Scripture: Mark 13:1-8
Many of you know that there is such a thing as a liturgical calendar, a church year, that consists not just of a few important dates like Christmas and Easter but that, depending on your tradition may have a whole series of significant dates from Ascension and Pentecost and Trinity Sundays to saints’ days and All Saints Day and All Souls Day and others, and that also has whole seasons like Advent and Epiphany and Lent and the Easter season, and about six months worth of a season called “ordinary time” that ends today. In fact the whole church year ends today and begins its new year next Sunday with the first Sunday in Advent.
I have mixed feelings about all of this. I have known people, ministers mostly I have to say, who have been so much into observing the church year that I begin to wonder if they care more about the church than about the world we live in. Shouldn’t we be taking our cues in worship and preaching and the life of the church from what is going on either in the world around us or in the equally expansive world that is inside us, rather than from a particular date or season on the church calendar? It can feel a little like a clubby Christian sort of thing, where the initiated are supposed to learn the right language, get the seasonal colors straight, say the right words at the right time, and in general demonstrate that they are observing the rules of the club.
As an example I particularly remember a time when I was meeting once a week with a small group of ministers to do Bible study and exchange ideas for preaching. I was living and serving a church at the time in a neighborhood of Chicago that was changing racially and a black family had recently moved in and been greeted by a brick thrown through the front window of their house. The situation was tense and called, it seemed to me, for some reaction from the clergy, and some serious consideration of what ought to be said from the pulpit. As we were getting down to business, one of the group said, “So, what’s everyone thinking about for this Sunday?” One of the other ministers immediately said something like, “Well, it’s Ascension Sunday. I’m going to preach on that. Anybody have any good ideas for a sermon on the ascension?” That single comment did a good deal to turn me off on the idea of paying attention to the liturgical calendar. It’s an extreme example, but it illustrates my point. Here was someone so caught up in this little churchly world that it never occurred to him to ask what we were thinking of saying in the light of the fact that a brick had been thrown through a person’s window because of his race.
On the other hand I do think there are some reasons to acknowledge the existence of a church calendar and pay it at least a little attention. For one thing it reminds us that Christians are meant to be a little bit out of step with the rest of the culture. And so to call the coming season Advent, rather than just the Christmas season with all the associations that might have, and to explore some of the themes of Advent that maybe don’t fit so well into the feel-good approach to the season—that’s all a good thing. And in a more general way the liturgical year reminds us that the rhythms of our lives as Christians are not just based on the changes in weather, on fiscal years, or calendar years, or school years. Christians organize their lives obviously around such things, but are also called in a deeper way to organize their lives around something different, to be grounded in a different source. Maybe the liturgical calendar suggests something like that. And sometimes it can suggest some aspect of our lives that we might want to pay attention to, like Thanksgiving (which is not part of the liturgical calendar) which invites us to pay some attention to the place gratitude, the giving of thanks, has in our lives.
This last Sunday in the church year has done that for me, suggested a theme that has to do with more than just church stuff. Technically this Sunday in church year lingo is called the Sunday of Christ the King. It has to do, in its limited meaning, with the end times, the second coming of Christ, the end of the world, and things like that. At the end of the church year we come to the end of the Christ story when Christ returns at the end of time as king, Christ the King, to rule over…well someone, those who have survived the apocalypse, all the living and the resurrected dead, a redeemed creation, there are a number of versions of how the story is supposed to go. And I know that the second coming of Christ, Christ’s return at the end of history, I know that for many people this is an important part of the Christian story. But I also have to say that for me, if that’s all this Sunday at the end of the church year were about, if I thought it was all about Christ coming again, and the rapture and being left behind and all such things, I would skip it. That way of reading this part of the Christian story frankly doesn’t resonate with me, and the attitudes it has sometimes fostered are, to say the least, not always very healthy.
But that’s not to say that I find no connection to the story. The passage we heard today is actually just the beginning of a chapter in Mark’s gospel that’s called the little apocalypse, because it has all this fanciful language about the end of the world. “The sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds.” Pretty fantastical language, and I admit I don’t know what to make of it except that Jesus has gone off into a flight of fancy here. But let’s go back and put this in context.
This is the last week in Jesus’ life. He has made his entry into Jerusalem and he is spending the early days of the week teaching in and around the temple, which is mobbed with people because it is the week of Passover and the temple is the center of activity. In a quiet moment one of the disciples, who is pretty much overwhelmed by the scene, says to Jesus, “Look, teacher! What big stones! What big buildings!” Almost like a little boy coming to the city for the first time. And I can understand the feeling. If you stand today at the Western Wall of the temple, which is what’s left from the temple of Jesus’ time, you do feel small. It was clearly a massive structure and the stones are large. The note in my Bible says some of them were 38 feet, by 18 feet, by 12 feet and weighed as much as 100 tons and they were somehow put together on top of each other to form a wall several hundred feet high. The piece of the wall that remains and is above ground is impressive. The original wall was much larger even and was meant to be not only impressive but to give the idea of permanence and indestructibility. Permanent and indestructible like the faith it represented. It was a tremendous feat of engineering, one of the reasons Herod was called Herod the Great. It’s no wonder the disciples were in awe. That’s how it was supposed to make anyone feel.
Jesus said, as I hear him, “Yes, but even this temple, which looks so permanent will someday lie in ruins. There won’t be a single stone left in place.” And he went on to talk about wars and rumors of wars and earthquakes and famines and the stars falling and other things that people have taken to be signs that the end of the world is coming. And I don’t know; maybe Jesus did believe the end of the world was coming. Scholars have different opinions on this. I just don’t know whether that’s what Jesus meant by some of his language.
What I do know is that this was the last week of Jesus’ life and I rather suspect that he was feeling his own impermanence. Even if he didn’t feel like he knew exactly what lay ahead—that’s also a matter of some debate—he must have had a sense of the uncertainty of his life. And I’m thinking he wanted the disciples to also have that sense…of the uncertainty and impermanence of his life, and of their own. The impact of what he was saying, for me, lies not in any predictions about end times or fanciful visions of what the end of the world will be like. It has much more of a personal flavor. See these stones? These stones that have built a temple that looks like it will last forever? That temple will not last forever. And neither will I. And neither will you. And neither will the little world we have lived in as we have traveled together these last few years. And neither will the world you may have imagined in your mind. Things come undone, even the things we think will last forever. Things come undone. Lives come undone. Our personal worlds that we imagine lasting forever, or that we have come to count on, our personal worlds can so easily come undone. Plans come undone. Dreams come undone. There is nothing that is for sure and forever. Not even these 100 ton stones you see before you are guaranteed to be standing there a year from now, a month from now, tomorrow.
It’s not so much that Jesus invites us to focus on some impending cataclysmic end of the world, although in our own day we can easily imagine the end of the world without the aid of questionable Biblical prophecies. The planet we live on is not permanent. Its resources are not inexhaustible. But it’s not that Jesus foresaw our wars, our earthquakes, our famines, our tsunamis, or our greenhouse gases. It’s that he invites us into that region of the spirit where the only thing that is for certain is that there is nothing that is for certain, where we know deep down that nothing lasts forever and that at any time we may very well lose some of what and who is most precious to us.
We don’t dwell in this region all the time, or even very much of the time. We can’t. We wouldn’t be able to complete our daily tasks, go about our business, make plans, enjoy life, work for a better future if at every moment we were acutely aware of and focused on how uncertain our lives really are. But that is a region of our spirits that is there for all of us, and Jesus our brother knew it, and at some level, at some very basic level of our spiritual lives, that uncertain, impermanent quality of our lives needs to be acknowledged, not avoided. That’s how I hear Jesus speaking to me through the pages of scripture today. That’s the message these last Sundays of the church year present to me.
The challenge of course is not only to recognize and acknowledge that uncomfortable but true region of the spirit where we take seriously the radical uncertainty of our lives, but to be able to acknowledge all the kinds of endings we may be called to deal with and be able at the same time to say, with the hymn that we are about to sing, that “everything’s gonna be all right”. To say that faithfully is not to say that with a kind of naïve, unreflective optimism. “Oh, everything’s gonna be all right.” Because at a superficial level it just ain’t true. The thing about endings is that although we know there’s something on the other side, we don’t know what it is, and it’s not always the case that at the simplest level everything will be all right. Sometimes it isn’t.
But there are faithful ways to make that affirmation. At one level, it is a prayer. Not a superficial assurance that “everything’s gonna be all right” but a prayer. It’s gonna be all right, right God, it’s gonna be all right. I pray it’s gonna be all right. Meaning that the test will come back negative, the treatment will work, something will happen that will make the threat go away, and life will take on its friendly, familiar look again. That’s one level and it’s a legitimate level. At a slightly different level there is the assurance that everything will be ok maybe not in the short run, but that in the long run it may take a while but things will work out in ways that we can’t anticipate now but that will enable us one day to say that it worked out in the end. The relationship needed to end, or the job needed to end because down the road, maybe way down the road, something better lay ahead. What was once a matter of grief can turn out to be a blessing.
But beyond any of that there may be a different way to say that statement altogether, a different kind of truth that says something to the effect that in spite of the uncertainties of our lives, in spite of the fact that we can’t say for sure with an easy glibness that every ending is just a new beginning, that no matter what may happen, even though in our usual ways of thinking everything may not turn out all right and there is nothing that can happen later that will make it all right, that nevertheless in some deeper sense everything will be all right. Everything will be…all right. To say those words in that sense is an act of pure faith. And it is a gift from God. May our spirits be open to receive such a gift. Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 26, 2006