The World is Ending (Again)

The last time we gathered for mid-week worship, Kristina offered a message that reflected on the fact that some acknowledge September as “Creation Justice Month,” and that though we are in the midst of many challenging dynamics, some imagination and hope is warranted and required to see a way forward. We looked at the video “Message from the Future” and were reminded of the power of creative thinking and sharing about what may come.

Today, I would remind us again that that in the midst of all the violent upheaval, civil strife, armed conflict, and political turmoil, the earliest Friends -- Quakers in the 1600s-- were pretty sure that the world was actually,

physically,

coming to an end. 

By the second generation of the Religious Society they began to think of the concept of the inbreaking of the Reign of God as more of a spiritual and ethical invitation, but at first, for years, they felt like they were in the middle of the true end. That it was all coming down. 

Today, once again, I find it easy to look around and feel like we are nearing the end. In addition to violent upheaval, civil strife, armed conflict, and political turmoil there are the realities of ecologically extractive commercial practices and various racial, ethnic, and class prejudices mean that there is not only an environmental crisis, but a widening gap in wealth within the US and globally. 

For example, in 1820, taking all the countries together, the per capita income of Europe was three times bigger than that of Africa. By the year 2000 it was thirteen times larger. In 2013, Oxfam calculated that the richest 85 individuals in the world controlled the same amount of wealth as did the poorest 3,585,000,0000 people.

To make matters worse, within some of the economically developing nations, the Western, largely American model of growth has become the model to emulate such that, for example, though India is still the place with the largest concentration of poverty in a single country, it is also one of the sites of rapid wealth growth in the hands of a very rich elite and an emerging middle class. 

So to reflect on all of this, to look around and know that the changing climate is fueling increased wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding and realize that the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air reports that the Chinese government is building approximately one large coal plant every week...  

Well….

it might be time to consider that the world is ending again.

But here’s the thing. When our spiritual forebears were under the impression that it was all coming down their response was not to sit it out and wait for heaven, but instead to begin the process of figuring out how to live now as it will be in heaven. To live in a manner that gives witness to the fact that another way is possible and that there is a guidance we can seek out, the Spirit of God, a “life and power that took away the occasion of all wars.” 

And today I think we are called to the same seeking, to turn toward that life and power that takes away the occasion for all coal plants. 

that life and power that takes away the occasion for widening wealth gaps. 

that life and power that takes away the occasion for the prison industrial complex 

and its ravaging of the lives of so many black and brown siblings

that life and power that takes away the occasion for us to think we can just wait. 

As some of you know, I am one of those rare breed of beasts known as a “Quaker Theologian.” I work teaching and writing about how we think of God and how that encourages us to be and act in the world. Specifically, I focus on what is called “liberation theology,” which is a tradition rooted in the ideas that the true Church manifests in places where there are concrete changes being done that result in actual, physical justice and flourishing for those who are poor, struggling, and oppressed. As I close today I want to share with you some of the words of one of the earliest writers in liberation theology, a Brazilian scholar named Rubem Alves whose words from 1968 still speak to our moment today.

Alves notes that when things are at their worst we are inclined to feel most passive and frozen in our fear. To dare to dream, hope, and imagine a better future is accused of being naive. And it can be naive he says, if your dreaming closes off your eyes, ears, and heart from seeing the suffering around you.

No. What Alves hopes for is a recognition of the pain and our complicity in it and then a kind of dreaming that makes possible the work to achieve what might come next. Our hope can be a way to pierce through the forces and figures that say things are too hard to change. This is what Alves says:    

Hope is the intuition that the imagination can be more real, and reality less real, than we had thought. It is the sensation that the last word does not belong to the brutality of facts with their oppression and repression. It is the suspicion that reality is far more complex than realism would have us believe, that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the present, and that, miraculously and surprisingly, life is readying the creative event that will open the way to freedom and resurrection ...

What is being called for isn’t a denial of reality that permits us to pretend that things are fine and nothing needs to be done. Oh no. Far from that. We’re being called to name the practices that hold us back and name the practices that will lead the way to what comes next. 

In a time when we can be overwhelmed by the facts and figures of pain around us, let us remember there is a guide who can turn our minds and work to a hope for something more than the way things are. The book of Isaiah has God remind us of this.

Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
   now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
   and rivers in the desert.

This new thing has already been seeded, Friends. Our path is to seek it out, to work with each other to nurture it and cast aside all the calls and taunts of the world that say such a justice is not possible. 

God is readying the event that will open the way to freedom and resurrection 

and so we turn toward that Inner Teacher and ask for a glimpse of what might be. 

As we turn to prayer today the query I would offer is this:

What do we imagine greater justice might look like? 

Is there something Spirit is lifting up to you that you need to see?