The Burr in the Burbs

Below is the homily I preached this morning in Kramer Chapel at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, IN.  I think I overdid it a bit with the references, quotes and illustrations.  As the dean said afterward, “well that was a post-modern romp.” 

Text: Malachi 4: 1-6

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

You may have recognized that quote from an episode of Mad Men, but it originates from a 1925 poem by T.S. Eliot called “The Hollow Men.”   What does he mean the world will end not with a bang but a whimper.  1925 is too early for there to be fear of nuclear holocaust.  One literary critic – I don’t remember whom off the top of my head – but someone opined that Eliot’s ending is hopeful.  That the whimper is the sound of a cooing newborn baby.

I’ll tell you what I think it means.  I had a parishoner named Dino.  Dino was a swarthy Mexican American man who worked hard at his white-collar job in Pittsburgh, who loved his family, and was, on occasion really nice to his pastor.  Dino’s family were in charge of the annual Easter morning breakfast.  It was the usual watery scrambled eggs with papery thin strips of bacon.  But not for me.  For me, Dino mixed in homemade salsa with the eggs and put a generous side of chorizo sausage next to them.  Dino was a terrific guy.  He fought in the Vietnam war.  To his wife and kids, to me, and to everyone who knew him, Dino was heroic.

One gorgeous afternoon in late Spring, right around Easter, Dino and his wife were at the Home Depot loading up on topsoil and other garden supplies.  As they were loading their trunk, his wife, Linda, remembered that she’d seen some African Violets by the counter and hustled back inside to grab a few pots.  When she came back to their car, Dino was lying on the pavement, turning blue, and very dead.

My friend, Dino, should have gone in a blaze of glory, but instead he collapsed alone in a parking lot holding a fifty-pound bag of manure.

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but with a whimper.

One perennial theme for popular American movies is about the end of the world.  People just love this stuff.  Two new ones that are getting lots of attention right now are 2012, based on a New Agey look at ancient Mayan calendars.

The other big film stars Viggo Mortensen and it’s called “The Road.”  I expect it will be a very bleak film based on the very bleak novel by the very bleak writer Cormac McCarthy.  But the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 2006, so it’s not trivial.  And McCarthy’s book, “No Country for Old Men,” was made into a film that won the Oscar for best picture of the year and it is infused with a sort of nihilism that even makes nihilists want to go look at photographs of soft fuzzy kittens to recover.

A reviewer writing for Entertainment Weekly said:  “Here’s a tip: If you see one austerely hopeless movie this year about a father and son wandering through a junk-strewn post-apocalyptic wilderness as they struggle to fight 
off demons of fear, madness, and starvation, not to mention roving bands of cannibalistic killers, then by all means make that movie The Road.”

Sometimes the end of man is by caused climate change, global warming and deforestation of the polar icecaps of some such.  Other times, the end is the result of a plague or a natural disaster.  The real end will come about as, to use the terminology of the insurance companies, “an act of God.”

For there is a day coming… A specific day, a day as real and certain as today, when God will punish the wicked and reward the righteous.

Woody Allen once said, “I’m not afraid to die.  I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”  The latest news flash from the great scientific geniuses of our time is this: Everybody dies.  You, like me, are on a time limit.  Sorry Woody, but you probably will be present at your own death.  You can’t phone in well that day.  You can’t evade the angel by traveling incognito.

And likewise, you will be present at your own death.  And it will happen, EITHER with a bang or a whimper.

Here’s a hymn verse that some of your parishoners know by heart:

Christ, whose glory fills the skies,
Christ, the true, the only light,
Sun of Righteousness, arise,
triumph o’er the shades of night.

But here’s a line from another song that many of your parishoners ALSO know by heart: It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. It’s from the pop song by REM. Many will say, it’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.  It concerns me little.  Death concerns me little.  And that that is the case, should concern you much.

No preacher worth his salt enjoys preaching about God’s anger.  God does not delight in the death of the wicked.  Malachi had a most unenviable call.  It stinks to be the bearer of bad news but you do no one any favors by avoiding it.

But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts.

Jesus Christ is the sun of righteousness who brings healing in his wings.

The phrase that pokes me in the eye when I read this text is the line, “you shall leap like calves.”  When God’s prophet was trying to think of the most dramatic way to depict the joy of the righteous on the Day of the Lord, what came to mind was the jubilance of baby animals.

In 1949, C.S. Lewis wrote to Owen Barfield: “when you study any animal you know, what at once strikes you is their cheerful fatuity, the pointlessness of nearly all they do. Say what you like, Barfield, the world is sillier and better fun than they make out…”

The unofficial motto of the United States Marine Corps is “No better friend, no worse enemy.”  And I have often considered how well that motto applies to God.  You have indeed been made friends of God.  We talk about the Great Exchange which took place upon the cross, where an innocent man paid the penalty for the sin of the world, but the righteousness of Christ was exchanged for the wickedness of man.  When you gaze upon the form of Jesus dying, know that there hung the most perverted fornicator, the most pathological liar, the greediest scoundrel the world has ever known.  It had to be that way.  He who knew no sin became sin for us.  If the accounting of God’s righteousness to men is to be something more than a mere legal fiction or a turn of phrase, then the promise of resurrection and glorification must be included in the Judge’s pardon.  We are not merely declared innocent.  We become innocence itself.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.