Not quite ten years ago, the predictions of Harold Camping of Family Radio in California
created a sensation, especially in Christian circles. Camping confidently predicted that, based on
a calculation of the creation of the world about 6,000 years ago, that same world would be
ending on May 21, 2011, at 6:00 pm in all localities. Billboards were posted all over the U.S.
warning people to get ready. Some parents stopped paying into their children’s college funds.
May 21 came and went, and the world did not end.
Even my grandmother, who although her formal education ended with the eighth grade is
a gifted theologian, was somewhat taken in. She called me to clear things up. “Do you think the
world will really end on the 21st of May?” she asked. My interpretation of much of Christian
theology is very different from my grandmother’s; the best thing I could think of was to say,
“Well, Grandma, you know scripture says that no one knows the day or the hour.” “That’s what I
thought!” she said, confident that she could still buy green bananas the third week of May.
Even my grandmother, who although her formal education ended with the eighth grade is
a gifted theologian, was somewhat taken in. She called me to clear things up. “Do you think the
world will really end on the 21st of May?” she asked. My interpretation of much of Christian
theology is very different from my grandmother’s; the best thing I could think of was to say,
“Well, Grandma, you know scripture says that no one knows the day or the hour.” “That’s what I
thought!” she said, confident that she could still buy green bananas the third week of May.
One commonality amongst all these warnings, predictions, and fears is the sense that the
world has gotten so topsy-turvy that it cannot stand much longer. The sixteenth century, in
particular, is illustrative of such concerns as they have arisen in our own day: capitalism was
eclipsing feudalism as the prevailing economic order across much of Europe, with a concurrent
depression of wages, increase in poverty, and fleeing of starving masses from the countryside to
the cities. A century or more of mercenary popes raising funds from amongst the laypeople by
whatever means possible to fund wars of convenience and extravagant building campaigns – like
Michelangelo’s decoration of the Sistine Chapel – had left in its wake a mood of anticlerical
disgust across much of Europe. And the Little Ice Age had begun, with year after year of poor
crops and bad harvests leading to famine conditions across the land. Just as in our own day, these
environmental and social devastations led many to believe the world could not long stand.
Another commonality amongst the many periods of end-of-the-world fears has been the
feeling that it was time for the people of God to circle the wagons and batten down the hatches.
Fears of persecution, death, judgment, heaven and hell are powerful community builders –
people tend to respond with a tribal desire to identify who’s in and who’s out, the better to know
who’s standing with you when the proverbial filth hits the fan.
Even as Jesus shared with his disciples the terrifying descriptions of the signs and
wonders that would accompany the close of the age, he comforted them by assuring them that
God would send the angels to gather the faithful in. The vision of angels flying forth to gather
and protect God’s people was a powerful one in Jewish theology. At perhaps the lowest point in
the story of the Jewish nation, when the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV profaned the sacred
Temple itself by installing a statue of Zeus in it, the prophet Daniel had visions of angels coming
down from heaven to protect and fight for God’s people.
It has struck me, though, that the apocalyptic predictions in scripture and in history stand
in tension with many of Jesus’ other pronouncements. For example, in Luke, he tells us that
there’s no point in going around saying, “Look, there it is!” because “the kingdom of heaven is
within you.” Elsewhere he tells his disciples that the kingdom is among us, that it is at hand.
Well, think about that for a minute. What does “at hand” really mean? Something that is “at
hand” can be reached for and grasped without any great exertion. It’s right close, it’s right here.
The kingdom of heaven, Jesus tells us, isn’t something coming down the pike or over the
horizon. It’s right here, right now.
The eighteenth-century Shakers took this notion very seriously. They believed that Christ
had already returned – as a woman this time, in the form of Mother Ann Lee – and the task of the
elect was to practice living as if we really knew and understood that the kingdom was here. To
that end, the Shakers practiced radical asceticism and celibacy – and also crafted quite a bit of
simple and beautiful furniture – but the movement eventually died out, as the decades wore on
and the understanding of the kingdom never seemed to get much clearer.
Jesus also told his disciples many times, including his last utterance to them, that he was
with them always – even to the close of the age. If Jesus’ kingdom is right here, right now, and
he is already, always with us, how do we square that knowledge with his pronouncements about
coming back like a thief in the night? How can someone “come back” when they’re already
here???
As I have meditated on what all this confusing end-of-the-world and second-coming talk
might mean, it occurred to me that when Hildegard or Luther or Harold Camping expected the
end of the world to be a large-scale dramatic event, maybe they were thinking too big. If you
think about it, doesn’t the world end for somebody, somewhere, every single day? Someone
receives a diagnosis of terminal cancer or inoperable brain aneurysm: the world as they know it
ends – collapses – shatters into fragments. Parents are told that their beautiful adored child has
cystic fibrosis, or leukemia has been caught cheating or is going to jail: the world they thought
they knew, beaming in pride at a beloved son or daughter growing up, suddenly and painfully
ends. Spouses come to the awful, inescapable conclusion that they cannot save their marriage,
and an entire life and future together vanishes in a puff of smoke. Worlds end for somebody,
somewhere, every day.
What worlds ended this year and this decade when fires raged across millions of acres in
the West? What worlds ended when the breadwinner of a household was laid off from work, or a
newly graduated student, a degree in hand, applied for job after job, and got not so much as a phone
interview? What worlds ended when a teenager or child could not face one more day of bullying
and decided to end his or her own life? How many worlds have ended when a loved one
contracted Covid and succumbed to the disease?
The world came to an end, at least partially, for two brothers in their 20s in the Jenin
refugee camp in Palestine this past September. Israeli Defense Force soldiers used a powerful
explosive device, for no obvious reason, to enter the brothers’ home early one morning. Israeli
soldiers have used this unnecessary and harmful tactic many times, often as no more than a
training exercise, to enter Palestinian homes. But Mohammed and Abdel Qassem’s lives will
never be the same. Mohammed, prior to the attack a strong and healthy young man, has been
hospitalized and undergone nine surgeries since September and is paralyzed and confined to a
wheelchair, becoming fatigued even in the course of conversation.
My own world came to a sad and painful end more than once the year after I finished my
doctorate. One of my former students in Berkeley, a bright, lovely, and grace-filled young woman
studying for the Episcopal priesthood, a courageous soul who did street ministry in the
Tenderloin district of San Francisco lost her battle with cancer at the end of June. She had been
diagnosed right in the middle of my class, when she took a phone call from Kaiser telling her
that the biopsied tissue from behind her left ear was a stage 4 melanoma. What followed over the
next two years for Kirstin was a series of world endings and unexpected resurrections.
Aggressive chemo sent that first tumor into remission for the better part of a year and a half.
During the summer of 2010, though, cancer returned with a vengeance, metastasizing to her
lungs. The treatment available to her had about a 30% chance of arresting or reversing cancer;
Kirstin took that chance. Meanwhile, she heard of a study at the University of San
Francisco looked promising for patients with her particular form of cancer. The only catch
was she had to have a particular genetic mutation to participate. Kirstin went in for the genetic
test and waited, hoping.
She didn’t have the mutation, but she did have the odds on her side. She was one of the
30% – cancer went into remission again. For a little while. Then it came back – metastasized
to her brain and the rest of her body. She started finding tumors just below the surface of her skin
on her legs and chest, and she lived in terror of losing her memories, her mind – a common side
effect of brain meds.
One night her companion and caregiver Andee rushed Kirstin to the ER in terrible pain.
The ER nurse asked, gently, how committed Kirstin was to her current course of treatment. She
said, “Not very.” The cancer was winning, and Kirstin knew and understood that she did not
have much time left. Andee took her home, and a circle of friends and family kept watch over
her last days until this world came to an end finally and completely for her.
In August of that year another friend, who had struggled with diabetes and other health
issues all her life, finally packed up her belongings and moved home to live with her mother in
Dallas after more than four years in graduate school in Berkeley. A week after the move, this
dear friend and former neighbor, Jiden, suffered a massive heart attack and died. She was a
scholar and practitioner of martial arts, a quiet, deep, introspective, and witty soul who enjoyed
good food and crazy cats (like mine), who served on the student advisory council and as the
student assistant for her department. Her dissertation would never be written. That world had
come to an end.
On September 16 and 17 of this year, two birthdays passed without cake or celebrations.
Kirstin and Jiden would each have been 49 years old – the same age I am now. Instead of parties,
their friends and loved ones had and continue to have memories, and grief. The world goes on
without Kirstin’s ministry and Jiden’s scholarship. And some of us, at least, know how much the
poorer we all are for it.
None of us in this room are strangers to the end of the world if we think of it in these
terms. We have all been on intimate terms with unemployment, illness, heartbreak, and death.
Each of us has lost someone – parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends. Each of us has
suffered something – physical or mental illness or injury, loss of job, divorce, or some other
world-ending sorrow. None of us are innocent or unscarred.
But here is the good news, friends. Jesus promised us that the world as we knew it would
come to an end – and so it has, again and again, and again, every day, for somebody, somewhere.
But he also promised that he would always be with us – not just himself, but also the Comforter,
the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit that encircles us and guides us and lives in our hearts and in our
connections of love and kindness to one another.
Because Jesus also told us and told us to pray, that his kingdom was coming, that it was
already here, among us, within us, at hand. He told us what that kingdom looked like – it’s where
God wipes away every tear and there is no more sorrow, no more grief, no more mourning, no
more death. Where justice rolls down like water, and peace like an ever-flowing stream. Where
the rich are sent empty away and the poor are filled with good things. Where old things are
passed away and behold, all things are made new.
How do we square that with the world we see around us? How do we place our faith in a
kingdom already present of no more mourning, no more death, when there is so much pain,
injustice, violence, and death in our midst? Theologians have termed the tension that we live in
between the kingdom of promise and the world of reality as living between “the now and the not
yet.” One foot in both worlds.
How do we do that? It’s like maintaining two physical addresses – trying to bilocate with
only one body. And as much as folks in the Okanogan Valley might have liked Tim and me to do
that while we are somehow also in Springfield, the world doesn’t work that way. The secret, I
think, is in Jesus’ mysterious words about the kingdom: it’s at hand. Among us. Within us. Here,
now. And I think the Shakers were on to something: the trick is to learn to live as if we
understood that.
Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and nun who was no stranger to
worldly upheaval, put it this way: “Christ has no hands but our hands. No feet but our feet.” We
live as if we really believed that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, here, now, within us, among
us, by being and bringing that kingdom to one another. When God promises to comfort those
who mourn, he sends our hands and feet and arms and lips and hearts to do it. When God
promises to bring good news to the poor, sight to the blind, and release to the captive, he sends
us to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and to work to bring it about. When Jesus talks
about the signs and wonders that herald the end of the world, he is sending us to perform those
signs and wonders.
How is that possible? Again, don’t make the mistake of thinking too big. I submit that
every act of kindness between strangers or friends is a small miracle, a sign, and a wonder. Every
opportunity was taken to turn aside from anger, to speak out against injustice, to feed someone who’s
hungry or befriend someone who’s lonely – that is making the kingdom of heaven manifest in
this world.
Friends, the good news is that the end of the world as we know it isn’t always bad news.
The world as we know it is full of strife, violence, injustice, mourning, and pain. But little by
little, kindness by kindness, prophetic act by prophetic act, we can together end that world, at
least for today, for somebody, somewhere.
I had a vision when I was thirty, the first time I went to a church on Ash Wednesday that
practiced the imposition of ashes. It was at the Metropolitan Community Church in Minneapolis,
and Wednesday night services were never a dressy occasion – people came in jeans, t-shirts,
flannels, and boots. I was one of the last to go up. After the mark of the cross had been smudged
on my forehead, I turned to go back to my pew and there it was – a room full of very ordinary
people in very ordinary clothes, all marked with that precious and holy sign of sacrifice and
compassion and mercy and love. And I got it. We are all marked with that sign every single day
– not just once a year forty days before Easter.
Jesus is here with us always, in our very ordinariness, right where we are. And we are
called to be Jesus to one another – to be the hands and feet and eyes and ears and arms and hearts
that herald and make manifest the glorious peace, justice, and community of the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of heaven is at hand, here, now, within us, among us. Let us go forth and live as
though we understood that, knew it, and believed it. Amen.
Bobbi Dykema is currently serving as pastor at First Church of the Brethren in Springfield, Illinois. She is also on the pastoral team of the Living Stream online Church of the Brethren and serves on the steering committee of the Womaen’s Caucus. Bobbi is passionate about racial and gender justice, beauty and the arts, and reading scripture as a living document.
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