Birth Pangs

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Ordinary 33B

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Warsaw, VA

Mark 13:1-8

Theme: The in breaking of the Kingdom of God

¹As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” ²Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

³When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, ⁴“Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?” ⁵Then Jesus began to say to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. ⁶Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. ⁷When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. ⁸For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”

As a college junior, the college group choir from First Baptist in Bowling Green, Kentucky undertook a mission trip to Chicago. It was my first – and to date only - visit to that city. I had grown up in an urban setting – in a city of four and a half million people, but it was one that had relatively few skyscrapers.

That was different in Chicago. Towards the end of our stay there, we got to do some sightseeing, including visiting the John Hancock Center. I don’t remember what the issue was regarding the Sears Roebuck Tower, but for some reason we didn’t go there. I remember craning my neck to try to get a look at the length and height and size of the buildings around me as we climbed out of the church van in the downtown area that day. We rode the elevator up to the observation floor of the building… it was inside, not outside, as some other buildings have, but it had this one thing, where the platform on which we were standing didn’t go all the way to the exterior wall of the building, but stopped about eighteen or twenty inches from the glass. The challenge was to lean over the rail and press your forehead against the glass and look down the 95 stories to ground level. I tried. I managed, but it was unsettling to say the least.

While I was at home in the concentration of people we found in Chicago, I had not had a lot of experience in spending time in skyscrapers, and I was awestruck by them. Their sheer size was enough to boggle the mind.

I think that may have been some of what was going on with the disciples as they approached and entered the temple in Jerusalem. The construction of the temple was actually still in progress at the time they were there, so not only were they seeing a portion of the building complex already completed, but they were also able to view the massiveness of the undertaking necessary to build it: the manpower, the resources, the investment of time and energy and money needed must have been more than any of them had ever been exposed to before then. After all, the construction of the temple had been going on for nearly 50 years by this time, since the year 20 BCE by Herod the Great, and would continue for another twenty or so years more. This third temple was completed in the year 63 of the Common Era, and destroyed a short 7 years later, after the Jewish uprising.

The stones used to build the temple were indeed large – somewhere around 35 feet long by 18 feet wide, by 12 feet high, certainly some smaller, and probably some even bigger. Any way you cut them, those are big pieces of rock. Even though they were probably seeing some of those stones being moved into place as they spoke, it would be difficult at best for them to imagine what they were seeing built as being destroyed.

Jesus seems almost dismissive of the object of their awe. Some would say that he knew in clear terms exactly what fate awaited the temple and the city of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans within the next three decades. Another way of looking at it is that, Jesus, in simply human terms, was aware of the unrest that was brewing in Palestine, knew the history of the Maccabeean revolt of 167 BCE and the resulting destruction of the temple THEN… so it would stand to reason that to some degree, the writing was on the wall if things continued the way they were going, as in fact, they did. So his saying to them “it’s all gonna crumble” was to a degree stating the obvious. They would have SEEN cities or towns, certainly buildings that had been destroyed in one or another battle or war in the course of their travels. The Romans would likely have made it a point to have their actions in punishing insurgent Kingdoms or cities, nations throughout their empire known to potentially troublesome hotspots… Palestine being one of them.

Some while later, the disciples and Jesus have retreated to the Mount of Olives, across from Jerusalem, where they can view the city as a whole, and where it probably seems even more permanent to them. Jesus’ statement would have piqued the curiosity of his disciples, since they probably could no more imagine the temples’ destruction than we could, on September 10^th, 2001, imagine the scope and speed of the destruction of the World Trade Center.

So they ask him the question – When is it going to happen, and how will we KNOW it is coming?

That’s them. And that is us. Always wanting to be in the know, in the loop. The saying ‘knowledge is power’ seems to be ingrained in us to such a degree that we are constantly scrambling to find out what is going on, to uncover the truth about something or other, to understand the motivation behind an action … it is what fuels our nearly insatiable appetite for news, for information, for knowledge … not that that is necessarily a bad thing, but it DOES have it’s dark side. Gossip springs to mind as a ‘dark side’ kind of knowledge – that serves primarily to tear someone down and feed an unhealthy appetite for emotionally-charged experiences when our own lives seem tepid and boring by comparison.

Friday night I went to see a movie: 2012. It is one of those ‘end of the world as we know it but through the heroic actions of the … well … HERO of the story, he is able to save his family from ultimate destruction.’ In this case, he along with the governments of the most powerful countries in the world, along with the wealth of that rarified strata of society that can afford to pay BILLION (with a B) Euros per seat to get their family on board one of several massive arks that the Chinese were able to build in the Himalayas away from the prying eyes of the world.

I’ve been following the lead up to the release of the film, watching the History Channel, and the number of programs that come on about the prophecies of Nostradamus, or the mysteries of the Mayan calendar, or any number of other end-of-the-world prophecies ABOUND. There is a fascination with it that speaks to a morbid fascination with the possibility of disasters or events that could lead to the extinction of the human race… from the text, even though the question may have initially been intended on a very local level, it could also be interpreted as a curiosity about the eventual end of the world.

Christ’s reply to the disciples is simple: you’re always going to hear about wars and rumors of wars, there is ALWAYS going to be terror and terrifying events that WILL occur. The world is not what it was intended to be. What I am about is breaking in the Kingdom of god as God intended it to be here on earth. Think of it this way: these painful experiences that are happening are just like the pains of childbirth.

And that was when this kind of clicked for me.

I remember as we began to count down the months and then weeks and then days to when Hannah was born. We were a little – sometimes a lot – anxious about what the future held for us … what kind of parents we would be, what kind of child SHE would be. We didn’t know exactly when she would come, but we knew KIND of when that would be… we were scared, yes, but we were also terribly excited at the prospect of having a daughter in our lives, and wondered how much she would change our lives.

Our ongoing lesson from Jesus, then and now, as we grew then through our first years of childrearing and as we have expanded our family recently for the time being, has always boiled down to this: trust me. Trust in God’s care for you. Trust in my love for you. Don’t put your trust in earthly temples, in massive fortresses and structures that promise a safety they can’t provide.

What can this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

The early followers of Jesus were well aware that there was not any other person or government or organization that they could put their trust in that would give them the peace that Christ did. Not just because of their own persecution, but just by virtue of living in the times they were living in – there was enough strife and chaos and unpredictability and uncertainty to drive ANYONE crazy. Shifting alliances and political intrigue made for wobbly footing when it came to navigating the halls of government, religious tensions between the Roman occupiers and the largely Jewish early Christian communities as well as the established Jewish leadership created a dynamic that often resulted in bloodshed and persecution. These people knew terror like very few of us have in this day and age.

The early church practice and the ongoing tradition of exchanging the peace of Christ at a point in the worship service was a verbal reminder of that fact – that Christ is our ONLY source of TRUE peace, regardless of what is going on politically, religiously, economically, militarily, emotionally. He is our rest and our comfort.

So as we step out into the days’ events, and the coming week, remember that our primary call from Christ is to be his presence… I know you’ve heard me say it time and time again; to a world at war, we are to bring peace.

So: family of faith at Jerusalem, may the peace of Christ be with you.

Let’s pray.

For The Sake of Appearance

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Ordinary 32B

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Warsaw, VA

Mark 12:38-44

³⁸As he taught, he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, ³⁹and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! ⁴⁰They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

⁴¹He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. ⁴²A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. ⁴³Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. ⁴⁴For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

I think if I were to find some sort of biblical basis for it, THIS is where my aversion to being addressed as something other than simply ‘Kenny’ comes from. As your minister, my reluctance to use ‘Reverend’ or ‘Pastor’ in regular conversation is a conscious decision to try to avoid being treated differently simply because of that fact – or for people to behave differently around me because they know who I am or what I do.

Three or four years ago, I happened to be working in the concession stand during a little league game for one of the kids’ teams, and one of the other men told a joke to the rest of the group of men and the one woman who was there that was completely inappropriate and terribly crude. The woman and I had been talking earlier, and she knew I was a Pastor. When the laughing had died down, she looked at the man who told the joke and said ‘I can’t believe you told that in front of the PASTOR here!’ … The look he gave me was somewhere between “well, that’s who I am” and “I wish I hadn’t opened my mouth”. He said something apologetic, and I answered “don’t let my being a Pastor stop you” … it’s not that I enjoyed hearing the joke or watching the woman’s discomfort, but it has to do with not wanting to be shielded from the truth – whether that is someone’s crass behavior when they are NOT at church or hearing something from a lifelong member IN church that is totally opposite to the Gospel.

Last week, we had Jesus talking with a scribe who, at the end of their conversation, Jesus declared to be ‘not far from the Kingdom of God.’ Today, Jesus’ opening words are as we heard, ‘BEWARE of the scribes … [reread 38-40]’ … I wanted to stop on that for a minute and reiterate what is happening here and what was happening there. Jesus was not condemning an entire class of people simply because they happened to belong to that class, but he WAS condemning their BEHAVIOR.

He points out to his disciples that there were scribes – unlike the one he had been speaking to earlier – who were NOT really interested in the deeper matters of faith – those that truly impact and change how we act with each other and with our neighbors – and ultimately, with God. But that were more interested in being recognized, being respected, being the recipients of special treatment because of their position in the religious structure in which they functioned. They were more interested in what they APPEARED to be rather than in what they actually WERE. Jesus spells it out, “⁴⁰They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.” And that, in a nutshell, is the beef that got the Pharisees, Sadducees, Priests and Scribes up in arms against him. Jesus called them on their hypocrisy. Called them on their twisting the redemptive power of the love of God in God’s adoption of the people of Israel and of his care for them through the centuries into what it had become – an oppressive, preferential, superficial, power-hungry THING that was about as far from what God had envisioned for them as it could be.

When he said ‘they devour widow’s houses’ he wasn’t speaking in metaphors. The widow who walked up to the treasury jar to drop her two copper coins in WAS giving all she had left, and we can talk about how that, yes, could reflect her faith in God, and we could also talk about how that could on some level represent the coming gift that Christ makes of his life for her, and for his disciples, as well as for those same Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees and Priests, as WELL as for all of us who have come and gone since then – for all the WORLD … and it would all make sense because we’ve heard some version of those interpretations before.

What might be less commonly understood, and less comfortable for us to hear, is the less metaphorical and more actual, practical, factual understanding of what is happening in the scene at the temple.

Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador has been attributed with making the statement: “If I feed a few hungry people I am called a Christian. If I ask why there ARE hungry people, I am called a communist.”

There are some things that Jesus said … some things that he did, that, when taken into consideration within the context in which he said or did them, were politically radical even by today’s standards. We’ve been over some of them in the past – his treatment of women, his interaction as a Jewish man with gentiles, especially Samaritans, his spending time with sinners, prostitutes, and tax-collectors. If you think about it, where did all the injunctions against that kind of behavior come from? The Religious Establishment. Those same men who had organized things to benefit themselves at the expense of the weak, the poor, the unprotected, the have-nots of their society, in this case, a widow – who, still being as faithful to the God of her faith as she knew how, was putting herself at the mercy of an establishment that had over the centuries become an institution that failed to treat her as a human being with dignity and worth, and was essentially merciless.

I read somewhere that the measure of the worth of a gift – of an offering – is not the amount of the offering itself, but rather what is left to the giver AFTER the offering is given.

This is, for us here today, sitting in Jerusalem Baptist Church in Emmerton, a fable of caution. For all intents and purposes, we belong to the Religious Establishment. It is for us to take to heart Jesus’ words as a warning to be more about the actual DOING of good deeds and merciful acts – randomly as well as among ourselves – REGARDLESS of whether or not we get the recognition for them – rather than to be concerned with the maintaining of appearances. Appearances are the least of our worries if what is on the inside is turning to dust.

One last thought, and it is in relation to the interpretation of the widow being a Christ figure, giving all she had left in faithful trust to God. The point in that analogy that causes some tension if you think about it is where we draw the parallels, and come to the point of the two copper coins – mostly worthless – but they are what was given – and the corresponding gift that was given by Jesus was what we would immediately rebel against calling worthless – his LIFE.

The second chapter of Philippians helps us put things into perspective, beginning in verse 5 –

“⁵Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, ⁶who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, ⁷but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, ⁸he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.”

To be something – someONE – to be … well … the creator of the universe, and to make yourself nothing … obedient, meek, silently fulfilling your responsibility, your role … making the necessary redemption possible through your own suffering. That is the model we have to follow. The one that calls us to give our all, to hold nothing back, to give ‘til it hurts.

May we all be so faithful, and so obedient.

Let’s pray.