Maybe I will write a book entitled, Conversations While Ascending, what people say to me as I ride the elevators of the Chicago Temple. These would be short chapters, of course, but peculiar bordering on bizarre. So, last week I get on at the second floor and there is a young man who had gotten on in the lobby. I get out my keys and turn the lock to allow me to go up to the twenty-second floor, and he says, “You’re special, right?”

 “Well, I am the senior minister of the church, and I live up there.”
      He says, “What do you think about the apocalypse coming in 2012?”
      I reply, “I don’t plan to retire until sometime after that, so I suppose we’ll just have to live through it.”
      “Yeh, if we can,” he responds, and then he gets off at the fourteenth floor.

I knew that he was referring to the new apocalyptic movie, “2012,” just out at a theater near you. The plot is based on the discovery that an ancient Mayan calendar projecting the cycle of the ages runs out on December 21, 2012, which will be my birthday. I can just imagine it: “Why, thank you, just what I wanted – the end of the world.” It was pointed out by one of you, however, that for the Mayans themselves, their calendar ran out about 1000 years ago. But that has not stopped the producers of this movie, which is just the latest in a five-millennium fascination with the end of things, with the apocalypse.

\When we look back in the Bible we find tumultuous scenes of God’s judgment in the Hebrew scriptures, especially in the prophets and in the Book of Daniel. And there is the same set of symbols in the New Testament, scattered throughout the gospels and then blossoming in full flower in the Book of Revelation.

So, from the beginning of our tradition there have been people of good faith predicting the end of the world – the consuming fires, the devastating winds, the swallowing earthquakes, the disharmony of the heavens, and the fierce judgment of the Divine. The imagery has been so compelling that there have been people of even age who have been convinced that it was meant especially for them.

In America of the 1800’s the Millerites, followers of William Miller in New England and upstate New York, were convinced that the world would end sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. Thousands of people lived in expectation of an earthly destruction of biblical proportions. On March 22, 1844, Miller recalculated, found a flaw in his equation, and declared October 22, 1844, to be the date. Again, his followers waited. On the 23rd some people formed a movement diverging from the Millerites so that they could express their “great disappointment.”

In our own time we have seen Hal Lindsey and The Late Great Planet Earth, the entire Left Behind series of a decade ago, a movie of Cormac McCarthy’s bleak “The Road,” and now “2012.”

I confess that part of my “apocalyptic theology” was formed by the "Beyond the Fringe” troupe of years ago, the forerunners of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” This was Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller. In one of their sketches a leader takes his followers up on a hillside to watch the end of the world. “When will it end?” one of his devotees asks. The leader responds, “In five seconds . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . zero.” And they all chant, “Now is the end, perish the world.”

There is a long silence, and then, “It was Greenwich Mean Time, wasn’t it? This is not quite the conflagration we were looking for. Oh well, lads, same time, same place tomorrow. One of these days we’ll get a winner.”

It just may be that if people constantly are predicting the end of the world, someday, maybe millions of years in the future, someone will be right. And the irony is that there will be no one left to whom to say, “See, I told you so.”

Given all of this, let us unpack the notion of the “apocalypse.” What does the word actually mean? It is a Greek word that means “to uncover, to unveil.” To reveal. Our word, “revelation” is the Latin equivalent of “apocalypse.” So, our Book of Revelation is an unveiling of a truth.

A very helpful guide as we look carefully at the notion of the apocalypse is Barbara Rossing’s book, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation.” She wrote it a few years ago to chide Christian fundamentalists for using the psychology of fear and destruction to misinterpret the Bible, make money, and manipulate gullible people. Dr. Rossing teaches New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology here in Chicago and also is an ordained Lutheran pastor.

Her point is simple: apocalyptic literature was a very popular genre back in biblical times, like science fiction is for us, or the horror story. The people who would have heard the Old Testament prophets, read John’s vision, his revelation preserved in the last book of the Bible, or heard Jesus say what is recorded in Luke Chapter 21, our gospel reading for today, would have understood the message: these are not predictions of the future but rather a vivid way of unveiling a truth that is crucial for today. Jesus declares to his disciples as he faces his own death, “It will look as if everything is falling apart. Stay strong; you will persevere. Carry on; there is hope for the future.”

Rossing makes a very helpful observation about this genre of literature—it often uses the structure of a visionary journey in order to reveal the truth. Time-travel, or space-travel, or both. And she points us to one of the most popular stories of this season to illustrate just how familiar the apocalyptic form can be. The story? Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.” Look at that tale, she says, especially the last of the three ghostly visits, and you will understand what the Bible is saying.

Here is a wonderfully-bound, thick-paged volume from a collection of Dickens’ works that we inherited from my parents. It looks, feels, smells like a book should at holiday time. So, Ebenezer Scrooge already has seen through the eyes of Christmas-Past all the people he had hurt and spurned. Christmas-Present has shown him the Cratchit family and how they are able to be joyful even in their poverty, while he is miserable in his wealth. (This is a great story condemning greed and capitalism at its worst. It surprises me that it has become such an American favorite, given its severe critique of all the commercialism that we attach to Christmas.)

Scrooge’s apocalyptic journey really takes flight as the bells strike midnight, when he sees an apparition and asks, “I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come? You are about to show me shadows of things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us? Is that so, Spirit?”

The ghost never says a word, but rather hovers Scrooge over three businessmen as they talk about the death of another, one of them pointing out that no one wants to be a pallbearer, but he would if he gets fed a lunch. And then, the ghost transports Scrooge to an obscure part of town. “Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offenses of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth, and misery.” Scrooge watches as three people divide the spoil they have lifted from the house of a dead man – clothes, money, and even the curtains from the room of death.

Then he is positioned over a man lying dead in bed, cats and rats trying to break into the room. Off, then, to the Cratchits, who are mourning the death of Tiny Tim, an unnecessary death if it had not been for the family’s poverty. And finally, to a graveyard where the ghost, shrouded in black and speechless, points a bony finger to a tombstone on which appears the name, “Ebenezer Scrooge.”

Finally, the old man catches on. He is the dead man people are talking about, from whom the thieves have stolen personal items, on whom the cats and rats want to nibble, who could have saved Tiny Tim, and he cries, “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only? Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”

He grabs at the ghost’s robe and pleads, “Hear me! I am not the man I was. . . .Why show me this, if I am past hope?”

The apocalyptic “aha” moment. There is still reason to hope if we change our ways. “Good Spirit, assure me that I may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life! I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three will strive within me.” And he stares at his tombstone he entreats, “Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!”     

We know how the story ends. Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning. He is alive, the curtains are still hanging, and it is not too late to buy the biggest turkey in town and send it to the Cratchits and then accept their invitation for Christmas dinner, which he shares with the whole family, Tiny Tim included.

That is the apocalypse at work, a visionary journey to unveil to us the truth of our lives, what we need to do, what we need to change, in order for there to be hope for the future. “Why show me this if I am past all hope?” Our hope, according to Jesus, is to stay strong in this world, to continue to be the beloved community, to persist in serving the marginalized and the powerless, to persevere in resisting the brutality and illegitimacy of tyrants.

That is a different kind of hope than what is in the “s2012” movie, as I have been told. In that plot it is best if you have the most firepower and a vehicle fast enough to outrun the earth cracking open behind you. Certainly, it is different from the fundamentalistic Left Behind series, which, as Dr. Rossing characterizes it, “presents an individualistic, jet-setting life for a secret band of born-again ‘Tribulation Force’ heroes trying to escape this world.”

There is the difference: the unbiblical apocalyptic literature tries to give us an escape from this world; Jesus’ apocalyptic vision insists that we become more involved in this world, that we change it, that we make it more just, more merciful, more loving, more beautiful. The “end of the world," that is, the purpose of creation, is that we find a way to live peaceably together, to inhabit the City of God on earth.

Charles Wesley wrote a hymn that draws from both the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. The title is, “Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending.” The direction of God’s salvation is down to earth, not up and away from earth. The language may be frighteningly vivid, but it is not intended to scare us into submission but to inspire us into right living. There still is reason to hope. Do not give up. In Jesus God appears on earth to reign, to prevail, to make things right.

So, on December 21, 2012, there will be at least one mighty conflagration, the multitude of candles on my birthday cake. I hope by then, I hope, so help us, God, that we will have changed our ways enough that our lives on earth will be more closely conforming to God’s will for us. That is what this Advent season is for – for taking an apocalyptic journey in order to watch, to contemplate, to assess, as did Ebenezer Scrooge. And then like he did, to change our ways. There still is reason to hope. Amen.