Pentecost 23C/Lectionary 33
November 17, 2019
Malachi 4:1-2a
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19
INTRODUCTION
Always on this
last Sunday before Christ the King Sunday, we hear texts about the end of the
world. The idea here is that this week we hear about how the end is coming,
then next week we hear about Christ’s second coming, when the King will come
and reign over all, and then the next week we begin Advent, when we turn our
hearts toward remembering Christ’s first coming, even as we still wait in
hopeful expectation for that day when the Prince of Peace will come again.
Cool, right?
Our first
reading today comes from Malachi, the very last book of the Old Testament.
After Malachi’s prophecy, there is a 400-year gap before Jesus (aka the Sun of
Righteousness) comes to save us from our sins. Our reading from Thessalonians
takes us to just after the resurrection, when believers expected Jesus to
return any moment. As a result, they had ceased to work or do anything,
thinking, what was the point anyway, if Jesus was coming back soon? Paul tells
them this is the wrong attitude; instead, they should always strive to do the
right thing, whether Jesus comes in 5 minutes, or 5000 years.
In our Gospel
lesson, Jesus warns the disciples about the end of the world, and the signs
that will make clear this is about to happen. Some of the signs sound
uncomfortably like what we can see looking around the world today. But, Jesus
assures them, even in this, God has a purpose, so trust in that.
It’s not a
particularly warm-fuzzy message, from any of these texts, but then again,
neither is life always full of warm fuzzies. As you listen, remember a time in
your life (or it may be right now!), where it felt like life as you knew it was
crumbling around you, and consider: where did God show up, or where did God’s
purpose become clear in that? Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from God our
Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
I’ll be honest:
this Sunday always gives me a stomachache. Every year, when I read this Gospel
text – always, on this Sunday, it is apocalyptic, describing the end of times,
and the signs that we will know it is coming – I look out my window and think,
“Is this it, then? Is this what we are experiencing now?” Hard not to think
that: wars, insurrections, nation rising against nation, natural disasters,
famines, plagues, signs from the heavens… it all sounds an awful lot like what
we hear in the news each day, doesn’t it? California is on fire, people are fleeing
their homes because the uncertainty of what lies ahead is better than the
tragedy they leave behind, climate change, a very real fear of Civil War or
insurrection right here in the greatest democracy on earth. Surely, this must
be the end of time!
But then, maybe
it’s always felt that way. The original hearers of this text were no strangers
to such difficult times. Here’s a little church history lesson for you, to give
you a better sense of the context of this writing: Luke was writing this story several
decades after Jesus lived, and in fact, after the Jerusalem Temple they are
looking at had already been destroyed. So while the story we hear is about
people gazing in wonder at that same Temple, the people hearing Luke’s version
of the story already knew that this Temple had been torn down. This was a
Really Big Deal. The Temple, you see, was the most profound and unshakable
symbol of God’s presence that they knew or could imagine. So as the disciples
gaze at it, they are admiring the gold and the size of the stones, yes, but
they are also marveling at being so close to this epic symbol of God, and all
the religious memory and sense of identity that goes with it. Luke’s audience,
who have already lost that symbol, have suffered far more than the loss of a
building. Without that Temple, their sense of who they are, and who God is, has
been severely damaged.
It makes sense,
then, that as Luke describes the foretelling of this event that his audience
has already experienced, that he would attribute some meaning to it. He is
aiming to illuminate God’s purpose, even in the tragedy they are experiencing.
Now, we are not
experiencing that same tragedy in our time… but we are no strangers to tragedy,
on a personal scale or a communal scale. Perhaps that seems especially timely
this week, as the impeachment hearings have gone public and the division in our
country as a result has grown even deeper. Plus all the other horrific news we
hear each day. I know people who have stopped consuming the news altogether because
it is simply too much to take. And in the midst of all this, we are all
managing our own personal pain and suffering, in our families, with our
friends, at our workplaces.
So I wonder – can Luke’s account of
Jesus’ words to a traumatized first century audience speak also to us in our
own context?
Let’s start
with the first move Jesus makes. After he describes the destruction that will
happen, the disciples immediately want more information: “When? How will we
know? Explain this to us!” We get that, huh? Especially in very emotional
times, as tragedy always is, we want more information, believing that just
knowing things will help us understand and move past it. But Jesus doesn’t let
them stay there. “Beware that you are not led astray,” he goes on, “by those
who promise to know everything.” I know I am susceptible to following whatever
or whomever will give me what I most crave, and in times of immense pain, what
I most crave is almost always understanding. But Jesus changes the question: he
instead moves the disciples not to think, “When, why, and how?” but rather,
“What does this struggle mean for my life of faith?”
And this is
where we can find a way to move from falling into despair, to moving toward
life. Imagine with me that the destruction of the Temple, the loss of this
consistent beacon of God’s presence with us, is a sort of metaphor for the ways
our own hopes and visions for how we expected life would be sometimes crumble.
With that image, a couple of questions come to mind: First, am I willing to sit
with the fact that sometimes things I had planned and counted on and trusted
in… fall apart? I doubt there is a person in the world who can say, “I made a
plan for my life, and everything has fallen exactly into place and turned out
how I planned it.” Right? Even if you eventually get to where you hoped you
would, undoubtedly the path had some unexpected twists and turns. Plans falling
apart is a part of life, always. And yet if you’re anything like me, you fight
against it when it happens, trying desperately to force things once again down
the path you had previously laid out. So what would happen if, instead of
looking always to understand, we were willing just to sit with this unexpected
reality and recognition that sometimes things do fall apart… and consider that
maybe God is using that to put us on the path we need to be on? If ours is a
God whose purpose is to show us that death leads to life, then it seems pretty
consistent with God’s character that things falling apart might be a necessary
step toward building something new.
The other
question that comes to mind is, can we accept and even embrace this journey of
faith, this one that includes rubble, ruin, and even failure? Can we embrace
that sometimes faith is saying, “I thought I had this figured out, but I
don’t,” and then putting our trust not in our own skills and understanding, but
in God’s own providence and wisdom?
If the answer
to each of these questions is, “Yes, I can accept that. I can embrace that ruin
and failure and plans fallen apart are a part of living a life of faith,” if we
can admit that our carefully made plans are not always aligned with God’s
plans… then we experience a little apocalypse. I don’t mean the world ends –
not at all, though it may feel that way! “Apocalypse” does not mean “the end of
the world,” so much as it means, “the end of the world as we know it.”
An apocalypse is an unveiling, a pulling back of the veil to reveal what was
hidden beneath. And yes, sometimes, this process is incredibly painful. It
shatters our perceptions, sets us off our balance, changes how we see
everything. It disillusions us. But disillusion is not, finally, a bad thing.
To be disillusioned is to be freed from an illusion, freed from a false truth
that was doing more damage to us than good. An apocalypse frees us from these
lies, and places our trust squarely where it belongs: in the one who always
brings us truth, hope, and life, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Friends, our
temples, whatever they are, will fall. Our plans will crumble around us. It
will be painful. We will feel disillusioned and maybe even abandoned, but know
this: we are not abandoned. The sun of righteousness will arise with healing in
his wings, and not a hair on your head will perish. Next week we close out this church
year with Christ the King Sunday, when we remember that our Lord and
King is ruler of all things – even when our politics are in shambles, and whole
states are on fire, and no one can agree on what to do with refugees, and
everyone believes their view is the right view. Christ is our King. And then we
will move into the season of Advent, when we are reminded again and again that
our God is Emmanuel, always God-with-us and never abandoning us. Even when we
sit in the midst of the ruin of our hopes, God weeps with us, and then takes us
by the hand, and shows us the new life that exists just beneath the veil.
Let us pray… When life is falling
apart, when things no longer make any sense, when we are faced with
uncomfortable truths, make us certain that with you as our Lord, not a hair on
our heads will perish. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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