July 18, 1999 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

God and the Millennium

Carol J. Allen
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Genesis 32:22–31
Romans 8:26–39

“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Romans 8:38–39

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We cannot escape. Tough questions keep coming at us. “Why do I have cancer? Why did their plane have to crash? What does it mean that my son has AIDS? What is the relationship between God and my grandparents Alzheimer’s disease?”

If not these particular questions, others of equal magnitude will get hold of us sooner or later. When this happens, the ability that sets human beings apart from other living creatures kicks in. We tell stories. We construct narratives to explain the world and our place in it. Stories help us make sense. They shape what we believe about ourselves and others. They influence what we do. Through stories, we decide what and whom to trust and not to trust.

Underneath each tough question is a story being constructed by the person or group asking it in order to give themselves a place to stand, a perspective to guide believing and getting on in the world.

To illustrate this with a touch of humor, Dick Hester, a pastoral counselor in North Carolina, likes to tell the story about three baseball umpires discussing their work. What each says hints at his view of the his world and his place in it. Listen in as Gary Gunderson, author of Deeply Woven Roots (1997), passes on to us Hester’s story.

“The first [umpire] says, ‘There are balls and there are strikes, and I call ‘em the way they are.’

The second says, ‘There are balls and there are strikes, and I call ‘em the way I see ‘em.’

The third one says, ‘There are balls and strikes, and they ain’t nothin’ until I call ‘em.’ “

Speaking of contrasting identities and world views! On a more serious note, writing in last Sunday’s “Perspective” section of the Chicago Tribune, Ron Grossman offered up “A Short History of American Hate.” It was his way of making sense of the recent killing spree over the Fourth of July holiday by putting it into a narrative context (July 11, 1999). Grossman wrote, “It would be comforting to consider Benjamin Smith just an aberration, a bit of human flotsam and jetsam tossed up from the lunatic fringe. But when, fueled by rage against racial and religious minorities, he found his way to a Pekin, Il. gun dealer; Smith parked that now infamous blue Ford Taurus a lot closer to the American mainstream than we would like to think.”

Grossman goes on to make the point that we too could make. There are conflicting stories to tell about America. The author explains that, “A morbid fear that America is about to be swamped by hordes of foreigners goes back to the Founding Fathers. The impulse for a gun when your particular view of right and wrong seems in peril is older than the republic itself. And when that fear and that impulse come together, the product can be tragic, as Smith demonstrated?” Grossman adds the caveat that, of course, not all gun owners or persons with such fears will resort to this kind of violence. Nevertheless, the story of Smith reminds us of “chapters of American history we would prefer to forget.”

The author goes on in the article to give examples of this impulse to exclude the other, the alien, the stranger in our midst: There was Thomas Jefferson, whose words in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal,” didn’t make room for the full humanity of African Americans. His congressional colleague, Benjamin Franklin, tried to keep persons of German descent from full citizenship. Vigilante groups meted out rough justice in the American West, Protestants and Catholics clashed, immigrant groups from differing national origins and ethnic histories fought with each other, the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan lynched black Americans and antisemitism could be seen in acts, like the sign I can remember as a child in Baltimore in the 50s that read “For Gentiles Only.” All this violence was serving a story that propagated a need to maintain cultural purity.

My goal today is not to dwell on the secular history of America but to invite your consideration of a religious story in which this history is partially rooted.

How Christians and the Christian church comes to terms with the difficulties this story presents will be reflected in the stories we tell about ourselves and our beliefs in the future. How we will live and whether we flourish in the next millennium depends on careful examination of this religious story. It is not the only story we have to tell, but it is a prominent one.

The story has to do with the aim of history from a religious point of view. It has to do with beginnings and endings. The coming of a new millennium gets associated with stories that predict the end of history and the world as we know it, and the creation of a whole new world.

I particularly like an alternative story of beginnings and endings, their means and ends. I’d like to share it before attending to the more troubling story. Stephanie Paulsell, a Disciples of Christ minister, tells this alternative story to share her reflections on the meaning of her experience as a Lamaze partner for a friend in her church. This meant that she was committed to attending weekly birthing instruction classes.

Consequently, when the word came that the birth of her friend’s baby was imminent, she went to join the others at the hospital with high excitement. But things didn’t go as they had planned and finally labor had to be induced. Paulsell remembers how “After a long and difficult night, my friend began pushing the baby out. The nurse, the midwife, the baby’s father, and I all gathered around her, holding her legs, rubbing her arms, urging her on with our voices. As exhausted as she was, seeing the baby’s head appear allowed my friend to reach for the strength she needed. And when, with one final, powerful act of loving will, she pushed her daughter out into the midwife’s waiting hands, we all burst into tears of joy and relief and wonder. I remember thinking, over and over,” Paulsell said, “as we stood here half weeping, half laughing: ‘this must be the way God made the world, this must be the way God made the world…’”

Paulsell goes on to say, “Such a reaction will not seem surprising. The wondrous act of one person giving birth to another can easily lead us to think of divine creativity. My friend’s courageous and difficult laboring for her daughter recalled for me the words of Paul in which he speaks of the labor of each person, and indeed of all creation, to be re-formed in God’s image.”

Paulsell’s citation of scripture is found in Romans 8 close to the section read for today. In the passage, Paul uses the imagery of a woman in labor to speak of the struggle to birth a new creation.

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies (8:22–23).”

Paul’s words along with Paulsell’s story of assisting a woman in labor leads her to affirm her faith that “The Christian practice of honoring the body is born of the confidence that our bodies are made in the image of God’s goodness” (from Dorothy Bass, ed., Practicing Our Faith, 1997).”

Keeping Paulsell’s story of beginnings and endings in mind, let’s turn to the more dominant story of re-creation and its means and ends. I am grateful to Darrell Fasching, who is on the Religious Studies faculty of the University of South Florida, for his book on Christian evangelism, The Coming of the Millennium: Good News for the Whole Human Race (1996). For Fasching, the key question for Christians, as we enter a new millennium, is how to understand what it means to be created in God’s image.

Conquering the world for Christ has been a dominant theme in Christian story telling. The theory has been that through the conversion of everyone to Christ, things would be made right. The stranger, the other, the alien would be purged from the picture. Jesus would come again, and God’s Kingdom would be fulfilled.

In this version of the Christian story, the church saw itself in a dualistic way, as children of light with a mission to fight against the children of darkness. The end would come with a final confrontation between the Messiah and worldly powers. This would usher in the age of a church triumphant. All unbelievers would be cast into the fires of eternal damnation.

Here the gospel story becomes good news for the few and very bad news for the many. This dualistic gospel of the saved and the damned gets used to reinforce an understanding that hatred and violence might be sacred duties because their use would accelerate the final confrontation between good and evil.

Fasching recalls a time when two Catholic bishops went to Hitler and objected to his treatment of the Jews. Hitler replied that he “was simply finishing what the church had started.” There are embarrassing stories about the church. The medieval Catholic Church made Jews wear yellow badges and forced them to live in ghettos. The Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, supported the burning of Jewish synagogues and legal restrictions against Jews. Hitler could say in Mein Kampf, “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” He was living in a story where one was either a man of God or a man of Satan. For him, “war was the sacrament, a sacred ritual,” to change the world into the kingdom, purifying the earth by removing all inferior races. The children of light would then inherit the new heaven and the new earth (see Fasching for sources of these quotes).

We can imagine how someone like a Hitler could have taken the portion of the Christian story that vilified Jews for killing Jesus and exploit this prejudice, to construct a story of his own power and importance in building a case to rectify the situation.

Stories do have power to move people and to alter history.

Apocalyptic expectations have always been a part of the Christian faith. They culminate in the Book of Revelation, where the story is that the millennium is a sign of the end that will come after a 1000 year reign of peace. There will be a final conflagration that will bring the world as we know it to an end and inaugurate a new creation,

One millennial theory in the early church was that history was divided into three ages: the age of the Father up to the time of Christ; the age of Son corresponding with the lifetime of Jesus, and the final age of the Spirit that would usher in a new heaven and a new earth. Several variations of this theory developed over time and differed regarding just when and how this final change would come about.

Adolf Hitler called the final stage of history the Third Reich or third kingdom. He believed that there would be in this age an apocalyptic confrontation between the German Aryan forces of good and the forces of evil, that included everyone else, starting with the Jews. These evil forces had to be destroyed before perfection could be achieved. Hitler viewed himself a kind of messiah who served this end.

This vision of purifying apocalyptic violence continues to this day to catch the attention of some Christians. Some of you will remember The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. It is an example of this destructive dualism. Hitler saw death camps as a means to cleanse. For Lindsey, nuclear war was the tool. A truly faithful Christian, he said, should welcome nuclear annihilation. All life would be destroyed, but Christ would appear in the fire and create a new world for the chosen few who would be saved (see Fasching for a fuller telling of this history).

What a contrast to Paulsell’s birthing story where there was cooperation and joy to welcome the stranger.

Distortions of the gospel story are stories in which some persons claim to know God more than anyone else, and, in fact, put themselves into the place of God. Their version of conquering the world for Christ thrives on uniformity and eliminating the alien and the stranger from God’s image. This version creates an expectation that violence must come to purify and purge the world and change it into a place where only those who are just like the perpetrators can live.

Fasching’s terse and biting retort to these distortions is that “Christians are called to be the salt of the earth not to turn the whole earth into salt. Spiritually speaking, he says, that would be a major ecological catastrophe.”

An alternative story does exist. It is a story of good news for all people. It is not the story of a triumphant people and church, having made all others into its singular image. It is a story of hospitality to the stranger rather than the conquest of the stranger. In this story, God may be found in the stranger. We can find this possibility in the ancient Genesis story of Jacob. Jacob’s story may serve as a helpful religious resource for Christians living in an increasingly pluralistic society and global history.

We could choose several entry points into Jacob’s story. Today we’ll enter the story as a case of jealous rivalry between two brothers, Jacob and Esau. They were Abraham’s grandsons. They couldn’t have been more different. Esau grew up a rough-edged hunter and adventurer. Jacob stayed closer to home; he was a quiet guy. The story goes that Jacob came out of the womb second, holding tightly on to his brother’s heel, hence the choice of his name. Besides meaning ‘heel,’ it means, ‘trickster, over reacher, supplanter.’

Along the way, Jacob colluded with his mother, Rebekkah, to cheat Esau out of his birthright as the oldest son. His mother dressed him in clothing that had the feel of Esau’s wardrobe and gave Jacob a dish Esau might have cooked for his father from the game he had hunted. Jacob took it into Isaac, who by then was old and almost blind. Isaac was beguiled into bestowing on Jacob the blessing of his wealth and its sign of divine favor, assigned by the culture of that day to the son’s inheritance. Once given, the blessing could not be revoked.

Needless to say, Esau was furious. Jacob hightailed it out of there, and went to live with his mother’s relatives, where he stayed 20 years and accumulated much more wealth.

Something made Jacob decide to go back and see his brother. It’s not clear what. Nothing social or legal constrained him to do so.

As Jacob was heading back toward Esau’s home, he got the word that Esau was coming to meet him with 400 men. He quickly sent his family and goods across the river for safety’s sake. He remained alone. Night came. A stranger showed up and the two wrestled with each till dawn. A robber hiding his skullduggery from the light of day? Or was Jacob wrestling with his fear of his brother, or was his conscience bothering him?

During the tussle, Jacob’s hip was put out of joint and he was left with a limp. In the text, this means that Jacob was touched by the stranger at his most vulnerable place. Yet Jacob did not lose. The stranger also prevailed. The stranger refused to give his name. He did give Jacob a blessing - the blessing was a new name for Jacob. The stranger called him Israel. We can wonder what sense Jacob made of all of this.

There was something in his encounter with this stranger that made Jacob sense God’s presence in him. What gave him this idea?

Was it because that out of his struggle with the stranger, he was blessed not cursed. For his past deceit, he might have expected punishment. Instead by the gift of a new name, he was granted a legitimate right to reflect divine authority.

Later, when Jacob and Esau saw each other, Esau was already running ahead to meet him, they fell into each other’s arms and wept. Brothers who had become strangers to each other were reconciled. Was this the power of divine authority at work?

The stranger had refused to be pinned down as to his full identity. He retained an air of mystery. What does it mean to be made, Fasching asks us, in the image of an imageless God? In this case, glimpses of God are discovered in the struggle with the alien, the other, the stranger in ourselves and outside of ourselves. In this story, no one can claim God’s image as their own private property. They can only open themselves to be led by the God they encounter in the struggle with the stranger.

What happens in this encounter is not destruction of persons but a reconstruction of relationships, not uniformity but harmony.

Each of us has behaved at times in ways we find strange and unbelievable - the Jacob story doesn’t suggest that God wants to cut us off from God’s care because of that. Each of us bring histories with experiences we would like to purge from the telling of them, perhaps. The Jacob story suggests that God uses power to reform us and others into what Fasching calls a “communion of strangers,” each learning to understand, respect and help in the struggle of reconstruction.

This is a model for the church as well, this “communion of strangers.” Fasching would say that “The church need not turn the whole world into Christendom in order to be faithful to the good news. It only needs to be the salt or leaven that spreads the Good News of hospitality to strangers, to every nation.”

“To be elected to a saving vocation, to be called by God, in this version of the Christian gospel,” Fasching says, “is not to be among the saved rather than the damned but to be among those for whose sake God saves the whole human race.”

In this story of the gospel, Jesus Christ, crucified but risen, becomes “the link between Christian and Jew - not a jealous rivalry but strangers whose histories and destinies are intertwined “ - by the love that came into this world not to condemn it but to save it struggling along with the people God created. This is what it means to be made in God’s image. This is what the church has to model to the world.

Think of it this way. Here’s a case.

You remember how Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. both worked for human rights and human dignity.

King’s commitment to nonviolent resistance was rooted in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Gandhi’s teaching was rooted in his understanding of Hindu scripture.

King went to India to study Gandhi’s teachings and was received with hospitality. He didn’t go to conquer India for Christ. Nor did he consider becoming Hindu. The insights he gained sent him back home to live his own tradition and the Sermon on the Mount more fully.

Gandhi was influenced by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s understanding of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Gandhi did not become a Christian but went home with insights to help in his work of advocacy for the outcasts.

The Kingdom of God is drawing near, Fashcing’s version of the gospel story would say, when hospitality to the stranger is drawing near. What does this suggest for living faithfully in our pluralistic society?

Fasching responds: “when we encounter those whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways, we should expect conflict and the need to wrestle with one another. . . this does not have to be a matter of one winning and one losing. Although Jacob was injured, he won, and yet the stranger was not defeated, but instead blessed Jacob. . . This is what we should expect. What we will encounter we cannot say in advance. [All we know is that] Our new being is a gracious gift of encounter with the stranger.”

This is the good news of the gospel that we have to share as we enter the new millennium—it is good news for Christians and for all people.

“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, not things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38–39) Amen!

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church