How Long Must We Wait?
In the myth of Apollo slaying Python, ancient Rome saw itself as Apollo. Apollo was the god of light and order and Python the serpent of darkness, confusion, and evil. But in the Book of Revelation John reverses this, so that the Roman empire is not Apollo but Python. It is now empire itself that is the serpent threatening to plunge the whole world into chaos. Not only does John portray empire as the evil serpent, the very incarnation of Satan, but also as the alluring and seductive “great whore,” Babylon” the great city ruling over the lesser kingdoms of the earth––symbolizing not only Rome itself but the whole idea of empire. She is dressed in expensive clothes and jewelry suggesting that the seductive secret of her beauty is in her wealth and power. Marcus Borg found this understanding of empire further substantiated by an early Christian acrostic. In Latin this early Christian acrostic reads, Radix omnium malorum avaritia: “Avarice (or greed) is the root of all evil.” Empire itself, Borg notes, is the embodiment of greed. The lust for power, control, and wealth is the driving force of every domination system––of every empire.

Here is something else we find in the Book of Revelation about living in an apocalyptic age. Millennium after millennium we hear the people of God praying desperately, crying out for release from injustice, suffering, and violence, “O’ God, How long? How long, O’ Lord, before you judge? How long before there is justice?” Eugene Peterson in his excellent book, Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying imagination, writes:

How long? Martyred souls are told to wait a little longer “until the number of their fellow servants and brothers and sisters is complete” (Revelation 6:11). The combination, added instances of injustice accompanied by further delay, is salt, not balm. But surely this has gone on long enough? Surely, after all these centuries it’s time to call a halt to the whole rotten business, call the perpetrators of these cruelties on the carpet and wipe the condescending smiles off their faces with a once-for-all judgment. It is disconcerting that there is no biblically straight answer to the question, “How long?”

Yet, as Peterson goes on to say, millions of Christians continue to believe in God’s judgement. What I think I would argue is that God’s judgement has both come and is to come. That is, even while the man or woman of Christian faith waits and cries out for vindication, the judgement is already taking place here and now, for the misery, the greed and the violence are themselves, as consequences, divine judgment.

Waiting in Apocalyptic America
America has never, in spite of its self-fabricated mythology, been a peaceful nation, but its propensity for wars of aggression, culture of violence and its justification of cruelty seems to grow exponentially. Even our language grows more blatantly aggressive, adversarial, and violent all the time. I frequently receive emails from liberal organizations asking my help in smashing, destroying,  annihilating or kicking some conservative politician to the curb. And although my Christian beliefs have given me quite a liberal political perspective, I am turned off by aggressive, crude and abusive language from the ideological left just as much as I am as when it comes from the right. It’s not that I am shocked by such language or have never used it myself, but that every obscene or curse word (whatever you want to call it) is meant, at least when used in anger or frustration, to strike a painful and damaging blow. But my perturbance over the defining down of language is causing me to digress. What I want to emphasize is that regardless of what Americans may say to the contrary, the reality of the day is that they reverence the dark lord of avarice, hatred, and violence more than the Prince of Peace. They are always worried they aren’t going to get theirs, or that something is going to be taken away from them.

Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner writes of our distorted values in relation to the coronavirus pandemic like this:

Donald Trump is suggesting that we should rescind efforts at coronavirus suppression in order to “save” the economy, while Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas calls on patriotic grandparents to sacrifice themselves to drive up the Dow.There’s another name for the daring plan now being promoted by the right: It’s called “doing nothing.” It’s called letting the disaster play out, or allowing the disease to run its course, or simply permitting the wildfire to burn unchecked. But the problem is that when it’s done, what they get would not be a nation going “back to normal.” It would be ashes. Any call for allowing the nation to move forward without every possible effort to restrict the spread of COVID-19 is profoundly foolish. For those who value their stock portfolio over their friends and relatives, it may seem like an obvious solution: Just pretend the disease isn’t there, send everyone back to work, and let God (and Adam Smith) work it out. But it won’t work. Because it can’t.

What should be obvious to anyone born before 1950 is that America has lost its soul, making the apocalyptic age we appear to entered and its continued deepening perhaps inevitable and, at least in the near future, probably irreversible.

• Terror is ubiquitous in our culture. A fourteen-year-old girl walking to her school in Clive Iowa was struck by a car driven by Nicole Poole Franklin who drove up over the curb in an attempt to kill the young teenager because she looked Mexican. Poole Franklin had already deliberately run into a twelve-year-old boy walking down another sidewalk because he was black. Or you may have seen the story of Tyshawn Lee. Tyshawn was a nine-year-old boy sitting on a swing in a park just down the street from his grandmother’s house when a man came up and began talking pleasantly to him, dribbled Tyshawn’s basketball, and offered to buy him a snack. Instead of buying him a snack he led him into an alley where without compunction or compassion he shot him to death. When Tyshawn raised his right hand (the hand of an innocent) in a futile attempt to ward off the bullets part of his thumb was blown off. Tyshawn was one more casualty of the continuing tragedy of gang violence.

•The slaughter of children has become common place. And the bizarre reality is that no one is safe from lunatic gunmen –– not a baby sleeping in her bed, not a couple out for dinner and a movie, not someone shopping in a supermarket, not a college student in the library or classroom or a kindergartner playing at recess, not the man or woman working in an office or shop or casually driving their car, not someone on a secure stateside military base, not even someone worshipping in a church. We are a nation sick unto death, and the disease wasting us is violence.

•In this catalog of hate and carnage we must note the awful plague of domestic violence. It would seem somehow sacrilegious to me to forget little fifteen-month-old Evelyn Boswell whose body, after over two weeks of searching by authorities, was found in an outhouse on family property. More than one in three women and more than one in four men in the U.S. report having experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. In 2017, there were approximately 674,000 maltreated children substantiated in the United States, a rate of 9 per thousand. Note that these data reflect states’ definitions of what constitutes maltreatment; these definitions vary across states and may change over time. But also note this, there is no abuse of any kind that is inconsequential or that is not damaging to the human spirit.
• The cruelty of economic violence continues its relentless expansion. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us into an unprecedented national emergency. It is, however, an emergency resulting from the deeper and much longer term crisis of poverty and inequality, and of a society that ignores the needs of 140 million people. One percent of the U.S. population holds more wealth than the entire middle class. They owned 29% or over $25 trillion—of household wealth in 2016, while the middle class owned just $18 trillion. Only 20% of the population has actually recovered since the great recession. Three people –– Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet –– own as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population, or 160,000,000 people. This would be no problem of course if those at the bottom had sufficient food, shelter, and health care. But that is not the case. The people who will suffer most as a result of the current pandemic, and every pandemic hereafter, will be the poor.

According to the USDA, more than 41 million Americans face hunger, including nearly 13 million children. Meanwhile, Republicans work tirelessly to eliminate school lunches and food stamps. As of 2018 there were around 553,000 homeless people in the United States on any given night. Many of them are preschool and school age children living out of cars with single mothers. HUD has advanced a plan, and there is no reason at this time to think it will not go forward, that, although aimed at hurting immigrants, will displace 55,000 children in the U.S. legally. The new rules are expected to drive 25,000 families out of the program. Families in our tri-city area of Oceanside, Carlsbad and Vista earning minimum wage can pay everything they earn to rent an apartment and still be considerably short the full rent amount, and that before they have purchased food, clothing, gas or transportation, much less health care. Speaking of health care, if someone walks into an emergency room on their own, as opposed to being brought in an ambulance, and they cannot demonstrate how they will pay the bill, they can be told to leave even though they may be dead before they can make it back out the door. About forty-four million Americans have no health insurance, and eight out of ten of these are workers or their dependents. Another thirty-eight million have inadequate health insurance.

• Military violence is one of the most characteristic features of American life. Since the time of European colonization white America has been almost continuously at war––and some think the word “almost” could be eliminated here. The United States is currently waging war, death and destruction, in seven countries. The next time you read about a school bus full of little children being bombed in Yemen, put on a red cap and say: “My! Ain’t America great!” Because it is your bombs that will have ripped and burned them beyond recognition. The U.S. has Special Operation Forces in 134 countries, either involved in combat, special missions, or advising and training foreign forces. The U.S. supports with military aid, advice, training and troops on the ground some of the cruelest and most murderous regimes in the world –– including Israel and Saudi Arabia. Gina Cheri Haspel, a woman with first-hand experience inflicting torture is now head of the Central Intelligence Agency –– her cruelty and barbarism rewarded with power. Those guilty of war crimes, of crimes against humanity, are seldom held accountable. And if they are found guilty in a military court they are likely to receive a presidential pardon –– as did Edward Gallagher whose own platoon members described as psychopathic and “freaking evil.” How hypocritical to imagine that we are not in the same class as the Gestapo and KGB.

• When we talk about climate change, or pollution, what we are really talking about is human violence against the Earth and its living creatures––the death of humanity by suicide. Disasters attributable to climate change have forced one person every two seconds from their home every year for the last decade, that’s 20 million people. People are now seven times more likely to be displaced by floods, wildfires, and cyclones than by volcanos and earthquakes, and three times more likely than by war. As always it is the poorest people in the poorest countries who suffer the most. Some eighty percent of those displaced over the last two decades were in Asia. American fundamentalists (My omission of the word Christian is quite intentional) ignorantly believe the billionaires when they brazenly declare there is no problem. There is no problem for them because they will never breathe the same foul air you breath or drink the same contaminated water. What the billionaires know is that if the whole earth is on fire they will suffer least and last.

If you were born in 1970 in North America, more than one in four wild birds in the U.S. and Canada has disappeared within your lifetime. According to research published online in September by the journal Science, bird populations in the continental U.S. and Canada have declined by almost 30% since 1970. Like the wild bird populations there is a frightening global bees-decline. The main reasons for the demise of both birds and bees are climate change, pesticides, industrial agriculture, and destruction of habitat. As I write we are in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. It is too involved to go into here, but the etiology of the coronavirus seems traceable back to the stress placed on bats by the destruction of their habitat and the wet animal market of Wuhan. In short, while we may blame the bats it is all connected to human destruction of the world’s natural environment––specifically deforestation and the treatment of animals.

In the drive hunt of Taiji Japan dolphins are driven into a small bay where they can be easily captured or slaughtered. There are other coastal communities in Japan and around the world where dolphin drive hunting takes place, but no-where does it occur on the same scale as it does in Taiji. You can witness the hunt and its gory methods for yourself in the 2009 documentary film The Cove. However, if you are bothered by gruesome cruelty I would not suggest watching it. My point here is that whether people hold the Bible in high or low esteem there is at least one thing that cannot be denied –– something is terribly awry in us that we have such little regard for the sanctity of life, human or creaturely, other than our own. But for Christians, who are specifically invited to reverence life, such callousness of soul contradicts everything they are called to be.

Those Who See, See and Those Who Don’t, Don’t
We could continue on to talk of apocalyptic America, of the violence of a legal system rigged at every level against the poor and minorities; of the for-profit prisons with their vested interest in seeing masses of men and women incarcerated for relatively minor violations. Or, we could look at the money that has been made in the inhuman confinement of desperate men, women, and children at our border. But there just is not space enough for that. Nor is it possible to examine here the horrors of human trafficking or involuntary servitude either in the sex market, service industries, or in agricultural labor. These and other topics like: the tragedy of racism, police brutality, or the overt corruption in government at every level can be, and frequently are, addressed as entire articles on their own. But there is really no need to go on. Those who see it, see. Those who don’t, don’t––or won’t.

For Now
So for now we wait. But for the believer it is a special kind of waiting. It is waiting in the presence and reality of the Holy Trinity––the unfathomable mystery of God. It is waiting in faith, hope, and love. It is waiting in the spiritual reality that already is, but is not yet. It is a waiting sustained by worship, by prayer, and by the daily practice of justice. I’ll say more about this in my next post: Practicing the Politics of Jesus in an Apocalyptic Age.

Dark Cloud Rising
In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in his trilogy, Gandalf comes to visit Frodo in his comfortable and homey Hobbit hole. Gandalf has come because he is deeply troubled about the rise of the Dark Lord in Mordor and the threat that poses for all Middle Earth. But he does not at first reveal the weight of his concern to Frodo. They sit up late into the night talking in general about human interest news of the wider world. But in the morning after a late breakfast, sitting in the study, smoking their pipes by the warm flickering flames of the fireplace, Gandalf the Wise reveals to Frodo the nature, history, and cruel power of the ring Frodo now possesses, but which may come to possess him; and, how the malevolent shadow of the Dark Lord who forged it in the hellish fires of the Mountain of Doom, grows larger and stronger all the time.

Frodo sat silent and motionless. Fear seemed to stretch out a vast hand, like a dark cloud rising in the East and looming up to engulf him. . . . “I wish it had not happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. And already, Frodo, our time is beginning to look black. The enemy is fast becoming very strong. His plans are far from ripe but they are ripening. We shall be hard put to it.

Tolkien’s Gandalf is, of course, entirely correct, and wise, in observing that all who live in dangerous times, menaced by disease, pestilence, violence, or chaos wish that “it had not happened in their time, but that is not a decision left in our hands. All that we have to decided is what to do with the time that has been given us.” One of the things I find so compelling about Tolkien’s trilogy is the utter realism with which his fantasy is written. It never dismisses or denies the depths to which the horror of real evil extends; yet, in doing so it never loses sight of the power of simple humility, kindness, and, in spite of creaturely frailty, fidelity to the good.

Tolkien was a devout Christian, a Roman Catholic, who was obviously familiar with Scriptures like 2 Timothy 3:1-5.

But mark this: There will be perilous times in the last days.
People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power (2 Timothy: 3 1-5A).

When Paul writes to Timothy about the “last days” he doesn’t mean the last three days, or the last week, month, year, or ten years before the world ends in a catastrophic conflagration beyond human imagination, but not beyond fear––the cosmos collapsing into that point of infinite density the physicists talk about, “the universe,” as Isaiah the Prophet imagined it, “rolled up like a scroll.” No, the last days biblically are all the days since the crucifixion of Christ that the Earth has and will revolve around the sun. The “last days” are the epoch in which we now live, and the time of whose end no one knows. Paul is simply saying that in this final era of human history there will be times or periods that are especially perilous and treacherous. There is no denial here, and no hiding behind sophisticated words like “existential threat.” Paul is concerned with that devouring evil with its rapacious appetite for souls––or whatever you want to call our human essence. The Greek term Paul uses for “perilous” or “dangerous” pictures the risk a traveler suddenly encountering a ferocious lion has of being torn to pieces and eaten. He wants Timothy to prepare his catechumenates for times of the dark shadow’s rising, and to train every pilgrim setting out on the Way what to do in those times and circumstances when it feels like everything is about to be engulfed by the dark.

Living in an “Apocalyptic” Age
Sometimes it feels like we are living in an apocalyptic age. What it feels like to live in times of crisis, chaos, danger, and peril was described by the Ipuwer Admonitions nearly 4,000 years ago. The Ipuwer Papyrus, probably written between 1850 and 1600 B.C., is a poetic description of Egypt in a time of crisis and multiple disasters. While it most certainly is not referring to the biblical exodus The Admonitions parallel the story of the plagues at several points. But it is metaphorical, apocalyptic language, describing Egypt in a time of utter chaos and ruin. People are thirsty and desperate for water to drink, but the river has turned to blood. There is famine, and even the aristocracy and their officials have nothing to eat. The fields are barren of grass, crops and trees. The stench of death is everywhere. There are so many dead bodies that they can’t be properly buried, and so are thrown into the river and streams where they are eaten by crocodiles. Travelers on the roads are robbed and murdered. Farmers carry shields to defend themselves from attack by thieves and marauders. Lawlessness is rampant and thievery blatant.

The Seven Bowels of Disaster
Of course, nothing captures the apocalyptic sense and feel like the sixteenth chapter of Revelation. Here is an excerpt and paraphrase using Peterson’s version:

I heard a shout of command from the Temple to the Seven Angels: “Begin! Pour out the seven bowls of divine disaster on earth!”
The first Angel stepped up and poured his bowl out on earth: Loathsome, stinking sores erupted on all who had taken the mark of the Beast and worshiped its image.
The second Angel poured his bowl on the sea: The sea coagulated into blood, and everything in it died.
The third Angel poured his bowl on rivers and springs: The waters turned to blood.
The fourth Angel poured his bowl on the sun: Fire blazed from the sun and scorched men and women. Burned and blistered, they cursed God’s Name. They refused to repent, refused to honor God.
The fifth Angel poured his bowl on the throne of the Beast: Its kingdom fell into sudden eclipse. Mad with pain, men and women bit and chewed their tongues, cursed the God-of-Heaven for their torment and sores, and refused to repent and change their ways.
The sixth Angel poured his bowl on the great Euphrates River: It dried up to nothing. The dry riverbed became a fine roadbed for the kings from the East.
The seventh Angel poured his bowl into the air: There were lightning flashes and shouts, thunder crashes and a colossal earthquake—a huge and devastating earthquake. The cities of the nations toppled to ruin. Hailstones weighing a ton plummeted, crushing and smashing men and women as they cursed God for the hail, the epic disaster of hail.
                                                                     (Excerpted from Revelation 16 MSG)

Perilous Times
I don’t know what all the poetic language of the Bible means when it talks about eschatology––that’s the intellectually sophisticated word for the study of “last things.” I certainly believe that the world will end. Even an atheistic naturalist believes that. But I don’t know whether every man, woman, and child in the world may be disappeared by some virus more insidious and lethal than the corona virus. I do not know whether it will simply whimper slowly to an end as the human race stupidly destroys earth’s atmosphere and entire eco system until there is nothing but ash and burning dust over the entire planet; or whether a few lunatic or senile old men will incinerate the whole planet with poisonous nuclear fire; or whether an asteroid sixty miles wide will collide with the earth some Tuesday morning while you are working out your future retirement and your kid is applying for college and your best friend from middle school is writing what, if it were not for that asteroid, is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel; or whether it gets sucked into a planet eating blackhole or the whole universe collapses into an infinitesimal dot. What I do know is that it will all end, and that there will be times before it ends that feel like Mordor rising, like bowels of disease, violence, and madness have been poured out on the earth. “But mark this: There will be perilous times in the last days.”

How Then Shall We Live
There are also at least two other things that I know from Scripture as well as from my own spiritual experience and that of the Christian sages, saints, martyrs, and mystics through the centuries: The first is that the only way to live in an apocalyptic time is with unreserved, unrestricted trust in “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.” Isaiah the Prophet who was brutally executed in a time of crisis wrote, “In quiet and trust is my strength.” There are certain things that are mutually exclusive. You cannot trust and be afraid at the same time. The second is that whether our time is easy and one of security or one of danger and peril and toxic madness our task remains the same––to devote ourselves to the fulfilling of God’s will on earth as it is done in heaven––to consecrate ourselves to the Way of love, of joy and peace. As with trust so with love, you cannot be loving and afraid at the same time. Love is the meaning of our existence.

And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
William Blake

Meanwhile
I am thinking about another post or two on Living in an Apocalyptic Age––perhaps one on The Politics of Jesus in an Apocalyptic Age. Meanwhile, if it is not too presumptuous of me, I would suggest reading a booklet I wrote a number of years ago, A Little Book of Sanity: Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety, Lawrence D. Hart. It is a print on demand book that can only be ordered by going to Blurb.com. But mainly remember that in these times simplicity is your friend, and the question to ask, although not easy, is utterly simple: “What am I to do with the time I have been given?”