THE FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT

IN THE END, OUR BEGINNING

November 15, 1998
John M. Buchanan

Death was possible. I thought we’d be lucky if we didn’t lose
one or two... .I have since been asked why I did it. I did it
because it was important for our country... . While I wasn’t
rushing to leave this life any more than anyone else, I have
always felt that it is more important how you live your life than
how long you live.”

John Glenn

Presbyterian Elder, U.S. Senator

Astronaut, Space Shuttle Discovery

Reflecting on his first

Project Mercury orbital flight,

February 20, 1962

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

IN THE END, OUR BEGINNING
NOVEMBER 15, 1998
JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Psalm 149
Luke 21:5-19
“,.. the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another.” Luke 21:6

Dear God, Sometimes the future seems so uncertain, so frightening—for the world
and for ourselves—that we look for a safe place to hide. Find us in those places, O
God, and help us to see the whole picture of your sovereign will at work. And give
us faith to trust and to invest our lives in the work you have for us to do. Startle us
with your truth and open our minds and our souls to your word of love and hope
on Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

What you believe about the future, how things are going to turn out for the world and for
yourself, has a great deal to do with how you live your life in the present.

Near the beginning of Arthur Miller’s powerful drama, The Death of a Salesman, written
fifty years ago and recently presented magnificently by The Goodman Theater, Willie
Loman’s adult sons have come home and are in their old bedroom reminiscing and talking
about the good old days when they were boys together, and then their talk turns to the
future—not nearly as pleasant as the past. The younger of the two, Happy, has a job, is
trying to get ahead, and is as hopelessly optimistic as his father. The elder son, Biff, has not
done so well and has chosen a counter culture life working as a ranch hand in the west. He
says:

“T’ll tell you, Hap, I don’t know what the future is. I don’t know what I’m supposed
to want.” .. .“To devote your whole life to keeping stock or making phone calls. To
suffer fifty weeks a year for a two-week vacation. And always to have to get ahead of
the next fella. And still, that’s how you build a future.”

His younger brother, Happy, responds:

“All I can do now is wait for the merchandise manager to die. And suppose I get to
be merchandise manager? I don’t know what the hell I’m working for. Sometimes I
sit in my apartment all alone. And I think of the rent I’m paying. And it’s crazy.
And still, I’m lonely.”

As the play unfolds, the future begins to loom ominously, threateningly. Willie Loman, the
quintessential salesman, is not going to realize his dreams of financial success, security, and
prestige. It’s all bluster and hype, a game of self-deception which everyone understands—
his wife, his sons, his friend. He can’t pay his bills, finally loses his job, his dignity, his
purpose, and begins to invest what hope he has left in his own death. He imagines all the
people who will come to his funeral.

“That funeral will be massive. They’ll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont,
New Hampshire. And all the old-timers with the strange license plates. That boy
will be thunderstruck, Ben, because he never realized. I’m known, Ben.”

And, of course, when it happens, only his family is there.

When the play ended, on the night I was privileged to see it, an interesting thing happened.
Most of the audience was in tears. So was the cast. The applause was strong and sustained,
and even when the final curtain fell, most of the audience remained seated for a few more
minutes and took what seemed to me a long time to exit the theater.

It was almost as if everyone understood that we had not only shared an important artistic
experience, but something else as well. We had, I believe, just experienced an encounter
with what theologians and philosophers have always known is the fundamental human
question, “Is there any hope—for the world and for me?”

How you view the future, the world’s and your own personal destiny, has a lot to do with
how you live your life. How you view the future has a lot to do with your soul, your
spirituality, that interior place inside each one of us where we decide what the purpose of
our lives is and then commit ourselves to it. Philosophers and poets have always paid a lot
of attention to this topic.

One of T.S. Eliot’s most distinguished poems, “East Coker,” begins:
“In my beginning is my end”

and concludes:
“In my end is my beginning.”

Macbeth, on the other hand:

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time....
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.”

French existentialist Albert Camus said that a lot simpler and shorter, “Men die and they
are not happy.”

So, religion has always paid close attention to the basic question. There is a word for it. It
is called, “eschatology,” the study of last things, the end times, the summation of the whole
project.

One of my favorite Bible scholars, Walter Brueggemann, warns that, “all this talk in the
Bible about the end-time is intellectually difficult and pastorally problematic. End-time
talk, which permeates the New Testament, is deeply incongruous with our intellectual
world. Besides, none of us wants to sound like a religious crazy.”

That’s who seems to fasten onto eschatology—the poor souls who know what day and time
the world is going to come to an end and who seem to long for it. My grandmother lived
into her nineties, and the older she became, the more she drifted from her sane
Presbyterianism, and spent her time reading her Bible and listening to radio preachers who
told her the end was near, in between asking her for a great deal of her money. In a way I
could never understand, the imminent return of Jesus and the end of the world seemed to
be good news to her. I, on the other hand, had things to do, places to see. Like theologian
Lewis Smedes, who when told that Jesus was coming again to take the faithful to heaven,
prayed that Jesus would hold off until the Detroit Tigers won a World Series, I had set my
personal aspirations on the Pittsburgh Pirates, and when they actually did it in October of
1960, I half expected the world to come to an end. Imagine the eschatological implications
of those of us who, in these latter days, are willing to invest our hope, year after year, in the
Chicago Cubs.

Our texts this morning are examples of Biblical eschatology, the end of things. Isaiah’s
prophecy was addressed to a community of people who had lived for a generation in
another country as captives, exiles. In fact, the people who read this poem were born in
Babylon. They had never seen Jerusalem. All they knew was what they heard about

Mt. Zion, the stunning temple, the marble and gold, the shops, the streets, the houses. Now
they had returned, and it was nothing like what they had been told. It was all rubble. The
shops were all gone, empty for decades. The wind whistled down dreary and empty streets,
the Temple was leveled, burned, desecrated, and destroyed.

I thought of those returning exiles and Isaiah’s prophecy when we traveled in Croatia two
years ago, representing the Presbyterian Church (USA). We visited UN Command
Headquarters in Vukovar, a lovely, old Croatian city just beginning to be reoccupied by
returning Croatians, and we saw the heartbreak and the tears as people came home to utter
devastation. Their schools, hospitals, public buildings, libraries, churches, the soul of the
community, had been deliberately destroyed—devastated.

That is the situation to which the prophet writes:

“For Iam about to create a

new heaven

and a new earth....

I am about to create Jerusalem

as a joy

no more shall the sound of

weeping be heard in it.

No more shall there be an infant that lives a few days
or an old person who does not live out a life time.
They shall build houses and inhabit them.

They shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.”

And the words of a prophet to a discouraged and frightened people were heard, and in spite
of the enormous gap between their expectations and the reality, a few visionary people,
people of hope and courage, raised their heads and saw God’s powerful hand at work
creating something new—a new future, a new hope, a new world, and they rolled up their
sleeves and went to work to build that new world, that new future.

In the Gospel lesson, five centuries after Isaiah, Jesus predicts the destruction of Jerusalem
again, including the unthinkable prediction that the Temple, the same one his ancestors
lovingly and carefully rebuilt, would again be destroyed. The people who read Luke’s
words again are living in the midst of enormous tragedy and destruction. In 70 AD, a few
years before Luke wrote his gospel, the Romans finally wearied of the persistent
rebelliousness of their Jewish subjects, laid siege to Jerusalem, leveled the Temple, and
dispersed all its habitants. Christians were hunted down, arrested, tortured, executed. But
Jesus, Luke reports, had said, “You will be hated because of my name. But not a hair of
your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

What does it mean to think like that when your world is falling down around you? What
does it mean to have hope when things look hopeless?

Nothing that has happened in history has ever challenged the conviction that there is a good
and sovereign God who is somehow in control of the whole enterprise more strenuously
than the Holocaust. And no one has ever struggled with the theological implications more
honestly and publicly than the brilliant Jewish author, Elie Wiesel, who survived
Auschwitz, but witnessed the death there of his own father, family, and friends. Wiesel,
over the years, in novels and essays, has expressed eloquently and passionately his doubts
about God’s goodness and mercy, about God’s compassion, about God’s existence in any
meaningful way; expressed his anger and rage at God, at his people for believing in God.

But this year, at Rosh Hashanah, he wrote, “A Prayer for the Days of Awe.” Let me read
part of it for you.

“Master of the Universe, let us make up. It is time. How long can we go on being
angry?

More than fifty years have passed since the nightmare was lifted. Many things good
and less good have happened to those who survived it. They learned to build on
ruins. Family life was re-created. Children were born, friendships struck. They
learned to have faith in their surroundings, even in their fellow men and women.
Gratitude has replaced bitterness in their hearts. No one is as capable of
thankfulness as they are. Thankful to anyone willing to hear their tales and become
their ally in the battle against apathy and forgetfulness. For them every moment is
grace.”

Even in the death camps, prayers were said, hymns were sung, faith in God was affirmed;
and even there, even in the darkest valley of the shadow of death, hope lived.

The basic message of the Bible is that no matter what is happening, no matter how bad
things look, surrounded by your enemies, overcome by suffering, facing death itself, God
the Creator is still God, God is on the side of life and justice and goodness, and because of

that, there is a better day coming. Jerusalem will be rebuilt. There will be a new heaven
and a new earth.

The message of the Bible is that God is not bent on destroying the world in one final, fiery
holocaust, but that God loves the world and has a purpose for the world and for each of us
in it and is at work in history and in our personal lives to bring about that purpose of peace
and justice and kindness and compassion. The message of the Bible is that God’s sovereign
will is never ultimately destroyed, regardless of bad things that are going on for the world or
for us personally.

People who believe that become people of hope and courage; people who do not give up;
people who persist in working for peace when there seems to be no reason; people who will
not stop hoping and working for a safer world for our children, for fewer guns, for better
schools, for more and better health care, for an economic system which extends its bounty
and incredible opportunity to everyone, not just those of us who were born into it.

People of hope will be discouraged on occasion, but not paralyzed by depression; will hear
God’s promise and never stop working for a church that is faithful and just and
compassionate and as inclusive as its Lord,

People of hope change the world because they know that regardless of how things look
now, God is ultimately in charge, and the end is God’s kingdom of justice and kindness and
mercy and love.

In her book, Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris has an essay on eschatology in which she
explains the focus on the end of things, but also her experience that what we Christians
believe about the end causes us to live lives of strong hope now. And she illustrates by
telling about a friend, a brilliant scholar, stricken with cancer, over a period of several years
of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, who almost died three times. Then, suddenly, the
cancer went into remission. Her future is uncertain, to say the least, but she has returned to
teaching and writing and, incredibly, she said, “I’d never want to go back because I know
what each morning means and I’m so grateful just to be alive. We’ve been through so much
together. And hasn’t it been a blessing!”

Norris concludes, “That’s eschatology.”

Kathleen Norris’ essay reminded me of a reunion I had recently with one of my oldest
friends, in fact the only other Presbyterian in my Divinity School class. His name is Gary
Hickok. He and Mary Jo had their children about the same time we did. We studied and
learned together, were called to small Presbyterian churches after graduation, he in
Southern [linois, from which he called me one night in the early sixties to ask me to go
with him to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to participate in a Civil Rights march. It cost $100,
and I couldn’t go with him. I didn’t have the money. But he went and was arrested, and
the good folks in that Southern Illinois town took a very dim view of the whole thing, so he
moved shortly afterward, and before I knew it he was a manager for Carson-Pirie-Scott and
then a very successful mortgage banker. A year ago, he started to get dizzy and have
headaches, and the doctor told him he had a brain tumor that had to come out. We talked
on the phone, and he told me that the operation would be very complicated and that there

was a fair amount of risk, and we laughed about our education and churches and
Hattiesburg and the fact that maybe not having $100 saved me from a career as a banker.

During the surgery, the worst happened. In the process of removing a very complicated
tumor, arteries and nerves around his eye were severed and, as the surgeons worked to try
to correct the situation, Gary had a stroke. The very difficult surgery lasted 32 hours. He
awoke without sight in one eye, very limited sight in the other, and paralyzed on his left
side.

He told me he had never known before what the valley of the shadow of death was like. A
strong, upbeat, resilient man, he sunk into the depth of depression. Confined to bed and the
wheel chair, unable to take care of himself, and without much prospect of improvement, he
stopped trying, even thought about ending it all. And then one day, at the worst time, his
seven-year-old grandson came to visit him at the hospital. Gary didn’t much want to see
anyone, but finally consented.

His grandson came into the hospital room, looked at him, and said, impatiently, “Grandpa,
are you ever gonna get up out of that wheel chair?” And Gary told me that, somehow from
someplace deep inside, he was able to say, “Yes, Mike, by God, I am going to get out of this
wheel chair.”

And, as Gary ever-so-slowly got up out of the chair in which he was sitting and limped
across the room to show me, I thought, “That’s eschatology.”

I remembered something I had read a long time ago. The great theologian, Karl Barth, said,
“Hope takes place in the act of taking the next step.”

We believe in God who is sovereign and who works in history and in our own lives to bring
us to our destiny.

We believe in God’s son, Jesus Christ, who experienced the worst life could be, and died
our death, and rose again to free us from fear and to live lives of courage and hope.

We believe, as the poet put it, that “Our beginning is our end,” and, “our end is our
beginning.”

Thanks be to God.

Amen,