“Endings and Beginnings”
Mark 13:1-8
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
11/15/15
The Jerusalem
temple makes a lasting impression on an impressionable disciple. With a kind of
quaint, Gomer Pyle innocence, he says, ‘Gaw-lee, Jesus. Just look at all them
big ol’ rocks, and them big ol’ buildin’s!’
‘Bless your
heart,’ says Jesus. ‘Yeah, they’re big all right, but enjoy them while you can.
They won’t last forever.’
Mark, like Luke,
precedes Jesus’ teaching about the destruction of the temple with the story of the widow’s two-cent gift to the temple. I feel a deep disconnect at
work in the pairing of these stories. In one breath Jesus commends a widow for
her financial sacrifice, and in the next breath he says that the temple’s days
are numbered. The woman’s tiny gift toward that large but condemned budget
seems indefensible. Why doesn’t Jesus just slip up to the woman and say
quietly, ‘Ma’am, keep your money. You’ll need it more than the temple will.’
Shortly after
Jesus reveals the stunning news about the fall of the temple, Peter, James,
John, and Andrew come to Jesus in private and ask when all of this will happen.
And Jesus opens up about would-be messiahs, about wars and military posturing, about
tensions between nations, and about earthquakes and famines.
I do not know
about you, but had I been with those disciples and heard Jesus’ predictions, I
would have been thoroughly underwhelmed. Think about it, all Jesus does is to describe
life on planet earth as it has pretty much always been. When has the world ever been free of misguided prophets claiming
divine authority? When has the world ever
known even a day without war and international tension? When has the world ever had even a moment when someone
somewhere was not experiencing some
sort of devastating storm, drought, or seismic upheaval?
Doomsdayers,
and particularly Christian doomsdayers
(“Christian doomsdayers” – shouldn’t that be an oxymoron for resurrection
people?) thrive on predictions of utter and final destruction. I can speak only
for myself, but if I were to preach
such things, I would be ascribing to God my own shallow fears and judgments. I would
be confessing my utter and final lack
of faith in God to redeem the creation. Most insidiously, I would be trying,
with all my terrified might, to take as many people down with me as I could.
Jesus has a
little surprise in store. After he predicts the fall of the temple, and after
he speaks of “wars and rumors of wars,” Jesus turns to his disciples and says,
“This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.”
That subtle phrase
sits in a grim shadow. But it sits there as a kind of ember, and Jesus is the ruach, the pneuma, the Holy Spirit of God. His life, his words and actions,
are the very Breath of God on that smoldering, two-cent ember of hope.
What gives a
poor widow and God’s disenfranchised Messiah faith to give their all to an
institution and, indeed, to a creation that appear on the verge of implosion? Trusting
that an ending is simply a God-initiated beginning, and then living that trust,
takes spirited and creative vision. It takes determined optimism. It requires
us to join in the fearless confession of Paul who says, “Everything old has
passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 2:17b)
Identifying
and moving toward God’s new thing throws us into the very birthpang-turmoil
Jesus portends. It awakens in us the awareness that the “wars and rumors of
wars” themselves are not our first concern. When we turn heart, soul, mind, and
strength toward the root causes of all the threatening and frightening
realities around us, what appear to be signs of catastrophic endings have the
potential to become birthpangs of a new and unimagined future.
Fear usually
feels like a sure thing, but it is the sterile delivery room of reasonable
despair, and of every selfish idolatry.
Faith is the
stable, the compost-rich barn of God’s new creation.
Jesus demonstrates
perfect trust in God. And it seems to me that he trusts God to be a verb rather than some static, bearded,
white-robed noun. I think it healthier for us to imagine God as more than a “Being,”
more than simply the “One” who oversees all the comings and goings of fresh and
constructive change. I think we get a truer sense of God by beholding God as
the very energy behind, before, and
within all things. God is the very activity
of creation and re-creation at work in the universe.
As creatures
we will never really understand that Energy and Activity. We cannot “harness”
it, not even for good. What understanding we gain, we gain of ourselves – of
the God-work within us. What good we do, we do for our neighbors and for the
earth. But as we deepen in self-understanding, and as we tend to and build up
our neighbors, we begin to realize that we are in relationship with so much more
than meets the eye. We are in dynamic relationship with that creative Energy
and mysterious Activity we call God.
“God is love,”
says First John (1John 4:8b) God is not a stagnant thing. God is the flow of
the river, the rush of the wind, the sound of the laugh, the fall of the tear.
In his essay,
“Another Turn of the Crank,” Wendell Berry writes, “I take literally the
statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the
world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures
by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by
love. I believe,” says Berry, “that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in
the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is
reconciliation and atonement…with God.”1
Love allows
even the holiest institutions to crumble like sand castles at high tide. But
they fall because their familiar, comfortable ways, as sound and as constructive
as they have been, now do more to conceal than to reveal a new, emerging God-work.
Marianne and I
both have wonderful families whom we enjoy. And as happens in all families, the
parents around whom we have revolved for more than a half-century are now
beginning to revolve around our siblings and us. The strong and gracious
gravity by which they have held us is shifting into our hands. The new thing happening
in our lives has happened for eons, of course. And in the shift itself, in the
fall of the old and the rise of the new – that is where we dance the dance of gratitude,
and grief, and awestruck hope.
God is not
simply in that dance. God is that dance.
Love is most nearly itself, writes T.S. Eliot,
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty
desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast
waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise.
In my end is my beginning.2
1http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=e3b49ff9-9ba0-4b63-8716-d78c8e3c02db&c=c98d6b50-eefa-11e3-853a-d4ae52754b78&ch=ca496850-eefa-11e3-8596-d4ae52754b78
2These are the closing lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The
Four Quartets (II, 5); http://www.philoctetes.org/documents/Eliot%20Poems.pdf
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