point any more forcefully. It seems as though all creation has somehow
been “uncreated.”
It’s difficult not to see parallels between Jeremiah’s vision and the world around us today. Just as Jeremiah envisioned a drastic collapse of creation into chaos, so we see in our world a host of ecological emergencies that threaten humanity’s wellbeing. This past week, I read about the flooding in Pakistan, a country that is twice the size of California and contains six times its population. Right now, over one third of the country is underwater. There are so many people displaced by the flooding, that the biggest concern is no longer safe shelter or housing but rather starvation. The emergency response has only been able to reach a fraction of the evacuated so far with food.[1] Although the scope of Pakistan’s flooding is what caught my attention, I’m all too aware that many people closer to home have also had to deal with more frequent flooding. It seems like David and God’s Pit Crew are going somewhere new for “muck-outs” every week. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when I enter the word “flooding” into Google, the automated suggested response “flooding near me” pops up.
Our world’s climate can be a divisive subject of conversation. For me, it’s a not a matter of debate. I have no stake in party politics, nor am I a climate scientist. I simply observe that many of our brothers and sisters are already living through their own doomsday. And I’m haunted by the possibility that the same consumerist and materialist attitudes that devalue and disregard the poor and disadvantaged, have also devalued the earth, treating it as a resource rather than as a gift to be tended and shared. I’m haunted by the story that our short-sighted, self-seeking tendencies—or sinful tendencies—might be our own undoing.
A New Creation
Reading Jeremiah’s doomsday vision leaves me on the edge of a cliff. As I observe some similarities between his times and my own, I find myself asking, “How should you live when the world is ending?” Because maybe it is—at least in the sense that it is undergoing profound change and may look very different in a hundred years’ time.
Around one millennium ago, the archbishop of York, Wulfstan,
preached to a people whose world was ending. Vikings raids had become
increasingly common, and it was only a matter of time before the Vikings would
prevail in England. Wulfstan’s sermon was unorthodox, to say the least. Like
Jeremiah, he boldly proclaimed that the end would come and in fact had already
come as many English had turned on each other in fear, suspicion, and power
struggles. His response was disarmingly simple. No matter—keep living
faithfully to God and one another. Do not worry about the result of things, but
about your responsibility in things. Let your speech be honest. Uphold your
commitments. Care for the vulnerable and the poor. It is common in difficult
times for people to circle the wagons and live for themselves in a mode
of self-preservation, but Wulfstan essentially invited his congregation to live
even more than before for others.[2]
Concealed within Jeremiah’s doomsday prophecy is a similar call to faithfulness and hope. There’s a rascally ambiguity in his use of creational language, such as when he envisions the tohu va-bohu, the “waste” and “void” (Jer 4:23). For on the one hand, these words signal a return to chaos; they signal the end. On the other hand, these same words were originally the prelude to a good and beautiful creation. If they mean that creation has been undone, they also mean that it can be remade. Paul writes about this. He says, on the one hand, “The present form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor 7:31), but on the other hand, “In Christ, there is a new creation” (2 Cor 5:17). What the world sees as an end, Christ-followers see as a beginning. Followers of Christ see redemption in every circumstance and faithfully bear witness to Christ’s reconciling love, in which all things are being made new.
Seeing crisis as an opportunity for God’s love, as a stage for our peculiar witness, is perhaps pertinent as we talk about stewardship this month and consider making commitments to Trinity. I won’t say much about your pledge. I will be honest that, in the past, I have looked cynically upon church stewardship drives. The request for money often seems to be more about self-preservation than the gospel’s call for self-giving. So my hope is that, if you do give, it is not to preserve Trinity or postpone its inevitable end—for all worldly things will come to their natural end (cf. Heb 12:26-28). My hope is instead that, if you give, you will be motivated by a desire to bear witness to God’s new beginning that happens wherever love welcomes the stranger and befriends the enemy and cares for the vulnerable. If you see that love here, if you have experienced it here, if you desire it here, then by all means please be a part of it in any way that you can. For our world, which is haunted by the end, needs to know about this love, which invites us into a new beginning.
Prayer
Creator God,Who looks upon the waste and void
And sees within it a very good world—
In Christ, you reveal
That the end
May in fact be a beginning.
Give us courage
To live as joyful, faithful witnesses
To your way of love,
Even as the present form of things
Passes away.
In Christ, crucified and risen: Amen.
[1] The
Guardian, “‘There Is Nothing for Us’: Pakistan’s Flood Homeless Start to
Despair,” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/06/we-screamed-our-hearts-out-for-help-homeless-escape-pakistan-floods,
accessed September 6, 2022.
[2]
Eleanor Parker, “The Sermon of the Wolf,” Plough 32 (2022): 32-37.
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