Peeing in Jermyn Street

A sermon by David Robert Ord

Dateline Denver: "The leader of a doomsday cult who predicted the destruction of Denver last weekend has vanished along with about 50 of his followers." The group, Concerned Christians, "have sold their belongings and abandoned their homes."

he article adds, "Critics said the group has transformed itself into an apocalyptic personality cult."

We've been hearing the word apocalypse a lot in recent years.  It's a Greek word that means "opening" or "revealing," from which we get the title of the book of Revelation.  Apocalyptic writings claim that even though sometimes it doesn't look like it, there's a plan.  If we could just see, we'd realize that God is running the show.

The Jewish peoples wrote a lot of apocalyptic books.  When Israel was threatened with destruction by the Babylonians over five hundred years before Jesus, the columnists of the day claimed, "You can't destroy Jerusalem, unless you want the sun, moon, and stars to stop shining, and the world to blow up." When their enemies invaded anyway, the pundits then said, "God will send a divine deliverer and remake the world with Israel as top dog."

The Babylonians wrote apocalyptic stories that claimed the same thing.  The Enuma Elish dates from long before Israel was ever a nation.  When God made the world, it says, the first thing made was Babylon and its temple to Marduk.  Destroy Babylon and its temple, neglect Marduk, and the world will end.

The Egyptians were saying the same thing two-thousand years before Jesus.  The proto-apocalypse of Neferti from 1991 BCE, for example, sounds like the book of Revelation. "Re (the god) must begin by recreating the land, which is utterly ruined, and nothing remains....  The sun is veiled and will not shine...  Enemies have come into being in the east, Asiatics have come down into Egypt... I will show you the land in calamity, for what has never happened before has now happened...." But, the writer assured folk, Re would send a great king to straighten it all out.

Stories about a champion who overcomes the invaders who have created chaos--represented by eclipses and so forth--and establishes a new creation, a new order, are common in the ancient world. Insecure people long for an idealistic world.  In such a perfect world there would be no evil.

As then, so today, apocalyptics see everything as worse than ever before.  The problem is that they have little sense of historical perspective.
Take crime. "What's the world coming to?" the Jehovah's Witnesses ask as they show you a copy of Awake magazine featuring crime.  They simply have no idea how incredibly safe our society is today compared with most societies in the past.  Because they aren't aware, such people see the ominous in the ordinary.

In one of Alan Bennet's works, the character Veronica observes, "I saw somebody peeing in Jermyn Street the other day.  I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it?  Or is it simply somebody peeing in Jermyn Street?"

Those expecting Jesus to come back soon see everything as ominous, including poor Disney, who are being boycotted by the Christian right.  To insecure people, daycares aren't daycares; they're portents of the end.  Russia, the European Common Market, Middle East oil, the decline of the nuclear family, health insurance for partners of gay people, liberals in government, floods, droughts and hurricanes are symbols of a cosmic, spiritual battle for control of the earth.

Whenever a group of people find their ideals are no longer the dominant values of society, they start talking gloom and doom.  Anything different from my standards is automatically ominious.  This is why fears of the apocalypse began to emerge as America turned from the old religious values to an ethic of personal freedom.  Women gained the vote and embarked on careers, daycare centers emerged, dad was no longer patriarch of the family, and churches sanctioned divorce and remarriage.
This fear of people who are different from us is why you find not only the poor, the downtrodden, and the illiterate believing in the end of the world, but also successful people.

The founders of Jainism, an apocalyptic movement in the sixth centure BCE, were from the upper strata of society, the bankers of India, extremely wealthy.  In the twelfth century, Joachim of Fiore began an apocalyptic movement made up mostly of people who abandoned great wealth.  In the 1450s and 60s, Janko and Irvin of Wirsberg in Europe were rich and powerful catalysts of an apocalyptic movement.  Many wealthy were involved in the apocalypticism that spread through Florence at the end of the fifteenth century, led by the famous civic reformer Sovarola.
Rich or poor, powerful or powerless, people are attracted to apocalypticism when the world no longer seems to fit together the way they think it should.  That's why the French Revolution, which lopped off the heads of those who normally lopped off heads, triggered a massive apocalyptic movement across the channel in England.

When their ideals aren't running society, apocalyptics run from society.  Partial or complete escape from the world, cutting themselves off from those who think differently, has always been a feature of apocalyptic movements.

In the two centuries leading up to the birth of Jesus, apocalyptic groups freuently withdrew to the desert to await a new order.  Books like First and Second Enoch, Third Isaiah, and Daniel were products of these communities.  Heaven's Gate took to a comet.  Less extreme versions pull their children out of the system into Christian schools or home schooling.
As a way of tolerating having to live in society in what they see as the last days, end-time groups develop a program of action.  They try to pioneer the conditions they believe will characterize the new age.  They try to live it now, in preparation.  They see themselves as forerunners of the new day.  Hence the religious right's political agenda.  People who are in a tizzy send their money to televangelists and right wing causes, thinking they're hastening divine intervention.

The Skoptzi sect in Russia included noblemen, state officials, and the very rich, all of whom expected an imminent judgment of the world.  Because they believed the new age would be sexless, they castrated all males--a feature of Heaven's Gate in our time.

Such movements are dangerous not only to themselves but also to the rest of us because they tend to try to make the apocalypse happen, cheer it on, provoke it.  In Jesus' day, hoping to force God's hand, four thousand people followed their leader into the desert beyond the river Jordan, then entered the Promised Land and circled the walls of Jerusalem thinking they would collapse as in the story of Joshua's conquest of Jericho.  When their apocalyptic dream failed, Rome exacted a terrible price and the roads were lined with the corpses of the crucified.

End-time groups often work up a program of military action.  Sioux apocalyptic groups wore so-called ghost shirts, which they believed invulnerable to bullets, and got themselves shot.  Sitting Bull, an apocalyptic, believed God would restore the land to Native Americans and fought, ending up six-foot under.  David Koresh's group armed themselves at Waco.

Former President Ronald Reagan was fascinated by apocalyptic sections of the Bible.  While governor of California, in 1971 he startled guests at a formal dinner by saying of Ezekiel 38-39, "Gog must be Russia.  It can't be long now." While President, he commented in a 1983 phone conversation, "I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon.  Believe me, they certainly describe the times we're going through."

When you think Jesus is coming back, you not only might blow the world up, but you can argue that policies to curb global warming are hurting the economy.  I mean, why conserve the earth when it's about to be destroyed?

People thought that way in nineteenth century New Guinea, when an apocalyptic figure named Tokeira predicted a tidal wave would wipe everyone out.  They slaughtered close to four-hundred pigs, exhausting their reservoirs of wealth.  It was an act of faith in the belief the end had arrived and that God would provide abundant food in the new era.  The right wing behaves like that where the earth's resources are concerned.
The planet has given us a one-time endowment.  Once a species is extinguished, we know of no power in heaven or on earth that can revive it.  We are extinguishing some ten thousand species a year.  Every second of every day, an acre of rainforest, the most luxurious life system of the entire planet, is destroyed.  That's a rainforest the size of Oklahoma each year.  But if the world is about to end, what's a rainforest matter?

We worry about chemicals causing cancer.  That's the least of our worries.  We ought to be worried about them causing the death of the planet itself.  Earth may be resilient, but it is also finite.  From physical assault on the environment to disturbance of the chemical balance of the ecosphere, we are eliminating the very conditions for the renewal of life.  But that's all right, because Jesus will wave his magic wand and the desert will blossom like a rose.

When people read in Matthew, Mark, Luke or the book of Revelation about the sun being turned to blood, the stars falling from heaven, the entire earth being shaken like a rag doll, the battle of Armageddon, and a second coming of Christ to usher in new heavens and new earth, they think it must mean what it says.  Well, Alice in Wonderland describes a fantastic world beneath the ground you and I walk on, but I don't see people tunnelling down rabbit holes.  And when we read George Orwell's Animal Farm, we don't believe that pigs once talked, do we?  Neither did the biblical authors believe that the sun would be turned to blood and the earth fall apart.  It was a poetic way of writing.

What did Jesus believe?  It was Sunday afternoon and a little boy who was bored kept interrupting his dad, who was trying to take a nap on the couch.  Finally the dad got out a newspaper and, finding a map of the world, cut it into pieces. "There, don't disturb me again till you've put that back together," he charged his son.

Twenty minutes later the lad was tugging at his arm. "You've done it already?" he snapped. "How can you have put all those countries back together so quickly?"

"It was easy daddy," the boy replied. "There was a picture of a man on the other side, and when I got him together, the world was together."

Jesus didn't look for a divine deliverer to straighten the world out.  He believed he was that deliverer--he and all who cared to join with him in changing things.  He realized that the new world people long for is a matter of seeing with new eyes.  When we face up to our insecurity and begin to believe in ourselves, our perspective alters so radically that it's as if the old oppressive order has collapsed and the world is at our feet.  The sky is brighter, the grass greener, the roses more beautiful, the trees more majestic.  There are new heavens and a new earth.

Because the literalists don't read the Bible literally enough, they don't notice that the New Testament writers evolved in their thinking.  Paul, who at first wrote apocalyptically, in his later writings stressed that the new heavens and new earth are spiritual.  John, who wrote a quarter century after the fall of Jerusalem, completely eliminated the apocalyptic passages of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

In the final analysis, for the writers of the New Testament the second coming is a resurrection in you and me of the sense that humanity is sacred, even divine.  For them, both the kingdom of God and the second coming of Christ are an internal, spiritual reality.  The discovery of our sacredness is the dawning of the kingdom.  No messiah is coming to save us.  As Jesus realized of himself and all who join with him in this mission, we are the messiah, and we will either save ourselves or perish.
Millions look for God to swoop down and save us.  But a literalized apocalypticism is killing us as we ignore problems we need to solve.  So I join Jacques Prevert in praying, "Our Father which art in heaven, Stay there.  And we will stay on earth, Which is sometimes so pretty."
But if we are to stay on earth and keep it pretty, we need a new health system.  The Clintons' vision was far too limited.  We need one not just for all Americans, but for the biosphere itself.  Planetary health is primary, human health is derivative.

The corporation must bow to cooperation.  Competiton must yield to doing collectively what's best for the planet and the myriad life-forms that derive their existence from it.

But how could that ever happen?  With our world of automobiles, shopping malls, factory farms, chemical plants, concrete jungles, eroded topsoil, poisoned land, air, and water, we have inserted ourselves so extensively into the functioning of the ecosystem that we don't know how to back out of it.  Our daily lives depend on it.

It could happen if, instead of buying into doom and gloom, telling ourselves you can't change human nature, politics will never be any different, and the world is doomed to self-destruct, we capture the dream of a new earth and sky that we must bring about.

If the emergence of life in all its brilliance in the Cenozoic was independent of our influence, it is we alone who can preserve it in what must become the Ecozoic.  No being in heaven or earth will do it for us.
Wallace Stevens wisely said, "God is in me or else is not at all." This was the message of Jesus.  If there is divinity in the cosmos, it's already here, in us.

The word apocalypse means opening or revealing.  It's to have our eyes opened.  Can we re-envision the world--and ourselves in our everyday work, play, and relationships--as sacred?  Can we capture Elizabeth Barrett Browning's vision: "Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God: but only those who see take off their shoes."
May our eyes be opened, so that we shed apocalyptic literalism and gain an apocalyptic vision of our world made new.