[Propertalk] Quotes for Luke 21:25-36 for 1 Advent - Part 5

[Joe Parrish]

Although we Christians may have pensioned off apocalyptic rhetoric, social scientists, AIDs researchers and a swarm of journalists and commentators are employing it. They warn us that as the collapse of the earth's ecosystems accelerates, our overstressed social structures will begin to pop like rivets on the doomed Titanic. Consider the disintegration of nation-states, the irreparable degradation of the environment and the reversion to tribal savagery. We are sinking into an abyss.

In fact, there are many places where biblically shaped imagination can already discern the end of our world: precious rain forests, the size of entire countries, gone forever in a few days; 50,000 bodies, many headless and limbless, float into Lake Victoria as Christians kill Christians in Rwanda; suburban kids in Reeboks and t-shirts methodically heat a teenager to death on the steps of St. Cecilia's Church in Abingdon, Pennsylvania (dead at 16 on the steps of the church where he had been an altar boy).

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n32_v114/ai_20016441/

James F. Kay, 1997
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"There will always be a tomorrow," some must have begun to say. "After all, there have been about 29,000 tomorrows since Jesus told us that he would return for us." The once-taut church relaxed, settling down into the everydayness of things.
But to live as if there will always be a tomorrow is to live like a fool. One of the best-selling religious books of all time is a rather shoddy piece of rehashed millennialism called The late, Great Planet Earth. Fifty million people paid good money to read Hal Lindsey's view of the end. It is not only people like Lindsey or Jerry Falwell or James Watt who think about the end. With the ecological crisis, the threat of nuclear war, and international monetary problems, everyone is thinking in apocalyptic terms -- except the liberal, contented church, which long ago made its peace with the present and trusted in tomorrow.
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When I was serving a little church in rural Georgia, one of my members' relatives died, and my wife and I went to the funeral as a show of support for the family. It was held in a small, hot, crowded, independent Baptist country church. They wheeled the coffin in and the preacher began to preach. He shouted, fumed, flailed his arms.
"It's too late for Joe," he screamed. "He might have wanted to do this or that in life, but it's too late for him now. He's dead. It's all over for him. He might have wanted to straighten his life out, but he can't now. It's over."

What a comfort this must be to the family, I thought. "But it ain't too late for you! People drop dead every day. So why wait? Now is the day for decision. Now is the time to make your life count for something. Give your life to Jesus!"

It was the worst thing I had ever heard. "Can you imagine a preacher doing that kind of thing to a grieving family?" I asked my wife on the way home. "I've never heard anything so manipulative, cheap and inappropriate. I would never preach a sermon like that."

She agreed with me that it was tacky, manipulative, callous. "Of course," she added, "the worst part of all is that it was true."

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1079

William Willimon, 1986
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...apocalypse. The word means "unveiling" -- specifically, the unveiling of things to come. 
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Apocalyptic has a foreshortened sense of time. It anticipates a final war between the powers of Good and Evil. 
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As the philosopher Gunther Anders put it, we move into an apocalyptic mode when we no longer find ourselves asking "How shall we live?" and ask instead, "Will we live?" The normal eschatological situation, which gives life urgency by facing us with the inevitability of our own death, the hunger for meaning, and the fear of suffering and loss, becomes apocalyptic when it appears that there is no longer time for normal urgency. Time collapses. The Time of the End becomes the End of Time... Anders wrote in the midst of the nuclear terror in 1962....the miracle we got came about because people like the physician Helen Caldicott refused to accept nuclear annihilation. But she did it by forcing her hearers to visualize the consequences of their inaction.
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If we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction, as scientists tell us we are, our response has in no way been commensurate with the danger. We Homo sapiens are witnessing the greatest annihilation of species in the last 65 million years, and our children may live to witness ecocide with their own eyes. 
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Eschatology is a line stretching out to the distant, possibly infinite, future. That is the horizon of hope, possibility and becoming. Apocalyptic, on the other hand, is a detour, caused by an immediate crisis threatening whole societies. Negative apocalyptic paralyzes us into inaction; positive apocalyptic challenges us to transcend ourselves, opening to the unexpected possibilities thrust upon us. Usually, when the crisis passes, normal eschatology is reinstated. But in our day, the apocalyptic crisis may not pass.

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2208

Walter Wink, 2001
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