Proper 28B (
Daniel 12:1-4
Pr. George L. Murphy
St. Paul’s Episcopal
Church, Akron OH
ARE WE THERE YET?
“Are we there yet?” It’s a familiar question that we ask – or used to ask- from the back seat of the car. We were told that we were going to Cedar Point, or to our grandparents’ house, or some other desirable destination, but it seems very far away. The trip is long and we’re getting tired and cranky. Are we still on the way? Where’s the reward we were promised? Aren’t we there yet?
It isn’t just a question that children ask. We are impatient people, and promises aren’t enough to keep us going through tough times. When will things get better? How many days till vacation? Till retirement? Till what we pray for when we say “Thy kingdom come” has arrived?
The Book of
Daniel, which our First Lesson is taken from, was written about a hundred and
seventy years before Christ, during very dangerous times for the Jewish
people. The Syrian King Antiochus, who
ruled part of the old empire of Alexander the Great, was trying to force all
the people of his domains to adopt Greek customs. Jews who resisted were being persecuted and
killed. A pagan altar – the “abomination of desolation” - had been
erected in the
The purpose
of the Book of Daniel was to encourage God’s people to remain faithful with the
promise that God would sustain them through this time. That’s the point of familiar stories like the
three young men who survived being thrown into a blazing furnace because they
wouldn’t worship an idol, and Daniel in the lions’
den. Today we’re near the end of the
book. We’re told that the tribulation will come to an end, that evil will be defeated
and that our hopes for the
There is a promise of the resurrection of the dead, the clearest statement of that idea in the Old Testament. “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” And there will be a final judgment. Finally, for all the universe to see and beyond any debate, love and faithfulness and mercy will be shown to be right and hatred, exploitation and torture wrong. God’s justice will be vindicated.
Those promises of God give hope to a people who are threatened with death. And Daniel naturally wonders, and we wonder, “When?” But Daniel is told to seal up the book. That’s all you get now. No schedule, no date. You and your people will have to let promise and hope suffice.
The writer of the Book of Daniel wasn’t content to leave it at that though. A few verses after our reading he tries to predict how long they’d have to wait. It will be “a time, two times, and half a time” – three and a half years we’re told at first. But a few verses later it’s a bit longer. And then longer still. We get the impression that the guesses weren’t working out and had to be revised.
Soon the
Jews did recover the
But I would be preaching to the wrong people if I went on to criticize those attempts to predict the end of history and the coming of God’s kingdom. Most of us here have gone in the other direction because we don’t want to be embarrassed like those people who are always predicting the end of the world. Episcopalians are too cool to do anything like that!. We’re too sophisticated to keep asking “Are we there yet?”
Is that perhaps because we’re not really sure that there’s any “there” to get to?
Have we gotten so used to the present state of the world that we can’t hope for anything really new? Our problem isn’t that we can’t wait to have what we hope for, like children looking forward to Christmas, but that it’s hard for us to hope at all anymore. We can pray “Thy kingdom come” because we’ve said it so often that it’s automatic. But hope that God’s kingdom really and truly will come – that’s a stretch.
Those who think that they can predict when God’s kingdom will come and those who think that things have to keep on pretty much as they have been both make the same assumption: The future will develop out of the past and be more of the same. What has already happened bears the seeds of what will be. If that’s the case then the future will be like the past and maybe we can figure out what’s going to happen and when.
But if God is true to the promise of resurrection, if “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake,” then we’re not limited to just the same old thing.
The resurrection of the dead at the end of history will be genuinely new – because in the world as we know it, the dead stay dead.
Except for Jesus. If the fundamental Christian claim is true, “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,” then something radically new has happened. The ultimate future of creation, the day of resurrection, has broken into the middle of our world. The one who says “See, I am making all things new” has come to us from the future.
When we look around us at a world plagued by war, terrorism, immorality and social, economic and environmental strife, there seems to be little to hope for. But before we look at the world, we are called to look to Christ and see in his life and his words, his death and resurrection, God’s final future. Jesus’ unlimited faith and obedience to God the Father, his unlimited love for others and his opposition to everything that damages God’s creation, give us a kind of preview – theologians call it “prolepsis” – of what creation ultimately will be. And it will be because Christ is risen.
Then, when we’ve realized that, we are to turn to the world. And our task as the church is really quite simple: To proclaim to the world what its future is by pointing to Jesus Christ, and to represent him faithfully in word and deed.
It’s natural for us, during the long courses of our lives and the longer stretches of history, to ask occasionally “Are we there yet?” As Christians we know what “there” is – the kind of life we see in Christ. And because he is risen, we know that our hope will not be disappointed.