Apocalypse – Peculiar Faith

Advent, Apocalypse, and AIDS

Many of us heard a portion from Matthew’s account of the Gospel yesterday morning in church, on the first Sunday of Advent. Matthew’s Jesus is talking about the so-called “end of the world,” the day and hour of which no one knows (not even him). But its arrival will be dramatic and dismaying: “Then two will be in the field,” he says; “one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding grain together; one will be taken and one will be left” (Mt. 24:40-41).

It’s fairly easy to dismiss those traces of an ancient apocalyptic scenario, but I can tell you firsthand what it feels like.

Around 1983, the year I graduated from college, people began to disappear. I started paying attention to this strange phenomenon two years later, my first year in seminary.

I knew a couple, Terry and Francis, who lived in New York. Each of them worked for the same advertising and marketing company, sharing ideas and strategies both inside and outside of the office. With hardly any warning, Francis was struggling to manage work and home life without Terry, as if Terry had suddenly been snatched away by aliens from outer space.

A seminary classmate told me about some friends of his back in San Francisco, David and Brad. They had moved there as roommates a few years earlier from the Midwest. They might as well have been a couple as they spent nearly all their spare time together exploring the city, taking trips to Napa Valley for wine tasting, or sailing on the Bay. Just as suddenly as Francis had, David found himself alone, without Brad by his side.

Before long, we knew more about the aliens who had been snatching these people away. They were given names like pneumocystis pneumonia and carposi sarcoma. A seminary professor started referring to this phenomenon like a thunderstorm—you just didn’t know where the lightning would strike next.

The storm was called HIV and AIDS, and we had no idea what the next ten years had in store for so many. Even if we did, no one could have prepared adequately for that kind of assault. Back then, young men who were perfectly healthy one day were admitted to the hospital the next, never to be discharged—just as Matthew’s Jesus described, one was taken, another left.

Sometimes more than one, far more. I heard of someone who lost more than 250 friends and acquaintances to this disease. I’m not sure I can believe that. Perhaps he was exaggerating. Or perhaps my mind’s gatekeeper refuses to let that information in, for fear of what it would do to my sanity. I did sometimes wonder how he, the one who had lost so many, had kept himself from going completely mad, running into the streets and screaming incoherently. Perhaps he eventually did, and I, for one, certainly wouldn’t blame him.

A dear friend of mine, Jim Mitulski, was the pastor of the gay-positive Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco at exactly that time of apocalyptic dismay. For longer than I can begin to fathom, Jim was conducting at least one funeral every weekend in his congregation, sometimes more than one; that he kept anything like his sanity is a miracle of God’s grace.

I consider Jim a powerful minister of the Gospel and a prophet of divine justice, who continues that ministry today as one of the best preachers I know. It’s also extremely important that this history is remembered, and now, thanks to a wonderful podcast project called When We All Get to Heaven, this slice of history is available to many more.

This is a remarkable documentary project telling the story of that church based on an archive of 1200 cassette tapes recorded during the height of the AIDS epidemic (many of them are Jim’s sermons). I cannot recommend this podcast more highly.

The importance of memory for activism also appeared in 1988, when the United States and many other countries began observing World AIDS Day each year on December 1. This became an important moment on the calendar for remembering—all those who were sick, those who had died, the many instances of truly heroic caregiving and tender accompaniment of so many thousands. It was also an important observance for the sake of public health; we cannot combat a deadly disease without being made aware of it, knowing its causes, and taking action for prevention and treatment.

AIDS Ribbon Collage, Arum Studios, South Africa

For the first time since 1988, the United States government will not be observing World AIDS Day today. This decision is a departure from a decades-long tradition observed by both Republican and Democratic administrations; many public health experts and medical professionals are denouncing this decision as “shameful and dangerous,” and even reminiscent of the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic when the government largely ignored this disease. Just like the policy decision earlier this year to end USAID grants for HIV prevention and treatment worldwide, the decision not to observe World AIDS Day has profound social consequences for public health—people will die.

And so Advent begins, as it always does, with a healthy dose of apocalyptic Christianity. Quite honestly, I happen to like Advent’s apocalyptic character; it faces the hard realities of the world directly and then invites, even begs us to summon hope from our traditions.

That combination of memory and hope—and the world-changing activism it can inspire—appeared vividly to me shortly after moving to Berkeley in the early 1990s. I saw a T-shirt while strolling through the Castro district in San Francisco; in simple poignancy were these words on the shirt: All I want is a cure and my friends back.

I can’t think of a better one-line summary of the character of Advent. For all its liturgical complexities and religious patina, let’s not miss that poignancy, especially on this day, when our own government is yet again trying to erase so many of us.

And let every community of faith boldly proclaim the heart of the Gospel on this very day: God Erases No One.

The Art of Love in the Advent of God

Disaster movies make a lot of money for Holly wood producers and movie studios. It’s also oddly the case that real-life disasters sell more newspapers and increase the ratings of television news channels.

Human curiosity is heightened and intrigue sharpened in moments of disaster, far more so than in situations of joy. Why is this? Researchers from various fields have noted that humans are generally fascinated by what can kill us, injure us, or even end the world, a fascination that occurs for a simple reason: evolution.

Those who pay attention to potential threats and prepare for them, especially those who cooperate with others to manage the threats, they are the ones most likely to survive actual disasters.

This evolutionary advantage, however, diminishes dramatically in what some researchers have called “apocalypse anxiety”—being so paralyzed with worry about disaster that we do nothing about it, except perhaps to engage in incessant “doomscrolling.”

Yesterday, on the first Sunday of Advent—one of my favorite days on the church calendar—the lectionary assigned a portion from Luke’s account of the Gospel (21:25-36) where Jesus describes disaster preparedness: when disaster appears on the horizon, he says, “be on guard” so that it will not catch you unexpectedly, “like a trap.”

The lectionary always assigns apocalyptic and world-ending texts like this for the first Sunday of Advent—and that’s pretty weird. How odd to begin the new liturgical year with the “end”! But the apocalyptic character of this day is not just peculiar; it has always been deeply challenging, and for multiple reasons.

For certain types of Christians, passages like this one from Luke are treated as predictive timelines for world events—that’s how I grew up hearing them in the Evangelical tradition of my youth. This approach invites ways to map global politics to biblical prophecies, but of course this kind of “mapping” can easily treat our precious Earth as disposable, not to mention particular groups of humans.

Another problem with predictive timelines is the perpetually delayed “end” they seem to predict but which never arrives. We’ve been living with these apocalyptic texts for nearly 2,000 years now and I seriously doubt that this very moment, right now, is the culmination of biblical prophecies (even though Luke’s Jesus sure sounds like he’s describing the effects of global climate change in yesterday’s passage).

Other types of Christians have mostly dismissed these apocalyptic passages entirely as rather crude and ancient mythologies that more rational people have outgrown. Some early twentieth-century scholars tried to “demythologize” these texts and then psychologize them instead: the apocalyptic moment refers not to world events but to an individual’s moment of crisis, a moment of decision about whether to live a fully authentic life, for example.

This approach has its own set of problems, not least the tendency to detach Christian faith from the wider social world of political and economic concerns.

Those on both ends of this spectrum overlook something terribly important: world-ending moments actually happen quite regularly. Worlds of meaning and beauty and also tragedy and conflict—whole worlds come and go all the time.

The advent of AIDS in the 1980s made this pattern shockingly plain, which having World AIDS Day land on the first Sunday of Advent compellingly invites us to remember. To see young and otherwise healthy men, and then children, and also women waste away into death was a rude reminder—just like Polio had been, or bubonic plague, or more recently Covid-19—a rude reminder indeed of our mortality and what it looks like when worlds end.

The point of these apocalyptic texts is not how to predict when those world-ending moments will occur, but rather how to prepare ourselves to live in them; and to bear witness to faith, hope, and especially love while those moments unfold; and to proclaim by the way we live that God is with us—always.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus makes absolutely clear to his disciples that they must not try to predict when the end will occur. Jesus instead urges them to live with hopeful expectation—not for any unraveling, or ending, but for the coming of redemption.

Honestly, I rarely heard that note of hopefulness growing up in my thoroughly apocalyptic religious tradition—these texts are not proto-scripts for the latest Hollywood disaster movie; they are like textual vitamins to nurture a life of hope. Luke’s Jesus was especially clear about this yesterday: When you see all the shit going down, raise your heads! Your redemption is near!

Reading a recent essay on Thomas Mann’s classic German novel, The Magic Mountain made that apocalyptic hopefulness poignantly clear. That novel was published exactly 100 years ago last month; Mann had begun working on it in 1913 but then put it away during World War I.

The “mountain” in the title of that novel was in the Swiss Alps where Mann’s characters were convalescing in a tuberculosis sanatorium. For Mann, it was the kind of place where one learns things that only disease and death can teach you.

“The Hotel Schatzalp” (inspiration for Thomas Mann; photo, Jules and Bear)

But then, lost and isolated in a blizzard while skiing, the main character in this novel has, what was for him, a startling realization—and this occurs nearly in the precise middle of the novel, a pivot point for the whole story: the only thing that can stand up to death, the only thing strong enough, is love.

Needless to say, Mann was not a romantic sentimentalist. By “love,” Mann did not mean a “cozy feeling” but rather the arduous work of forging bonds with each other, not from a sense of shared doom, but with the enlivening conviction of our shared humanity.

This turn in the novel represents a dramatic shift for Mann himself. He was a German loyalist and a supporter of the Kaiser in the First World War. But his entire philosophy changed after that war (as it did for many). He was dismayed to see the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and he was stunned to see how quickly and how deeply that party was able to divide Germans against themselves, and to turn dear neighbors into monstrous enemies.

Witnessing this horrific turn of events in his homeland, Mann insisted that the only kind of love that can stand up against death is the love of an artist.

Living as I now do along the so-called “arts coast” of West Michigan, this caught my attention and it’s worth noting: for Thomas Mann, the kind of art that truly matters is the kind that excludes nothing that is truly human—all of our complexities and ambiguities, all of our moral failures and triumphs, each of our joys and sorrows alike—the artist must gather all of this and then bind all of it together with love.

The lectionary was kind enough to make this same point yesterday in a passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Christians in Thessalonica (1 Thess. 3:9-13). Those Thessalonians were terribly distressed that some of their friends had died—which they didn’t think would happen after they became Christians. That distress is what prompted Paul to write them a letter.

The cycle of life and death will indeed continue, Paul tells them, even as we wait for the glorious coming of Christ with all the saints. All the more reason, he says, for you to “increase and abound in love for one another and for all.”

I couldn’t help but tie all of these various texts together—from Luke and Mann to Paul—and imagine our worship at the Eucharistic Table yesterday as a gathering on the “Magic Mountain”—a place for healing and insight.

But like Mann’s characters, we don’t stay in that sanctuary. We are sent out from that Table—we go back down the mountain—fortified by the hope for the healing of the world.

This world of flourishing will emerge not from our own efforts alone but from changed hearts and minds, from making ourselves open (and vulnerable) to the transforming power of God’s love.

This is the God who comes not just once, centuries ago in Bethlehem, nor only for a second time, at the so-called “end of time,” but the God who is always arriving, always appearing, always as the God of Advent, always ready to remake us with love, and then always sending us out with that love for the healing of the world.

“Be on your guard,” Luke’s Jesus says, “so that your hearts are not weighed down…”

“Increase in love,” Paul says, “for one another and for all.”

Stay Woke and Keep Awake

Like many other white people, I first heard the term “woke” roughly ten years ago after the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the killing of Michael Brown. The term quickly became associated with Black Lives Matter activism, and also with wider social concerns that included both gender and sexuality.

“Woke,” however, has much earlier origins. After the horrors of institutional slavery, the devastation of the American Civil War, and the rocky period known as “Reconstruction,” the early twentieth century held a great deal of promise and potential for racial healing, and a new chapter of economic prosperity for all racial groups.

But there were also notes of caution, coming mostly from Black musicians and visual artists in the 1920s and 1930s: “stay woke,” they said; pay attention and be vigilant; don’t take anything for granted.

Turns out, those were important cautions; the era of Jim Crow segregation and lynch mobs soon followed.

The Gospel writer known as “Mark” composed his account of the Gospel not long after a turbulent and violent period in first-century Judea. “The Jewish War,” as it is sometimes called, occurred right around the year 70 when Judeans rose up against their Roman occupiers; Rome destroyed much of Jerusalem during that war, including the Temple. This came right after decades of severe economic hardship among those we would call the “working poor” during the reign of King Herod.

Many of us heard that time of upheaval referenced in church yesterday, on the first Sunday of Advent. The opening verse of the Gospel passage—“after that suffering”—probably refers to those unsettling events (Mark 13:24-37). Mark’s Jesus, in other words, is trying to prepare his listeners for a time of significant social unrest and political violence. “Keep awake,” he says; pay attention and be vigilant; don’t take anything for granted.

“Stay woke” and “keep awake” come from two very different cultural and historical eras, yet the message of vigilance seems remarkably similar. The key question they pose is this: to what should we be paying such close attention? World events? Our own anxieties? Portents of doom in sea and sky?

The Gospel passage assigned for the first day of the new liturgical year (one of my favorites on the calendar) comes from a chapter sometimes referred to as the “mini-apocalypse” in Mark’s account of the Gospel. It’s striking that this chapter is the longest speech of Mark’s Jesus (in Mark, Jesus is mostly an action figure and doesn’t actually say very much), and it’s also striking that this longest speech is steeped in apocalyptic images.

Christians have interpreted this passage in many different ways over the centuries—from the fall of Rome, when it was sacked by barbarians in the fifth century, to the nineteenth-century reframing of the Second Coming of Christ as that sense of inner peace that passes all understanding.

Regardless of the interpretive framing of such texts, Advent will always provoke, stymie, and vex. How could it not when Mark’s Jesus warns us that the sun and moon will refuse to give their light, and all the stars will fall from the sky?

I know there are some Christians who truly do expect that kind of fundamental realignment in our solar system and an unraveling of our galaxy. I don’t—and I don’t think even Mark thought such events were likely, not in his lifetime and probably not ever.

If astronomical chaos is unlikely to happen any time soon, perhaps Mark is inviting us to wonder what is likely to happen in a world that seems to be careening toward catastrophe on nearly every front.

Ethnic cleansings, hospital bombings, ecological collapse, mass extinctions—how do we read those signs of these times today? If we stay awake and pay attention, will we find God’s presence in such moments of distress? What kind of hope—I mean, real and tangible hope—does the Church offer to a world in pain?

The whole season of Advent poses that question of hope with urgency, and we cannot squirm our way out of it, and we dare not try, either.

This urgency of hope shaped the insights of Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. She studied carefully the rise of totalitarian regimes, including in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. One of her main takeaway points is rather startling. A momentous difference between the modern Western world compared to all the centuries that came before, she argued, and which makes authoritarianism possible, is the loss of any expected Final Judgment.

That’s not just a startling but also rather peculiar thing to note about the modern world, except that it sounds as if she could have written that cautionary tale today. Losing any sense of divine judgment has meant, she noted, that the worst people among us no longer fear accountability, of any kind, and the most oppressed among us have lost nearly all their hope.

To fill that intolerable gap, the modern world tries to fabricate the paradise we long for, but ends up creating the hell we dread (German concentration camps in the 1940s, she observed, resemble nothing so much as Medieval visions of Hell).

That’s one hell of a quandary, and I’m grateful for the multiple ways we might engage with the question of hope posed by Advent.

Theologian Daniel Day Williams, for example, suggests that the classic and fantastical images of Advent—the Second Coming of Christ, the Final Judgement, and the End of Time—that these are symbols residing on the boundary of knowledge; they perch there, like sentinels, marking that line beyond which, they declare, our reason and experience will fail us.

That doesn’t make all those notions irrelevant or disposable. To the contrary, these symbols on the very edge of what we can know invite our trust. Life takes us up to the very edge of the map, where the road abruptly ends, beyond which we must choose whether we can trust that God is with us, that God will accompany us, and that God will provide what we need.

When the world is falling apart—either on a global stage or in our own living rooms—we yearn for something more than scolding from our sacred texts (we should have known better!); and we need something far more than mere moralizing from our religious traditions (shape up or things will get worse!). We must instead dare to find the very presence of God in the midst of our terror, and then help others do the same.

Let the fig tree be your parable for this, Jesus says (Mark 13:28). When the tree starts to put forth its leaves, you can trust that summer and its fruits are coming. Pay attention like that, Jesus says, for the sake of trust.

The symbols on the edge of our knowing—and the fig tree itself is one of them—these symbols can stretch our imagination toward the God who is always coming to meet us, always already appearing among us, always bidding us still onward toward that horizon over which we cannot presently see—and thus we must travel with trust.

This is why, by the way, my little parish along the “arts coast” of west Michigan devotes so much time to visual art. There is always a featured image on our liturgy leaflets, and in our weekly ad we place in the local newspaper, and we place nan image prominently in our weekly email newsletter (you, too, could subscribe to that!).

Art of all kinds can help us expand our imaginations, liberate us when we get stuck, and enhance our willingness to reach beyond the edge of what we can know with something like courageous trust.

In a world brimming with pain, God is not calling any of us to perfect knowledge or flawless solutions—these are far beyond us. But we must not therefore remain idle or merely sleepwalk our way through a disaster.

God is calling God’s people to live as a community of storytellers, and divine artists, and hospitable hosts, and players of musical instruments, and bakers of heavenly pastries, and tenders of gardens, caregivers to other animals, and funders of budgets, and still much more as all of us together offer healing to a wounded world with images of peace, as champions of justice, and lovers of beauty.

There’s really no time to waste; and we have got to stay woke and keep awake.

Advent: Let it Be Strange and Unsettling

Tucked away between Thanksgiving and Christmas are the four Sundays of Advent. I love this season, in part because it’s probably one of the more counter-cultural moments on the Christian calendar. While the wider society gears up for the “holidays” (a.k.a. shopping) and “Christmas” music floods the airwaves, the new liturgical year begins, not with the baby Jesus in a manger, but with the second coming of Christ at the end of time.

On the first Sunday of Advent, many Christians will hear (perhaps with some alarm) a whole array of biblical texts rooted in apocalyptic or eschatological sensibilities. Most mainline or “liberal” congregations likely find this quite perplexing, maybe even a bit embarrassing. But I think we should let this first Sunday of the new year remain strange and unsettling; let’s keep it odd and disruptive enough to inspire hope.

We might recall, for example, that the Greek word eschaton means “last thing.” But “last” can mislead us. Rather than referring to something like a final chapter, “last” most often refers to a fresh beginning in Christian traditions; the end of this world inaugurates new life in God.

“World” deserves further scrutiny as well. That word in biblical texts rarely if ever refers to planet Earth. The Greek word usually translated as “world” is kosmos, at once more expansive than this planet (the whole of reality) and much smaller than Earth (one’s own social location or neighborhood). In that sense, all sorts of “worlds” come and go with some regularity, whether the world of one’s personal relationships, or of one’s biological family or a professional career, or the “world” of commerce, of nation-states, and ecosystems.

Detail from Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment”

I imagine few Christians relish delving into these apocalyptic themes on a Sunday morning while thinking about buying a Christmas tree that afternoon. Yet in a world of violence – whether overseas in distant deserts or European cities or in our own backyard – the strangeness of Advent can remind us about the vital and disruptive character of hope itself.

“Business as usual” simply will not do in a society marked by gross income inequality, violence against women, and so many unexamined social policies rooted in white supremacy. Each of those “worlds” Christians should be glad to see end. Frankly, given the current state of affairs, I’m not optimistic that they will end any time soon.

That’s why I need Advent’s unsettling insistence on hope.

Unsettling, because hope inspires us to live in anticipation of a new world, even when we can’t see how things could possibly change.

Unsettling, because hope urges us to act on behalf of a new world that we can’t yet see (Romans 8:24-25).

Unsettling, because hope might convince us to set aside old, familiar things, even the most comfortable things, to make room for the new thing that God is constantly bringing about (Isaiah 42:9 and 43:19).

To be sure, apocalyptic texts and traditions can sometimes fuel armed conflict as a strategy for social change, or portray the world neatly divided between the saved and the damned, or simply breed complacency and neglect over this world in favor of the next one yet to come. That’s why Advent 1 cannot stand alone. We need the rest of the liturgical year to guide our vision toward the presently unimaginable – a world of peace with justice where all can thrive and flourish.

When that unimaginable world seems so terribly far out of reach, complacency feels easier – or more accurately, the paralysis of despair. That’s when I need to be troubled and startled into a fresh encounter with hope.

The shopping can wait. So can the Christmas tree. And, for right now, so can the baby Jesus. Right now, I need to sit with the strange and unsettling rhythms of Advent.

May this season stir up our collective imaginations for a different world – and the courage to help usher it in. advent1

The collect for the First Sunday of Advent, 1979 Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives
and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and
for ever. Amen.

Paul’s Wake: Coming Out as Christian on the Aegean Sea

By “wake” I mean the scant traces a boat leaves behind as it cuts through the water. I have no idea whether the Apostle Paul was afforded the other kind of wake, the one before a funeral. Both seem rather apt images for my upcoming Greek adventure.

I’ll soon be sailing the Aegean Sea on a fifty-foot sailboat with seven other gay men. Paul himself sailed this sea (at least nearby) on his missionary journeys, even though (of course) his ship’s wake disappeared quickly many centuries ago.

Paul’s theological wake remains, however, and in more ways than anyone can calculate. That wake is carved indelibly on the sea of Christian faith and spiritual practice. I’m actually a great admirer of Paul, even though I argue with him frequently.

I’m going on this trip to relax but I can’t go without pausing to reflect theologically on the locale – especially since Paul’s writings have too often caused serious harm. Paul would be appalled by that damaging wake.

Paul exhibited extraordinary courage, erudition, and even deep pastoral care. Some of my most cherished biblical texts come from Paul: the declaration that “faith, hope, and love” are the hallmarks of Christian life, the greatest being love (1 Cor. 13:13); the insistence that in Christ there is no longer “Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female” (Gal. 3:28); his timely image these days of the whole creation “groaning” as it waits for salvation (Rom. 8:22); and of course his game-changing crescendo that absolutely nothing can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ (Rom. 8:38-39). And that’s a short list.

Sadly, the only Pauline text most LGBT people know instead is the one from his letter to the Romans. There he describes same-sex sexual activity as “para phusin” (1:26-27), or what biblical translators typically render as “unnatural.”

To honor all those who have suffered harm because of this one biblical text (and some have taken their own lives), I hereby dub my upcoming Aegean excursion “The Unnatural Tour.”

I call it that not in spite of Paul but to respect his pioneering insights in that world-changing letter (countless people have had course-changing moments by reading that letter to the Romans, including Augustine in the fourth century, Martin Luther in the sixteenth century, and Karl Barth in the twentieth century, to name just a few).

Consider Paul’s astonishing declaration later in that letter where he describes God’s grace with the same peculiar phrase – para phusin (11:24) Paul uses that phrase only twice in the writings we have from him and both in this letter to the Romans. The first refers to sexual practices; the second, to divine grace. But how to translate it? Against nature? Contrary to nature? Above nature? Or just “unnatural”? Whatever it means, Paul seemed perfectly fine with using it to describe both sex and grace.

So I embark on an adventure in Paul’s wake, the one that disappeared long ago and the one that remains. I go on “The Unnatural Tour” with some anxiety as well. Will my gay sailing companions (whom I have not yet met) find it odd, disturbing, or annoying to be sailing with a theologian? Will I even tell them that they are?

Sad but true, it’s often more difficult to come out as Christian among LGBT people than it is to come out as L, G, B, or T among Christians – at least the kind of Christian one bumps into here on the Left Coast of California.

To live with more anxiety about revealing one’s Christian faith than revealing one’s sexuality actually feels like a relief for those of us who grew up in mortal terror of coming out sexually. But that relief comes with profound sadness and not a little anger. To set the joys of bodily intimacy against the good news of the Gospel distorts both, and far too frequently in tragic ways.

So I set sail with a bunch of gay men, not as a missionary but with honesty. I hope they will discover two things: 1) priests and theologians really can have fun; and 2) the source of their bodily yearnings for intimacy is in fact God, who made them for bodily joy. (By exhibiting the former, I hope the latter becomes obvious.)

I’m also relishing this: When the gay cruise ends, I will wash up (via ferry) on the shores of the island of Patmos. There, reportedly, the seer known as “John” was exiled and wrote what became the last biblical book of the Christian Testament.

As an eschatology geek, Patmos might be the highlight of my trip, even though it comes at the end (appropriately). I’ll visit the legendary cave on that island where pilgrims mark the spot of John’s visions. I’ll also be staying at the hotel on that island (complete with a spa!) where the restaurant is called “Apocalypsis.”

I’m sure that everyone working there has heard every joke imaginable about their “apocalyptic meals.” But just in case they haven’t heard the campy versions from a gay priest, I’ll make sure they do.

I’ll be my campy theological self on Patmos and on that boat with gay men because it just might prompt a Gospel moment – a moment appropriately and wonderfully encountered in Paul’s wake.

Popping the Lid Off: AIDS, Advent, and Hope

All I want is a cure and my friends back.

The list is long – breast cancer, world hunger, or what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” In a deeply patriarchal, violent world of unrelenting corporate profiteering, I want a cure for all those maladies and more.

On this 25^th anniversary of World AIDS Day, I’m thinking especially about HIV. When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1991, I saw those simple yet poignant words on a t-shirt: All I want is a cure and my friends back.

Perhaps that’s just too much to hope for. Yet, tomorrow also marks the beginning of Advent, a Christian season perfectly suited for wildly peculiar hope. Both wild and peculiar especially on the first Sunday of Advent, when most Christians will hear, not about Christmas, but about fantastical world-ending scenarios in apocalyptic biblical texts.

That’s certainly peculiar, but is it hopeful?

The word “apocalypse” has its origins in a rather ordinary Greek word that referred to a cover, like the lid on a jar. The ancient Greeks may have used the verb apocalypto when they opened something. It just means “to take the lid off”; we usually translate it as “to reveal.”

I like that image for sifting through biblical texts and Christian history in search of vision to feed our hope. Here are just a few things we might find when we pop the lid off:

Hope for the Nations
Readings for the first Sunday of Advent will sometimes include something from the last book of the Bible. There are lots of nasty bits in the Revelation to John, completely unsuitable for young children. In the last chapter, however, there’s no more Armageddon, no more terrifying horsemen, no horrific tribulation, but instead an amazing vision of the City of God. A river flows from that city, and on the banks of that river, a tree. The leaves of this tree, John writes, are for “the healing of the nations” (22:2).

John did not say that those leaves are for the healing of “Christian nations,” or “nations that we agree with,” or “nations that never committed war crimes,” or “nations never guilty of slavery or colonialism or economic imperialism,” or “nations that we might like to visit as tourists on vacation.” Looking forward to healing rather than vengeance surely qualifies as a counter-cultural hope.

Hope for Gate-Crashing
Not long after John’s revelation, a theologian by the name of Origen took the lid off again and found the irresistible love of God. The love of God, Origen declared, is so compelling that not even the Devil and all his fallen angels will be able to resist that love forever. Eventually, Origen believed, everything and every creature would find a blessed home in God.

That’s a compelling vision indeed – so compelling that just a few centuries later the institutional church condemned it as heresy. They put a lid on it. And that’s not so surprising. If an institution understands itself primarily as a gatekeeper, it won’t look very kindly on those who insist that there’s no longer any gate to keep. Gate-crashing is a deeply hopeful spiritual discipline.

Hope Beyond Hope
Fast forward a few more centuries and we find the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, who lived at a time when bubonic plague was decimating most of Europe in ways difficult to imagine. Anyone who lived through the early years of the AIDS crisis has a sense of what Julian must have witnessed – bodies suddenly and mysteriously falling ill; bodies falling all around her; bodies dying in such numbers that they literally piled up in the streets with no one to bury them.

In the midst of that devastation, Julian had some visions. The lid popped off and this is what she wrote: “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Was she just delusional? Julian herself wondered the same thing. She was surprised by these “showings,” as she called them, these mini-apocalypses. “This can’t be true,” she wrote. “Holy Church teaches that sinners are condemned to hell.”

But the showings persisted: “All shall be well.”

These irruptions of wild hope and fantastical visions throughout Christian history emerged from a truly impertinent question: Can God be trusted? Will God really keep faith with us even with bodies falling all around us?

That was playwright Tony Kushner’s question in a moving prayer he wrote in 1994 for the National Day of Prayer for AIDS: “Must grace fall so unevenly on the earth? Must goodness precipitate so lightly, so infrequently from sky to parched ground?” Can you be trusted, God, really?

Kushner speaks for so many when hope seems little more than a bread-crumb trail in a messy life, or a glimmering ember in the fireplace teetering on the edge of going out.

It’s the rare individual who can summon a hopeful faith alone. The rest of us need some help. We need those fantastical visions that sprout up quite unexpectedly in the middle of troubling biblical texts, or those moments of stupefying hope punctuating a disturbing Christian history.

Probably most of all, we need each other. When my faith is weak, I need people whose faith is strong; when my cup overflows, I can share it with others.

I was reminded of this just last night at the National AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco during a lovely event honoring two colleagues and their remarkably hopeful work to end AIDS and comfort the grieving.

That event was “church,” a reminder of why I keep doing what many Christians do on a Sunday morning. There are many reasons. But on the first Sunday of Advent, I need a community that isn’t afraid to say wildly peculiar things and find it hopeful: All I want is a cure and my friends back.

Got Hope?

Will the world end if the Euro zone collapses? Will it end with rising sea levels and global droughts? Has your world already ended with prolonged unemployment or a foreclosed mortgage? Where do you find hope in a world that seems to be coming apart at the seams?

These are perfect questions for tomorrow, the first Sunday of Advent.

Advent marks the beginning of a new Christian liturgical year. On the first Sunday of this season (“New Year’s Day”) most lectionaries recommend, oddly enough, apocalyptic biblical texts for worship. So the New Year begins not at the beginning but at the End, with the second coming of Christ (not the first) and the end of the world as we know it (cue music from R.E.M.).

So stop shopping (for now), stop stressing over Christmas decorations and ponder the theme for tomorrow that sets the tone for the entire liturgical year to come: hope. What do you hope for? How does your hope shape the way you live? Does it make a difference? Where do you find what you need to replenish your hope?

Let’s be more specific: Should anyone place any hope in the U.S. political system these days? In our financial markets? Do you have any hope of being able to retire? Of having social security checks? Feeding your family? How about the Occupy Wall Street movement? Is that hopeful to you?

Questions like that make it seem far less peculiar to begin a new year with the End. I believe there’s a profound connection to tease out between how Christians navigate the liturgical year and how we think about the world around us. Advent brings this vividly to light.

Tomorrow, the Church will launch again into the great cycle of observances that take us from incarnation to epiphany and on into passion, death, resurrection, and the gift of the Spirit. That cycle takes roughly six months. And tomorrow sets the tone for the whole thing: What, finally, do we hope for from all this?

Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, once described that great cycle like this: “The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us.”

Reading aloud that one sentence in every Christian congregation each Sunday morning for a year (to ensure that every member hears it) would transform the Church more fully into the world-changing community it’s called to be. Why? Because I think most people consider themselves, at best, “tolerable,” maybe loveable (if God is the one loving), but very rarely desirable.

Williams appears to have realized this too and insisted that God’s desire for us means, quite simply and profoundly, that the Church’s job is to ensure that people see themselves as desirable and “occasions for joy.”

If the Church really did that, it would change the world. How could we ever let “desirable occasions for joy” go hungry and homeless in our streets, or turn them away at national borders, or deny them health care? How the Church worships can and should shape how the Church lives in the world.

But what about all that apocalyptic, world-ending stuff that bubbles up in Advent? Actually, all sorts of “worlds” come to an end quite regularly – personal worlds and relationships, the worlds of social institutions (banks!?), economic empires, a computer’s operating software. “Worlds” as we know them are never permanent. It’s really not so surprising that they end.

What is surprising is how people manage to live with hope in those world-ending moments. For me, I can’t do that alone. I need a community and I need regular reminders about where true hope can be found. That’s what Advent is all about.

I find it helpful to remember that the word “apocalypse” (which we usually translate as “revelation”) has its origins in a rather ordinary Greek word that referred to a cover, like the lid on a jar. Put a prefix on the front and a verb ending on the back and you get apocalypto, which ancient Greeks probably used every time they opened something. It just means “to take the lid off.”

I believe revelations happen all the time. I believe the Apocalypse unfolds constantly. I believe the advent of Christ is ongoing, not isolated to a moment 2,000 years ago, nor to a far-distant future we cannot see. Everything about life, our relationships, our struggles, our dreams, and fears can “take the lid off” God in our midst. That’s when hope happens, and it changes us so that we can change the world.

May all of us find ourselves desirable this Advent season and treat one another as occasions for joy.

Apocalypse Now or Later?

Harold Camping and his fervent followers in Oakland, California believe that the world will end this Saturday, May 21. (Read about the prediction here.) It’s rather easy to ridicule such beliefs and dismiss this group as just bizarre. But have you read any church history lately? The whole history of Christianity, from the very beginning, brims over with peculiarities, with one bizarre moment after another.

And what about the Bible? Are those ancient texts really less strange than Camping’s sermons? This Sunday, many Christians will hear a portion of John’s Gospel from the Easter lectionary, including this promise from Jesus: “if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (14:3). To me, that sounds only just a little less peculiar than what Harold Camping is preaching. (Read my take on the queerness of the Bible here.)

Given the trendy enthusiasm for atheism these days, some would insist that just believing in God at all is really peculiar if not downright queer.

So I’m not troubled by the oddity of Camping’s predictions. If you’re not odd in some fashion, then you’re really not Christian. I do worry, however, about those among his multiracial, multi-generational community who have forked over their life savings to bankroll the multi-million dollar media campaign that has brought all of this to our attention. For the sake of argument, let’s say the world does not come to an end on Saturday. Well, who’s going to manage all those really angry, newly-poor people?

But there’s something else I worry about even more: the severe division of humanity between those who will escape the catastrophe and those who are left behind. That’s the core of Camping’s message and why we see his billboards along Bay Area highways.

Philosopher of religion Edith Wyschogrod identified the root of this problem as the “great sorting myths” of Western culture. She means those grand narratives that divide the saved from the damned, or the sheep from the goats (Mt. 25:32-33). Those myths, Wyschogrod argues, have inspired some of the most distressing moments in Western history, fiercely punctuated by Nazi Germany’s concentration camps and gas chambers.

To be sure, one can read the Bible as supporting those sorting myths, just as Harold Camping is doing right now. But there are just as many, if not more ways to read the Bible quite differently.

In that same portion of John’s Gospel for this coming Sunday, Jesus declares that in God’s house there are many mansions (14:2). Don’t skip over the queerness of that image too quickly. (Think of Dr. Who’s phone booth that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.) That Gospel image ought to stretch our credulity far enough to imagine that there really is enough divine grace to go around for everyone and not just a select few.

(For you theology geeks out there: I do subscribe to the “doctrine of election,” but it’s Karl Barth’s version – everyone belongs to the elect. And if that isn’t queer, I don’t know what is.)

I find it helpful to recall that the original meaning of the word “apocalypse” does not demand some kind of doomsday catastrophe. That Greek word just means “revelation” or “unveiling.” In that sense, what we read in John’s Gospel is thoroughly apocalyptic: the unveiling of God’s wildly generous hospitality that will make room for everyone, no exceptions.

Queerly enough, I consider myself an “apocalyptic Christian.” Worlds actually do come to an end, and quite regularly – the world of one’s personal relationships, the world of professional work, the world of economic stability, the world of thriving ecosystems. All of these “worlds” and many more do on occasion come to an end.

The question all those world-ending moments pose is not how to find the “escape hatch” where we can scramble out with our friends and loved ones and let everyone else go to hell. The question is rather how to live in and through world-ending moments with others, and to do so with faith, with hope, and most especially with love (1 Cor. 13:13).

I pray for Brother Harold and his community, just like I pray for all of us. In this Easter season, may we find the faith and the hope to live into that love that is stronger than our many divisions and disagreements; stronger than any world-ending moment; stronger than death itself.