Between Worlds & End Times

By James C. Miller

A sermon for Religious Liberty Day 2001

I.

Baptists have had a passion for preaching about "end times." We have been lodged "between worlds" on vital issues. Thus, our identity has been shaped in a matrix of dissent and propagation as we have examined faith and polity of other church worlds and encountered polices and values of secular worlds. The worlds we want kept and the ones that should end are critical choices.

Certain experiences have influenced me to preach about the "end of the world." I was reared in West Virginia's most rugged terrain of the Appalachian Mountains. Long before electronic billboards were anchored into hillsides, itinerant preachers amazingly suspended themselves over cliffs that hung above winding roadways. Onto rock ledges they boldly painted scriptural warnings such as, "Jesus is coming again. The end of time is near. Prepare Ye." As a kid I could not appreciate the eagerness in revival meetings to end the world so quickly.

When I got to seminary I discovered there was a language and body of thought to deal in a more comprehensive framework and sophistication with the whole matter of eschatology – "last things and end times." But immediately after seminary I was plunged into the bizarre again. I enrolled for a summer of clinical pastoral education at a state mental hospital. Typical of that day, it was a warehouse of all forms of mental illness. A patient who was to be my case study whispered in my ear, "The world is coming to an end on Friday," then scooted to a corner of the ward. By Friday, the articulate soothsayer had cast a haunting anxiety throughout the ward, just as in biblical times strange figures alarmed passersby with their apocalyptic portents.

In every age there have been predictions and descriptions about the end of time. Some are to be dismissed – they are psychotic. Some cannot be ignored – they are factual. In biblical times there was expectation of the imminent return of Christ to close the age. Second Peter 3 is one graphic image. In our times the religious writings of Hal Lindsey, The Great Late Planet Earth, are at the top of best-selling lists. Thought about the end of times sinks deeply and widely into the psyche of a good many church folk.

End of the world predictions do not emanate solely from silly sources and scary fundamentalists. Environmentalists and eminent scientists carefully document how fragile is the world! They disseminate computer printouts that chart an eventual doomsday unless we reverse the ecological damage inflicted on earth's ozone layer. Their words are just as graphic as the Bible – we'll be burned up! Or, nuclear holocaust! Desperate nations and unstable rulers yet have the capacity to unleash nuclear warheads and end everything we know and love.

So, I do have a passion to preach about how the world might end. However, I have been "setting you up" a bit. Surely, you surmised the teasing route thus far. There is another way in which I believe Christians should speak and act concerning the end of the world. Let me make a right angle turn and head in that direction of thought.

II.

My life has been decisively influenced by a splendid human being named Clarence Jordan – my John the Baptist. If ever I had a mentor in the Christian faith, he is a master one! He and other pilgrims of faith founded Koinonia Farms, known and revered by many. Their intent was to teach itinerant farmers, be they poor whites or ostracized blacks, how to farm with productive land management and how to market their crops at a fair economic advantage. Their community encompassed all sorts of people – Th.D. preachers, field hands, Ph.D. agronomists, and lots of sojourners we Baptists like to call Seekers. Koinonia shaped its community according to the ethical and spiritual principles enunciated for the New Testament Church in Acts 2 – a community bound and guided in Christ's spirit with no demarcations of race and class. It was a place of kindred spirits who wanted to put overalls on their faith and live out the high calling of the Servant Jesus.

They attended and joined the little local Baptist Church nearby. You can imagine how lucky the church first felt when the people of Koinonia first started attending. What a crop of seminary-trained Sunday school teachers, choir members and tithers they embodied! It was not long, however, until the white Baptist church realized that Koinonia was a racially integrated compound. You know what was bound to happen in that era of the mid-50s. They were told to get out!

Why? Why was this cadre of Christians commanded to get out of a local church? Why were they branded and ruled out of their Christian fellowship? Clarence Jordan's wife, Florence, explained it in a way that forever will grip my soul. "It was because of what we were doing. What we were doing was preaching the end of the world – THEIR WORLD: the end of the big plantation owners, the end of the boss who'd sit on the porch and let somebody else do their work for nothing, the end of separate and unequal status as God's children."

Christians should preach and long for the END OF THE WORLD –

END the world of bigotry!

END the world of hunger and refugees!

END the world of despotism!

END the world where people are violated, where dreams and hopes are denied, where freedoms and dignities are squelched and disavowed!

III.

America was once called "the new world." Old worlds of religious and social tyranny had to end in order for the new worlds of liberty and dignity to be birthed and manifested. When I ascend the stairway to the pulpit of The First Baptist Church in America, I am cognizant of the people called the Baptists who preached the end of the world in their day. And I am also awakened to new alliances in civil and religious arenas bent on the end times of separation of church and state and religious liberty principles we have preciously instilled and guarded. What to end and what not to end are vital issues.

The masterful Methodist preacher, Harold Bosley, sounds the reveille for Baptists when he preached long ago: "All vital issues are controversial issues. This being true – and not more than a moment's reflection is necessary to substantiate it – the sobering corollary comes to mind: The only way to avoid controversial issues is to avoid vital issues. This the Christian preacher can scarcely afford to do."

Here are some of the worlds whose age should close, I believe:

END ANY WORLD that lies to us and conceals the truth.

A world of deceit, corruption and exploitation will surely end us if we do not end it first. This is true in personal relationships and societal manifestations. Domination and exclusive privileges make up a world that will not unite or protect us, but will ultimately destroy us. Know the falsehoods that the world speaks cleverly and deceptively. When we are caught between worlds, choose the one where truth and freedom reign.

A.J. Muste was a sane soul who labored in the same era and similar spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. Muste constantly traveled to remote towns and unpublicized locations where nuclear weapons were stockpiled. There he engaged vigils of prayer and witness to abolish destructive arsenals against humankind. A news reporter once asked him what good he thought such lonely vigils could ever effectuate in the outcome of the world, particularly when no one else seemed to care? Muste answered: "I don't do this to change the world; I do it to keep the world from changing me."

There are emerging world conclaves that want to end liberty of conscience and sanctions of religious freedom in the delicate intertwine of church and state polity. If they succeed, they might end what generations later will regret that they ended capriciously and mistakenly. What to end and what not to end are pivotal issues and moments for Baptists!

THE END TIMES of religious antagonism should be near at hand.

A divided world does not need a divided Church. Households of Faith are split by religious antagonism. It is wrenching and scarring the Body of Christ.

Baptists emerged from a world antagonistic to our dissent. We spoke our convictions with intellect and honor. There is a difference between antagonism bent toward destructiveness and dissent shaped toward honest engagement. We must ever show due regard to the antagonist who is in our face; yet we must not allow vehement religion to abridge our freedom of conscience. Religious convictions can be stated with civility and Christ-like graces. Sadly, there is a surge of militant religion across the land and throughout the world. It looks ugly, sounds spiteful, and feels vengeful. Let its world not end our world.

END ANY WORLD that offers no freedom, hope and enabled opportunity.

We must ever strive to be a liberating Church in a world of despotic empires.

Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the greatest Baptist and ecumenical preachers of the 20th century, cries in my soul these days as I ponder anew one of his famous sermons: "There is the need for a clear insight into the main issues of modern Christianity and a sense of penitent shame that the Christian church should be quarreling over little matters when the world is dying of great needs."

Too many hopes are being denied today. Too many dreams are being deferred. Too many opportunities for human betterment are aborted. That is why I am passionate for the themes of religious liberty and prophetic social consciousness. They are indispensable in weaving the fabric of human rights and building solidarity out of our diversity.

I have been Minister of The First Baptist Church in America for a short time. Each week I am afforded the opportunity to speak with visitors from around the world. I marvel at how special and needed are our Baptist principles in the world community. Some visitors are tourists. They wind their way to the upper sanctuary and under the vaulted steeple admire architecture and the crystal chandelier. I am impressed by those who visit us not as tourist but worshiper. They kneel reverently in our sanctuary and later say as they leave, "I purposely have come here to be refreshed by a spirit and legacy of this church. In my country today the candle of religious liberty is snuffed out or burns hidden and precariously."

We then swap stories of what daring tasks of discipleship are before us in this age. What worlds must end; what worlds to be brought into new creation? There is consensus to our thought. We want to end times in which hope vanishes and possibilities are snuffed out. We want to enlarge worlds of servitude in Christ's name.

In this regard, I am inspired by a terrific story that Tony Campolo once retrieved and dusted off for our hearing. It is a courageous story told by the Baptist inspirational writer, Margaret Applegarth.

She summarized a sociology class project at Johns Hopkins University engaged decades ago to study a blighted area in the inner city of Baltimore. Case studies were written about the children of that area, examining their homes, gang patterns, school and church environment, etc. When the survey was completed, 200-case studies were lumped into one category and labeled with the frightful prediction – "Headed for Jail." Sociologically, it was measured that these children had little chance to "make it." Most likely, their world would end up in jail by the time they entered adolescence or young adulthood.

A few decades later another sociology class at Johns Hopkins came upon those old research files, and some bright graduate student asked, "What actually happened to those two hundred or more children marked "Headed for Jail?"

The new tribe of young sociologists sought the whereabouts of those youngsters twenty-five years ago. Surprisingly, they located a goodly number of them and were able to interview them again but this time in their adult years. Amazingly, the early prediction about them had not been true for a great majority of them. When the new researchers looked for reasons that invalidated the earlier assessment, one reason kept reoccurring. The reason was a person – Aunt Hannah!

Aunt Hannah was a teacher who lived in that same blighted area of Baltimore during the growing up years of those particular children. She was not only teacher to most of them, but she was neighbor and Sunday school teacher to a lot of them. When those re-interviewed children spoke of their experiences in the hindsight of adulthood, they insisted that Aunt Hannah was the one who had made a difference in the outcome of their lives. They told how she kept them after school for additional tutoring. They told how she often invited them to her home giving them the only square meal they had eaten in days. They told how she imparted deep and lasting inspiration and courage into their minds and hearts.

And so, these children who had been classified as "Headed for Jail" became doctors, teachers, ministers, solid homemakers and parents, good factory workers and community leaders. I challenge us – be an Aunt Hannah who opens new worlds for others, ending the worlds where kids have no fair chances to grow up safely, freely and healthfully.

The End of Times – come quickly, Lord Jesus, to help us.

James C. Miller is Minister, The First Baptist Church in America, Providence, Rhode Island.