Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Mark 13:1-8 + Pentecost 26 + November 17, 2024

Alleluia. Christ is risen!

Christ is risen, indeed. Alleluia!

That’s a rewind to the sermon two weeks ago, two days before the election.

I did my own rewind this week. I looked back to see what was falling down last time this gospel text came around.  Interestingly, there is only one sermon on this text. Microsoft Word says that the file was created in 1969 and was modified in 2003. That means I would have written the sermon when I was six but didn’t preach it until forty years later. That has to be wrong. I was ten when I started playing church in my bedroom and didn’t have a computer until I was 20. More interesting is that the sermon isn’t finished. It’s one page and it ends with one word at the bottom of the page: doomsday.

The sermon started with a story about the first church I served in Columbus, Ohio. Apparently, it had just closed, (perhaps an argument for the 2003 date.) When I left in 1995, no one saw that coming. I was young, too enthusiastic and naïve to notice the signs. At the final closing service, the attempt to give thanks for its ministry was overshadowed by the grief. For me, this was the congregation that embraced me and a new vision of welcome and justice when I came out. Some in the synod used that closing to suggest that such a mission for the church would end in with the destruction of the whole ELCA. Its closing was the sign that should be noticed.

Those emotions standing in the rubble were real, but, as it turns out, it wasn’t the whole story.

Most in that congregation would find their way to other churches where faith took root and the building would be given to an Ethiopian Lutheran congregation that was growing like a weed in the carefully tended soil of European Lutheranism. No one would have predicted that the policy toward LGBTQ+ pastors, built on an ancient foundation of assumptions about sexuality, would fall down like the stones of the temple in a matter of five years.

Often in the moment, we don’t perceive the whole story. When we say “He will come again to judge the living and the dead” in the creed, it’s not meant to scare us into faith but to point to the long game, the direction of the cosmos is into fullness of love.

We picked back up with Yellowstone, the mini-series about the Duttons, a ranching family in Montana. Filming stalled when the star, Kevin Costner, withdrew in a contract dispute. His departure, the end of the world for some viewers, required a retelling of the Dutton story. The new season begins with a murder that seems self-explanatory by most of the evidence. However, the second episode does a “Six months before” turn, and we begin to discover another story that led to the murder, a story “behind the scenes.” We know because we’ve watched a lot of TV, and we’ve begun to recognize the signs, that the truth will be revealed. It won’t be the truth that we first assumed.

Rewinding now to the Gospel story. The disciples admiring the beautiful temple complex in Jerusalem, and Jesus’ startling prediction that “not one stone will be left on another. It will all be thrown down.” The story itself is a rewind. Mark was writing at about the time when the city, including the temple, the heart of Jewish faith, was destroyed by Emperor Titus. It was a time of wars and rumors of wars, the end of the world as they had known it for hundreds of years. Jews were barred from returning to Jerusalem. Jewish faith is being rewritten from being centered in a temple to being centered around the Torah read in local synagogues.

Literature like the 13^th chapter in Mark and section of Daniel that we heard, apocalyptic literature if you want to be fancy, is never written by those for whom the world is working. It’s always written by those who live with suffering, who have been forced into submission by political and economic beasts, to use a word from Revelation. From the standpoint of those at the edge of the empire, whether that be Roman or American, Jesus words, This is but the beginning of the birthpangs isn’t a threat that things are just going to get worse. It’s a word of hope; that something new, right now, is being born, and the inside joke is that the emperor has no clothes.

The disciples are about to see him hanging on a cross, when for them everything really would come crashing down. They probably forgot everything he said about birthpangs. That day at the temple, Jesus points them to the bigger story that we still forget when we’re standing in the rubble. The God that we dare to trust is creative, ever-moving, ever-present, ever-speaking. Jesus is rewinding his disciples to the moment at creation, when all was chaos and emptiness, God spoke a word and set a world into motion. He is rewinding them to the moment the Red Sea parted and a new future was laid out before a band of slaves. He is rewinding them to prophetic vision-truth of flowers in the desert, water gushing from dry wells, and a child promised who will lead the people into an eighth day of creation, another new age, one that begins to dawn three days after the temple of his own body has been destroyed.

There is a sign for what is coming. It’s not the rubble. It’s the empty tomb.

There are so many ways to describe the rubble of the temple: an election, a divorce, financial failure or an F on the exam, the rage at what never changes, a relapse in our recovery, the body’s eventual decline, the death of our beloved, the crumbling of religious institutions, and maybe for many, the largely white, liberal assumption that progress is working for everyone when it’s working for me. Or you’re just like my family growing up. Getting to church on Sunday morning on time involved a regular seismic argument about who would sit in the middle in the back seat. All I can say is that my parents must have had hope that we would be redeemed, because on the day of resurrection, there was little evidence in that Chevy Caprice Classic.

The wheels come off. The grief at all these “ends” is real. Jesus weeps himself in the garden over what is next. The Easter proclamation isn’t a cliché’ that changes everything into sunshine and rainbows. It’s a ridiculous, expression of hope that relies on sketchy evidence that it’s not over. It takes faith to believe that sometimes, but we’re the people that are going to keep saying it until it’s fully true.

That’s a big job in this pile of rubble. Most of us are hardly ready or good at this, but here we are. We’re here because we need it all: the time to grieve, the honesty about the rubble, even a wrestling with how many of us built on the wrong foundation. At the same time, we are mysteriously and surprisingly raised up as a living sign, a witness, a reformation, a people who cannot wait until death to join the resurrection. Easter is a resistance movement with love as its power.

Jurgen Moltmann said, “Resistance is the protest of those who hope, and hope is the feast of the people who resist.”[1]

Or if you can’t remember that, just this:

Alleluia. Christ is risen. Christ is risen, indeed. Alleluia.

[1] Jürgen Moltmann, from _Theology of Hope_ (1967).