Gain Your Souls

Sunday, November 14th, 2004
24th after Pentecost
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Luke 21:5-19

5 When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, 6 'As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.' 7 They asked him, 'Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?' 8 And he said, 'Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, "I am he!" and, "The time is near!" Do not go after them. 9 'When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.' 10 Then he said to them, 'Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; 11 there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. 12 'But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. 13 This will give you an opportunity to testify. 14 So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; 15 for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. 16 You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. 17 You will be hated by all because of my name. 18 But not a hair of your head will perish. 19 By your endurance you will gain your souls.

Sometimes, being a Pastor requires you to go from one extreme of the human emotional spectrum to the other within a short period of time.

Last Saturday evening, while there was a wonderful birthday celebration going on inside the firehouse at Callao for Berenice, outside, there was a sad, stumbling fight going on between a man who had drunk himself almost into a stupor and just about anyone who tried to approach him to try to convince him to let them take him home. I went from taking Berenice on a short spin around the dance floor to stepping toward the man as he was kicking at another man who was trying to get him to settle down and go home and sleep it off.

Sunday, we attended the funeral of William B. Graham, in Irvington. He was an exceptional man.

We came home from that to news of Uncle John Parker's passing. It wasn't unexpected. We had just celebrated his 90th birthday, and he never fully recovered from the party. Kenneth, his youngest son, told me that he went home from the party and got back in bed and, except for a couple of instances where he got up and went to the table for a few minutes at a time, he never got back up out of bed.

On Tuesday afternoon, after stopping in to do my chaplaincy rotation at Riverside, I got a call from one of the ER nurses, asking me to come in. They had a bad situation coming in from Mattaponi, and needed a chaplain on standby. I know Leslie shared with you some if not all the details on Wednesday night. For those of you who were not here then, a woman 33 and a half weeks pregnant with her third child and second son had given birth unexpectedly, and the boy wasn't responding.

I arrived at the hospital within 5 minutes of being called, since we were in the parking lot at Wal-Mart when the call came in. When I walked into the ER, the nurse who had called me explained the situation, and asked me to stand in the entryway to the ambulance bay, to stand near the outer door to trigger the motion sensor to keep the door open when the EMT's got there.

As it turned out, the nurse who came through to meet the ambulance and unload the baby stepped up to the doors, triggered them, and reached up and flipped a switch that locked them open. All I did was stand, and hold a pan with a bag with some stuff in it from the house.

The nurse took the baby and immediately began to do CPR on him. He was tiny, and he didn't move.

They wheeled the mother into one of the empty bays and got her settled onto a gurney. My first impression was "she sure is taking this well." There was very little reaction from her. She was not screaming or crying. In fact, more than anything, she struck me as being angry. I stayed with her, introduced myself as one of the chaplains on call. After a few minutes, I went to check on how the baby was doing. There were no signs of life. I went back and stood by the mother. I asked her if there was anyone I could call for her. She gave me a name of a friend of hers to call. I did, but only got an answering machine.

Over the next few minutes, after going back into her, one of the doctors came over to let her know that it didn't look good. After he left I took her hand and just held it. She didn't say anything, but she began to silently cry. She held onto my hand very tightly.

I asked her if she attended church anywhere. She named a church up in King and Queen, but admitted in the same sentence that she didn't go very often. We had a few more quiet exchanges. Then the doctor came in and asked if she wanted to move into the room where the boy was being worked on. She did, and we got a wheelchair for her and wheeled her across the way. She sat and watched quietly as the nurses and Doctors did everything they could to revive her baby. Finally, the doctor asked her if it was okay for them to stop. She nodded that it was.

The nurses wrapped the baby and brought him over to his mother to hold. We wheeled her back into the bay where she was after she first came in. She held him, and just looked at his little face and cried some more.

Her husband came in then. He was a big man, easily 3 times my size. He broke down as soon as he walked around the curtain. After a few minutes of holding his baby boy, he asked if his mother, who was out in the waiting area, could join them. I went and got her, and as soon as she walked into the bay, you could almost see this 300 lb man become a little boy once again, crying and asking his mommy to "make it better".

Wednesday I drove to Lexington for Uncle John's visitation and funeral. Aunt Edith and he had been married for 7 years. They had just celebrated their 84th month-aversary two weeks before he died. Wednesday evening was filled with people who had come to know Uncle John since he'd moved to Lexington about 10 years ago, as well as good visiting time with David and Kenneth, his sons, and four other missionary aunts and uncles in addition to my parents, who had all gathered with everyone else to pay their respects to Uncle John. The funeral was much more a celebration than a time of mourning. There WAS that, of course, it is a part of any funeral. But the service looked back on a 90 year span of life - for the most part dedicated to the service of the Lord, an unwavering commitment to him and a faithful reflection of God's faithfulness in Uncle John's life.

I'm still trying to fit my brain around the week. To be confronted with the two deaths at opposite ends of the spectrum of human life and to try to bring them into some kind of coherent association, if not understanding, is proving to be difficult at best.

Before leaving the family at the hospital on Wednesday, I asked if I could pray with them, and in my prayer I asked God to help us live with the questions, and to be with us in our asking of them.

Jesus was addressing the questions the disciples had for him at the temple that day. They were commenting on the magnificence of the temple, the beauty of the stones and the gifts that were laid out by people coming to offer their sacrifices. There is a quality unique to the human spirit: curiosity, a thirst for knowledge, a desire to understand. In some way, I think if we understand something, an event, if we gain some perspective on it, grasp some of the factors that played into the outcome, we feel we have somehow managed … a kind of control over it. When faced with that proposition, we would quickly dispel it, realizing that understanding does not imply control, but before that, somehow in knowing "why" we find ourselves more inclined to accept a given event.

That is what was happening with the disciples. Jesus tells them the temple will be destroyed so utterly that not a single stone will be left standing on top of another. Their first reaction is "When? And how can we see it coming?" They were confronted with the possibility of an event that wouldn't even fit in their current understanding. They were sitting surrounded by a building that had stood for as long as any of them could remember. They were reeling, trying to find a reference point from which to begin to build their new understanding of the world. So they fell back on knowing as much as they could about the coming events.

I've heard sermons preached on this passage before, as I'm sure most of you have. As near as I can recall, those sermons primarily focused on the correlating of events listed in the passage with events listed on the front page of the newspapers or in the evening news on television. There may be some truth to that, but I don't think it is the message that Jesus intended us to hear. We are so easily distracted by the trees that we forget there is a forest. We are so consumed with predicting, with knowing, with having an inside track on what is going to come, that we lose sight of our reason for being here in the first place.

Jesus tells us 'Yes, there are going to be terrible things happening, things you can't even imagine. You might be betrayed by family, there'll be terrible natural disasters, there will be wars between nations the likes of which you've never seen, and can't begin to comprehend. You'll be taken prisoner for your faith and taken before judges and governors, people who have a say over whether you'll live or die."

So what does he tell us to do? Look at verse 14:

14 So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; 15 for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.

That seems counterintuitive. That's a fancy word for 'It doesn't make sense." If you KNOW these things are going to happen, shouldn't you prepare? SHOULDN'T you get clear in your head what you'll say? What's the saying? The best defense is a good offense?

That's the whole point, Jesus is saying. If you prepare, you'll be relying on yourself to see you through. Where is the faith in that?

You are going to see and go through terrible things, things that shake your faith; things that will make you question your basic foundations. You're going to see a family lose a son before they even have a chance to know him. You're going to lose someone on whom you rely for wisdom, and guidance, and encouragement, and you will realize in that losing that your foundation needs not be on assumptions, and people, but on God.

The firmest foundation on which to build our lives is not made of cement, but of blood. If we work for the kingdom, and don't become distracted by these side issues, if we work to build our relationship with Jesus Christ, our foundations will stand.

Let's pray.