Doom-scrolling

'They asked him, "Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?'"

When occasionally asked to preach, I have always been disconcerted if asked whether I wanted to choose the lessons for the service. This is chiefly a selfish response: I know that I'd be tied in knots of indecision and second-guessing if I had to choose. I also have to admit to declining those offers as a rather self-satisfied way of asserting my high-Anglican opinion—forged from too many years spent studying seventeenth-century divines—that the church's lectionary is there for a reason and shouldn't be messed with. But my goodness, was my bluff called when I received our two lectionary-appointed readings today—a one-two punch of an Old Testament prophet's indignant confidence that a vengeful God will incinerate his chosen people's enemies, followed by the first half (yes, there's more) of Jesus' 'eschatalogical discourse', or (my preferred epithet, because it sounds nicer)), the 'little Apocalypse'—which distinguishes it from the book-length vision-version of St John the Divine, but is nothing less than our Lord's last word to his followers before his Passion, and found in all three of the synoptic Gospels. No pressure then—and perhaps no place for someone standing here who is not a theologian. But, with God's grace, needs must.

It may be just as well though, since the Apocalypse is trending at the moment. Taking just three examples from recent news (perhaps in descending order of seriousness): one of the world's richest men, very influential in Washington, has been attracting attention for unpublished, behind-closed-doors lectures on nothing less than how to delay the coming of the Antichrist: that figure or thing whose world-domination will, according to Revelation, precede the Apocalypse. Another wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur has recently launched an AI venture to realise his dream to 'improve the quality of life of every human on the planet and hasten the coming of Christ's return.' And then there is the Canadian, erstwhile a psychologist, now turned cultural and political commentator who, in addition to having a sideline in lecturing on the Old Testament and debating with atheists, has a distinctive taste (indeed even a brand) in men's suits, perhaps the most iconic being the 'Heaven and Hell suit', not only made in garish block-panels of blue and red, but with the blue ones in sheep's wool and the red in mohair—that is, a wearable assertion that at the Last Day, humanity will be divided by God's judgment between 'the sheep and the goats'.

Entertaining as those things are from what we might unwisely assume to be a safe distance, might we all not be feeling a bit 'apocalyptic' at the moment? anxiously seeking, and frantically interpreting, 'signs' of what it all means for where we're headed? Not for nothing is the obsessive scrolling on our phones, through what feels like endless bad news, called 'doom-scrolling', and those who draw from it deeply negative conclusions about the world's fate called 'doomers'. But even if one carefully curates one's social media and news feed, or is somehow still phone-free, surely it must feel at times that the times are out of joint: a pandemic, a collapse of faith in governments and of familiar party systems, two major wars, a genocide, overt racism of a kind not seen since the last century, the stigmatising, criminalising, and persecution of refugees, of immigrants, of sexual minorities—all just to pick from the major headlines of the past ten years. Add to that existential threats like those to creativity, learning, and teaching by the slapdash promulgation of artificial intelligence rather than the curation of natural, I might venture here God-given, intelligence; or the undeniable reality of destructive and life-threatening climate crisis, and, well, it's feeling very like our Gospel's 'wars and insurrections', 'famines' and 'plagues'. So we look for good news, those occasional bright spots that come along, but they hardly have time to register before they're swamped by the next churn of the news cycle and forgotten. And public institutions and public offices that we have looked to in the past as bulwarks against incivility, as bastions for decency, of peace, of learning, now seem not only sclerotic, but—much worse—complicit in the injustices and degradations they are meant to oppose. But considered altogether, what resonates most between the apocalyptic imagination of our readings and our world may be the sense of an unstoppable winding down; an entropy, an enervation, a decay that can't be resisted. We wonder what on earth we as individuals can do in the face of it. In what, in whom, to hope? What to believe? What to do?

Do our lessons today help? Prima facie, the compilers of the lectionary put these two together for obvious reasons, not least that both Malachi's prophecy and Christ's are written in the same literary genre, the apocalyptic, and share its most familiar features of predicted portents, judgement, and the promised end. Also prima facie, and for a long time customary, would be the easy conflation of the two readings, where we assume that in Christ's version there will be Malachi's harsh dualism of 'evildoers' who are burned to a crisp and 'the righteous' who get to rise on the sun's 'healing wings'. But I hope that those who contrived this pairing for us today did so for exactly the opposite reason: so that we will notice that in Luke, although there are persecutors of the righteous, and though the righteous receive assurance ('not a hair of your head will perish'), neither the righteous nor their God pray for, promise, threaten, or prophesy the destruction of those who persecute them. This should strike us as eerily strange. In times of persecution, nothing is more natural to human nature than to hit back; to gather ourselves together, and define and defend our identity by lashing out, even killing the threatening other, even in the name of 'peace', and certainly for profit. But Christ's 'little Apocalypse' tells those listening to him in the Temple, just as his words tell us now, that that old human order would be turned on its head, turned outside in: His innocence in death, His absorption of the wounds of death itself into a Body risen and ascended to the right hand of God, His capacity through love divine to forgive His own murderers and beyond even that, to love them, to freely and unconditionally love them, is itself both the Judgement against and the release from humanity's closed-circuit of defining and protecting ourselves through the stigmatising, even killing, of any deplored other that we flatter ourselves by calling an enemy.

And Christ here teaches those early listeners, and for millennia after continues to call the Church, to what life should be like under that new dispensation, a new dispensation that would commence not at the end of time, not at the coming of an Anti-christ, not as a curtain raiser immediately preceding his coming in glory. It started on the morning of the Resurrection, and began in earnest for the church when the Apostles gazed up as the innocent victim ascended to the right hand of the Father, leaving them and us, to unlearn the old ways of living as we grope toward the new. And notice that it is not a rosy picture: being persecuted, being afraid, being misunderstood, feeling helpless, not being able (indeed being told not even to prepare) to defend ourselves. All of those things speak to how we might feel now as we doom-scroll, and they also invite how we might be inclined to respond: to attack persecutors, to frantically defend ourselves, to assert our worth against those we think are inferior. But is that what Christ here says we should do? Not a bit of it. We are to tell another story, a story that, in the words of the theologian James Alison, rejects 'the tired story of the violence of the world.' It is so easy in Apocalyptic writing, as it is in an Apocalyptic frame of mind, to focus on the violent 'signs': the 'signs in the sun, the moon, the stars', the shaking heavens, the hatred, the persecutions. But that is to miss the point of how those traditional ingredients of Apocalypticism are being deployed by Christ to say something new: ignore them. They're the signs not of heaven but of the violent world and have nothing to do with what we should be paying attention to. And that is, in Christ's words in our lesson, to receive from him the 'wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict'. And that is the wisdom of innocence, the wisdom of resisting and rejecting exploitation, violence, and scapegoating. Which is, in turn, a wisdom to know that the only way to calm our troubled minds is to do those things which are the surest, because the most selfless, refutation of the signs that most dismay us. We heard them just a fortnight ago inimitably summarised in Luke's very grown-up version of the Beatitudes: 

'Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.'

As the assistant curate said here in her sermon on that text, 'We are to be pains in the backside'. Or, as Christ says in our text today for the same reason, 'You will be hated by all because of my name', but also—'By your endurance you will gain your souls.' 'Endurance'. It's a quality that never quite made the traditional lists of theological virtues, perhaps because it sits just uncomfortably short of 'hope', and in a challenging way hints that hope can be cheapened by its abstraction into something flimsy and dangerously disengaged from now, and from doing. Difficult times require something more, something more directly engaged with what we face. So, heads down, Christ says. Endure. Ignore the distracting signs of division and hatred and scapegoating and the false sacreds of both self-justification and of self-pity. Instead: Feed the hungry. Clothe the poor. Minister to the sick. Visit the dying. Embrace the dispossessed. That is to have our eyes trained not on the distractions of this violent, always-Apocalyptic world but on its victims ('whatever you did for one of the least of these . . . you did for me') and on the One Innocent Victim who by carrying our brokenness and the very scars of death itself to glory at the right hand of God will fully gather us to Himself. 'Beloved', writes St John in his first epistle, 'we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.' 

And with that, in the very last stages of a different kind of time—our liturgical year—impatient to trace again the steps of our Lord's life that show us how to endure, may we say, 'Oh come quickly. Come, Lord, come.' Amen.