Daniel 12:1-3
Psalm 16:5-11
Hebrews 10:11-18
Mark 13:24-32

Like the Stars Forever

Our readings this morning invite us to contemplate the very serious subject of the End of the Age. In pop culture today this is linked to images of chaos as "the elect" are plucked from their cars directly into Heaven leaving their careening vehicles to wreak havoc upon the earth and others standing by. A powerful us-versus-them scenario dominates. But where does this focus and emphasis come from? And who are the elect? The scenes depicted in "Left Behind" books or in movies concerning "The Rapture" seem, in fact, out of focus when they are set beside the parable of the Prodigal Son or of the One Lost Lamb or of the Son of God Who came to save sinners.

Without question, the End of the Age is a subject that echoes through all of Sacred Scripture, a golden thread that appears in Genesis and is seen running all the way to Revelation. The Eschatological level — interpretation of Scripture through the lens of Judgment — is a primary meaning of the Bible, part of the Bible's four-fold interpretation, received by Christians at least as far back as Origen at the turn of the second century.

Our own experience instructs us in the End Times, for the moment each creature is created, it begins a journey toward its end, which we call death. An essential tension appears, therefore, between dying matter and humans, who are created never-to-die, and who are born with intimations of Heaven. From "Teen Angel" in pop music to "Touched by an Angel" on television to endless varieties of spiritual seeking in every country in every age, all people are propelled forward each day as living souls who irretrievably are spiritual beings and therefore seekers .... yet who are placed in a material world.

God's name is I AM WHO I AM (Exodus 3:14) — in the Vulgate sum qui sum, the verb to be, the infinitive, absolute being, equated to the verb to be by means of its own relative pronoun: an enclosed, perfect circle of being, pure Being. For God is not a creature, and His children, created in His deathless Image, are mortal yet divine. All matter in the universe may pass away, but God and God's children pass through a dying world in a process of divine eternity.

Yes, not all of God's children will remain with Him in His Heaven eternally. In a perverse rebelliousness, many will separate themselves from God and stubbornly remain so. Yet are they deathless, too, and will live forever, permanently separated from God — a state known as Hell.

The "End Times," signify a threshold for the entire universe, when the material Creation passes away. Each one of us, within the personal scope of his or her life, will experience this threshold "in small" upon departure from this world. For each, there will be an End Time, when the material body will drop away from the spiritual. At this moment, God's plan is that our individual beauty, reflecting His Image, will be freed from dying matter as surely as the human person is a divine soul lashed to a dying dog (to paraphrase W. B. Yeats).

As our material bodies drop away and disintegrate freeing our eternal, spiritual selves (though we remain bodily substantial through eternity), the ever-present tension between the deathless and the dying, between the spiritual and the material, comes to a burning point. For no point in one's lifetime is of greater moment than this threshold. So anxious and agitating can this subject become in a life separated from God, Who is our only Father and home, that the untethered and undisciplined imagination cries out — from depictions of the walking dead in Gothic novels to lurid images in horror movies, which have been since books and film have existed. Matter versus spirit, spirit versus matter .... here is the essence and master subject of humanity on earth.

Centuries ago, this tension reached a new burning point with the advance of technology in optics giving rise to the telescope and microscope. Closer and systematic inspection of the material world developed into a revolution, called empiricism, which would become a basic and pivotal turning away from the spiritual, and specifically Christian, view of reality in the West and toward the material as the way to explain all creatures and phenomena.

The invention of the Western printing press, coming about in roughly the same era, meant that findings from all these empirical investigations could be shared worldwide. Organizations such as the Royal Society were formed to encourage and regulate this international commerce of knowledge and science. With the discovery of the New World, empirical activity exploded with new species being collected and recorded every day. The President of the United States, that Master Empiricist, Thomas Jefferson, saw the Lewis and Clark Expedition not so much as a surveying activity but as a data collection enterprise. An across-the-board, consensus decision among the universities of Europe (formerly centers of religious learning) caused them literally to burn down their whole past in the form of books and to join the new movement of cataloging the world in terms of its material composition in countless varieties and dimensions. On the land! Under the sea! Up in the sky! In the palm of your hand .... microbes!

Much later, psychology — meaning literally the study of the soul — would be proposed as the new religion in a quest to explain spirituality in terms of materialism. Advances in neural imaging has only propelled this instinct even further. Some influential figures have advocated the end of psychology as a clinical discipline emphasizing the promise of an empirical approach to the subject. Recently, the "God spot" portion of the brain has been proposed as the empirical explanation of God. Stimulate this part of the brain, and you have a spiritual experience.

May I pause to relate a conversation I had with a scientist who had come to Haiti to volunteer? He confidently dismissed all religion as being nothing more than stimulation of brain tissue. I asked him, "Have you heard of the 'Apple Pie Spot' in the brain? Stimulate it, and you smell apple pie, you taste apple pie, but, doctor, this does not constitute a proof that there is no apple pie." But back to our story.

Occurring in lockstep with this revolution of ideas was a revolution in religion. Being dominated by the intellectuals of the time, who were empiricists, much of the ancient religion was rejected. These men rejected the supernatural and miraculous. They rejected the sacraments. They rejected the Real Presence of the Lord Jesus Christ in the consecrated elements of bread and wine. They rejected the Church that the Lord Jesus founded upon the Apostles (and their descendants the bishops). Priests would no longer be necessary in their modern and new religion. Replacing these things would be scholarship — direct inspection of the Sacred Scriptures under a protocol where each person was his or her own investigator following the pattern of empiricism. Thus, each reader of Scripture would be his or her own theologian, and worship would become little more than singing songs and then rising to the high point of .... hearing a scholarly paper. The man standing on the stage (there would be no Altar) would be standing before the pews in a academic gown, sometimes with three stripes on the sleeve, and he would offer a paper, which would be called a sermon (whose Latin meaning is words).

As rejection was the primary mode for these religious revolutionaries, their new religion became known as Protestantism, signifying an ongoing protest against the religion of the past. The word suggests the passive periphrastic in Latin — that one must be in a state of protest, constantly protest.

In concert with these changes, yet another revolution was taking place, an economic revolution. As materialism, empiricism, and the industrial revolution (which these gave rise to) expanded, expanding with it was something the world had never known: a middle class. Suddenly, the old pattern of nobles and peasants had new company: wealthy and highly independent industrialists, merchants, and traders. For these new men, money and its influence in society became a new basis for ordering the world. For these powerful families, materialism, industry, monetary wealth, and its decisive influence were the world. They would found the universities and colleges. They would build the grand churches, hiring and firing the clergy. They would inform and decide policy in government and foreign relations.

Topping all, they would live in an American nation that had been founded by empiricists, members of the Royal Society, who subscribed to the religion of Deism, a subspecies of Anglicanism, which dominated Anglican intellectuals of the period (with scarcely any Catholics from the Western Church or Eastern Church to be seen anywhere). Men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin understood the world through the lens of materialism. They saw the Creation as an intricate machine whose working parts eventually would all be catalogued and well understood. And the One Who made that machine? He was now distant by their estimate, departed from the scene long ago. When you see paintings of George Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge, please understand that the actual George Washington did not believe in a God Who heard your prayers.

Among the Protestants a slightly different materialism emerged. Christian believers began collecting data from their own persons to adduce material evidence of their salvation. To borrow the words of John Wesley, "I felt my heart strangely warmed." And like good empiricists they brought these findings forward and shared them, even published them, as material proof of their faith and eternal bond with God, that they were among the elect. Even to the present day, Christians of this tradition ask one another, "When were you saved?" meaning "When did your strange warmth occur?" In like measure, these same empiricist-Christians, referring always back to their Scriptural investigations, continued to reject the Mysteries of the Church out of hand, asking for data, demanding that these findings be empirically defined. They would weigh the body before and after death to verify the existence of the soul. An Anglo-Protestant bishop in England ordered the consecrated Gifts of the Altar to be examined under a microscope and tested chemically to verify whether they were the Body and Blood of Christ.

Of course, all persons and all things in this unfolding and prismatic story were, and continue to be, headed toward an End Time — each life, each Christian congregation, and all history ... headed for an End Time. And the world these people believed in all along, which shaped their beliefs and their values, and which would determine their expectations .... this world had been dominated by materialism. And the material world, as everyone knows, is finite. Natural resources are finite. Commodities are finite. And the money supply, into which all things are translated for the sake of commerce, that is finite too. Each dollar I have is a dollar that you cannot have. Economists call this a zero-sum game. There are only so many dollars in the great pot. If you take one, that is one that no one else can have. And we must admit its cruel corollary: for every wealthy person, there must be a poor one.

Think of practical examples (for these are things we don't like to think about): not everyone who wishes to dine at a certain restaurant on a certain evening will be seated. Reservations are limited to the number of chairs and tables. The food is ordered according to that number. Not everyone who wishes to see a famous musician perform at a one-night-only concert will be admitted into the hall. There are only so many seats. Our world of materialism and commercialism and competition, together with the religion that arose from it, Protestantism, demands a loser for every winner. This is why one of the founders and cornerstone theologians of Protestantism, Jean Calvin, set out a master theology of election and its follow-on, double predestination: a finite number of people are born into the world elected to Heaven; everyone else is elected to Hell. That is just he way it is. There is nothing anyone can do about it. It is in this light that we are able to understand the Protestant phenomenon of The Rapture and various "Left Behind" books and movies that have dominated our culture for more than a generation now.

To the ancient Catholic faith, these ideas are foreign and distant. And, of course, the Eastern Church was never influenced by developments in the West. It did not go through the revolution of Protestantism with its reshaping of religion in the image of the empiricist and commercial world. One thousand years ago an enormous splinter group, the Roman Catholic Church, broke off from the ancient Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, and immediately proposed radical, new theologies. Five hundred years later another enormous splinter broke off from the Roman Catholics, the Protestants, emptying Roman Catholic churches of perhaps half their members.

But in the ancient Church, we find preserved for us a way of life and a theology of the Apostles and Fathers that has not been disrupted .... or corrupted. Let us then consider the several revolutions described this morning in a different light. May I discuss things so basic that we never think about them? For example, there is gravity which holds our whole world together. I might have stepped into this room and said "What a splendid gravity we have here today! Sr. Maryann is seated nicely in her chair. Things are not floating around us. The refrigerator contents are being contained wonderfully." These are things so near to the bone of reality that we don't say so. But please let me talk about the most basic things. Here is another "most basic" truth:

• The word materialism derives from the word matter.
• The definition of matter is something that has mass.
• The definition of mass is that it is a quantity of matter.

Meantime, the ancient Church has preserved the Mysteries and theologies that constitute the other principal way of interpreting all data in the world. I do not mean Christian Fundamentalism, but rather the opposite: the premise proposed by the earliest Church Fathers that historical or literal facts and truths must be reverenced and that

We do well to say that the eschatalogical meaning of history — every life and all time leading up to a Final Judgment — is part of the spiritual interpretation.

As I have said, the ancient Church was not shaped by the empiricist revolution, the scientific revolution, the social revolution signified by a middle class, the Protestant revolution, and therefore not by materialism as had occurred in the West. Indeed, to take one example, the largest group in the Eastern Church are the Russian Orthodox, who have steadfastly preserved their values and faith and theology apart from the world-shaking economic and social revolutions and upheavals that played out in their homeland. But the Russian Orthodox Church chose not to be part of that, preferring to live a wilderness existence of exile and persecution, which is why there is a Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and an Orthodox Church in America in this country.

The ancient Orthodox Catholic Church, and all Christians who are grounded in the Undivided Church of the first thousand years, have a very different view of the End of the Age. They do not focus upon an us-versus-them scenario. They reject The Rapture and the Left Behind. There is no zero-sum-game understanding so common among many Protestants, including Evangelicals. All attention is focused on the greatest of human truths:

We realize that there are many who have separated, and will separate, themselves from this loving Father and remain stubbornly separated, like the unrepentant thief. We know that while God patiently awaits their return, they will not appear at the bend in that road. And we weep for them and for this needless and willful tragedy. But they were not destined or elected to this choice. Election is a free choice made by each and every person.

Heaven is not subject to materialism. Heaven, in fact, marks the end of all materialisms (though our resurrected bodies mysteriously will be substantial). Heaven will not "run out of real estate." Heaven will not run out of blessing, for that money supply is infinite. And Heaven will not run short of love (as the wealthy are pitted against the poor on earth). For our God is love, and He is spirit. So you see, Origen was right: the spiritual meaning is primary. And that loving God's intention is that each of His beloved children be "like the stars for ever and ever." Do you remember this phrase from Genesis 26:4:

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.