The Crawl Of The Ages
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
For Sundays In Advent, Christmas, And Epiphany
The young mother sat nervously in the office of the Christian counselor. "I have a question I would like to ask you," she uttered, "a serious, religious question."
"Why, certainly," replied the counselor. "Ask away. What has you so upset?"
"I would like to know," she said, "if when you and your family die and go to heaven, those family roles continue. Will I know my children and husband in heaven and will they know me?"
"What makes you ask a question like that, Alice?"
With complete candor, Alice answered, "Because I think I can make it to death. Beyond that I am not sure!"
There are some aspects of permanence whose prospects are downright frightening to some people. Today's scripture seems to render an earthly verdict on priests. Death certainly prevents them "continuing in office."
As we wrestle with God's word to the Hebrews, it is apparent that we humans go off on what Gerald May calls "a multitude of side trips" as we seek to express our primary longing for union with God.1 One of these side trips concerns time. What lasts? For how long? The early church certainly expected Jesus to return to the earth in a matter of weeks. Time was short and flying toward extinction if not annihilation. Nothing needed to be viewed as permanent. Heritage counted for little.
Then the crawl of the ages started to set in. The Hebrew Christians -- people of Jewish heritage who became Christians -- began to face difficulties. As time relentlessly marched onward, they seemed to recall their heritage with nostalgia. Maybe there was value in the institution and offices of Judaism after all. Maybe this Jesus Christ was not so unique and supreme after all. Maybe they should rethink the old order of the Jewish priesthood of Aaron. Indeed, why not go back to the old routines?
The crawl of history causes humans to reconsider abandonment of old routines. This happens frequently. It happened to the Jews themselves in Egypt. Before people were willing to follow Moses and his "new" God into the wilderness, it had to be shown that the old gods of Egypt no longer worked. Each and every plague visited on the Egyptians showed the weakness of a traditional nature god or goddess. One might have called the story of the plagues a chronicle of imperfect old Egyptian gods. The Nile River became a river of blood, which exposed imperfect old river god, Hapi, as the vital source of Egyptian life. The plague of frogs exposed old Heqit, goddess of fertility as imperfect and weak. So it went, plague after plague exposed the frailty of the Egyptian gods. The message was clear: rivers, frogs, cattle, gold, economic systems, and the sun are imperfect gods and not permanent.2
In short, if you are to get your daughter to embrace a new boyfriend, she must become aware of the imperfections of the old boyfriend. Like Israel of old, the Hebrew Christians were faced with a similar problem. The sacrificial system under Jewish priests had been the very routine of their religious system. Every human relationship with God had depended on keeping the system going. When old priests died, new priests had to be found. Sacrifices had to be offered by priests day by day.
How could the early church, short of a series of plagues on priests, address the issue? Herein is the key: they wrote an epistle to the Hebrews describing the imperfect nature of the old priesthood. If you are going to switch priesthood, you had better have good reasons. Otherwise the crawl of the ages will start people heading back toward what they once knew.
The epistle to the Hebrews rather clearly showed three things that were lacking in the old priesthood. The former priests could not endure over time. When they died, their influence went with them. The influence of the Christ, by contrast, persists and continues. Christ stands at the end of time as he did at the beginning. Should anyone doubt human endurance, just try to get someone to tell you the first and last names of all eight of their great-grandparents!
The former priests could not save humans for all time. Only Christ would always live to make the sacrifice for succeeding generations.
Finally, the former priests could not make the perfect sacrifice. Because the human priests were themselves imperfect, they had to make sacrifices for their own sins before they could take on the sins of other humans. This was not the case with Christ, who being perfect could make the perfect sacrifice.
While you and I live in a totally different religious climate, the issue is still the same. Where do we turn when time begins to crawl? How do we maintain our religious perspective when the crawl of the ages comes upon us? The more science summons its evidence from the stars, we learn that our universe is older than we had ever dreamed. This makes us as a species much younger than we had imagined. At least some Christians are beginning to realize that Jesus and the disciples, rather than the culmination of God's expression to us, may have been part of the first sentence of the first paragraph of the prologue.
The U.S. Department of Energy commissioned a study of how to create warnings that can survive and be understood as long as existing nuclear waste dumps remain toxic. This will be until at least the year 12,000. How, it was asked, can any message be transmitted to human beings of the 120th century? No one has ever tried to communicate written information over a 10,000-year span of time. The human story could well have another hundred centuries to go. Why do we expect God to act fast? God doesn't seem to have done that in the past, even for those who believed in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Some bright scientists suggest that the crawl of the ages might force us to ring our meaningful areas, from nuclear dumps to sacred sites, with modern Stonehenges into which huge cartoon narratives depicting what they are can be etched.3
Perhaps we, too, need to reflect on the once and for all nature of the Christ. We have a call to surrender to the permanence of Christ every bit as much as the ancient Hebrews. Otherwise it will be tempting to stay put and cling to the corpse that every tradition ultimately becomes. We, too, must look up and out beyond every human imperfection. We will have to learn to like ourselves and feel important. Even on days when science makes us feel small, we have an appointed Savior who "has been made perfect forever."
We will also have to accept ourselves as being forgiven for all time. This is not as easy to do as it might at first seem. Many of us have grown up with the impression that God's love is something that has to be earned. For us, God loves only the behavior that justifies that love. From childhood days many form the image of God as a punitive parent.
Perhaps human parents warned us that God would punish us if we did not go to the store or carry out the trash. Perhaps a teacher reminded us that hell is the resting place for those who tell fibs; or the preacher may have remarked that eternal darkness is the result of breaking ethical codes concerning sex, dancing, smoking, or some other such item viewed as a sin of the flesh.
Recently a colleague asked a group of children to draw a picture of God as they saw him. One child drew a huge lightning bolt striking a cluster of stick men. "What's that?" he asked. "God killing all the bad people," was the reply.
Now we should not for a moment doubt that the teachers, ministers, and parents behind such situations are generally well meaning. They, as do all of us, consider it their duty to teach children to be God-fearing. On the other hand, they perhaps also find the fear of God very convenient as a tool for controlling behavior. Over the long run, though, since we are all fallible creatures, such fear does not succeed in controlling behavior. It succeeds only in the production of intense guilt.
To put it mildly, the life of Jesus the Christ created no psychological guilt in the lives of his followers. Jesus did not preach a tyrannical God of wrath and superstition. This is all the more amazing when we consider that he lived and preached in a place and at a time when mystery religions were making such claims. In like manner, the epistle to the Hebrews recognizes that a loving God is in the business of salvation over the long haul.
When we focus on the imperfect faces around us in an imperfect world, indulgence in self-pity need not be our common lot. We have an appointed Savior who has been made perfect forever.
When we are certain we are the least lovable creatures in the world, we can be surprised by God's grace. The crawl of the ages need not shackle us. We can move forward in the assurance that there is always a better covenant extended toward us.
____________
1. Gerald A. May, Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 151.
2. Many sources can be used to back up this claim. Among the most readable are -- Nahum Sarna, Exodus: The Traditional Hebrew Text With the New JPS Translation Commentary (Israel: Jewish Publication Society, 1991) and James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt: The Evidence For the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
3. See the ideas debated in Patrick Henry, The Ironic Christian's Companion: Finding the Marks of God's Grace in the World (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), pp. 35-37.
"Why, certainly," replied the counselor. "Ask away. What has you so upset?"
"I would like to know," she said, "if when you and your family die and go to heaven, those family roles continue. Will I know my children and husband in heaven and will they know me?"
"What makes you ask a question like that, Alice?"
With complete candor, Alice answered, "Because I think I can make it to death. Beyond that I am not sure!"
There are some aspects of permanence whose prospects are downright frightening to some people. Today's scripture seems to render an earthly verdict on priests. Death certainly prevents them "continuing in office."
As we wrestle with God's word to the Hebrews, it is apparent that we humans go off on what Gerald May calls "a multitude of side trips" as we seek to express our primary longing for union with God.1 One of these side trips concerns time. What lasts? For how long? The early church certainly expected Jesus to return to the earth in a matter of weeks. Time was short and flying toward extinction if not annihilation. Nothing needed to be viewed as permanent. Heritage counted for little.
Then the crawl of the ages started to set in. The Hebrew Christians -- people of Jewish heritage who became Christians -- began to face difficulties. As time relentlessly marched onward, they seemed to recall their heritage with nostalgia. Maybe there was value in the institution and offices of Judaism after all. Maybe this Jesus Christ was not so unique and supreme after all. Maybe they should rethink the old order of the Jewish priesthood of Aaron. Indeed, why not go back to the old routines?
The crawl of history causes humans to reconsider abandonment of old routines. This happens frequently. It happened to the Jews themselves in Egypt. Before people were willing to follow Moses and his "new" God into the wilderness, it had to be shown that the old gods of Egypt no longer worked. Each and every plague visited on the Egyptians showed the weakness of a traditional nature god or goddess. One might have called the story of the plagues a chronicle of imperfect old Egyptian gods. The Nile River became a river of blood, which exposed imperfect old river god, Hapi, as the vital source of Egyptian life. The plague of frogs exposed old Heqit, goddess of fertility as imperfect and weak. So it went, plague after plague exposed the frailty of the Egyptian gods. The message was clear: rivers, frogs, cattle, gold, economic systems, and the sun are imperfect gods and not permanent.2
In short, if you are to get your daughter to embrace a new boyfriend, she must become aware of the imperfections of the old boyfriend. Like Israel of old, the Hebrew Christians were faced with a similar problem. The sacrificial system under Jewish priests had been the very routine of their religious system. Every human relationship with God had depended on keeping the system going. When old priests died, new priests had to be found. Sacrifices had to be offered by priests day by day.
How could the early church, short of a series of plagues on priests, address the issue? Herein is the key: they wrote an epistle to the Hebrews describing the imperfect nature of the old priesthood. If you are going to switch priesthood, you had better have good reasons. Otherwise the crawl of the ages will start people heading back toward what they once knew.
The epistle to the Hebrews rather clearly showed three things that were lacking in the old priesthood. The former priests could not endure over time. When they died, their influence went with them. The influence of the Christ, by contrast, persists and continues. Christ stands at the end of time as he did at the beginning. Should anyone doubt human endurance, just try to get someone to tell you the first and last names of all eight of their great-grandparents!
The former priests could not save humans for all time. Only Christ would always live to make the sacrifice for succeeding generations.
Finally, the former priests could not make the perfect sacrifice. Because the human priests were themselves imperfect, they had to make sacrifices for their own sins before they could take on the sins of other humans. This was not the case with Christ, who being perfect could make the perfect sacrifice.
While you and I live in a totally different religious climate, the issue is still the same. Where do we turn when time begins to crawl? How do we maintain our religious perspective when the crawl of the ages comes upon us? The more science summons its evidence from the stars, we learn that our universe is older than we had ever dreamed. This makes us as a species much younger than we had imagined. At least some Christians are beginning to realize that Jesus and the disciples, rather than the culmination of God's expression to us, may have been part of the first sentence of the first paragraph of the prologue.
The U.S. Department of Energy commissioned a study of how to create warnings that can survive and be understood as long as existing nuclear waste dumps remain toxic. This will be until at least the year 12,000. How, it was asked, can any message be transmitted to human beings of the 120th century? No one has ever tried to communicate written information over a 10,000-year span of time. The human story could well have another hundred centuries to go. Why do we expect God to act fast? God doesn't seem to have done that in the past, even for those who believed in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Some bright scientists suggest that the crawl of the ages might force us to ring our meaningful areas, from nuclear dumps to sacred sites, with modern Stonehenges into which huge cartoon narratives depicting what they are can be etched.3
Perhaps we, too, need to reflect on the once and for all nature of the Christ. We have a call to surrender to the permanence of Christ every bit as much as the ancient Hebrews. Otherwise it will be tempting to stay put and cling to the corpse that every tradition ultimately becomes. We, too, must look up and out beyond every human imperfection. We will have to learn to like ourselves and feel important. Even on days when science makes us feel small, we have an appointed Savior who "has been made perfect forever."
We will also have to accept ourselves as being forgiven for all time. This is not as easy to do as it might at first seem. Many of us have grown up with the impression that God's love is something that has to be earned. For us, God loves only the behavior that justifies that love. From childhood days many form the image of God as a punitive parent.
Perhaps human parents warned us that God would punish us if we did not go to the store or carry out the trash. Perhaps a teacher reminded us that hell is the resting place for those who tell fibs; or the preacher may have remarked that eternal darkness is the result of breaking ethical codes concerning sex, dancing, smoking, or some other such item viewed as a sin of the flesh.
Recently a colleague asked a group of children to draw a picture of God as they saw him. One child drew a huge lightning bolt striking a cluster of stick men. "What's that?" he asked. "God killing all the bad people," was the reply.
Now we should not for a moment doubt that the teachers, ministers, and parents behind such situations are generally well meaning. They, as do all of us, consider it their duty to teach children to be God-fearing. On the other hand, they perhaps also find the fear of God very convenient as a tool for controlling behavior. Over the long run, though, since we are all fallible creatures, such fear does not succeed in controlling behavior. It succeeds only in the production of intense guilt.
To put it mildly, the life of Jesus the Christ created no psychological guilt in the lives of his followers. Jesus did not preach a tyrannical God of wrath and superstition. This is all the more amazing when we consider that he lived and preached in a place and at a time when mystery religions were making such claims. In like manner, the epistle to the Hebrews recognizes that a loving God is in the business of salvation over the long haul.
When we focus on the imperfect faces around us in an imperfect world, indulgence in self-pity need not be our common lot. We have an appointed Savior who has been made perfect forever.
When we are certain we are the least lovable creatures in the world, we can be surprised by God's grace. The crawl of the ages need not shackle us. We can move forward in the assurance that there is always a better covenant extended toward us.
____________
1. Gerald A. May, Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 151.
2. Many sources can be used to back up this claim. Among the most readable are -- Nahum Sarna, Exodus: The Traditional Hebrew Text With the New JPS Translation Commentary (Israel: Jewish Publication Society, 1991) and James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt: The Evidence For the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
3. See the ideas debated in Patrick Henry, The Ironic Christian's Companion: Finding the Marks of God's Grace in the World (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), pp. 35-37.
