The Coming Cloud

Abstract

As the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor in Theology and Ethics, Christopher Morse became known and beloved as one of the great teachers at Union Theological Seminary. With humor, humility, and humanity, he conveyed to his students that systematic theology is both an utterly human enterprise and an indispensable academic discipline. Despite its putative pretensions, and sometimes its pretentious practitioners, systematic theology can serve the church and the world by enabling Christians to give an account of the hope that is in them, usually with reference to prevailing “plausibility structures,” while also prompting them to engage the received Christian message with both respectful reflection and critical testing. Thus, the point is not to pass along intact an unchanging “deposit of faith.” Rather, by critically learning and engaging the traditions of faith, the followers of Jesus Christ become better equipped to be “on hand” for the God who is ever “at hand” in all the events of life and death. Nowhere is the challenge of interpretation more demanding than in the sermonic and catechetical appropriate of the scriptural tradition’s apocalyptic texts, a challenge that Morse repeatedly takes up in his work. For example, in his reflections on the “Life to Come” concluding Not Every Spirit, Morse attends to the sayings of the New Testament regarding the coming of the “Son of Man,” derived from Daniel 7 and featured in Luke 21:25–28 with its synoptic parallels. In his section on “The Coming Cloud,” Morse interprets the redemptive coming of the Son of Man amid nations in distress and a destabilized natural order not as “a prediction of the inevitability of destruction, but a promise, as only God can make and keep, that even when the worst things come upon us that can possibly happen, they will not be able to prevent Christ’s coming to us and to all the world in redemption, an ultimate reclaiming from all harm.”1 In the years leading up to the publication of Not Every Spirit, I was privileged to read preliminary drafts of this book, including the section on “The Coming Cloud.” I was also thereby prompted to try to think through the implications of apocalyptic for homiletics, understood primarily as theological reflection on the practice of preaching.2 But side by side with this “second order” work, I felt compelled to see if apocalyptic, when reframed as Morse’s “promissory narration,” would actually preach. One result of this latter attempt was to take Morse’s formulation of “The Coming Cloud,” as the focal metaphor for a sermon from Luke 21. Although typically an Advent lectionary text, I selected it for pulpit use on August 6, 1989