I HAVE $8,600 IN NOT-SO-CRISP BILLS packed away in my canvas overnight bag, along with two pairs of shorts, two shirts, four socks, two pairs of underwear, and, for some reason, a small penlight. I am a forty-eight-year-old man, and tomorrow morning I’m running away. I’ve become nothing more than a provider of excess and extravagance, working to pay for Izod shirts, plasma TVS, Ugg boots, and sushi binges. I am giving up my most valuable asset, my time, to provide baubles for uncaring, spoiled offspring who refuse to earn money for
themselves. I have spawned an ungrateful five-car, nine-phone-line family joined
to me solely by finances. I can no longer put up with kids who despise and use me, sick parents, chemically dependent siblings, a therapist who thinks I’m an ass, and, most hurtful of all, a spouse who is totally indifferent. Running away is like a living suicide: everything in your life ends, only you get to keep going. I hope to find a new, cell- phoneless existence with more experiences and less clutter. I know my departure will be seen as selfish, but there is no alternative. Tomorrow morning I’m going to get into my car, drive to the traffic light, and make a left turn instead of a right. I’m going west. It’s too cold up north, and I know too many people down south. If I go east I’ll be in the ocean, and I decided against that last year. So it’s west. I am resolute: I will make that left turn tomorrow morning at exactly 8:50. I will (anonymous contributor to The Sun Magazine).

Isaiah wrote his sublime poetry to a people who wanted to run away. People who had run out of options like the anonymous fellow I spoke of but who had no where to go.

On the last day of the year 999, the old Basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome was thronged with a mass of weeping and trembling worshippers awaiting the end of the world. The pope was there, and just as anxious as his flock that some cataclysmic act of God was at hand. When nothing happened his flock ran out into the streets of Rome, shouting and cheering and celebrating the fact that they were still alive.

Apocalypticism has been around for a long time. It is in the Bible. The early Christian church, living under intense and unbelievably cruel persecution, fervently prayed for Jesus to return and bring to an end the horrific ordeal they were enduring in his name.

And their graphic hopes and predictions have been adopted, misunderstood and misused in every generation since.

Many thought the world was coming to an end in l945 and that the anti-Christ was F.D.R. . How else could he have been elected four times?? People actually believed that.

Some among today’s fundamentalist Christian zealots, for instance, reading the biblical apocalyptic predictions literally, believe that the Jerusalem Temple must be rebuilt on the exact spot as the old Temple, leveled by the Romans in 70 AD to usher in the new age and the return of the Messiah. The problem is there is a building on the spot—a very significant building—the Dome of the Rock, Islam’s third most sacred space.

So, when I went to Israel in 1999 the people going through the check-point to the temple grounds who were most closely questioned were Americans. The Israelis were pretty worried some American Christian fundamentalist was going to try to blow up the Dome and, in some way force God to bring about a swift end to the world.

Today in 2007 there are hundreds of thousands of Christian Fundamentalists who drool over the prospect of the end of the world—If you read their web sites as I do you will see that, for many of them, it can’t come too soon for them.

Joanna Adams tells about seeing a sign in front of a bait shop on a country road in Georgia. “Smile! Our God is a consuming fire.” That is just not a thought that puts a smile on my face,” she quips. (“The End of the World As We Know It,” sermon, 11/28/99)

A reporter from the Mail Tribune called me in December of 1999. He asked me if we were going to have an end of the millennium observance. He was clearly looking for something juicy about the imminent end of the world and was clearly disappointed when I told him we weren’t into that kind of thing and we were more concerned about how to live faithfully in the future—not nearly as newsworthy as frantic zealots cowering before the impending end.

There is another way of looking at the future and it is at the heart of our faith tradition. Hear another section of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, a letter written to a community of exiles or captives in Babylon 2,500 years ago.

“Comfort, comfort my people says your God,”
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem . . .
Get you to a high mountain . . .
lift up your voices with strength
He will feed his flock like a shepherd
he will gather the lambs in his arms
Those who wait for the Lord shall
renew their strength
they shall mount up with wings
like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.”

I love those words. I love them for their beauty and power, and I love them because they were written to a community of people who had run out of options for the future and had given up hope. Their situation could not have been more difficult. They had no army. Their capital was in ruins, their leaders were either slaughtered or exiled, their temple had been leveled and they themselves were held captive, in a foreign land, in a ghetto.

One can easily imagined those people spending most of their time remembering the good old days, how it used to be in Jerusalem, when David was King and Solomon his son, when our army was feared, when there was food enough for all, and our Temple, the glory of Israel, stood bright, gleaming in the sun; Solomon’s gift to all. Now, imagine how those people felt when the prophet, after he wrote words of comfort and tenderness—delivered these words:

“Stop it.”
“ Do not remember the former things, or
consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing,
now it springs forth, do you not
perceive it?”

There is in those words a very important faith affirmation. When our resources are depleted, God’s are not. When we’ve used up all our options, God has more. When we’ve given in to hopelessness, God comes with new possibilities, new hope, a new creation, a new future.

Faith, in this way of thinking, is not looking backward but forward, not sitting around the fire telling stories about how good the good old days were, and how bad the present is so isn’t it time for God to usher in a horrific end to history?

No, it’s about being bullish about the future. It’s about getting ready to join God in the ongoing drama of creation.

There is in these words a new way of honoring the past by remembering that God’s promise has always been about the future.

I like the way British theologian John Taylor put it: “There are two ways of looking at time—

Is the source of time behind us, pushing us from history into the future?

Or is the source of time ahead of us, pulling us out of history into the future . . . so that the present always has within it the seeds of hope?” (The Go-Between God, p.76-77).

I like that. In that sentiment is great wisdom. It says, no matter how rich are our memories of the past, regardless of the comfort memories give us, in the future lay riches. In the future lies a chance for us to co-create with God a world that is better than any that has come before.

I look at the great scheme of history and get hopeful. The world is a better place than it was thousand years ago when life was ugly, brutish and short. Even a hundred years ago. It’s certainly a better place for women and children. I remember the 60s and being told we were headed for an all out war with the Communist Chinese and that millions would surely die and then I think of the wonderful presentation our recent China travelers gave us Thursday at the meeting of Presbyterian Women. It’s amazing.

Sure there are throwbacks. Who could look at the lynching of Saddam Hussein and not be, as the British Finance minister said yesterday, filled with revulsion. It was something out of the dark ages. But expressions of revulsion themselves are signs of hope.

You know, if you can think that way, as a new year is opening up before us, there is no limit to what good can be done, big and small. It just takes hoping.

Another story – “My kids loved it when my husband’s mother, their one living grandmother, made her annual visit to our house. She always brought gifts and fantastic homemade chocolate chip cookies and pound cake. My mother-in-law was not always kind to me, though. She treated me as inferior because I wasn’t Jewish. Certainly I wasn’t good enough for her highly educated and handsome son. But I wanted the kids to like her, so I pretended to be glad to see her and ignored her not so-subtle criticisms. Inevitably, if we planned to do something she developed a migraine headache, and we wouldn’t go. As my mother-in-law’s health began to decline my husband persuaded her to move here to Tucson. He found a wonderful doctor for her and an assisted living facility that met her high standards. Her son’s attention helped revitalize her.

As my mother-in-law entered her nineties she lost her power to hurt me. I suppose I matured some too. My skin had grown thicker. Hesitantly I became involved in her life. I bought her things she needed and surprised her with flowers or a new shade of nail polish. She’d let me know if she didn’t like it, of course. I felt good to be helping, and, I’ll admit, a bit superior.

A few weeks before her death my mother-in-law and I were having a quiet visit. She sat in her wheelchair facing a window with a view of th mountains. Her agitated tapping on her lap tray ceased for a moment, and hse turned to me and said, “Do you like me?” At last she was asking me for approval. Without hesitation I said, “Yes, I do.” No longer afraid of her criticism, I asked her, “Do you like me?” And she said, “Yes I do. Very much.”

Will Campbell, a wonderfully cranky Southern Baptist preacher and writer, has that perspective. It’s in everything he does and says. In fact, his perspective on time and the hidden purposes of God has made him something of a prophet.

Just listen to what he suggested in December of 1999. In the midst of all the hoo-haw about Y2K and Christian fundamentalist apocalypticism over the coming of the year 2000, Campbell said this: all Christians should go to Mecca to celebrate the millenium.

“Most of the serious wars today are by people of competing religions. That’s absurd. Let’s do it this way. Judaism is the oldest of the three major faiths. Christianity is the adolescent and Islam is the youngest. The youngest is generally most favored in a family. So let’s all go to their house, all kneel on a rug and put our heads to the ground and pray, vowing as we do never to kill one another again in the name of God. . .” (Soul Among Lions, p.49)

That kind of thinking could have been the undoing of Osama bin Laden way before 9-11. In the wake of centuries and centuries of failed end time predictions I think we are ready for more prophets like this Southern Baptist preacher.

I wonder if perhaps 9-11 has even helped us in this regard. Remember how fearful we all were after 9-11? Remember how we all wondered if the Al Queda was so firmly entrenched among us and we were afraid that “things would never be the same again.” Most of us have gotten past that feeling.

Pat Robertson doesn’t like that we have. Thus his prediction of last week that 2007 will end in more horror within our borders. Sure, we know we will most likely get hit again on our own soil. No one knows if it will be another airplane hijacking or some dirty bomb contaminating one of our cities. But most of us are not letting that fear keep us from living our lives. Most of us are living as though someone bigger than we are holds the future. We refuse to let fear keep us from living our lives or make us vote a certain way.

We celebrated a birth a week ago—a birth of a child who was, we traditionally believe, the light of the world. Here, in January of the year 2007, that light still shines, and the darkness has not overcome it. It may threaten. It’s code may be “orange,” but we live our lives with courage, determined not to let terror have the last word.

In Colonial America there was an eclipse of the sun that caught everybody off guard. Many of the state legislators in New England were afraid . . . they thought it was the end of the world. Several legislators moved quickly to adjourn, but before the presiding officer could call for a vote, another Colonialist stood and said, “Mr. Speaker, if it is not the end of the world and we adjourn, we will appear to be fools. If it IS the end of the world, I should choose to be found doing my duty. I move you, sir, let the candles be brought.”

The future, Peter Gomes asserts, is a “blessing of God . . .The future is God’s time.” That has enormous implications for how we live and it has deep and powerful implications for you and me personally. Our future—our time—the time we have left to live, whatever that happens to be, is time inhabited by God. Wherever we go, God will be there. Whatever happens to us, God will be with us.