sermon preached
at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
by the
Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
The
Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 28B), November 18, 2018
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great,
And would suffice.
That’s Robert Frost’s 1920 poem “Fire and Ice.” We often hear about the remote possibility of hell freezing over, but not until this week have I heard of Paradise burning. The city of Chico, California suddenly has 50,000 new residents: refugees from nearby towns that wildfires have all but destroyed. Over 1000 homes have burned. More than 75 people have died, and hundreds are still missing. A woman being interviewed said, “It’s as if God has checked out.” I urge your continuing prayers for the victims of these fires.
Meanwhile, in Greece, archaeologists have just uncovered the ruins of the ancient city of Tenea. Historians knew about the city from ancient writings: it was founded 33 centuries ago and then abandoned 16 centuries ago. Clearly it was a very affluent place, as evidenced by the finding of exquisite pottery and jewelry. It was there for a long time, and then it was gone, and we’re just now finding it again. Everything that begins will end.
In our readings today, we hear of “a time of anguish,” and “the Day”—capital D—“approaching.” Jesus’ friends point out the wondrous spectacle of the temple in Jerusalem, and Jesus responds with a rousing … “meh.” He tells his friends, “It’s not long for this world anyway. It’ll be gone soon—very soon.”
Naturally, the anxious disciples have to ask: “Well, how soon are we talking?”
And Jesus says, cryptically, “What looks to you like the end of the world is really only the beginning.”
Most scholars agree that Mark’s gospel was written sometime around the year 70. Mark that date well, because it’s the year of the most important event in the Bible that is not explicitly mentioned in the Bible. That’s when the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed God’s Temple.
By then it had been 40 years since Jesus’ crucifixion, and the nascent Jesus movement had spread all around the Mediterranean. It is crucial for Christians to know and understand that all four gospel writers wrote in the shadow of Jerusalem’s destruction: for Mark it was either imminent or immediately in the past; for the others it was a reality they were trying gradually to accept. For Jews, this meant the beginning of a complete reworking of their faith from the ground up. Jews still live in the post-Temple era that began at that time. Doubtless it felt to them, too, as if God had checked out.
When faced with the enormity of destruction and loss in our world, we cannot help but try to make sense of it, even if our arguments are clearly faulty. We blame ourselves or others. Some made sense of the destruction of Jerusalem by asserting that it was God’s punishment. In later times, many Jews would take the route of humility, naming their own people as idolatrous and unjust, seeing the loss of Jerusalem the way the prophets saw the ancient invasions by Assyria and Babylon.
Christians, unfortunately, would also come to blame the Jewish people, but in terms more like, “Well, Jesus came, and you didn’t listen to him.” This unfortunate dynamic was already going on in the writing of the gospels. We need to know that, and we still have need to repent of it. If you’re going to see death and destruction as God’s punishment, do it in humility. But for Christians, there is no warrant for turning the Messiah who died to save us all into a Messiah who lays waste to God’s chosen people.
Others of us just deny reality completely. I’m convinced that this is why some people still deny climate change even as the term “climate change refugee” comes into common parlance. It’s too big to accept, and even if we do, it’s so difficult to change our comfortable lives to meet the challenge. A few weeks ago a new report from climate scientists told us that we have a decade at most to make dramatic changes in our world to ensure human survival. I’ve had a hard time inwardly digesting this. I’ve done my research, and it seems clear that solving this problem will require the unprecedented cooperation of all the most powerful nations on earth, most of which don’t get along with each other. I am filled with hopelessness … and then I go back to my life. I just don’t have the bandwidth to handle such things for very long.
I want to suggest that, sooner or later, spiritual maturity means that when faced with disaster, we don’t need to feel guilty, blame others, or deny reality. Rather, we prevent it while we can, fight it while we can, and then simply accept it. Disaster happens because everything that begins must eventually end. To me, Jesus sounds heartlessly casual when he describes the kind of destruction we can expect to see: “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.” It’s important to hear Jesus’ words through the lens of Mark, writing of the siege of Jerusalem with a fateful inevitability. Do you hear in these words futility, or hope? Or maybe both?
Built into Christian theology is the ability to be both realistic and optimistic at the same time. Yes, it’s all going to end. Yes, there is hope even then. We hear it in our funeral rite: “All of us go down to the dust, yet even at the grave, we make our song Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!” When our world ends, God is here, and we are the song-makers of eternal life.
When you suffer grief and loss, where do you place your trust? When comfort and familiarity cannot continue, where do you see God’s Kingdom? Our call today is to see what’s real, acknowledge our fear and pain, and place it in its proper context. We can’t do this without God’s help. We can’t rise above our survival instincts and emotional overload without calling on the one who made us, who named us, and who keeps calling us to trust more deeply. If Jesus says that this is only the beginning of the birthpangs, what reason do I have not to trust him? Only my human perspective, which I know is woefully limited. Only my feelings, which are not the same as facts.
Someday this building will be gone. There will be no more Church of the Good Shepherd and no more brand-new organ in the choir loft. We don’t know if that’ll happen in a generation, or many centuries from now. But it’s definitely going to happen. There will also be a time when there is no United States of America. It will either be conquered and occupied like ancient Israel or come apart at the seams like Rome. Nations that fall typically do so right in the wake of their most prosperous times. So it will happen. And someday there will be not even be any more humans.
Another poet, Mary Oliver, wrote in “The Summer Day”:
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
In last week’s reading, the poor widow gave her one wild and precious life to God completely. She entrusted her lifeblood, two small coins, to a Temple that would be destroyed forty years later. Today is the conclusion of our annual pledge campaign: we’re about to turn in our pledge cards to support the work of the Church in this temporal world.
Now, I need you to know and to trust that we do not save ourselves by giving; God’s got you covered, not the Church. Your soul does not hang on your pledge card! Yet we only have this moment in which to give. We only ever get to live one moment at a time, so let’s live it. Let’s do what we can do today.
After all, Jesus showed us how to do this. When we are baptized into Christ, we become his people in the world. At that moment, our possessions cease to be our own: they are for God’s purposes. How could we be Christians if we weren’t constantly giving ourselves away for the sake of the abundant life of others—even abundant life in the face of hopelessness and despair? If “wars and rumors of wars” are only the birthpangs, then God is our doula, and I can’t wait to meet the baby! What looks to us like the end of the world is really only the beginning.
So I want to close with the words of one more poet, the prophet Habbakuk, whose words we don’t hear enough in church. Writing at the time of the Babylonian conquest of Judah—another end of the world for God’s chosen people—Habbakuk wrote:
Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation. (3:17-18)
Amen.
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