Facing the Future

This time of year, it starts feeling that it’s all downhill until Christmas. We’ve had half-term, we’ve had Halloween, we’ve had Bonfire Night, we’ve had Remembrance Day. Next stop, Christmas!

Of course, for us Christians that isn’t strictly true, as we have Advent first, and the church is already in the countdown to Advent, which is why our readings today are about the future.

Isaiah is optimistic. He is looking far, far ahead to a time when people will routinely live to be well over a hundred, when there will be no more famine, no more war, no more weeping and wailing. People will not have to slave for others, but will work for themselves and live happy and contented lives, with no illness or misfortune.

Well, I don’t know what Isaiah was on when he wrote that, but his vision is still very far from being fulfilled, in these days when so many people are reliant on food banks, trafficking and slavery are a thing, racism is prevalent, the future is so wildly uncertain. It would be lovely if we were anywhere remotely close to what Isaiah saw, but, sadly we aren’t.

We’re much closer to what Jesus said about the future. He was with his friends in the Temple, which was still a fairly new building then, and they were marvelling at the beauty of it, rather as we might go into a cathedral and marvel at its beauty, too. And, let’s face it, our cathedrals and churches are, in many cases, very beautiful.

But Jesus said that the Temple would be pulled down, and not one stone left standing – and, indeed, by the time Luke was writing all this down, this had actually happened. Jerusalem had been overthrown and destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans, who were clamping down on the rebels who had tried to establish a provisional government there. I am reminded of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia, as it then was, in 1968, when the Soviet Union allowed rebellion for a short time but then clamped down. The Romans came with their equivalent of tanks, and overthrew the city, and destroyed it.

The Temple has never been rebuilt. For us Christians, it didn’t need to be, because Jesus had been the one, sufficient sacrifice, so Temple sacrifices were now obsolete. But for the Jews, of course, it was and has been a cause of immense sadness, especially as the site is now a famous Mosque.

But Jesus makes it clear that anything built by humans is only temporary in the grand scheme of things. And that life is going to be anything but peaceful, most of the time. There will be wars and earthquakes and famines and plagues – are we reading the Bible, or the newspaper? Even then, says Jesus, it’s not going to be the end.

It is futile to speculate, to try to decipher a timeline of events. Every generation, I think, has looked at these words of Jesus and reckoned it applied to them. And it probably has! It applies to us, of course – but it also applied to our parents and grandparents who lived through the cataclysms of the last century. It applied to those who lived through the Great Plague of the 17^th century and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It applied to those who lived through the various religious persecution of Tudor times – perhaps especially to them. Jesus said “They will seize you and persecute you. They will hand you over to synagogues and put you in prison, and you will be brought before kings and governors, and all on account of my name. And so you will bear testimony to me.” I am sure that both the Protestant martyrs in Queen Mary’s day and the Catholic ones murdered by the other Tudor monarchs – well, not actually by them, but you know what I mean – I’m sure they reckoned that these words were addressed to them.

And there was the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, and, of course, the various major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and other natural disasters that have happened over the years.

We’ve just been to Pompeii, last month, and visited the town that was destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. It was fascinating to see how they lived – you had the big houses, but most of them had let out their front rooms to shops. You could tell which were the shops, because they had had sliding doors, and you could see where they had been. And some of the shops had sold hot food – the local equivalent of McDonald’s or Burger King. There was a bakery, and we have seen a loaf of bread – burnt to carbon, of course – in an exhibition in Oxford about the food in Pompeii and contemporary Roman Britain. The exhibition is fascinating – do go, if you’re ever near Oxford, it’s on until 20 January. Anyway, the point is, they had things just like us, even muffin tins! They were people just like us, living lives similar to ours, enjoying the same kind of things we do – and their world came very abruptly to a very decisive end.

I think this is partly what Jesus was talking about. The end can come incredibly quickly and unexpectedly. Of course, many people get “notice to quit”, and know full well that they are going to die very soon. Others, however – well, it’s the road accident, the stroke, the heart attack, and “this night your soul will be required of you”, as Jesus said in the story he told about the rich farmer, who concentrated so much on gaining great harvests and making loads of money that he forgot about the things that really do last.

That, after all, is what is important. Jesus said that we will face persecution – well, we in the West don’t, just now, but that’s not true of all the world. Although some churches in the USA say they’re being persecuted, when they really aren’t…. they aren’t likely to get put in prison, or worse, for meeting to worship, or for telling other people about their faith and about Jesus. That, sadly, is not true in some parts of the world today. And who knows what it will be like here, in the future? We don’t know. We don’t know the future, we don’t even know our personal futures. Yes, we expect we’ll be leaving here and enjoying a good Sunday lunch, or perhaps we’re planning on going out to brunch, as lots of people do on a Sunday. We expect that tomorrow morning we’ll be heading off to work or college or school, or whatever we usually do on a Monday morning.

But things can change so quickly. A month’s worth of rain has recently fallen in the Midlands, causing rivers to burst their banks and homes to be flooded. In Australia, people’s homes, and, indeed, their lives are being menaced by bush fires – I have a friend who has spent the past few days on high alert, expecting that she and her family may have to evacuate their home any minute. Thus far, fortunately, that hasn’t happened, but….

The people in Pompeii and the neighbouring town of Herculaneum were enjoying their lives right up until the last few minutes, when the volcanic ash started to fall on them.

It is possible – not very probable, but possible – that we are in “the end times” and Jesus will return in glory, as we say we believe he will, to judge the living and the dead. But it’s far more probable that some natural or human-made disaster will intervene first. But whichever it is, we are expected to carry on with our lives as if they were going to go on forever. I didn’t choose to have the reading from the Epistle today, but it’s the one where Paul reminds the people of Thessalonia that they do have to work, even if they are expecting Jesus to come back at any minute. They still need to eat, and nobody is going to feed them! They must go and earn their livings, and expect Jesus to find them getting on with things.

Jesus is pessimistic about the future, and with hindsight we can see that he was right to be. Life is pretty good most of the time, except when it isn’t. And we don’t know when it will suddenly switch from being great to being ghastly. All we can do is trust Jesus, and trust that we will be shown what to say and what to do in the face of catastrophe.

And we mustn’t lose sight of Isaiah’s vision, either. One of thing things I specially noticed was that God is going to be there and speaking with us - “Before they call, I will answer, and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.” That contrasts with the dire warnings in the Old Testament about how the heavens will be shut up, and people will long and long to hear from God but it simply won’t happen.

I don’t know whether Isaiah’s vision can come true this side of heaven. It probably can’t. Jesus’ vision of the future seems really rather more probable. But does it have to be inevitable? I don’t know whether we can do very much to change things, to bring about the peaceable Kingdom that Isaiah foresaw, rather than the disastrous world that Jesus did. But shouldn’t we be trying? Shouldn’t we be doing what we can in the cause of peace and justice? In the cause of trying not to destroy our planet? In the cause of balancing humanity’s needs with those of the natural world? Maybe, just maybe, if enough of us did, it would tip the balance. Amen.