Category: Sermons

“I have compassion on the multitude”

It must seem strange in the sultry heat of the quiet summer and in the lush richness of nature’s bounty in the beauty of the valley, to hear about sin and death and about being in the wilderness with nothing to eat, even given the endless shadows of COVID-19 and the sense of outrage in the culture against the churches.

But this is to lose sight of the guiding wisdom of the Spirit in the Scripture readings in terms of the balance and interplay between the theological themes of justification and sanctification which ultimately speak profoundly to our current distresses.

Sanctification is about our taking ahold of the redemptive work of Christ’s justifying grace; it is the active reception of what has been given. This Sunday’s readings highlight this idea in terms of our lives sacramentally which is nothing less than our living in the love of God.

They open out to us things that we need to hear, things which have to do with a larger, more complete, and more honest view of human life  and in its relation to the natural world of which we are an integral part. Ultimately, it is about life with God in Jesus Christ, something of lasting worth and meaning in which we participate here and now. To put it more simply, there is a spiritual and scriptural wisdom here which challenges the complacencies and certainties of our ordinary lives. Ours is the culture, to some extent, of full bellies and empty souls, notwithstanding the grotesque inequalities of wealth in the global world where famine and poverty still rule. The greater question is about what it means to be human. The spiritual and biblical view of orthodox Christianity suggests that it has altogether to do with the dynamic of our life with God. And that is wonderfully illustrated for us in the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for today.

“The free gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ,” St. Paul tells us. “I have compassion on the multitude,” Jesus says. These are the strong positives of our spiritual life that speak to the human condition, “in times of adversity and prosperity,” we might say (echoing the marriage service). They are profoundly suggestive of the dynamic of that spiritual life expressed sacramentally in terms of baptism, on the one hand, and holy communion, on the other hand. Baptism is about nothing less than our personal and individual incorporation into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, “being made free from sin and become servants to God” and to what further end? That we may have our “fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.” This we cannot earn and do not deserve. It is not something to which we are entitled. It is, precisely, “the free gift of God.” Yet, it is meant to be lived. If we have the beginning of our spiritual life personally and individually in baptism, then we have the continuation and growth of that spiritual life in us through holy communion and by its extension into our lives.

In a way, it is as simple as that. And as hard. Why? Because we have to think it and will it. We cannot take it for granted or assume that we deserve anything that is good.

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“Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you,
and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man!”

Today’s Gospel ends where the Gospel from two Sundays ago began. “Be ye merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” Both Gospel readings belong to Luke’s account of what is known as Christ’s Sermon on the Plain, a remarkable set of ethical teachings, some of which are utterly unparalleled in the Scriptures and are particularly challenging.

Perhaps, there is nothing more challenging than Christ’s commandment to “love your enemies” and to “do good to those who hate you,” words which mark the beginning of today’s Gospel. You did not hear in that reading that “blessed are you when men hate you,” but those are words which are part of this remarkable sermon. In between this text and the demand to love your enemies are four unique statements by Jesus, four ‘woes’ which complement the four ‘blessednesses’ or beatitudes in Luke’s account. “Woe to you that are rich for you have received your consolation (in the sense of getting what you called for or sought); woe to you that are full or satisfied for you shall hunger; woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep; and finally, woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.” These call into question how we define ourselves in relation to others: as rich, as self-satisfied, as self-content, as highly regarded in the eyes of others; in short, how we compare ourselves to others and how we want to be seen by others. These ‘woes’ precede today’s Gospel reading which is in effect a kind of commentary on the blessings and woes that Luke records.

As commentary, it complements as well the Epistle reading about the radical nature of baptism not simply as rite but as the symbolic and sacramental reality of our life in Christ. Baptized into Jesus Christ means baptized into his death without which we are not alive. “If we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him,” “be[ing] dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Powerful statements which belong to the equally powerful demands of the Gospel about loving those who hate us, loving those who are our enemies; in effect, saying that this may actually be a blessing. But how do we make any sense of this? It seems so completely impossible and so completely counter to our experiences.

In truth, these words belong very much to the confusions of our age and to the empty rhetoric of apology. The American writer and social, gender, and racial activist, Roxane Gay, rightly notes a feature of our contemporary world in which, as she puts it, we have made “a fetish of forgiveness”. In other words, we talk the talk but that doesn’t mean we walk the walk, if you will ‘forgive’ the cliché. There are important questions about what exactly is apology and by whom is it made, to whom, and for what. What does it mean to apologize for the sins of others, for instance, (about which some have made a particular fetish)? We may regret any number of things which have happened in the past but that is not the same as apologizing for our own thoughts and actions and their consequences, nor is it the same thing as repenting.

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“We have taken nothing”

Today’s Gospel illustrates at once the emptiness and the futility of our lives, on the one hand, and the fullness and the purpose of our lives, on the other hand. It suggests something about what it actually might mean to be “all of one mind,”as the Epistle begins, and, then, concludes after showing us exactly that it would mean to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” It has altogether to do with our attitude and relation to Jesus and to his Word. “At thy word I will let down the net,” Simon Peter says, even in the face of the empty toil and fruitless labour of the night and in the awareness of our nothingness. It is about blessings even in the face of suffering, “if ye be followers of that which is good.”

Our lives are empty and futile in themselves. This is a hard, but necessary and humbling lesson, but it is the counter to our folly and our pretension. Only “at thy word” can we “let down the net” and begin to discover what ‘fulfillment and purpose’ might mean for us in our lives. It is altogether about our being with Christ. And what is our attitude to finding ourselves in the presence of God revealed in Jesus Christ? It is what Simon Peter says, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”

This must trouble us. Why does he say this? Why doesn’t he rejoice in the sudden abundance of a rich catch of fish, the nets breaking with the fullness of the unexpected harvest? Because of a deep and profound spiritual insight, an insight which belongs to biblical wisdom. Simon Peter is aware of a power that is more than natural and more than human. He recognizes the reality of God in Jesus Christ. He gives expression to the deep biblical insight of the distance between God and man, the distance between God’s righteousness and truth and the unrighteousness and folly of human lives. The language is that of knowing oneself to be a sinner and therefore not presuming to stand on equal ground with God. It is the attitude of a humble yet philosophic piety. It is to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” You are in the presence of the Holy. It is not an entitlement. It is grace.

The Gospel story suggests that the real purpose of our lives and our lives as being fulfilled, to use the psychological language of our day, is about our being with Christ and acting in obedience to his word. “At thy word” is a phrase which echoes Mary’s response to the Angel Gabriel, “be it unto me according to thy word,” which is the condition for the richness and the wonder of the Word made flesh, the Incarnation of Christ, for us. We can have no fullness apart from Jesus. “Without me, ye can do nothing,” he says (Jn. 15.5). We can only enter into the will and purpose of God in the order of creation, redemption, and sanctification. Our lives, in other words, find their purpose and meaning in his Word. This is, of course, the reason for the Church. It is not by accident that the call of Simon Peter follows from this encounter. “Fear not,” says Jesus to him, “from henceforth thou shalt catch men,” anticipating his statement in Matthew  “that thou art Peter [Petros means rock], and upon this rock I will build my church” (Mt. 16.18).

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“Thou hypocrite”

It is sometimes called ‘the Mercy Gospel’. It is part of the “Sermon on the Plain” in Luke’s Gospel which complements the more famous “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew’s Gospel. Both ‘sermons’ present to us some of the most powerful ethical and spiritual teachings of the Christian Faith, teachings which we have either forgotten or of which we are completely unaware. Mercy, as this rather challenging reading makes clear, is inescapably connected to justice. Hypocrisy, starkly and sternly presented in the parable, is injustice masquerading as justice in the form of self-righteousness and judgmentalism so prevalent in the current confusions of our culture and in ourselves.

The mercy is that we “groan within ourselves,” as the Epistle puts it, waiting for the fuller realization of what we know is yet incomplete in us. Mercy lies in suffering the forms of our finitude and our sinfulness, our unrighteousness, but only if we can be brought to know our unknowing; in short, the blindness about ourselves that belongs to our self-righteous judgments about others. It is an ancient and classical theme and by no means unique to Christianity. Buddhism, for instance, arises in part out of a critical rejection of the Brahmin class of Hinduism who are seen as “the blind leading the blind” especially with respect to the question of human suffering. In today’s Gospel, the point is made in very graphic and personal terms as suggested in the use of the second person. Why do you behold the mote, the small faults of others, while remaining unaware of the much greater faults in yourself? Such is hypocrisy, the only answer to which is self-criticism and self-correction. We are quick to judge others but only so as to absolve ourselves in the emotive forms of passionate outrage.

We are hypocrites, to be sure. The mercy is that God calls us to self-understanding in which we are made aware of our absolute need for mercy. We all stand under the same condemnation; in other words, none of us is fully righteous. “There is none that doeth good, no, not one“ (Rom. 3.12) as Paul puts it, “the good that I would I do not, the very evil that I would not do is what I do” (Rom. 7.19). This is to confront the limitations and failings of our very hearts. Yet, this is good news precisely because it turns us to the desire for the mercy of God and puts a check on empty emotivism.

We meet within the Octave of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of French Canada and associated with the European encounter with North America through the landing in Newfoundland of John Cabot supposedly on his feast day in 1497. Thus the Collects for the Nativity include prayers for the nation of Canada, prayers which are surely much needed. Yet John’s birth signals primarily his vocation within the Providence of God in the working out of human redemption. His life and death point inescapably and necessarily to the one for whom he exists. He preaches, as Luke puts it, “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Lk. 3. 3). He is not that forgiveness but the one who belongs to its necessary preparation and ultimate fulfillment in Christ who is the forgiveness of sins. The desire for righteousness leads to its highest expression in mercy.

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“God … shall himself restore, stablish, strengthen you”

Some ancient texts add ‘settle’ to this list of verbs, as in being “settled upon a foundation”. In a sense, our return to in-person worship here at Christ Church is about our restoration, about our being established, about our being strengthened, and about our being settled upon the foundation of our life together in Christ. It is good to be back and I hope that we can begin to settle into the regular forms of our corporate life in Christ with a spirit of gratitude and forbearance, knowing that there are and will be uncertainties ahead. We have, I hope, learned something about ourselves in and through these troubling times. The challenge has been to keep our focus on the spiritual teachings that alone restore, stablish, strengthen, and settle us upon the care of God; “casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you.”

The care of God is a radical concept and teaching. It belongs to the even more radical concept of God as love, whose love is the ground of all life and being, all knowing and loving. Yet again, the Gospel provides us with a telling illustration of what the care of God means for us in our lives. In the face of the critical murmurings of the Pharisees and Scribes about Jesus being in the company of publicans and sinners, “receiving sinners and eating with them,” as they suggest, Jesus tells three powerful parables, two of which comprise today’s Gospel. They are the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the parable of the prodigal or lost son. The fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel is a tour-de-force of teaching about repentance and rejoicing. Repentance and joy go together. That alone is worth pondering and thinking about. We are meant to see ourselves in these parables.

Such a view underlies an important aspect of the Prayer Book liturgy as penitential adoration and reminds us of the deep love of God for us that derives from the love of God himself. Our whole liturgy is about joyful repentance; our turning back to God because God has turned us back to himself. Such is restoration and the grounding of our lives in God, restored, established, strengthened, and settled upon his love.

I have on occasion thought about the ethical teaching of this chapter of Luke’s Gospel aesthetically, by way of the idea of a triptych. A triptych is three panels, usually painted, depicting certain biblical stories understood in relation to each other and often placed just above or standing on the altar. In this case, the whole chapter could be captured in a triptych illustrating the theme of repentance and rejoicing. Triptychs are a feature of Medieval Christian art and usually take the form of a large central panel framed by two hinged side panels each half the size of the central panel. The hinges allow the side panels to enclose the central panel if desired at certain times in the liturgical year. In terms of the fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, the parable of the prodigal son would have to form the central panel framed by the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin.

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Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Second Sunday after Trinity

“If the world hate you”

Well, it does. Deal with it. But while the world may hate Christians and Christianity (and every other religion for that matter), self-hatred is equally, if not more destructive, a deeper denial of our God-created being and life. Self-hatred now extends to a certain kind of cultural self-loathing and self-flagellation current in the western democracies of our contemporary world, something which Michael Houllebecq has recently written about in relation to France (The Narcissistic Fall of France, Unherd, June 8th, 2021). It is not just a North American phenomenon. It arises out of the profound disorders and discontents that belong to the destructive tendencies of the twentieth century which remain with us and which we either choose to ignore or begin to ponder. It is part of a general sense of malaise that our way of thinking and being has to change. But in what way? At the very least through a kind of thoughtfulness which the remarkable readings before us encourage and demand.

The cultural problems of our age have very much to do with assumptions about human rights and the principle of self-determination and how those ideas are to be understood in relation to the more universal principles of justice and compassion, such as in Plato, Deuteronomy or even Cyrus the Persian, as Samuel Moyn notes (The Last Utopia, Human Rights in History, 2010). Contemporary human rights talk is “the last utopia”. The language of rights that dominates our thinking presupposes a principle that transcends the political communities in which we live. But then how are they to be embodied, enjoined and enforced? How are they to be respected and upheld without reducing things to the endless power struggles of this group or that tyrant over and against every other? How do we live and think apart from the local communities in which we live? The Global is the great abstraction. The “right to have rights,” as Hannah Arendt brilliantly observed, leads nowhere; for “without communal inclusion, the assertion of rights by itself made no sense” (Moyn, The Last Utopia, p. 12). The principle of self-determination historically has been rather problematic and so, too, the extension of that idea to individuals whose self-determination is asserted now as a sovereign right. It is what underlies the conflicts and problems that belong to the native peoples in Canada, on the one hand, and to the vagaries of the politics of sexual identity, on the other hand. As Moyn says in a later book, “rights are not enough” (Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, 2018). They lead more to division than unity and equity; the very things that paradoxically are sought.

It is in this contemporary context that we might begin to ponder the wisdom of the scriptural readings for this day. John profoundly counters the problem of self-hatred by recalling us to God. “If our heart condemn us,” he says, “God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” We are not who we think we are in our own heads, in the proud fancy and imagination of our own hearts, in our claims to self-determination, as it were. We are instead God’s beloved who are known in God’s infinite knowing and loving of “all things”. “Beloved,” as John immediately goes on to say, “if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence towards God.” In other words, knowing ourselves as ‘the beloved of God’ changes our whole outlook and attitude. What we hate should not be ourselves (or one another) but our sins which make us less than ourselves. John is reminding us of an important spiritual insight which speaks to the moral and ethical confusions of our world and day about the constraints to the extent and meaning of cultural and personal identities.

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Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for the First Sunday after Trinity

“This commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.”

And if we don’t? Then we have the powerful story of our denial of God’s love by our complete neglect of one another. Lazarus is lying at our feet. How we deal with one another is entirely grounded in our relation to God. Make no mistake, the parable of Lazarus and Dives, the rich man, speaks directly and profoundly to the forms of “the malaise of modernity.” The term is not mine; it was used a long time ago by Charles Taylor, Canada’s ‘pre-eminent’ philosopher. We live now in the collapse and disarray of the institutions that in their truth contribute to the dignity and ennobling of human existence. This  compels an awakening of an ethical attitude towards the world of which we are a part; a corrective and critique of ourselves.

The lessons for the First Sunday after Trinity are particularly instructive and challenging. The Epistle reading from 1 John 4 encapsulates the meaning of Trinity Sunday quite profoundly. It is remarkably simple: “God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God in him,” to use the older translation that remains in the Scriptural sentences as the refrain of the Trinity season. It is at once so familiar as to be completely overlooked and ignored. Perhaps that is why we need the accompanying Gospel reading from Luke 16 to point us to the radical meaning of the commandment to love, paradoxical as that may seem. For the parable is a telling indictment of our neglect of God through our neglect of one another. The point is not that the world is a problem; we are the problem. We create the gulf, the abyss between ourselves and God, between ourselves and the world, and between one another through our indifference and neglect.

The dangers are very real. This week has confronted us with the heart-breaking spectacle of the unmarked and concealed graves of native children who died in the Residential Schools system, neglected and ignored by those to whose care they were entrusted. It is a sad story and another blow to the quest for respect and dignity of Canada’s native peoples, many of whom remain deeply committed Christians, hence the touching spectacle of love and compassion in the placing of children’s shoes on the steps of churches. It makes visible the desire to be seen and remembered, and not to be neglected and ignored.

The parable is about the realities of neglect and indifference. It turns us to the literal ground of our lives; Lazarus on the ground at our feet. In that sense, the First Lesson at Matins from the Book of Joshua complements the Gospel. The Book of Joshua is about the conquest of the promised land but as the lesson makes clear that is entirely based on God’s Word and Will as the defining feature of Israel.” Be strong and of good courage; be not frightened, neither be dismayed; for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Words which have a certain power and resonance for us in the present. Just so the Second Lesson from Mark makes clear that the land is also a place of teaching and healing, indeed, spiritual healing. Jesus teaches “as one who had authority”, the ultimate authority of God, the one who raises to life and casts out demons.

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Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity Sunday

“No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father,
he has made him known.”

“Now the Catholic Faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity, and the Trinity in unity.” A surprising and startling statement, it may seem, and yet it belongs not only to the Athanasian Creed but to the central logic and meaning of the Christian Faith. God is Trinity though the word Trinity appears nowhere in the Scriptures. It appears first in the writings of Theophilus of Antioch writing in Greek in the second half of the second century, albeit in a peculiar form, and then in the Latin writings of Tertullian in the late decades of the same century. Yet it belongs to the revelation of the essential life of God and to the equally essential task of our thinking God. The first section of the Athanasian Creed ends with the words: “He therefore that would be saved, /let him thus think of the Trinity,” think of the Trinity in this way, the way of affirmation and negation in the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology that is the Athanasian Creed. Pretty strong stuff. Can we really think this?

It is the essential proclamation of the Christian Faith but far from being something exclusive and forbidding, exotic and remote, speculative and abstract, it is the doctrine, the teaching, that requires and provides the basis for the Christian engagement with other religions and faiths and with ourselves. In short, the divine self-relation which the Trinity is and reveals offers the connection to the universal idea of thinking God without which we cannot think ourselves. It is not about some form of Christian triumphalism or supersessionism – the idea that one religion or philosophy supersedes another or that the latest fancy or fantasy is by definition the best.  It connects us instead to the quest for wisdom that belongs to the radical truth of our humanity.

“No one has ever seen God,” John tells us. He states a simple truth. God is nothing, no thing among other things, not an object, not a thing, but rather the very ground of the being and knowing of all things. What John highlights here belongs to his thinking deeply and profoundly upon the words of Christ. “Apart from me you can do nothing,” for instance; “Before Abraham was, I am,” and so forth. These are radical words which speak about God in himself without which we are nothing, not even selves. As John rightly intuits, the truth of God is revealed in the only-begotten Son, who ever is and never was not. His words compel us and challenge us. That is the meaning of the Gospel lesson about Nicodemus coming to Jesus in the hiddenness of the night. The meaning is about how we have to think about things in a radically new and different way; literally, to be born again, into a new way of understanding.

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Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Day of Pentecost

“And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind”

Sometimes the things that come upon us suddenly unsettle us most of all. We live in rather unsettling times because of the Covid-19 pandemic and all of the disruptions that it has occasioned. This prompts the question as to whether we are simply and completely determined by things outside our control. To be blunt, you cannot blame Covid-19 on Christ Church or Windsor or Nova Scotia or Canada or China or Wuhan. It is not so simple. It is a modern pandemic which has to do with global mobility and the inequalities socially and economically among so many in our so-called global world. We are all, in that sense, completely implicated in our current unsettledness. Everything comes down to the spirit in us by which we confront our struggles and concerns; in short, about how we think about ourselves in relation to one another.

Perhaps, just perhaps, Pentecost might provide us with a way to think about things more universally and yet profoundly local. There are things which unsettle us, perhaps, never more so than in these unsettling times. But is it so with the Descent of the Holy Ghost? He came down suddenly upon the disciples, we are told, but was his coming suddenly a coming unexpectedly? That he came suddenly we read, his coming unexpectedly we do not read. In fact, Jesus tells us to expect the coming of the Holy Ghost “commanding them not to depart from Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of the Father,” even the descent of the Holy Ghost. We are meant, it seems, to be settled upon what comes to us even in unsettling times.

Yet we may wait expectantly and still be caught unawares, for the realisation of what we await may far exceed our expectations and so catch us by surprise. We await for what we do not fully understand. The grace of God is always something more; the mystery of God something more yet again. The promise of the Ascension was the coming down of the Holy Ghost for which Jesus prepares us and bids us wait, yet “suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind.”

Certainly, the effects of this coming down would appear to be most unsettling, the manner of their appearing no less so – “a rushing mighty wind” and “cloven tongues like as of fire,” lighting upon the disciples gathered in Jerusalem filling them with the Holy Spirit and moving them “to speak with other tongues.” To all appearances an event most unsettling, at once exotic and ecstatic.

We all know about the winds that unsettle us – the rushing mighty winds of rumour and slander, of whisperings and murmurings, of allegations and accusations which seek to belittle and destroy. The winds of hatred and revenge, of judgement and accusation, are the winds of death. These are the winds that unsettle us as sure as the sea-storms which come up suddenly and trouble our ships upon the waters. But in our current situation, we live in the midst of other uncertainties, the uncertainties of those claiming to speak in the chimera of ‘science,’ those who rightly demand our acquiescence to this restriction and this but at the same time suggesting their own uncertainty, their own sense of the provisional and the uncertain which belongs, to be sure, to the truth of modern science.  To be up-front about this is really about transparency and honesty, a check on our presumption and pride. To be patient about all of the forms of uncertainty that swirl around us is our current struggle and demand, a check upon our frustrations and judgements.

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Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Sunday after Ascension Day

“The end of all things is at hand”

Ascension is apocalyptic. That is a loaded term and, perhaps, a frightening term since it is fraught with the images of impending doom and destruction. Yet apocalypse really means an uncovering, a making known, or a revealing of what is hidden. In this sense, it is actually something powerful and positive rather than fearful and paralyzing.

Everything turns on the sense or meaning of an end. End in what sense? Ascensiontide celebrates the end of Christ’s saving work in his homecoming to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to redemption. His homecoming is about our end with God, an end in which we participate now through the life of the Church. “It is finished,” Christ says on the Cross in what is regarded as the penultimate word from the Cross. It is an ending which is really about completion and accomplishment in the restoration of all things to God – something which is envisioned in the lovely passage from Isaiah at Matins in the harmony and peace between everything in creation and God. That is also what is shown in the imagery of the Ascension captured in Peter’s rich statement that “the end of all things is at hand.” That leads not to fear and anxiety but to charity and hospitality, to service and ministry “as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.” It is now and always now.

To put in in another way, Christian life is always about living in the end times since everything is gathered to God. We are given a way to face suffering and death, hard times and sorrow with a good heart and with courage and even with joy so “that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ.” There it is, grace and glory! As the Matins lesson from Luke indicates, Christ’s Ascension leads to the disciples returning to Jerusalem not in sorrow but in joy, waiting upon the promise of the Father in the sending of the Comforter. This is the truest form of empowerment.

The term, apocalypse, serves to awaken us to that reality even in the face of the ups and downs, the catastrophes and challenges of our world and day. What is apocalyptic is not just about the rise and fall of kingdoms and of social and economic structures but about the making known of the love of God in human lives.

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