Don Friesen
Christmas is a joyful time for most people. Oh, it can get hectic. We feel rushed because there are so many things to do, but it's a festive time. Christians, however, have a weird way of starting the festivities. The Church begins its preparation for Christmas in a dark manner. Today's Scriptures set the mood, a thread of foreboding running through them, as if we are on the edge of a cataclysmic event. The Gospel, for example, urges us to keep awake! (Matthew 24:42) There is a warning tone to the scenarios it presents. Something is about to happen and the "day and hour no one knows...." (24:36) Matthew compares this moment to the days of Noah, when people were engaged in frolicsome festivities-and-then-some, quite un-aware that a disaster was looming! Imagine two people working in a field, says Matthew – and suddenly one is gone! Two women will be working in the mill – suddenly one of them is missing a companion! You're fast asleep in your own home – and suddenly a noise downstairs awakes you – a thief is prowling around down there!
Matthew is trying to prepare us, lest the un-expected proves our un-doing. (Matthew 24:44) Similarly Paul, in his letter to the Romans, is trying to alert us, lest the "works of darkness" (Romans 13:12) prove our undoing. If you're going to spend your leisure time "in revelling and drunkenness, ...in debauchery and licentiousness, ...in quarrelling and jealousy" (13:13), says Paul, you just may miss the train to glory!
A Long Line of Millennial Mad Hatters
The Scriptures that traditionally begin the Season of Advent are often dark, urgent, apocalyptic warnings: Awake! Be alert! Be ready! Get ready! Such apocalyptic threads have set off more than one crazy Christian! Wave one of these passages in front of an apocalyptic extremist, and he will march off anywhere – preferably an obscure location – to wait for Christ's second coming! One of the more recent millennial enthusiasts was David Brandt Berg (1919-1994), who predicted that a comet would destroy the United States in 1973 – or 1974 – that the tribulation would begin in 1989, and that Christ's Second Coming would occur in 1993. That all of his predictions failed has not appeared to disillusion his followers (Children of God), now known as The Family International.
A long line of millennial mad hatters can be found in Christianity's wake, and we find them easy to dismiss. Some are simply certifiable and some self-destruct, but all ignore Jesus' own words that we do not know the day or hour of Christ's return! Only God knows. (Matthew 24:36, 42) Today's Scripture readings contain some urgent warnings, but they also have instructions for the here-and-now! "Lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light," says Paul. (Romans 13:12) "Live honourably.... Put on the Lord Jesus Christ...." (13:13-14) "Walk in the light of the Lord!" (Isaiah 2:5) says Isaiah. Allow God to "teach us His ways ...that we may walk in his paths". (2:3)
Should we not Have the Millennium on our Mind?
We may find millennial mad hatters easy to dismiss, but we should be careful lest we throw away everything that cannot be listed on the inventory of the here-and-now. Christian tradition and memory is ripe with expectation of things that not easily noted in a ledger, like our expectation of "new heavens" and a "new earth". (2 Peter 3:13; Revelation 21:1) What of the promise that swords will be beat into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks? What of the promise that institutions of military education will be shut down? (Isaiah 2:4) Unbelievable? Perhaps, but biblical hope is based on the assumption that imagination is more compelling than reality.
Biblical hope fosters "...the suspicion that reality is far more complex than realism would have us believe, (and) that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the present...." (Rubem Alves) Therefore the tale in one of Elie Wiesel's books, when he tells of a wise and faithful rabbi whose daughter was about to be married; and when the nuptial agreement was brought to him for approval he added a condition, that the "agreement be null and void should the Messiah come before the wedding." Frank Epp, a former minister of our congregation, urged Mennonites to live "with the millennium on our mind" – a state of mind that never loses its sense of anticipation of something much better than what we have in the here-and-now.
Millennial Mennonites Revisited
We have a few mad hatters in our own history, figures that are easy to dismiss because their own anticipation of the end times ended badly. In 1850 the Prussian constitution abolished Mennonite exemption from military service, and so a number of Prussian Mennonites emigrated to Russia. Among them were some millennial enthusiasts, among them a fellow named Claas Epp. His father, the leader of this new settlement, was not happy; he wrote, "Our belief that the Son of Man would appear in the clouds of heaven, the most important event awaiting his church, has been reduced to the dust of an unsavory fanatical imagination." (cited by Walter Unger, "Mennonite Millennial Madness: A Case Study," Direction, Fall 1999, Vol.28, No.2)
In 1877 Claas Epp, Jr., wrote a book entitled, The Unsealed Prophecy of the Prophet Daniel and the Meaning of the Revelation of Jesus Christ. The book, augmented by Epp's teaching and preaching, inspired several treks to Turkestan where the group waited for Christ to return. The trek itself was plagued with suffering and with doubts from within the group itself, some calling the trek a "crazy venture" and denouncing Epp as a false prophet. (Direction) Epp eventually died a lonely man, noted one of his descendants, and in his later years was prone to "wearing his white robes and sitting out at the chicken coop staring off into space." (Jesse Nathan, "The Unfinished Great Trek," Mennonite Life, Fall 2007, Vol.62, No.2)
Modern-day Mennonites, historians and scholars included, have been quick to distance themselves from Claas Epp, but what is interesting is that descendants of the families 1 who survived the trek – and emigrated to North America – are returning to visit the old village of Ak Metchet, which means "White Mosque". The last of the Mennonites left this Muslim community in 1935, thanks to Stalin's oppressive tactics, but seventy years later they are still remembered by the Muslim community. Here the Mennonites found friendship, shepherded by Muslims everywhere they went in a land that was and is largely Islamic. The word, "inter-faith," was not a current mantra in the 1800s, but while the Mennonites lived there, they met for worship in the local mosque – Mennonites worshipping on Sundays, Muslims on Fridays and Saturdays.
A Witness of Hope in the Here-and-Now
The inhabitants of the community today still remember the Mennonites, not for their millennial fantasies, but for their daily witness. The Mennonites left behind a wake of goodwill so strong it has lasted well over a century! They are still viewed as hard-working and caring people who demonstrated, in their mastery of farming and woodworking and by the strength of their tight-knit communities, the kind of ethic their hope inspired.
The current residents of Ak Metchet describe the Mennonites as firm in their Christian beliefs, but willing to share their cultural and agricultural knowledge, and to this day, every spring, local Muslims pray over the ground believed to be the Mennonite cemetery, hoping to call forth and draw upon the spirit of those first-rate tillers of the earth.
We may call them crazy, but they proved to be among Christendom's finest ambassadors. They left a mark. A very well-known Uzbek photographer (Xudoybergan Devonov (1878-1940), for example, got his start in photography from Wilhelm Penner, a Mennonite pastor and teacher who provided him with his first camera and with instruction. When the Khan of Khiva built his Nurullabai Palace he asked Mennonites to build him a parquet floor like the one he'd seen in St. Petersburg at the palace of the Czar. The floor is still there, a magnificent monument to the Mennonite-Uzbek relationship of a century ago. The locals also remember – with admiration – the Mennonites' refusal to acquiesce to Stalinist forces, even when ten Mennonite leaders were marched through the streets of Khiva in shackles and sentenced to death by a firing squad. The story of their resistance is a great story in itself, involving women singing hymns as the Soviet soldiers arrived, while others lay down in front of the trucks of the Soviet army.
Jesus did not descend bodily to meet the Mennonites in Uzbekistan, but his presence was there, in the daily witness of a faithful community. If there is to be peace and hope on earth, it has to begin with us, with the community of faith, a community whose hope for a better future is already evident in its caring life and witness in the here-and now.
1Thanks to Harold Penner, our Ten Thousand Villages voluntary service worker in 2007, for pointing me to this story. RETURN
Quotations of Scripture are from the New Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise noted.