The Bible and the End of of Times
by Rev. Colin Bossen, June 16, 2010
This sermon marks the last in our year long series on the Bible. Over the last ten months we have explored such topics as: "How Religious Liberals Read the Bible," "How Fundamentalists Read the Bible," "Homosexuality and the Bible" and "The Pagan Origins of the Bible." Our series on the Bible has been meant to roughly put us in sync with what the children and youth study in their religious education classes. This year they have been focused on stories from the Bible; next they will learn about world religions. In September we will begin a parallel exploration and I will offer a series of ten sermons inspired by the non-Western religions of the world. Today, at the end of our Bible series, I want to focus on the last book of the Christian New Testament, The Revelation to John.
Revelation might be the strangest book in the Bible. It almost forms its own genre. It is not a mythological or historical narrative like Genesis, Exodus or Kings. It is not a pastoral letter like Galatians or Timothy. It is not a Gospel. It is not a series of liturgical texts like Psalms. It is an apocalypse.
The biblical scholar Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza defines an apocalypse as a text that "speaks about the past, present, and future in mythological language and images." In "apocalyptic literature," she continues, "world empires have become beasts, nations are symbolized by birds, and serpents start to speak."
Revelation is the only text in the Bible that is entirely apocalyptic. A few other texts, such as the last half of Daniel, are apocalyptic in part. All of the biblical apocalyptic texts share a variety of characteristics. They contain dream visions of future righteousness, angels and improbable beasts. They proclaim God's sovereignty. They predict the collapse of Earthly empires. Most importantly they are the products of communities in crisis.
Daniel was probably written during the period known as the Babylonian exile when the Jewish leadership was living in exile in Babylon. The kingdoms of Judah and Israel had both been crushed and the last Davidic king slain. Many Jews longed for the fall of the Babylonian Empire and the restoration of a Jewish state. They looked for signs of God's sovereignty over the Earth and earthly rulers. Daniel is replete with such signs. In narrative after narrative Daniel and his companions survive the torments of the Babylonian courts and predict God's triumph over the Emperor.
Revelation was mostly likely written in the closing years of the first century. It was a time when the early Christians suffered from severe persecution. The state religion required the worship of the Roman Emperor; most Christians refused. As a result they faced brutal torture and martyrdom. The Emperor Nero, for example, is alleged to have lined the road to Rome with 4,000 burning crosses. On each cross was placed a Christian. Other Emperors and some provincial governors were reputed to have been equally cruel--though on a smaller scale--and being a Christian meant facing the possibility of being fed to wild beasts, decapitated or tortured to death in public.
Many early Christians believed that Jesus would return to Earth in the near future to bring about divine justice, topple the Roman Empire and establish the kingdom of God on Earth. Revelation is a vision of what such a return might look like. It is bound up in rich, and widely interpreted, symbols that draw upon motifs from the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament, the cult of the Roman Emperor and ancient Middle Eastern paganism.
Understanding exactly what a given symbol refers to in the text can be maddening. There are monsters, apocalyptic horsemen, serpents and angels. Everything contains the quality of a vivid polychromatic hallucination. Strange beasts have eyes both inside and out. A seven horned sacrificial lamb comes back to life. A red dragon pursues a pregnant woman in an attempt to devour her unborn child. Gruesome horsemen roam the Earth bringing plague, death and war. Interpreting all of this has left scholars scrambling for generations.
Fortunately, a cursory understanding of Revelation does not require deciphering the myriad of symbols within the text. Instead what is crucial is realizing that at its core Revelation seeks to answer three religious questions. The first question is: Who or what rules the world? The text's answer is God.
This first question leads immediately to the second: If God rules the world why does evil exist? The answer Revelation provides to this question is complicated. Borrowing from Mesopotamian and Babylonian mythology, Revelation describes a primordial battle between the angels of God and a great dragon and his legions of angels. Before time began, the angels of God won the battle and cast the great dragon, otherwise known as Satan, down onto the earth. There the text says he "led the whole world astray." Evil exists, in other words, because of Satan's presence among us.
The third question of Revelation can be stated two ways: Will justice prevail over evil? Or will God prevail over the evil Satan has brought to earth? Revelation answers this question by predicting that God will defeat Satan on earth just as God defeated Satan in heaven. Revelation is a vision of that defeat.
In sum, Revelation seeks to explain why evil exists and how evil can be eradicated. The problem with the explanation found in Revelation is that it offers little place for human actors. Christians are to experience justice not because they have worked hard to create a just world but because they are saved through Christ. The responsibility for, as the Hebrew prophets would say, binding up the broken and strengthening the sick does not lie with either the individual or the community. It lies with God. God alone who can bring justice to the world. Humans cannot fight Satan and win, only God can.
The comfort of a such theology is that it assures members of an oppressed community--be they Jews in exile or early Christians in the midst of persecution--that God will ultimately be victorious over their oppressor. The problem of a such a theology is that it provides no call to action in the face of oppression beyond a faith in God. There may have been some historical situations where such a theology was appropriate. Today it is wholly obsolete.
Our contemporary world is in crisis. The time is ripe for apocalyptic visions. The United States is embroiled in two wars--one now the longest in its history. The economy is either slowly recovering from a recession or on the verge of stagnation and further decline. Many people in this congregation, in Cleveland and across the country are out of work, underemployed, in danger of losing their jobs or saddled with onerous housing, credit card and health care debt. The planet is warming; its ecosystem is strained, threatened and ill treated.
When I studied physics my professors used to encourage us to conduct Gedankenexperiments--or thought experiments. Thought experiments are experiments where you apply a principle of physics to a situation and imagine the outcome. Thought experiments are often used when it is impossible to conduct an actual experiment.
I want to try one briefly. Let us imagine the theology of Revelation applied to a real life contemporary situation--the Gulf oil spill. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up more than fifty days ago. Since then oil has flowed into the Gulf at a remarkable rate. The oil spill is both an ecological and economic catastrophe. It threatens marine and costal life throughout the Gulf states. The region will not recover from the spill for decades.
According the theology of Revelation the cause of the oil spill is Satan's influence on humanity. The gross negligence and greed that led to the spill are a result of the weakness of the human heart under Satan's sway. This is not an entirely improbable scenario. Setting metaphysical considerations aside, it is not hard to argue that Satan is responsible for focusing the corporate hierarchy of British Petroleum on little more than profit. Such an argument is not all that different from saying that their negligence came from loving money more than people or the planet.
Where the theology of Revelation utterly fails is in offering solutions to the oil spill. Instead of acting to staunch it Revelation would have us wait until God sealed the oil well. Justice and the defeat of Satan is God's, not humanity's, and it is God that will ultimately fix the ills of the world.
There are some Christians who see in events like the oil spill signs that God is coming to bring justice to the earth. Revelation suggests that much of the planet to be cleared of human life by violence, disease and natural disaster before the advent of the new millennium. When calamity strikes on any sort of scale there are inevitably people who claim it heralds God's new earth. So far the proclamations of such false prophets have always been wrong. I suspect that they always will be.
The theology of Revelation is an instance that clearly shows the Bible to be the product of communities that are in some ways profoundly different from our own. While there is much to be found in the Bible, there are segments of the text that it is simply irresponsible to pretend are relevant to contemporary life. The apocalyptic texts are some of them. In the 21st century humanity has achieved the power to profoundly alter the Earth's ecosystem. We can end life as we know it with nuclear weapons. We can obliterate whole ecosystems with bulldozers, chainsaws and the construction of mini-malls. We can, through our ravenous appetite for fossil fuels, change the average temperature of the planet.
In apocalyptic literature God brings about the end of time through acts of divine justice. God is one who binds up the broken and strengthens the sick. God has all the power and humans are merely minor actors on the cosmic stage, destined for bit parts as God and Satan wage their celestial war.
In reality humans have enormous collective power over the fate of our species and our planet. We are the ones who can, and quite possibly are, destroy the planet's ecosystem and bring about a real end of times. As the old Pogo cartoon reads, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Recognizing this, let's conduct another thought experiment. This time let's apply the principle that humanity is ultimately responsible for its' actions to the Gulf oil spill. We will begin by considering who is responsible for the spill.
Deep water oil drilling takes place because the industrialized economies of the world are built upon a foundation of fossil fuels. In the United States the vast majority of our energy needs are met by burning oil, coal and natural gas. These are not renewable resources. They exist only in a limited supply. Energy companies go to great lengths to find new caches of fossil fuels, particularly oil and natural gas. The financial rewards for doing so are great. In our economy energy is essential. So long as we continue to use fossil fuels energy companies will make great profits extracting, refining and distributing them.
We Americans have a particular fondness for cheap and plentiful fossil fuels. Our cities are low density. We invest in infrastructure that promotes the use of cars and the burning of fossil fuels rather than in infrastructure that encourages the development of mass transit, walking neighborhoods and alternative energy sources.
Until we as a society are willing to commit ourselves to a new lifestyle there will always be a motivation, and a need, for oil companies to engage in deep water drilling. So on some very real level we are all of us responsible for the Gulf tragedy. We are responsible because we have not demanded and sought to create a new energy economy. We are responsible because we have made lifestyle choices that increase our society's dependence on fossil fuels.
The responsibility for the Gulf oil spill does not solely lie with the public. It lies with the corporate hierarchy of British Petroleum and the government agencies that failed to regulate it. While our society's addiction to fossil fuels may be the general reason for the oil spill loose regulation and corporate greed are the particular reasons. Two recent pieces by investigative journalists detail exactly how loose regulation and corporate greed caused the oil spill.
The first, appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. It details how the Minerals Management Service, the government body charged with regulating the oil industry, allowed British Petroleum to sidestep safety standards and environmental statues. BP was allowed to file sloppy paperwork, some of which had obviously been falsified. It facilities received only cursory inspections. In one glaring example, the Oil Spill Response Plan that BP developed for the Gulf of Mexico, the paperwork submitted did not even match the region of the world that it was supposed to pertain to. In the semitropical Gulf BP anticipated having to protect walruses, and other cold-water mammals. Even more shockingly BP listed among the "primary equipment providers" for "rapid deployment of spill response resources" the web site of a Japanese home-shopping network.
The second article, published in the Washington Post and on the public interest journalism web site Propublica, details how BP's culture of cost cutting led to the spill. Lacking sufficient government oversight BP was able to "systematically... [ignore] its own safety policies." A practice called "run to failure" was developed which encouraged aging equipment to be used as long as possible. This led to accidents, including a 200,000 gallon oil spill in 2006.
Additionally, BP harassed any of its own safety inspectors who found problems with equipment or procedures. In one instance the technician Stuart Sneed was fired after he ordered work to stop on a site when he discovered a two foot long crack in an oil pipe. Sneed's supervisor called the crack superficial, without inspecting himself, and ordered work to resume. Sneed protested and two weeks later he was fired on what he claims was a trumped up safety infraction.
Finally, BP's habit of cost cutting has meant that adequate safety equipment has not been installed in many of its oil rigs. It is estimated that for a mere $5 million BP could have installed the type of equipment and followed the requisite drilling procedures that would have prevented the Gulf oil spill.
Assigning responsibility to humanity for the oil spill allows us to then explore how to stop similar events from occurring in the future. Stating that the corporate greed, an addiction to an unsustainable lifestyle and government negligence are behind the problem may not be all that different than claiming that the oil spill resulted from Satan's influence over humanity--the Devil might behind all of those things. However, understanding which human actions have resulted in the oil spill offers us as a society the opportunity to prevent those actions from being repeated. We as species can learn and adapt. If we do not we will surely perish.
Believing that humanity is ultimately responsible for its actions leads us to a radically different place than hoping that God will arrive with divine justice in hand. Instead of waiting for the apocalypse we can begin to act in such ways to avoid future oil spills. In the near term this means demanding that our government provide regulation and oversight to the oil industry and calling for an end to oil industry practices, like deep water drilling, that are currently unsafe. In the long term this means committing to fundamental changes in our lifestyle--a shift away from an unsustainable car culture and low density communities and towards a new energy economy that utilizes renewable and safe energy resources.
Following this thought experiment to its logical conclusion it is our responsibility, not God's, to build, as Revelation would have it, "a new heaven and new earth." No else is going to do it for us. Let us, therefore, take the words of our closing hymn to heart and pledge to "build a land where we bind up the broken...[where we raise] up devastations from old; [restore] the ruins of generations...a land of people so bold."
May it be so,
Blessed Be
and Amen.