Several weeks ago
our acolytes went up to the Washington National Cathedral to participate in the
acolyte festival. It is a magnificent place, with soaring nave, intricate
carvings, stained glass windows that reach a hundred feet to the roof. I know
it well, since I sang there with the Cathedral Choral Society for almost a
decade. Many times, as familiar as it was to me, I simply had to look up and
stare at it, the grandeur and beauty of a space dedicated to the glory and
worship of God. I would imagine our acolytes did a goodly amount of looking up
and staring as well. It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by it all.
That image can give
us an insight to the thoughts and understandings of the disciples who sat with
Jesus as he taught in an even more impressive space, Herod’s Temple in
Jerusalem, as Luke describes.
They were sitting
there in that magnificent place, so big it could hold some 400,000 people,
adorned with all the jewels and magnificence that Herod the Great could put
into it. They were looking up at it. The vastness. The opulence. All to the
glory of God, or perhaps not, since it was Herod, Jewish client king of the
Romans, who built the thing in the midst of a murderous reign where he killed
his own brother to protect his throne and steal his brother’s wife.
It must have been a
pretty remarkable sight to those country boys from the Galilee, who might never
had been to the temple before.
And here was Jesus
telling them that this would all be dust. Just rubble on the ground.
There’s a certain
irony in Luke’s telling of this story of Jesus and the disciples in Jerusalem ,
because when the Evangelist Luke wrote this gospel, what Jesus had said was
already a reality. In Luke’s time, the temple was gone, nothing more than a
pile of stones, for something like thirty years. It had been destroyed in the
midst of the Roman response to a Jewish rebellion in the year 70. In the wake
of it, the Jews were drive out of Jerusalem, dispersed to distant corners of
the empire where they presumably couldn’t cause the Romans trouble. The
Pharisees, those righteous opponents of Jesus’ teachings who featured so
prominently in the legal arguments that immediately preceded this passage, were
no more.
It was the
culmination of a geopolitical collapse, a religious collapse, a shift of
monumental proportion.
And it was precisely
what Jesus had talked about.
Or was it?
Some read Jesus’
words as predictions of the end of days, the day of final judgment. All the
talk of portents and omens, that apocalyptic language, what would happen when
it all was over. An end to all that was wrong with the world, and a new
beginning after all the dust settled.
I cannot say whether
this is about then or about what will be. It certainly can be read either way.
But I do know this: things happen that so completely and inutterably change the
world as we know it that it is as if God has pressed some divine reset
button…and this, to me, is what Jesus is talking about, a reset.
This past week we’ve
been horrified by pictures of the typhoon in the Philippines that wreaked
horrendous destruction in many communities. These scenes have become familiar
to us. Building collapses, hurricanes, floods, bombs. Whether natural disasters
or ones that have their genesis in human actions, awful things seem to happen
with terrifying regularity. It leads some to wonder if these or the same
portents and omens that Jesus spoke of, or that are spoken of so elliptically
in the Book of Revelation.
It might well have
felt that way to the listeners who first heard Luke’s story. Many of the early
Christians thought that Jesus was coming back any day, and that they didn’t
have to follow the rules of the communities in which they lived because it
didn’t really matter. And eventually they figured out that he wasn’t coming
immediately, and they had to find a way to live as followers of Christ in their
situation.
Now, as the
disciples discerned then, I would expect that the second coming is not around
the corner. The bad things that are happening now are no different than the bad
things that happened back then. Earthly life is not easy, not for Christians,
not for anyone else.
But if Jesus’
remarks are not about the End of Days, what are we to deduce from them?
First, bad things
will happen. Sometimes horrendous things will happen. The world will change.
Geopolitical and environmental change will continue to occur. Whatever our
equivalent to Herod’s Temple is, whether we think that’s the World Trade Towers
or the chapel at Virginia Seminary that burned down a few years ago, will
become a pile of rubble. And we human beings, being creatures of hope, always
say we will rebuild in the wake of such things. Sometimes we do, sometimes we
don't, but it is a human instinct after these horrible things happen. When the
seminary chapel was destroyed by fire, the cry went up almost immediately to
rebuild a replica of that dear old space. We want to survive the bad things by
rebuilding. We pride ourselves on our resilience and endurance in the wake of
such things.
Hold that thought,
but let’s turn back a minute to the gospel: we might ask why Jesus is dwelling
on such frightening things.
We know that Jesus
is continually telling his followers that they are loved by their creator, his
heavenly father. Is Jesus telling a scary story to get the attention of his
listeners? Is he so tired of fighting with the Pharisees and the Sadducees and
the scribes that he’s depressed and thinks everything is just going to fall to
pieces?
Or is he saying that
in the frightening things that will happen there is an opportunity for
something new, something better?
Is he saying that
unless the old ways die, we cannot embrace his new way?
Is he saying that
rebuilding old temples, like rebuilding houses on a flood plain after a
hurricane, like building a copy of the old chapel despite the fact that it was
too small, is a foolish exercise?
Perhaps the message
is simply this: that we cannot keep doing things in old ways, those ways that
may keep us from being in relationship with our Creator. We cannot simply give God a nod of the head
on Sunday morning and think all is well. We cannot pray only when we are faced
with disasters, but then we suddenly catch our breath and think “Maybe I need
to pay attention to God now, because I need strength to get through this.”
Because it is not endurance that is the mark of the Christian, it is
resurrection. Jesus did not merely endure the Cross, he was resurrected
afterwards, changed beyond comprehension. And that is his message here to the
disciples and to us, his present day disciples.
We must be willing to try to reshape our relationship with God,
willing to strive to build the world that God first imagined, an Edenic place
of peace and tranquility, by resurrecting that first perfect love with the creator
God.
Christians cannot be
people who are satisfied with maintaining the status quo or simply replicating
old structures that have fallen down– we must be in the resurrection business.
And if that makes us uncomfortable, so be it. Whether it is resurrecting the
lives of those who are struggling in the aftermath of disaster, or resurrecting
an economic system that continues to see the rich get richer and the poor get
poorer, or resurrecting the souls of those who are mired in the chains of
addictions, or even…
…even resurrecting
our own sometimes weak and lukewarm relationship with the one who created us
into something worthy of being called love, we are in the resurrection
business. Resurrection is something different than mere resilience...it is
fundamentally changing, not restoring. It isn't endurance, it is a pressing of
the reset button.
We cannot wait until
our souls are no more than cracked and jagged pieces of stone on the ground. We
cannot wait until the world is no more than a place of competitive consumerism.
Jesus says: “Be resurrected. Be resurrecting…resurrect love, as I am. Resurrect
worshipping your God. Resurrect joy in service. Resurrect your soul.”
Amen.
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