It is the next to last Sunday of the Church year and, again, the readings deal with end-time things. Maybe it would be useful to just comment on this strange passage that Eileen read from 2 Thessalonians. This is not a kind of Mike Harris before the time: "If you do not work then you should not eat". The writer of this text, perhaps Paul, is worrying about his proclamation of the end-time, and some peoples’ apparent understanding that this was an invitation to just sit on their haunches, wait for the end-time to come, and stop participating in the ongoing life of things. So that is the basis of that and we have to be careful not to misinterpret it.

So, the issue is the end, which is the establishment of the Kingdom of God, the so-called Eschaton. And scholars differ as to whether Jesus was talking about the end as the end of the world or the end as the end of a certain stage of Jewish history wherein the destiny of the Jews would be fulfilled. And what was that destiny? To be the agent of salvation for the whole world. That is the whole point of the election of the Jews: that they were to be God’s agency to dispense, illumine and open up God’s mercy to everybody and therefore the Kingdom, the entire human race, will be put back together. The problem, of course, in Jesus’ own day was that some of the Jews had (understandably, because they were persecuted and occupied by foreign powers during most of their lives) set up all of these regulations as to who was in and who was out, that is, as to what it meant to be faithful to God. This is the problem, for instance, that dogged Paul during most of his life. And of course Jesus simply demolished all of those boundaries. So you have the classic statement in Paul to the Galatians: "There is no longer a Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." For all of these things that distance us from each other are removed, even the distinctiveness of the Jews. And so the end will either be the end of the world (and you get all of this wild talk about the sun being darkened, wars, and earthquakes because these are just metaphors for the crucial event in the whole history of the world) or it will simply be that the Kingdom will somehow take place on this earth and then the absolute end will happen later.

So the point of the text today (at least two points) is to remind us of what the whole human enterprise is supposed to be all about. Where are we going? What is all human effort supposed to be bent toward? Above all, what is the Church supposed to be, because we talk about ourselves as the New Israel. The Church is supposed to be the one institution in the world that is not here for its own sake but clearly for the sake of the world. And so this is one of the big problems with the Church because we, often enough, fall into the same trap that the Jews did by saying, "No. We want to set up this little Salvation Club and tell very quickly and readily who is in and who is out. We want these boundaries set up very clearly". So, by reflecting on the end-time we get to think again about what we are supposed to be about as a Church. Whom do we exclude? Who has no place here? Frankly, our record is not very good: women, the role of women, the way we have treated Jews, the authorization of slavery, the enslavement of peoples and the elimination of millions and millions of indigenous people – Indians in the Caribbean, Latin America, and here in Canada – in the name of God of course.

Again, I just finished writing a little piece on this poor guy who was beaten to death, a homosexual in Wyoming. They used to burn them. Who is in and who is out? And so in my own life, who is in and who is out? That is what the end-times are supposed to remind us of: to look at again. And there is even a darker aspect of this that should be mentioned as well because, as we know from reading the New Testament, the end also means some kind of judgement. God is going to exercise some sort of discrimination as to where we are, who we have been, and what we have chosen. And what is that going to be? God sitting down on a big bench saying, "Listen you guys, you buggered up. You are going to hell, and you are not going to hell, and we do not know what to do with you?" It is not that. Presumably, this judgement scene is simply going to be some great moment of illumination in which we are going to know who we really are; that the power of God is going to operate in us in such a way as to make us aware of all of the evasions, the disguises, the camouflage, and the excuses that we have erected in ourselves for excluding the other, for ignoring the other. In other words, the judgement is going to be our own judgement of ourselves. And so, this is the other thing that is really important when thinking about the end in the context of the end-times. How consciously do we live at this moment? Because there has to be some kind of continuity between now and the end. And so the question raised by all of these texts is: "how consciously do we live as to what we do, who we are, and what we choose?"

Yet, since Socrates’ lifetime, people have said that the unexamined life is not worth living. But why? Because, unfortunately, the unexamined life means precisely living within these little boundaries that we erect within ourselves, excluding everybody else, without acknowledging (or even recognizing the fact that the boundaries are there) how firmly and ferociously they operate in our lives. In other words, there is a Christian meaning of that Socratic dictum: We have to know who we are. We have to live consciously. We have to live with the intention to establish as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, the Kingdom of God. "Your Kingdom come", we pray. Where is it supposed to come? In us! This is the only one that I can manage at all. I cannot manage my kids. I cannot manage you guys. I am not supposed to manage my kids or you guys. But I am supposed to manage my life as much as I can. I am supposed to live as consciously as I can.

So, in order to prepare for the Kingdom of God, to participate, to create the Kingdom of God, we are called to all of this; the point being not to terrify us when we talk about Judgement, but to show how little our imaginations are as to where we are supposed to end up. In other words, it may be somewhat intimidating but the prospects that are opened up beyond that kind of scary news are unspeakably grand.