De-creation. Recreation. Reading Aloud in times of Apocalyptic Text

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed up on the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pilotless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This is the Word of the Lord according to...? The prophet Haggai? Malachi? Isaiah? Wait – its from the beginning of a Gospel, Mark? Luke? ... It is the Gospel according to Irish poet, William Butler Yeats.
We heard from Isaiah: For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. We heard from Luke: The days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down. Nation will rise against nation... and so on.
What is it about this kind of literature that it is repeated from generation to generation across cultures and boundaries?  Texts that speak of DE-CREATION. The texts mention the noisy din of war and rumours of war, the devastation and upheaval of environments and ecosystems taxed beyond limits, the disrespect and ill-regard  ---cruelty--- toward fellow human beings.  This de-creation was not meant to be --- it seems humans are insistent on messing up God’s continued creating of a new heaven, a new earth.
What is it about this kind of literature? This kind of literature -the language of apocalyptic text- challenges the status quo, continually planting the idea that there are other options as to how to live – NEW, re-newed, wisdom led and fed ways. Apocalyptic texts tell us that whatever the circumstance we are facing, it will not always be this way; change is inevitable. In Luke’s apocalyptic moment he reminds us – as he always does: do not be terrified.
When one hears the text it is sometimes hard to not get pulled into the images of fire and destruction, of war, persecution, and terror ---  to listen with different ears, to pull out the Gospel (which is God’s continued action to bring life), and in this to find hope.  God is creating and we have been invited to be a part of it.
This new thing God is creating – is about to create--  is described in the final sentence of every piece of apocalyptic literature.  We heard read aloud from Isaiah, Luke, and Yeats:
They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.
By your endurance you will gain your souls.
Its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born
In some text there is promise throughout. Luke’s rendition is a foretaste of the what is to come in his Gospel sequel – the book of Acts, where the Holy Spirit comes on the day of Pentecost – changing the disciples lives forever.  Luke’s Jesus promises: I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. Wisdom is not just a state or a quality someone possesses. Wisdom is described as the breath of the power of God, a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty, a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God and an image of God’s goodness. This description comes from the extra biblical book, The Book of Wisdom.  Imagine --- God giving such to human beings; new creations where the breathe of the power of God, a pure emanation of the glory of God, an image of God’s goodness, comes through us. There is power in the words of apocalyptic text; planting the idea that some day God will use us in this way to confound the status quo and say “there is a different way.”
Scripture has been told and read, poetry recited, stories recounted, ALOUD for as long as humans can remember.   The tales tell of war, struggle, famine, sickness; anger, revenge, sadness; overcoming monsters and obstacles; finding love, hope, acceptance; the literature contains woes and blessings, opens the hearer to the intimacy of human relationships, and seeks to make sense of a world -and life- that is fraught with complexity and confusion.
I have been reading a book about the importance and benefit of reading aloud, and being read to. Church is one place where adults are read to. Every week we hear various pieces of literature read from sacred text – and sometimes from works that are outside the Canon of Scripture. The texts we hear help us strive to make sense of the world, to say and wrestle with what is written, and feel what we might not be able to express.  Literature allows us to move through a vast array of emotions quickly, stretching the brain by imprinting ideas to be tucked away for later reflection. 
The book reflects on the studied healing power of reading to those in the hospital, rather than conversation that often gets stuck in the complaints of the day. The book remarks on the improvement of function and emotional calm brought by reading to those with dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Meghan Gurdon, also tells a beautiful story from history, which I recount in my own words:  Once upon a time, 1865 in Cuba to be exact,  a man named Martinez organized public readers to read the newspaper to the working class- only 15% of whom could read for themselves. The next year, public readers moved into the Havanna cigar factory – the cigar-rollers even pitched in to pay the reader.  Listening sure helped the workers by offering a distraction, something of interest, outside the mundane and repetitive rolling of tobacco leaves hour after hour. For six months the workers revelled in a sea of words and thoughts and ideas, until --- until the authorities put a stop to filling workers with dangerous ideas.  Afraid of the power being given to the working class, growing ideas and thoughts, public readings were banned. It wasn’t the first time books and literature were taken from the hands of the working class and it wouldn’t be the last.
A few years later, a son of a public reader, had moved to Florida with other Cubans seeking a new life. Remembering the heart of his father, and his father’s love of literature, and his sense of purpose to read aloud, the son began to read to cigar workers in Key West; the newspaper in the morning and novels in the afternoon.  He sat above and behind the cigar-rollers so his voice would carry, there cross-legged and spectacled he took the whole factory to places of great imaginings: around the world on pirate ships, to deserts and oasis, to great kingdoms, and to walk in the shoes of the cigar workers favourite character, the Count of Monte Cristo.
In the time of Jesus, the authorities did not much like the literature that Jesus shared with the disciples and the people (including the marginalized, the poor, the forgotten, the widow) who gathered around to hear Jesus. Jesus’ words were a disruption to the status quo and gave people ideas that balked against a heavy handed wealth acquiring ruling class.  As Jesus told stories, read scripture, wrestled with the Law, made apocalyptic pronouncements, people’s imaginations grew, affecting emotions, imprinting ideas, and bringing hope to a people who had forgotten how to hope, and thus, how to live into God’s new creation.
It was the same in the time of the prophet Haggai, Isaiah, or poet Yeats.  Text was read to empower human beings, to remind them of the essence of their being – created by the great Creator and then filled with Wisdom who would speak holy words through ordinary people, to continue the work of creation.
The beauty of being read to is not the expectation that we understand every word.  It is a growing of capacity for language, idea, vision, and a turning from de-creation to NEW CREATION.  I will admit poetry was never my favourite type of literature – at least not when every ounce of meaning was to be taken from the words – for me it was the feeling left behind by the hearing of the words, it was the communion of the community listening together and interacting in the process; it IS the ahhs and ooohs and yikes and the AMENs collectively shared.
Yeats poem, the Second Coming, is a foretaste of the readings to come over the next five weeks.  Next week we celebrate the reign of the Christ – the last Sunday of the church year.  We collectively read about Christ dying and rising, to remind us the ‘why’ of returning to Advent the week following and progressing via sacred text to the celebration of Christmas. In times when the noise of the world overpowers the falconer, when anarchy is loosed, innocence lost, and it feels like the centre is about to let go, and around us things fall apart...We come to read the texts aloud, so to stir up the Wisdom of the creator, so that facing a world rushing to consumer Christmas and wars and rumours of wars, we might be given the words to speak louder than the status quo, words that signal:  a new way -HOPE- ; a new vision -PEACE; a new heaven -JOY; a new earth - LOVE.