Going Somewhere--August 10, 2021

Going Somewhere--August 10, 2021

"And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him." [Hebrews 9:27-28]

There's something unnerving about the sensation that you've been somewhere already before, but can't quite place it.

If you're on a hike through woods you have never entered before and you get the feeling, "I've seen that tree before," it may well be a sign you are going around in circles, rather than getting to a destination.

If you have a strange feeling of deja vu visiting a place for the first time, it can feel eerie and unsettling.

And even, for that matter, if you are in your same old usual home or work routine and having the same problem over and over again, the same argument again, or the same anxieties without any relief, it can feel desperate and hopeless to say to yourself, "We've been through this before."

Sometimes the idea of going on and on in an endless loop of repetition might seem great--like the vacation week you never want to end, or the beauty of a summer evening you wish could just go on and on, or the fleeting moments of your children's youth that you know will be over in a blink.  But some part of us also knows it's not right--it's not the way it's supposed to be--to be stuck like a song on permanent repeat.  At first it might seem like paradise to be able to relive the same things over and over again, maybe, if they are good--but pretty quickly the unending, unchanging looping would feel like hell, I suspect.

I read a book recently that made me see that in a new way.  In David Arnold's 2020 novel The Electric Kingdom, we are introduced to a character who is at first only given the title, "The Deliverer," who we learn pretty quickly is in some kind of a time loop, sent by handwritten notes (in the Deliverer's own handwriting) on missions to go and help particular people, over and over again, but knowing it will never be possible to change some things.  Some outcomes are fixed, no matter how one might try, but other kinds of help and rescue depend on the Deliverer showing up and doing what the notes say to do, cycle after cycle.  And before long, both the Deliverer and the people who get a strange visit from this astronaut-looking character, find themselves thinking, "We've been here before."  I won't spoil more of the plot of Arnold's story, but it becomes evident that there is something deeply disturbing--and terribly lonely--about being sent to help people in small ways, while being impotent to avert big disasters or save everyone, all for an eternity of repeated circles in time.

I had never really thought about it that way before, but I think there's reason in that little thought experiment of fiction to appreciate the way the Scriptures talk about the flow, the directionality, of history and of time in our faith story.  The Christian faith isn't an unending loop of rehashing the same mistakes, the same failures, the same cruelty, and the same sins, over and over again. And the Christian gospel isn't that a Savior comes from time to time with the limited ability merely to nudge and adjust things at the periphery, but not to save us from true destruction.  There is a flow, a story-like quality, to time as we experience it, which moves us toward something--toward a culmination, a goal, a completion, a consummation of all things.  Our death is a part of that story, to be sure, but it is not the end.  And the hope we have of life beyond the grip of death--the resurrection life of the new creation--is good news precisely because it is not merely the endless repetition of our old ways of greed, selfishness, violence, and hatred.  Reliving a terrible history over and over again would hardly be good news--that would be torturous and cruel.

We need to know that we are really going somewhere.

What we need, then, is the assurance that our lives, both individually and in the whole of God's creation, are headed somewhere.  What we need is the promise that Christ is drawing all things toward himself.  What we need is, to borrow a phrase of Julian of Norwich, is the peace of knowing that "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be made well." Hearing that we were being rescued today, but that we might slide off the edge of things again tomorrow and need another rescue all over again tomorrow, well, that's no good at all.  That's going to leave us in perpetual fear that nothing is solid or reliable, and we'll all die of ulcers and nervous breakdowns.

So it is with that in mind that the writer of Hebrews assures us that there is indeed a direction to things--to everything.  That's not the same as saying (as often religious people want to say) that "Everything happens for a reason," which has a way of being used as a cheerfully brandished weapon to club people into a fake optimism that their abuse was OK, or that the suffering of their lives can be shrugged off as collateral damage for a happy ending, or that they should just "get over" whatever tragedy they are dealing with.  The writer of Hebrews isn't trying to cajole us into pretending we are happy about a cancer diagnosis because it will lead to something good for someone else, or saying that the tragedies and terrors of human history, from the Holocaust to the Trail of Tears, were necessary evils to bring about a brighter future.  Instead, he seems to be saying that there is a direction, a flow, to the universe's story, and we are not doomed to live through our worst moments over and over again with the suspicion that "we've been here before."  

Our lives are pointed somewhere--in fact, Jesus has come into history as the One toward whom all our lives have been pointing.  Jesus has come so that while death is a part of the story, it is not the end of that story--and yet the story of our lives and of the cosmos has meaning.  The universe isn't just one of those old dictation-style voice cassette-recorders, endlessly being rewound and overwritten over and over again while the tape wears out; our confidence is that everything is being gathered up together into God's new creation.

So many times in my life, I've heard Respectable Religious people quote these verses as a threat to intimidate or frighten people into faith, as they ominously wield the words, "It is appointed for mortals to die one--and then the judgment!" as if we are supposed to be afraid of God's kind of justice that restored and repairs and rebalances what is broken.  I don't think these words are meant to give us nightmares. They are meant to give us hope--hope that your story and mine are headed somewhere, hope that Jesus is able to do more than just adjust our time-looping lives in meaningless ways, hope that death may be a part of the narrative, but it is not the last word.

That is the news we need for this day.

Lord God, draw us all to yourself, and help us to use the breath, the day, the life, you have given us, to be a part of your work to gather all things in your love.