All posts by The Rev. Erik Parker

iPhone Pastor for a Typewriter Church. Blogger, Podcaster | High Church Lutheran | Husband & Dad | Oilers fan in exile | He/Him
Doctor of Ministry, Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

The Apocalypse of John the Baptizer’s Community

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You may have noticed that for a few weeks now, the titles of my weekly reflections have had mention of Apocalypse in them. You may be thinking that I am starting to sound like one of those Hellfire and Brimstone types. Maybe that is true. However, unlike in the movies, Apocalypse biblically carries a different definition than just the end of the world. Apocalypse comes from the Greek meaning ‘uncovering’ or ‘revealing.’ Apocalyptic literature speaks to the revealing of God’s plan or designs for the world or God’s intention to make right. This lands at the heart of created existence, where this ‘making right’ is contested or in a state of conflict. The Apocalypse or revealing is where God’s Kingdom coming to make the world righteous is in conflict with the powers of sin, death and the devil – forces that we experience in this world that are in opposition to God’s great love for us. 

Phew…

With that understanding of Apocalypse, we pick up with John the Baptist. Who is speaking to the crowds who have come out into the wilderness to hear him and be baptized for repentance and the forgiveness of sins. This follows with the long history of Israel seeking out prophets sent by God in times of crisis and seeking to repent of the ways in which God’s people have turned away from God. John is standing in a role they know and can identify from the Scriptures, and they are seeking to repent just as good people of faith should. 

Yet, they don’t quite get there. John isn’t just preaching repentance like the prophets of old. He is also preaching the coming of another, a Messiah. 

The crowd responds peculiarly. They ask John, “What then should we do?”

They ask this three times: “What should we do?”

In a time of crisis, when the world feels like everything is falling down around them, when the powers are threatening to crush them, when the future feels terribly uncertain, they want to know what they can do. Each of John’s answers is unsatisfying. 

Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

In a time of great uncovering and revealing the deep and uncomfortable truths at the heart of our existence, the apocalyptic conflict between God’s making right and the powers of sin, death and the devil that we can feel palpable in our world… the answers to our wonderings of, “what should we do?” have proven equally unsatisfying.

Maybe that is the point. It seems to be John’s point. Maybe what we need to do isn’t the chief issue. In this moment of Apocalypse, what we do just might be secondary to our salvation. The uncovering of what is really happening to us as God’s people is still in process, still being made known to us. But as we turn to the second half of Advent, I am sure it has something to do with the One we are waiting for, the One who is coming. 

The Messiah is on the way. 

Doctor of Ministry, Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

The Apocalypse of John (the Baptizer)

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Apocalypse of John 

This week, our family went to the movie Wicked. For those who don’t know it (or who have been living under a rock!), this is the recently released movie based on the Broadway musical Wicked (which debuted in 2004), which itself is an adaptation of the Wizard of Oz. The movie tells the stories of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch of the North. As you might be able to surmise by the name, the twist of the story is to give depth and context to the Wicked Witch of the West we remember from the Wizard of Oz. 

As I have often found in movies and stories, it turns out that the villains or antagonists seem to be the people that I find the most interesting. Maybe that is  why Darth Vader is a favourite of Star Wars fans and the Joker a favourite of comic book fans. Heroes or protagonists can often be kind of boring and one-dimensional in movies, TV and literature. Heroes do what is right and good because it is right and good. Villans are more often portrayed as dynamic and complicated, their backstories providing deep motivations for their actions, and they do what they do for various reasons. 

As we come to the Second Week of Advent, we will hear about John the Baptist, a character who is an interesting figure in the narrative of Advent. He isn’t a villain; nor is he a hero. He might even fill the role of anti-hero. He certainly is a character who challenges the norms and expectations of his day. He was born to be a temple priest like his father Zachariah, yet he eschews that calling and power to go into the wilderness. He takes on the role of hermit prophet, to preach against the powers of his world, but also to leave questions as to whether he is really speaking with the authority of God or whether he is simply a lunatic out in the desert. 

He is exactly the kind of character that we find interesting, the kind of character who isn’t a hero just because it is right and good. But he is also one that challenges us, too. We wouldn’t want to become the target of his ire – as what happens to some in the third week of Advent when we hear from John again.

What John does do is serve an important rhetorical or narrative purpose. Luke paints him as a figure that we simply have to listen to; he demands that we go out into the wilderness like the rest of the crowds to hear what he has to say. And yet, he bears the apocalyptic weight of Advent that Jesus gave us last week. The Kingdom of God is breaking into our world to reclaim it from the powers of sin, suffering and death. John turns us from seeing the signs and alarm bells all around and pin-points us to Jesus, the promised Messiah who is bringing that Apocalyptic Kingdom to bear on us now.

Pastor Erik+

Pastor Thoughts, Sermon, Theology & Culture

Apocalypse is waiting

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This week, we have stepped fully into Advent, the season that begins each liturgical year with waiting and watching for Messiah. Advent is the favourite season of most pastors and deacons, and I know more than a few lay folks who love Advent as well. There is something about those shades of blue that captures the essence of the night sky in this season of darkness. The Advent hymns of hope and longing speak deeply to the reality of our world. Advent doesn’t rush us to the good part of the story… rather, it takes its time unfolding. We are just starting this season now in the Church, whereas many in the world have been celebrating Christmas since November 1st. 

I think this love and connection to Advent is precisely because of the contrast it offers to the expectations of Christmas that begin ramping up in November with Christmas parties, concerts, baking, decorating, Hallmark movies and holiday muzak playing on radios everywhere. Our calendars fill up; we have to summon the energy to be social, to be good guests and hosts, and to be present physically, mentally, and emotionally at events with family, friends, acquaintances and strangers. It can be delightful, difficult, busy, tiring, fun or all of those things at once.

Conversely, Advent is about preparation and anticipation. Not in the frantic getting-the-house-ready-for-company kind of way, but in the quiet-stillness-of- your-own-thoughts-and-a-hot-cup-of-coffee-at-dawn kind of way. Advent calls us to slow down, to be present in our own minds and thoughts, in our bodies and hearts. Advent calls us to watch and listen for God, to prepare our hearts for Messiah, to attend to pregnant possibilities of divine activity in our world. 

In the four weeks of Advent, we journey from big to small. In the first week, we begin in the cosmic and apocalyptic realm, where Jesus calls us to pay attention. God is at work bringing the Kingdom of God to confront the kingdoms of sin, death and the devil. 

In the second week, we hear John the Baptist preach about the Kingdom of Israel, of empires and rulers, of politics and nations. 

In the third week, we keep shrinking down: John addresses the crowds before him on the River Jordan. 

Finally, in the fourth week, we witness an intimate conversation between Elizabeth and her cousin Mary, two women pregnant with miraculous babies. 

In Advent, divine activity is revealed in all the levels of our existence, from the cosmic, to the political, to the communal, down to the intimate. And yet, divine activity begins in this final and special place—in the wombs of our mothers. In this most intimate and closest of relationships we can have as human beings, God enters into creation in order to meet us in Christ. From this smallest and closest of beginnings, Christ proceeds to encounter the fullness of creation, joining God once again in divine fullness to every part of our existence. From incarnation and birth to crucifixion and death, Christ becomes one with us. And then, in the Resurrection, Christ’s apocalyptic renewal and reordering of our world in a new creation, we become one in Christ. 

Doctor of Ministry, Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

Waiting for the Apocalyptic Kingdom

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We have arrived at Christ the King Sunday. This is the end of the liturgical year, which means we have made our way through the stories of Jesus’ birth, journey to Jerusalem, death and resurrection as told by the season of Advent through Easter. We have also made it through Jesus’ teaching and ministry as told by the Gospel of Mark. 

Altogether, these two parts of the liturgical year serve to create a narrative that takes us through the story of Jesus each year. 

There is another piece to this journey, however. This liturgical move is more than one that moves us from one year to the next. The move we make in our calendars and in our Sunday worship shows us a glimpse of the much larger scale movement that is happening all around us. 

Christ the King Sunday, or perhaps more accurately, the Reign of Christ Sunday, lifts the Apocalyptic veil on our world. No, not an apocalypse like the movies imagine with zombies, nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, or exorcist priests fighting demons.

Rather, the Apocalypse as the Biblical Narrative imagines it, the one that we have had in the background in this year of reading Mark, and perhaps in the background of pandemics, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the election of populist leaders that are tracking to fascism. Apocalypse hardly seems like the thing of movies and novels these days, it is out there in the world. 

The Apocalypse that the Bible imagines is one that is rooted in the conflict between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Sin, Death and the Devil. On Christ the King Sunday we are equally concerned with the fact that the Kingdom of God has entered the battle plains of this world with the intention of striving against those forces that would defy the One who holds all creation and us within God as we are with Christ’s Kingship. 

This is the work of God’s Kingdom in the world, to push back against all those forces that cause suffering and death, the forces of systematic sin and evil that cause oppression and enslave us.

But God’s Kingdom’s work is not the one of military might or political and economic power.  Rather, it is accomplished on the cross, in the one who takes our sin and death to the grave while exchanging with us the gifts of forgiveness, righteousness and life. The Kingdom’s work is to meet the powers of this world with the reconciling mercy of God, with true Kingdom power that can transform this world for the better. 

On the Christ the King Sunday, we prepare for the Apocalypse of Biblical proportions to come – for it to flip us over into the Advent of God’s new world, where we will be new creations. 

Theology & Culture

That familiar feeling of dread

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Sometime in the evening on Tuesday night last week, a familiar feeling returned. It’s one that I thought we had finally been able to lay down and move on from sometime in late January of 2021–a burdensome feeling, full of dread and uncertainty. 

If I am honest, I would admit that that feeling has been lingering in the shadows of my mind for months now. I think we all have wanted to move on, to think that the chaotic years from 2016 to 2020 were some kind of fluke or accident of history, that Donald Trump, by pure dumb luck, had somehow gotten himself elected as President of the United States of America. Once that presidency ended in 2020, it was easiest to think we could just return to not having that feeling anymore. 

Since Tuesday night, when it started to become clear that the election was going the way it was going and that feeling of dread was surfacing again, I tried to analyze how things are different this time around.

In 2016, it was so shocking to think that this absurd candidate actually would become the President, and no one knew what would happen. This time, none of it is shocking, and I think we all have a pretty good idea of what is coming. I think about all those whose lives will be qualitatively worse: immigrants and asylum seekers, LGBTQ2SIA+ persons, women, people of colour, people who practice a faith other than the ones that support Trump, people who believe this is new totalitarian administration or anyone who invokes the ire of the new wanna-be “tyrant king.”

I also think this result is not surprising for many reasons, most of all since many of our political leaders around the globe appear to have been too long in the pockets of the ultra rich. Our politics might technically be democratic, but our economics look a lot like feudalism. We live in a world where a small privileged few control just about everything, and the vast majority of people are left to fight over the scraps. But this time around, the kings and privileged few are better at hiding our slavery from us. Instead of making us slaves, having us till the land which we do not own and grow food which we aren’t allowed to eat, the small group of billionaires have given us just enough distraction to make us think we are free –smartphones, crumbling hospitals and schools, endless entertainment like the gladiator games, but delivered to phones, tablets and TVs–and the illusion that the people we vote for are stark and different choices when instead they are more or less the same choice no matter what. 

Kamala Harris represented an interminably broken system that will not fix itself, while Trump represented change. That is change in the form of total destruction of the system, but change nonetheless. Given the choice between interminable brokenness and change through destruction, I am not surprised that so many opted for change. It is the same instinct that has led to every revolution and the overthrow of kingdoms, empires, regimes or other oppressive systems. 

Now, not being surprised by what happened is not the only difference this time around. 

Lately, I hear Martin Luther in the back of my head a lot. He lived in a time of oppressive and evil rulers, too. Popes and Emperors wanted him dead. Jesus also lived in that kind of world. That has been the normal state of the world for much of human history. We have been fortunate to have lived so long in a world where we (privileged North Americans) could sleep comfortably at night without wondering if some tyrant was going make life worse tomorrow. 

In the face of this kind of world, Luther would tell us to turn to God and God’s promises. The Gospel is the only hope that we truly have. This Gospel includes God’s forgiveness of sinners, Christ’s salvation enacted on the cross and Christ’s resurrection from the dead. There is no human effort that will save us and no political power, no king or queen, emperor or empress, no president or prime minister that can bring about our salvation or reconciliation. 

Yes, the world feels heavy and full of dread this week. But our hope and salvation remain what they have always been – the One who does the thing that we cannot do ourselves, the One in whom we die to sin and death and are raised to new life. 

Photo: The last bits of Berlin Wall. On November 9th, was the 35th anniversary of its fall. The movement that led to it being knocked down was begun by a group holding prayer meetings in St. Nikolai’s Church in Leipzig by pastors who were heavily influenced by Martin Luther’s writing The Freedom of a Christian. Within weeks, the meeting grew to be silent, candle-held protests of hundreds of thousands, which led to the wall coming down.

A reminder that tyranny can be resisted and overcome…