Hope, Faith, and the Apocalyptic? Choosing Our Vision.

9 Pentecost, C p14, August 10, 2025
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3 (4-7) 8-16 Luke 12:32-40

Lectionary Link

The Apocalyptic is an uncomfortable topic for many; it may be uncomfortable for each of us to ponder the personal ending of our lives that we know to be death. The genre of writing known as Apocalyptic was present during the time of Jesus and the early Jesus Movement. It perhaps arose in biblical and apocryphal writing traditions during the exile in Persia, when Zoroastrian influences appeared in the Hebrew traditions. Apocalyptic writings functioned as a text of hope for people who suffered as a group because of being overrun by conquerors. How could one maintain a belief in being a favored people of God when one's people suffered so much apparent disfavor? How could one maintain the belief in a God of justice, when things seem so unjust in the conditions faced by so many people?  The topic matter of Apocalyptic visions are various but they include the interdiction of our world with woes by a discontinuous and impossible "utopia" with "utopian" people such as messiahs.

Isaiah saw a world where normal predator-prey relationship were converted to the harmony of friendship.  It was a vision of a return to the primordial Eden when the world was perfect and the people were innocent and justice was known as the harmony of everything living and being together without any harm.

Faith is the evidence or being persuaded in the moment to act toward what is good and perfect, namely as what is the not yet reality of the vision of hope.  The Apocalyptic and the utopian arise in human experience even for people who have come to criticize biblical religion for using utopia, heaven, and the apocalyptic interdiction of this world as an opiate or analgesic for the actual pain of the world.

Hard scientists and political skeptics like Marx might rightly criticize religious people who engage in religion as an excuse to tolerate conditions of injustice and oppression or as the mentally unhealthy habit of denial, while justifying a seemingly inconsistent loving, all powerful God, in the face of so much innocent suffering.

We should be honest today regarding how we don't avoid the manifestation of the apocalyptic in our own time in various ways.  Science fiction is a favorite genre of literature and cinema today.  Science fiction highlights the dynamic between the speculative and the actual empirical now.  Things which were once science fiction have become empirical now, from flying, space travel, submarines, and Dick Tracy's walkie talkie wrist watch.  Things that were once deemed impossible have become actual even if in ways that weren't originally visualized.

Life has always involved the dynamic of the speculative and the actual, the speculative in the actual now as being the guidance for human futurism.  Our lives bring us to pose questions: Do we have a future?  What kind of future?  Can we have a future that is discontinuous with the pain and suffering in our lives now?  Does the apparent widespread phenomena of pain and suffering seem to indicate a dystopian future for humanity?

People in biblical times engaged the dynamic between the speculative and the empirical in ways which were contextual in the writings for their times.  We can criticize them by noting how wrong they were, even while being in denial about how we too are caught in the dynamic between the speculative and the empirical.

In short, this dynamic is also expressed the dynamic between faith and hope.  The Christ-mission on earth and the Gospel is to influence the quality of how we live within the dynamic of the now and the future.  We have choices to make based upon our we choose to interpret our actual conditions and how we engage in extrapolations for our future?

We have the choice to be governed by the vision of utopia or dystopia.  We can concluded that our lives are already dystopian and that good is losing the battle to evil, and so the future is only going to be dystopia on steroids.  Therefore we should live selfishly defensive for now, and take as much as we can for ourselves right now.

But this choice is not the Gospel choice.  The Gospel choice is the belief that the "good genes" of the divine are invisibly hidden within our world and in the image of the divine upon humans.  And this original goodness can give us validity in asking for God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, essentially as a way of asserting that it is preferable for our lives to be motivated by a supreme good future than to be lived according to the vision of me and my world going to hell in a hand basket dystopia.

Being human means that we will never be delivered from the dynamic of speculative and the empirical.  Affirming the Christ-vision of humanity is to assert hope as the driving vision of our faithful actions now, rather than the visions of doom.

Let us choose the vision of hope today, and let us have within us the faith of Christ who is but the image of the divine within us rising to the fore.  Amen.