Too often, however, in the (appropriate) effort to distance itself from the tragic/comic millenarianism of the sectarian fringes and in its (inappropriate) comfort with the status quo, United Methodism has ignored the pervasive eschatological themes of the Christian faith. Compounding our ignorance is the fact that eschatology is just plain difficult to talk about. After all, how does one explain the “here now but not yet” character of the Reign of God? A claim such as this is inherently paradoxical, and paradox, by definition, mocks our attempts to rope it and brand it in the name of theological precision. It turns out that Christian liturgy offers a different manner for considering eschatology. Liturgy at its best has never settled for reducing meaning to the narrowness of theological positivism; instead it has preferred the primacy of encounter with Holy Mystery, of experiencing the Divine to explaining it. Indeed the grammar and syntax of liturgical practice—the playful engagement with poetry, metaphor, symbol, and song, especially in relation to Book, Table, Font, and a distinctive patterning of Time—provide a unique medium for revealing to human beings (hearts and bodies as well as minds) the deep, even paradoxical mysteries of God’s extraordinary saving grace in Jesus Christ. This includes, of course, the mystery of eschatology. Rather than talking about eschatology, Christian liturgy invites its participants into an encounter with eschatology. As such, Christian liturgy becomes nothing less than the church’s lived experience of a God who has saved, is saving, and will save the world in and through One who is at once peasant child and cosmic king. In other words, Christian liturgy, by holding together simultaneously and with intensive creativity all the dimensions of this eschatological paradox that elude our well-meaning attempts at explanation, becomes uniquely capable of evoking this reality. And it is finally in worship where persons of faith encounter the God whose faithful past is shaping a present and a future that Christians may anticipate with trust and hope rather than fear or dread. How does liturgy accomplish this feat? To some extent, attempts at explanation inevitably fall into the same reductionist trap of “explanation” criticized above. On the other hand, sensitivity to the eschatological dynamics operative in our worshiping patterns can only strengthen a community’s faithful response to God and to a culture seemingly overcome with with repeated visions of a millennial apocalypse. An undergirding assumption at work here is that eschatological theology is already embedded in our worshiping practices; therefore we need only tune our “faith senses” into the gifts that God is providing. We begin with time. Following the insights of Alexander Schmemann, the Orthodox liturgical theologian, I suggest that the Christian patterning of time enacts fundamental theological convictions. According to Schmemann, by the end of the first century, Christians had increasingly segregated themselves from their synagogue communities. Consistent with their experience of the resurrection as central to communal life and identity, they also began to worship on the first day of the week, variously described as “the Lord’s Day” or (more notably) “the Eighth Day” rather than the Sabbath. Schmemann claims this as an example of the manner in which the church’s own emerging liturgy of time (Lord’s Day placed in ‘contrasting conjunction’ with the Jewish week) witnesses to its distinctive theology; in this case a new eschatology—one that, since it is rooted in faith that the messiah long-anticipated by Israel has come and his kingdom has begun, is no longer exclusively future-oriented as is its Jewish source but is instead simultaneously future-oriented and presently fulfilled. 9 Clearly the Lord’s Day does not cancel or nullify the week in the church. For Christians, the Eighth Day marks a new creation, a new reality, a kairos, yet it nonetheless requires the Jewish week for its revelatory opening to the world. Embedded in the church’s creative patterning of time is the paradoxical reciprocity of past, present, and future at the heart of its theological eschatology. The same pattern is evident in the seasons of the Christian year. Just as the Lord’s Day recasts the Jewish week, so does the Paschal feast of Easter reinterpret and refashion the Passover; likewise the Great 50 Days from Easter to Pentecost the other 6/7 of the year. Again I should stress that these were not policy decisions emanating from denominational headquarters; instead they exemplify the church’s genius for actualizing in its liturgical life its experience of God’s new activity in Jesus Christ within the context of God’s history of salvation. The season of Advent deserves special attention. Advent manages to be at one and the same time a season of beginnings and endings, a crucible of time that simultaneously enacts past, present, and future. Advent revels in the paradoxical themes of Christian faith: the “here now but not yet fully realized” character of the Reign of God (thus the focus not only on the manger but on “watchfulness” for the return of the cosmic Christ and his reign of justice and peace); as well as the incarnational notion of a “transcendent” God becoming “immanent” in human life (thus the focus on God’s risking the redemption of all creation on the willingness of a peasant women to make a home for God’s flesh). Some churches simply don’t “do” Advent, caught up as they are in the juggernaut of North American cultural Christmas and its consumer countdown. On the other hand, shallow pastoral understanding, teaching, or leadership can make Advent feel like nothing more than the Christmas Grinch stealing away everybody’s holiday fun. As a new millennium emerges, however, the juxtaposition of a White Christmas with John’s imprisonment or a sentimental manger scene with the approaching cloud of judgment offers a rich resource for evoking, confounding, interpreting, and recasting the pervasive cultural ambiguity afflicting the late twentieth century. Practicing Advent watchfulness and its dialectic of prophecy and hope not only resists the current mythology of consumption, it provides a vision and experience of faithful leaning into God’s promised future in the context of God’s saving past. In this way we rightly proclaim and dwell in the tension of “Maranatha” (Our Lord Come) and “Maranatha” (Our Lord has come). 10 In the former, the future is joyfully present; in the latter, it is painfully not yet. The Eucharist is another liturgical practice brimming with eschatological power. As liturgical and textual scholars have ably demonstrated, Jesus’ instruction to “do my anamnesis” is impoverished when translated as a passive “remembrance.” Eucharistic anamnesis implies action, a remembering, a re-presenting of the history of God’s saving work, including especially the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Mere ordinance will not do here, as clearly the meal means and intends far more. Just as the child’s question at Passover, “Why is this night different from all others?” signals more than a memory exercise in progress, Christians cannot be content with the supper as flat memorial. As Don Saliers suggests, Eucharist is a “foretaste of glory divine” where a Stranger becomes host to the community’s life-giving meal, a messianic banquet that inverts and perhaps even subverts typical human relations of power. 11 In other words, our Eucharistic celebrations are a partial realization of God’s Promised Reign. Eucharist becomes for God’s people an occasion where past and future collapse into present sacramental action, where, through the mystery of grace a historically and culturally bound community finds fellowship with the risen Christ and a host of heavenly witnesses. This eschatological dimension of Eucharist was brought home to me when a recently widowed parishioner, after participating for the first time in an All Saints’ service of Word and Table, described it as follows: “It was an experience of fellowship I’ve never encountered or even considered before. I felt connected to persons I’ve loved and lost but they also seemed out there ahead of me.” Lest this all seem a bit too glib, I should add that our actual practice of the sacrament may function to undermine this eschatological reality. When we look around us to see who is doing the serving and who is denied that privilege, or who is present and who is absent from our table, or even how often we break bread together and whether we celebrate the sacrament with joy or hurried obligation, we may feel ourselves judged rather than empowered. This dialectic of judgment and grace is inevitable, however, and consistent with our eschatological vision. Though our journey is well begun in Jesus Christ, we clearly haven’t yet made it all the way over to the other side. The sacrament of baptism, long the Rodney Dangerfield of Protestant liturgical practice and understanding, is another key to a creative eschatology in the church’s liturgical life. Churches have for too long regarded baptism as an isolated one-time event for individual Christians and, in the process, condemned it to irrelevance. Baptism deserves better. To begin with, as is the case with the Eucharistic Prayer of Great Thanksgiving, the Service of Baptismal Covenant, and especially its Prayer Over the Waters, carries an anamnestic quality and function, a re-presenting of God’s salvation history in the sacramental action. This prayer ought not be an easily dispensed with elective in our services of Baptismal Covenant. Baptism as an initiatory rite also shapes the present and the future. Gayle Felton describes this future-orienting function of baptism as “prolepsis,” a “representing in the now that which will be accomplished in the future, but representing that anticipated fruition so powerfully as to make it real even now.” 12 Once again we find ourselves in the wormhole of paradox, but I hope by now you will agree that this is not such a bad place to be. Indeed, from the standpoint of eschatology it is exactly where we need to be. The graceful mystery of baptism is that it somehow enacts a covenantal binding of past, present, and future. The womb of our common life becomes our destination as we seek to live out our baptisms in the world and beyond. That is why the church affirms and reaffirms its baptismal covenant at confirmation, in Christian marriage, at ordination to ministry, and at services of Death and Resurrection. Baptism embraces the personal and the corporate; it goes before us and outlasts us as the church’s means of making faith in the world. It enacts the “new creation” but insists that God’s people must continue to grow into their baptismal garments. How may liturgically enacted eschatology shape our engagement with a new millennium? Not wishing to circumscribe the mystery of God’s gracious action, I offer only a few suggestions. First, we might realistically imagine that Christians may ultimately be moved to cultivate affections of expectancy and hope through the liturgy in place of fear and dread, since the experience of God’s future is made present to them in liturgical and sacramental ways. The opposite is also true, however. Impoverished worship practices that ignore or mask liturgy’s eschatological dimensions may wind up reinforcing the feelings of helpless passivity before the apocalytic terror of impending doom. Indeed, besides rehearsing the hopeful and trustworthy posture of God’s people in light of God’s unfolding Reign, liturgy also enacts important dimensions of this Reign. When we drag ourselves to church on Sunday mornings, we participate in a patterning of time that denies work, competition, and wealth as the ultimate ends of humanity; when we wash at the font, we are taught and formed in gratitude for a past that has gifted us all with this present birth; when we gather for the communal meal, we taste and see the new community whose mutuality and interdependence model a sustainable future for ourselves and for the planet. These are some but by no means all of the themes liturgy offers for faithful congregations seeking a toehold in the twenty-first century. Local communities will want to construct liturgical practices that embody their own understandings of faithful leaning. Let the people do their work. And in the meantime, Maranatha!
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QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION & DISCUSSION
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-- Fred P. Edie and his family live on the Isle of Hope near Savannah, Georgia. Edie is a United Methodist pastor and religious educator and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Emory University.
Other Millennial Perspective Articles: | The Centrality of Christian Worship | Worship Forming Faith | Hope | The Changing Cultural Look of Worship | Visual Arts | | Advent: Between the Times | Worshiping with Jubilation | Children and 21st Century Worship |
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| Introduction | Preface | Contents | Copyright | | Millennial Perspectives | Worship and Study Resources | | Seven Days of Praise and Prayer |Prayer and Worship for a Jubilee Week | The Last Letter: Revelation’s News | Repairing the World: God's Gift of Jubilee | Hymns | Additional Liturgical Resources | Appendix |
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schatology is not a word that trips easily off the tongues of the Sunday morning coffee klatch. Yet when persons pray, “Thy kingdom come,” they speak, knowingly or not, the language of eschatology. Eschatology voices our tradition’s deepest hope for the fulfillment of God’s Reign. It describes the promised destination of our baptismal waters—the new Jerusalem, the city on the hill—symbol of God’s ever-lasting reign of justice and of peace. Christian eschatology is also the most appropriate theological thematics to interpret and lend context to that strange cultural convergence of fear and hope arising just now as we lurch toward a new millennium.