“This isn’t the apocalypse pop culture prepared us for.
We were promised fire and panic and blood in the streets, shambling hordes of zombies and cities disappearing in mushroom clouds. We were promised leather-clad biker gangs and the ruins of famous monuments and the Statue of Liberty half-buried on the shore…Instead, what we got was quieter, more subtle and more slow-rolling than anyone could have guessed. It’s an apocalypse of sheltering at home and baking bread, rainbows in windows, and long walks in spring, and Lysol.1.”
Adam Lee wrote this in an article for his blog on the website Patheos in early May, just a few months and a seeming life-time ago. I want to open this sermon with his words because on the one hand he admits what is hard for me to do, which is to say that this is An Apocalypse. We are living in an age of apocalyptic and deeply unsettling events. And he points to the reason why I find it so difficult to say this without feeling hyperbolic. I’m struggling to both comprehend and express what is going on all around us, and I don’t feel alone in that. Our culture, through fundamentalist Christian visions of the End Times, and the hyperbole of Hollywood, has set our End-Time Expectations against mythological standards. Even though so many pieces of our lives have changed irreversibly, calling these events an apocalypse still sounds excessive.
Parts of our world are certainly ending. So many parts of our world - lives and life-ways - have been lost in the course of the last year, and because of these, things will never return to “the way they were” before this pandemic. But I don’t think we’re living through the End Times. We are living through an apocalypse, but not the End Times. We are facing the end of so many things we took for granted, but this is not The End. What we’re experiencing right now is a revelation of how things actually are, and it’s a revelation of who we are when things get tough. And as tough as this year has been, we have responded in some way to meet every calamity we’ve faced.
I’ve spent a lot of time in this pandemic chewing on the meaning of apocalypse. I’ve often thought back to something a priest from my childhood said. Dan, with a lot of his characteristic poise, was one of the first people I heard point out that the origin of our word apocalypse comes from a word meaning “uncovering” or “revealing”. Like a veil being pulled back, like our English word “Revelation”. That an apocalyptic event – whether it’s straight out of the Christian Book of Revelations or not – is a revelation of things are they are in a profound, cosmic way. I’ve spent a lot of time meditating on this over the last seven months. It’s a more mystical understanding of the word that looks to the long-view of things. It shows up in our today’s first reading, and in other sources I’ve drawn from to put this service together.
But generally this isn’t the level of composure we associate with apocalypse. Our popular culture is full of apocalyptic visions, with movies about zombie pandemics and nuclear aftermath, and conspiracies about Mayan calendars and the fragility of our supply chains and information systems. And in the United States, our religious culture is filled with warnings of (or even hopes for) the Second Coming and the literal manifestations of the Christian Book of Revelations. These days, any high-visibility figure, from the Pope to the President of the United States, can get branded as the catalyst of the End of Days. Even when we don’t subscribe to stark visions of human destiny, we still encounter and contend with them. As individuals or wider traditions, we acknowledge their presence among us, if not our shared belief.
Unitarian Universalists aren’t an apocalyptic bunch. We haven’t built a theology around the End Days. We don’t talk about a future time when wrong will be made right, or even when the true will of God, the true nature of things, becomes fully revealed. Instead we can pick apart this last sentence and come up with a host of new answers to ponder:
Instead of flipping to the end of the book to see how the story ends, we more often live in the importance of the current moment and the difference we can make here. If we look anywhere at all, this present moment is probably where we will look for our big revelations, whether it is from the Divine, the Universe, or the Human Experience. We call this our Living Tradition. It isn’t sealed with a testimony of the End Days, but it continues to grow as we grow, and urges us to look at the Revelation of the world around us. If we’re looking for big revelations, we’re asking questions like: What is this world revealing to us? And how do we respond to that? Many of us form our response to the world’s revelation as an answer to the call of justice. Our Second and Sixth Principles call us to seek and honor justice in our relationships with one another and our wider world.
And our world is in sore need of justice. On a daily basis, we can bear witness to terrors and injustices new and old. Ones we have seen over and over again and ones we never expected to see. We are living through an apocalypse of mythological proportions. We are in the midst of a global pandemic where a cure is a murky possibility in the near future, and the logistics of distributing it are even murkier. And alongside it, we’re coming face-to-face with a painful reckoning of the racial, environmental, and economic violence that is now harder and harder for more and more people to ignore. The injustices that have been present for so long only burn brighter in the face of our present situation.
Three weeks after Adam Lee wrote about an apocalypse full of Lysol-wipes and bread-baking, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. A month and a half before this blog post, Breonna Taylor was murdered in Kentucky. And a few weeks before her, Ahmaud Arbery was murdered in Georgia. In the summer of 2020 amid a raging pandemic people across the world cried out against the injustice that these three Black people, their families, and communities contended with. The world cried out against the injustice of their deaths and the deaths of so many others, all in the middle of a pandemic. An apocalypse which has been inconvenient for some has been lethal for others.
In late summer and through the fall, the western United States has seen wildfires perhaps worse they’ve ever been in terms of geographic range and severity. And it feels like we’ve been saying this same thing every summer for much of the last decade. Hurricanes Laura and Delta tore through the Gulf Coast in August and October, and a derecho storm tore across much of the upper Midwest with windspeeds comparable to a Category 4 Hurricane. Our world is getting warmer and wetter in some places or drier in others.
Plague, murder, fire, flood. I don’t mean to be brief in paying witness to these atrocities, but I think we can all see what’s happening around us in some part or another. We know what’s going on, and we can easily pull all these events together into one vista. Together these disasters have both stripped away all distraction from reality, and worsened reality with compounding interest. What all these disasters share is their ability to lay bare profound inequities in wealth and access to resources. The people, families, and communities with the scarcest resources face the greatest barriers to prevention, healing, and recovery. The stripped-down reality of our world is, I think, a big Revelation we are witnessing. In the sense both of painful, global upheaval, and in the sense of uncovering the bitter reality of things, it seems like we truly are living through an Apocalypse. As I said at the beginning of this sermon however, the structure of the world is not the only thing revealing itself right now. This pandemic event is also revealing our own natures as people and the nature of our societies as well.
It could be really easy to be pessimistic in the face of all of this. To look at the pain and anguish of the world and say our responsibility for this is the true revelation of Human nature, and the true revelation of our societies’ ends and design. And while it is revealing, in that the injustices of our world are human-wrought and human-designed, I don’t necessarily think this is the most important revelation of the hour.
The second reading we shared today was actually an article on science fiction, the stuff of pop-culture that Adam Lee blamed for our distorted view of what the apocalypse would be like. And Arkady Martine agrees that works of science fiction, and by extension the popular culture they shape, has a tendency to race to the worst conclusions when imagining the apocalypse. As she sums it up,
If science fiction is – as sometimes described – a literature of ideas, then apocalyptic science fiction is the literature of how ideas go wrong—an exploration of all of our bad possible futures, and what might happen after2
But what she points out is that in reality, humans do not respond to apocalyptic calamity with our worst, but rather our best. In fact she says, maybe society works better than it ever had, if for a brief time. Maybe we show our greatest virtues in the direst straits.
It can be really easy to look at this current situation and see only the worst. But the worst is not all there is to look at, and our worst is not all we’re showing right now. Communities across the country have cared for each other with grassroots organization, activity that continues to outlive the momentary surge of attention when calamity and deep pain are revealed.
If you want to see how that looks in Des Moines and central Iowa, look at the work of Des Moines Black Lives Matter; at the Eastern Iowa Community Bond Project; at the Supply Hive; at the Des Moines Mutual Aid and Edna Griffin Mutual Aid Funds. Wherever you are, someone near you is organizing to care for their community. If you have some money or some time, send it their way. If you could use some help from people like them, reach out.
And the people here at First Unitarian are caring for each other and our community too. People are sewing masks; gathering donations for the food bank; calling to check in with one another; helping each other figure Zoom out. We’re finding new ways to stay connected to one another through small group ministries, reading groups, calling trees and social hours. Faced with hard conditions, we find new ways to be together and care for one another.
If you have time or resources or ideas to share, talk to church staff and leadership. Talk to them if you need resources or connection, but don’t know how to access it. We are still finding ways to grow and nurture this community with one another, even in the face of a pandemic.
Our care for one another and our communities is more substantial than rosy platitudes about sticking together. I don’t share this message to make it sound like staying connected and caring for each other is easy. I don’t think it ever really is. It certainly hasn’t been these last seven months. And I don’t offer you this sermon from my perfect example of leadership and engagement, because at times staying connected and caring for the other people in this community, and asking to be cared for in turn, has been hard for me also. But our willingness and determination to keep showing up for each other – in this congregation, this community, this world – says a lot about who we really are in this Apocalypse. So many precious things are ending and slipping away, but this is not the End. It’s not the end because we continue to look after one another, and we are going to continue doing that until we are incapable of caring for one another anymore. And I think that’s it, that’s the Big Reveal of 2020. That might be the Big Revelation.
1. Adam Lee, “Not The Apocalypse They Wanted”, OnlySky, May 6, 2020, https://onlysky.media/alee/not-the-apocalypse-they-wanted/
2. Arkady Martine, “What Really Happens After the Apocalypse”, Reactor Magazine, November 14, 2018, https://reactormag.com/what-really-happens-after-the-apocalypse/