Scripture: Mark 13:1-8 and Jeremiah 32:1-15
This is one of those sermons that I didn’t really intend to give, at least not today. It’s therefore a sermon I don’t feel quite ready to give. It’s also a sermon I don’t feel qualified to give, won’t be able to get very far with this morning, and where I’m not really sure exactly what it’s about, which means, I guess, in a literal sense, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, With all that as a recommendation, here it is anyway.
A few of us have been meeting to talk about worship themes for Advent, which begins just two weeks from today. I mentioned in a conversation that the lectionary scripture readings for the beginning of Advent had more to do with the second coming of Christ than with his first coming…and that over the years I typically had done my best to avoid talking about those passages.
This year, for instance, the reading for the first Sunday in Advent is from Luke, and it says, Jesus says during the last week of his life: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming on the world, for the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the son of Man’ coming in a cloud with power and great glory. When these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” All that is a far cry in my book from those comforting and inspiring visions of swords being beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, of the wolf lying down with the lamb, the promised coming of the prince of peace. These are much more drastic and troubling words, and I have never quite known what to make of them, and I have therefore mostly avoided them.
I’ve avoided them not just because I didn’t know what to make of them, but also because I frankly don’t feel that speculations about the world’s end is where Christians ought to be focusing their attention or their spiritual energy. Better to leave the world’s end in God’s hands and attend to matters of love and justice that we are immersed in every day. Christianity is not about preparing for the “rapture” but is about the practice of mercy, the pursuit of justice, the love of neighbor in the here and now. Furthermore, I have the conviction that sounding panic alarms is not in general the most productive thing we can do, whether it’s predicting the end of the world, announcing the sky is falling, or warning that there would be death, mayhem, and social chaos when the year 2000 came. In that case, which I presume was true here as well as in Chicago where I was at the time, the voices of direness came in very studied and sturdy intellectual tones over public radio, not from a street preacher asking us to repent. And the point was not the actual issue of whether there was a legitimate concern that needed to be taken seriously, but the general sense of alarm that was being spread, almost intentionally, it seemed, but in any case vigorously. Panic, of course, is never a great way to respond to anything, and it cannot be healthy for humans to live for long periods under a threat of impending cataclysm. So for all those reasons, and others, I have tended to sidestep those passages in the Bible have to do with the world’s end.
When we were talking about this though, in the conversation I just referred to, I said I was beginning to feel like I should reconsider my strategy of avoidance. For one thing there is the general principal in life that if there are things I am avoiding talking about, those are probably things I really need to talk about. There is the general principal in working with the Bible that if there is a passage that is offensive, obscure, uncomfortable, or unappealing in any way, then there is a very good chance that we would benefit by paying some attention to that passage, and that in any case not liking a passage is no excuse for ignoring it. But beyond the general principals, I said I had begun, notwithstanding my difficulties with these passages, which are still there, I had begun to feel more in sync with them. “Living under the threat of impending catastrophe” is a phrase that I think describes more of me, more of what I am sensing from others, and more of what is just in the air than has been the case in the past. And so I committed myself to a sermon along these lines at the beginning of Advent. Then I looked at the scripture readings for the next two Sundays and found that they too spoke of drastic things taking place before or in connection with the end of the world. You heard Allison read Mark’s version of the story, speculating about the end times. For better or worse I decided not only that I shouldn’t avoid this subject matter but that I couldn’t even put it off another couple of weeks. So here I am talking about scriptures that talk about earthquake and famine, wars and rumors of wars, the destruction of the temple, and so forth.
I should make clear that what I am in sync with is not any of the particular statements these passages make. I don’t think they should be read in a kind of rational or analytical way. They don’t contain, in my reading of them, predictions about the future or instructions on how to behave. They communicate more of a feeling, a sense of the way things are. They are more like a painting that you look at not trying to get a message from it and not even knowing quite what to make of it, but that still touches you at some level inside. What the scripture is doing in this case, as in so many others, is not urging on us some teaching or Truth, some lesson to live by or some nugget of wisdom to reflect upon. What it is doing instead is confronting us with ourselves. And in this case the part of ourselves we are being confronted with is this sense that it is the condition of our lives that we live under a threat of impending catastrophe.
Now, I know that saying it that way is too easy. A few words don’t capture the range of feelings people may be living with. A catch phrase doesn’t do justice to the complexity of feelings we may have. But acknowledging the difficulty of finding words to describe feelings is different from not acknowledging them at all. I feel a need to pay some renewed attention to these passages about fanciful things like the second coming or the world’s end not because I believe we will find there some information we can use or advice we should follow but because those passages invite us into a part of ourselves we at least need to be aware of and may very well have a tendency to avoid.
What Mark does in the passage we heard this morning is invite us into a world of terror. His world was a world of terror, but of course it’s not just his world that he invites us into but the world of terror that is our world. People talk about living in a post-9/11 world, and sometimes it seems like what they mean is external things: everything from being willing to put up with security checks in airports to committing huge amounts of money to a global war on terrorism. But 9/11 both symbolically and actually represents a change in our inner lives as well, a change that is not one-dimensional and is not easy to describe but that is nevertheless real.
Some people have suggested that our whole culture is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, that post-traumatic stress pervades our lives, affecting some people more than others to be sure but affecting everyone to some degree. I intentionally did not try to bone up on post-traumatic stress, leaf through my files to find a few saved articles or do a google-gleaning on the internet. I didn’t do that because I didn’t want to be tempted to pretend to some knowledge or expertise I didn’t have just because I found a few things I could read quickly. But I suspect that post-traumatic stress would be one way of helping to understand our inner life these days. Maybe plain old grief is another lens through which to see things. Or maybe there is a kind of insecurity or dis-ease that is eating away at us that is more profound than any categories or labels we are used to dealing with. 9/11 did not create a culture of fear. 9/11 did not all of a sudden bring about a sense of being under attack from mysterious forces. 9/11 has become symbolic of such things, representing a kind of vast insecurity that maintains a life of its own beneath the superficial realities of our everyday lives.
I am sensing that for many of us the world is pretty severe these days, not for one reason, but for many reasons. Severe, not because life is such an awful struggle, because it is filled with suffering, or even because it is very uncomfortable but because it is profoundly uncertain and frightening. And whatever words we attach to this underlying dis-ease, it may be tempting to avoid confronting it, recognizing it, or dealing with it. 9/11 after all was more than two years ago. However it might have affected us, we should be over it by now. We’re not supposed to get stuck in places of fear or grief. Time now to move on. Besides, we are told, one way to fight terrorism is to return to normal living. Show that it will not turn your life upside down or prevent you from leading the kind of life you would otherwise lead. In one sense avoiding this underground stream of feelings that just may be real, just may be penetrating our souls and psyches, avoiding all of that is precisely the strategy that has been urged on us from many quarters.
But then along come these strange scripture passages like the one from Mark for this morning. And although, as I suggested earlier, I think we should be slow to say what we think these passages are saying to us, at the least I hear it saying to me: Don’t. Don’t avoid the world of terror which lives partly inside each of us and has to do partly with the times in which we live and partly, we need to say, just with being human. When Mark has Jesus talking about how the temple will be destroyed, this is not a saying about how true religion is not to be found in church buildings; it is not a saying about how Judaism is about to be supplanted by Christianity; it is a saying about how radically insecure life can feel. Those who have stood at the base of the western wall or walked on the temple mount know that this is a very large and very solid structure. Although the temple has been destroyed as far as being a temple is concerned, the basic structure has survived these 2000 and some years. When Jesus suggested that these two ton stones that the temple was made of could crumble, would crumble, he was suggesting that there is very little we can count on. And the passage says to me, to us I believe, don’t ignore those insecure parts of yourself, especially in these days when the world we live in gives us little reason to feel secure.
It has been my intention all along this morning to stop without giving answers as to how we are supposed to deal with this situation we find ourselves in. I don’t think the scriptures for this week, or next week, or for the first week in Advent tell us too much about this. They are concerned as I read them, to invite us, to urge us not to deny any feelings of insecurity we may have, not to pretend to our inner lives have not been changed over the last few years but to attend to what it feels like to live in a world such as ours and how that is affecting us. Maybe for now that is enough of a message, and all we are being asked to hear from these scriptures.
But I confess that as I was reflecting on all these things, I recalled this story about Jeremiah that we also heard this morning. Jeremiah lived in desperate times. In fact he was in prison for defying the Patriot Act. Israel was about to be conquered, the land occupied. In the midst of all this Jeremiah does something that probably didn’t make much sense to too many people. He bought a piece of land, ceremoniously, publicly, going to some effort to have it legalized, witnessed, notarized, whatever would make it official. He bought a piece of land even though there was no immediate hope of his ever benefiting from it or living on it. He bought it as a testimony to his belief that the future was more than what anyone could see right now.
I think I recalled this story about Jeremiah because one of the things I am afraid of these days is that we will lose our future, our belief in the future. One of the things I believe living in times of terror, or of deep uncertainty and insecurity, does is encourage us to have an attitude of just making it from one moment to the next, one day to the next, since the future is too much to hope for and cannot be counted upon. One way to deal with that way of seeing and feeling things is to stubbornly assert a belief in the future. Which is what Jeremiah did and which is what churches at the best do by their very nature. We proclaim a vision that is not based on the way things happen to be going right now, and we insist on believing in a future that the present gives us little reason to believe is possible. As we take stock of ourselves in various ways, as we will be doing over the next several months, and as we just go about our business of trying to be church in the best way we know how, may we pray for the gift of visions that will enable us to stubbornly assert a belief in God’s future, that keep us from being imprisoned by the insecurities of the present, and that are capable of inspiring our living day by day. Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 16, 2003