Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
Rev. David Williams; 12.14.08
Scripture Lesson: Isaiah 61:1-4; 8-11
Several months ago, anyone traveling across the Washington metropolitan area on our painfully inadequate public transportation system would have begun to notice some rather striking advertisements posted in Metro stations.
They weren’t the usual fare of metro maps or Macys ads or charities begging for you to remember them during a United Way campaign. They didn’t involve rail thin models looking at each other poutily while crammed into boot-cut jeans sized to provide a relaxed fit for skeletons. They weren’t pitching the latest Omnia touch screen phone from Samsung, with 3G browsing, an HD camcorder, and optional surgically implanted neural dock.
These ads showed stark images of a bleak Washington landscape after a nuclear attack. In the background of one ad, the Capitol building stands as a shattered ruin, nestled on a National Mall now painted with a mix matte grey ash and blast-black. In the foreground, a faceless warfighter stares out at you through the lenses of a bio-chem armored helmet. In another ad, the Washington Monument stood silhouetted like a broken, bony finger against a similarly grey sky, great gashes torn from it’s sides.
These ads got noticed. For those who have lived in the Washington Area long enough to remember the Cold War, such pictures of destruction are enough to stir up memories of the nuclear nightmares of childhood. For those who were in this area during the horrific moments of September 11, and felt the fear that held the whole region in a chokehold of anxiety after the anthrax and sniper attacks, this vision of WMD effects wasn’t particularly welcome either. People complained to the metro board. People wrote angry letters about the ads the Post and the Washington Times. Articles discussing the propriety of the ads and the product they were pitching appeared in the media. The ads themselves became news.
In other words, this was an insanely, wildly, gloriously successful marketing campaign.
What was being pitched was a game called Fallout 3, the latest from a well regarded Bethesda software publisher. The game is set in the post-apocalyptic remains of the Washington Metro Area, generations after a nuclear exchange between the United States and China leaves the world in ruins. Reviewers describe it as an absolutely haunting game, filled with a level of primal violence and survival-of-the-fittest moral ambiguity that makes Lord of the Flies look like good storytime reading for preschoolers.
So, of course, I’m playing it...for purposes of sermon research, of course, and only well after my boys have gone to sleep. It is relentlessly grim, both spare and tense, and filled with intelligent writing and voice acting. It completely engrosses you in it’s world, giving a profoundly realistic sense of the depths to which human beings will go to survive after everything they’ve known and the whole framework of their society has been obliterated. The struggles to rebuild something, to live something resembling a worthwhile life...well...they feel painfully real.
From the Book of the Prophet Isaiah today we hear a message from a time in which the struggle to rebuild from the ashes of a society was front and center. In our Bible studies over the last few weeks, we’ve discussed how most Bible scholars worth their salt see the Book of Isaiah divided up into three clear sections, each of which has it’s own particular focus.
Today’s section comes from what is known as Third Isaiah, which was written and preached perhaps 510-515 years before Christ by a prophet who followed the tradition of Isaiah. It’s visions and proclamations do not describe a Hebrew people comfortably ensconced in Jerusalem and the temple, as do the first thirty-nine chapters. They also do not assume that the Jewish people are shattered in the Babylonian exile, like chapters forty through fifty-five. The context of the last ten chapters is clear: the Hebrew people are struggling to rebuild.
What they’re struggling to rebuild is their whole society, wiped from the face of the earth in by the relatively low-tech but nonetheless effective implements of the Babylonian Empire. After Babylon was defeated by Persia, the Hebrew people were encouraged to return to their ancestral lands. They were filled with hope at the prospect of return, but what they came back to was the ancient equivalent of stepping out of a fallout shelter. There was pretty much nothing left.
The walls of Jerusalem had fallen, and the temple had been razed. Everything had to be rebuilt from the ground up. The people returned thinking that things were going to be easy, and things were the farthest thing from easy. Life was hardscrabble, a serious struggle from day to day. The bricks that had been part of the walls of Jerusalem did not leap up on their own and autonomously reassemble themselves into Zion Gardens Condos and Suites.
It was hard. It seemed hopeless. People began to despair.
But the word from God that Isaiah proclaimed defied that despair. It was a word of intense hope, a word that comes directly from the prophet’s sense of being anointed with the Spirit of the Living God. It’s a word of intense confidence in the power of God to work through his people to bring about restoration.
For the oppressed and the brokenhearted and the captives who had returned to the land and still despaired, the prophet affirmed the devastation that they were experiencing and the ruins in which they found themselves. Yet in the face of their suffering...and in some way because of their suffering...the prophet declares that God’s love for justice and covenant presence will make his people an instrument with which he will rebuild the brokenness of their land.
It’s a word that they needed to hear, and a word without which their hearts would have been too broken to continue. It’s also a word that many of us need to hear right now, as many of us look fearfully out at the seeming chaos and confusion of our economy.
With banks and businesses both small and large failing, families struggling with foreclosure and job loss, and retirees reading their investment reports with trembling hands, it is easy for us to fall into the same kind of despair that seems to have afflicted those Hebrews upon their return. With the media humming with hysteria, every headline and talking head warning of a new depression, it’s easy to give in. We feel an uncertainty that can paralyze us, allowing us to turn from the task of rebuilding. We become overwhelmed. We hunker down.
In his reaffirmation of God’s essential justice and care for his people, the prophet is telling those who despaired that no matter what happens, God will show grace to a covenant people. If we’re willing to accept that grace, and to practice it, those places of ruin will be rebuilt.
It won’t be easy, and it won’t come quick. Nothing good does. But if we turn our will towards righteousness...meaning care for one another...and praise...meaning care that glorifies God...then the garden will spring forth.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Water in the Desert
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
12.07.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture: Mark 1:1-8
A while back, I had the great pleasure of presiding over the wedding of a friend. I’d known her since high school, when she and my wife were part of a circle BFFs before the word BFF even existed. It was a complete joy officiating over her union with her husband, but as I prepared for the service, I got a little bit concerned about the location.
Her parents had left the Washington metro area years back, and now lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico. It’s an absolutely gorgeous place, smack out in the middle of the desert in the Rio Grande Valley and surrounded by mountains. The plan for the wedding ceremony was to have it in a park at the base of the mountains, at an amphitheater that had towering and glorious peaks as a backdrop. When the couple showed me pictures of where they wanted to have the event, I had to agree. It was a perfect place, just radiant with the glory of God’s creation.
That didn’t make me any less nervous. I tend to be a total wuss when it comes to outdoor weddings, because as complicated and challenging as organizing a service can be, adding the randomness of weather into the mix is just more than I can stand. What if it rains? What if one of those sudden storms pop up, and the wedding party has to flee from driving winds and torrential rain?
When I arrived to check out the site the day before and to do the wedding rehearsal prep, I realized that my worry about rain was totally off. This was really and truly desert. The sun was brilliant and intense, and the light pressed down like a physical presence. But the heat you felt was totally different. It was the complete opposite of the Washington August heat, which is like getting into a jacuzzi while wearing a sleeping bag. This heat was totally dry, and the strong winds that blew off of the desert and up the sides of the mountains had not a single molecule of H2O in them. As I stared into that wind, I felt it greedily pull the moisture from my mouth and throat. After five minutes, my tongue felt like sandstone, and my eyes were like sand-crusted marbles. It’s a good thing I wasn’t going to have to do any public speaking there. Oh. Wait. I was.
The only option was water. I had to drink, and drink both regularly and constantly. Without that, my vocal cords would have dried out like parchment in a matter of minutes. Fortunately, the wedding party had provided this aplenty.
They knew, as anyone with a lick of sense knows, that there is nothing more precious in the desert than water. We kinda sorta know how important water is, but it’s easy to forget it as we trundle about our day to day lives, our Big Gulps in hand. Water is everywhere. But in the intense scarcity of the desert, our appreciation of the humble liquid that makes up around 70% of our physical forms is heightened. We need it more, and we become aware of how deeply we need it.
The desert and those wilderness places in the world have always been central to the lives of those who wanted to get down to the most essential, the most necessary, the most vital parts of their faith. Throughout the history of the people of Israel, desert places had always been the ones that had provided refuge from the distractions of the world. It was into the wilderness that monks had fled seeking escape, and it was from the wilderness that prophets came with proclamations of truths that were beyond the grasp of those who had forgotten what was truly necessary in the world.
As Mark’s Gospel begins, we heard today of a prophet who came from the wilderness, of John the Baptist. Mark’s book of the story of Christ begins by first declaring itself good news, and then gets right into a reference from the prophet Isaiah. That prophet’s poetic cry of the arrival of a messenger in the wilderness is declared a reference to John the Baptist. What John did was not too uncommon among the Hebrew people. Rituals of cleansing in water were part of the way in which Jews in the first century reclaimed themselves and recommitted themselves to their faith. In order to be ritually pure for worship in the temple, the Torah requires ritual bathing. While the process of being baptized was not quite the same, it had the same spiritual foundation.
But while there were similarities between what John did by the banks of the Jordan and what others had done before, there were some real and significant differences. What was striking about John was how intensely he pointed beyond the act that he was engaged in. While he was engaging in a ritual that had deep symbolic roots, the one who was to follow on afterwards, and who John himself was to baptize...that one would engage in an act far more potent and transforming than the ritual and symbolic cleansing of baptism by water.
The baptism by the Holy Spirit described by involves a far deeper transformation, a changing of the will through the presence of the grace of God. That sense of the presence of God, and the awareness that in some strange way God is working through you to change you...that’s the very heart and essence of the Gospel message that Jesus proclaimed.
But, you may ask, how does this work for us, today? To get a sense of the powerful presence of God’s Spirit, the prophets wandered out into the wildernesses of Judea. To know the working of God’s grace in themselves, the monks of the early Christian church isolated themselves in the deserts of North Africa. How can we get that same sense of God’s presence?
We are far closer to the desert than we might think. Not a desert as defined by the absence of water, but a desert as defined by the absence of the Spirit. Just as water brings green life and blooms and fruit, the fruits that come from the presence of the Spirit are grace and comfort and forgiveness. All of us experience areas in our lives in which those things are as hard to find as an orange tree in Death Valley.
Those broken and barren places may be a friendship that has soured. It might be a relationship where once there was love and now there is only hurt. It might be a place that should bring direction and hope, but brings only anger and confusion. It might be a season that should bring comfort and joy, but instead yields only stress and greed. Our lives do not lack for deserts, and they test us as truly as the burning sun tested the prophets. How we respond to those times and places is the measure of our faith.
We all have our deserts. And just like we need to take every opportunity to drink in the desert to keep it from drying us out like a stone, we need to take every opportunity to both seek and express the fruits of the Spirit in those desert places in our lives. There is no moment or place in your life where that cannot be expressed, where the Spirit cannot work change. It comes when you offer a word of grace instead of a cutting remark. It comes when you choose to reach out to someone who is different, or who seems to stand in opposition to you. It comes when you choose to help someone grow, instead of ignoring them or allowing them to continue to fail.
That Spirit is always there, always present, always waiting to rain down upon the dead places and to bring life to them again.
Know that truth, and drink deep.
12.07.08; Rev. David Williams
Scripture: Mark 1:1-8
A while back, I had the great pleasure of presiding over the wedding of a friend. I’d known her since high school, when she and my wife were part of a circle BFFs before the word BFF even existed. It was a complete joy officiating over her union with her husband, but as I prepared for the service, I got a little bit concerned about the location.
Her parents had left the Washington metro area years back, and now lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico. It’s an absolutely gorgeous place, smack out in the middle of the desert in the Rio Grande Valley and surrounded by mountains. The plan for the wedding ceremony was to have it in a park at the base of the mountains, at an amphitheater that had towering and glorious peaks as a backdrop. When the couple showed me pictures of where they wanted to have the event, I had to agree. It was a perfect place, just radiant with the glory of God’s creation.
That didn’t make me any less nervous. I tend to be a total wuss when it comes to outdoor weddings, because as complicated and challenging as organizing a service can be, adding the randomness of weather into the mix is just more than I can stand. What if it rains? What if one of those sudden storms pop up, and the wedding party has to flee from driving winds and torrential rain?
When I arrived to check out the site the day before and to do the wedding rehearsal prep, I realized that my worry about rain was totally off. This was really and truly desert. The sun was brilliant and intense, and the light pressed down like a physical presence. But the heat you felt was totally different. It was the complete opposite of the Washington August heat, which is like getting into a jacuzzi while wearing a sleeping bag. This heat was totally dry, and the strong winds that blew off of the desert and up the sides of the mountains had not a single molecule of H2O in them. As I stared into that wind, I felt it greedily pull the moisture from my mouth and throat. After five minutes, my tongue felt like sandstone, and my eyes were like sand-crusted marbles. It’s a good thing I wasn’t going to have to do any public speaking there. Oh. Wait. I was.
The only option was water. I had to drink, and drink both regularly and constantly. Without that, my vocal cords would have dried out like parchment in a matter of minutes. Fortunately, the wedding party had provided this aplenty.
They knew, as anyone with a lick of sense knows, that there is nothing more precious in the desert than water. We kinda sorta know how important water is, but it’s easy to forget it as we trundle about our day to day lives, our Big Gulps in hand. Water is everywhere. But in the intense scarcity of the desert, our appreciation of the humble liquid that makes up around 70% of our physical forms is heightened. We need it more, and we become aware of how deeply we need it.
The desert and those wilderness places in the world have always been central to the lives of those who wanted to get down to the most essential, the most necessary, the most vital parts of their faith. Throughout the history of the people of Israel, desert places had always been the ones that had provided refuge from the distractions of the world. It was into the wilderness that monks had fled seeking escape, and it was from the wilderness that prophets came with proclamations of truths that were beyond the grasp of those who had forgotten what was truly necessary in the world.
As Mark’s Gospel begins, we heard today of a prophet who came from the wilderness, of John the Baptist. Mark’s book of the story of Christ begins by first declaring itself good news, and then gets right into a reference from the prophet Isaiah. That prophet’s poetic cry of the arrival of a messenger in the wilderness is declared a reference to John the Baptist. What John did was not too uncommon among the Hebrew people. Rituals of cleansing in water were part of the way in which Jews in the first century reclaimed themselves and recommitted themselves to their faith. In order to be ritually pure for worship in the temple, the Torah requires ritual bathing. While the process of being baptized was not quite the same, it had the same spiritual foundation.
But while there were similarities between what John did by the banks of the Jordan and what others had done before, there were some real and significant differences. What was striking about John was how intensely he pointed beyond the act that he was engaged in. While he was engaging in a ritual that had deep symbolic roots, the one who was to follow on afterwards, and who John himself was to baptize...that one would engage in an act far more potent and transforming than the ritual and symbolic cleansing of baptism by water.
The baptism by the Holy Spirit described by involves a far deeper transformation, a changing of the will through the presence of the grace of God. That sense of the presence of God, and the awareness that in some strange way God is working through you to change you...that’s the very heart and essence of the Gospel message that Jesus proclaimed.
But, you may ask, how does this work for us, today? To get a sense of the powerful presence of God’s Spirit, the prophets wandered out into the wildernesses of Judea. To know the working of God’s grace in themselves, the monks of the early Christian church isolated themselves in the deserts of North Africa. How can we get that same sense of God’s presence?
We are far closer to the desert than we might think. Not a desert as defined by the absence of water, but a desert as defined by the absence of the Spirit. Just as water brings green life and blooms and fruit, the fruits that come from the presence of the Spirit are grace and comfort and forgiveness. All of us experience areas in our lives in which those things are as hard to find as an orange tree in Death Valley.
Those broken and barren places may be a friendship that has soured. It might be a relationship where once there was love and now there is only hurt. It might be a place that should bring direction and hope, but brings only anger and confusion. It might be a season that should bring comfort and joy, but instead yields only stress and greed. Our lives do not lack for deserts, and they test us as truly as the burning sun tested the prophets. How we respond to those times and places is the measure of our faith.
We all have our deserts. And just like we need to take every opportunity to drink in the desert to keep it from drying us out like a stone, we need to take every opportunity to both seek and express the fruits of the Spirit in those desert places in our lives. There is no moment or place in your life where that cannot be expressed, where the Spirit cannot work change. It comes when you offer a word of grace instead of a cutting remark. It comes when you choose to reach out to someone who is different, or who seems to stand in opposition to you. It comes when you choose to help someone grow, instead of ignoring them or allowing them to continue to fail.
That Spirit is always there, always present, always waiting to rain down upon the dead places and to bring life to them again.
Know that truth, and drink deep.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Generation Now
Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
11.30.08; Rev. David Williams
Scriptures: Mark 13: 24-37
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been watching the activity in the marketplace with a considerable amount of interest. As my retirement investments ditch tens of thousands of dollars, and this church loses hundreds of thousands of dollars from it’s endowment, it’s hard not to be paying attention.
It’s strangely fascinating, and for some reason reminds me of this last summer, when I and the family were vacationing up at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania. A couple of the coasters there were just too intense, even for my coaster-happy 10 year old, so we’d sit and watch them as they went howling by, laden with screaming, happy, terrified park-goers.
Watching the markets lately is a bit like that, only you have to imagine that all of the coaster riders are carrying their life savings with them in big open buckets filled loose hundred dollar bills. As the ride soars by, the air is filled with their lost money, fluttering down and filling the air like dry leaves in a strong autumn wind. The screaming of the riders is still plenty, though.
For some reason this week, I found myself thinking back to a book that did extremely well waaaay back in the year 2000. It was written by James Glassman, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the current Undersecretary for Something Something Something in the outgoing administration. Mr. Glassman suggested that stocks were hugely undervalued, and that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was going to soar high up into the heavens, more than tripling in value in the near future. The book was entitled: Dow 36,000. Glassman was not alone in this prediction. There were books calling for the Dow to be at 40,000. There were books calling for the Dow to be at 100,000. An investment advisor by the name of Robert Zuccaro was pitching a much more specifically dated book back in 2001. It was entitled: Dow 30,000 by 2008.
It’s easy to be cynical. Sure, the market has plunged wildly this last year, dropping from close to 14,000 to under 9,000. But we have, what...still a bit over a month left in the year! You never know!
For Glassman and Zuccaro and others like them, those totally incorrect predictions are likely to make most of us rather skeptical about taking their advice in the future. Any future they might have had as a market prophet is shot. That’s fine, though. There are plenty of other jobs out there in retail. Oh...wait...not any more. Ooopsie.
Our reluctance to take the these self-declared market gurus seriously anymore actually follows a biblical rule about prophecy. How do you tell whether or not a prophet is truly from God? In the Torah, those first five books of scripture that are the highest law of the Hebrew Bible, the measure is pretty clear. In Deuteronomy 18:21-22, we hear that the measure of a prophetic truth is...whether it comes true or not. From those verses we hear this:
"How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD ? If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him.”
Pretty easy to remember. While this law works well for weeding out delusional prophets of God and crackhead financial advisors alike, it also leads us to a great fuddling question. If you were listening to today’s scripture from the Gospel of Mark, one verse should have whacked you straight in the forehead.
Beginning at the start of chapter 13, Jesus has begun to describe the things that will happen as the end-times come. We hear of trials and tribulations that will be endured. We hear that Judea will undergo all manner of bad things, and that people will flee to the hills. In today’s passage, which follows on all of this talk of apocalypse, we hear that the Son of Man will come in his glory, and gather up the chosen. It’s pretty standard “Left Behind” book fare.
But then things get odd. In verse thirty of chapter 13, as he wraps up his we hear Jesus say this: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” To which any of us who are actually listening might say...what? Huh? Ex-squeeze me?
Jesus is talking to his innermost circle of disciples. He is telling Peter, James, John and Andrew about the fulfillment of the Kingdom and the coming of the Son of Man, and saying that it will happen in their generation. That generation, of course, lived 2,000 years ago. So...um...how does this teaching of Jesus...which is as clear and as straightforward as could be...fit within the measure of truth laid out within Scripture itself?
To put it more plainly...is Jesus wrong? I mean, we’re happy to snicker at the dolt who claimed that the Dow would hit 30,000 this year. Are we equally happy to laugh at this nutjob from Nazareth who claimed that the Kingdom of God would come 2,000 years ago? If you talk to many atheists...as I do...this is one of their very favoritest passages. Look, they say, parading around triumphantly. Jesus said the end time would come, and it didn’t. Naany Naany Noo Nooo!
Yet I think that approach to what Jesus is saying misses several vitally important things about his teachings. The first...quite frankly...is that most of what was described in chapter 13 of Mark’s Gospel did occur. Within the lives of most of his listeners, Judea was completely destroyed by the Roman Empire. The city of Jerusalem fell, burned into nothing in the year 70 by the combined assault of three Roman legions. The second temple was razed, and Israel as a nation was shattered for nearly 2,000 years.
Yet though that “suffering” which is described earlier in the chapter and is referred to in verse 24 seem certain to have happened within a generation of Christ’s saying it, the passage seems to go further. Jesus suggests strongly that somehow Christ’s kingdom may be something that the disciples will experience...and yet it clearly hasn’t happened yet. The Son of Man descending? Has he? Angels gathering the elect? They can’t have. Can they?
It is that tension between the arrival of the fullness of the Kingdom and the anticipation of it’s arrival that is why this passage gets served up on the first Sunday of Advent. What Jesus is saying is not to be understood as being true only for the generation that heard him first. The reality he is describing isn’t something that occurs at one moment in time, or at one place. The arrival of God’s Kingdom does not belong to one particular generation...it belongs to all of them. It’s not a reality that happens at one moment, and then passes on. As Christ says, though Heaven and Earth will pass away, my words will not pass away.
What Jesus is doing is not predicting a future, for this generation or some future generation. He is declaring something that is happening, right now, for you and for me and for those who came before us and for those who will come after.
As we move towards the celebration of the coming of the Christ child, let’s do all that we can to live into that moment.
11.30.08; Rev. David Williams
Scriptures: Mark 13: 24-37
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been watching the activity in the marketplace with a considerable amount of interest. As my retirement investments ditch tens of thousands of dollars, and this church loses hundreds of thousands of dollars from it’s endowment, it’s hard not to be paying attention.
It’s strangely fascinating, and for some reason reminds me of this last summer, when I and the family were vacationing up at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania. A couple of the coasters there were just too intense, even for my coaster-happy 10 year old, so we’d sit and watch them as they went howling by, laden with screaming, happy, terrified park-goers.
Watching the markets lately is a bit like that, only you have to imagine that all of the coaster riders are carrying their life savings with them in big open buckets filled loose hundred dollar bills. As the ride soars by, the air is filled with their lost money, fluttering down and filling the air like dry leaves in a strong autumn wind. The screaming of the riders is still plenty, though.
For some reason this week, I found myself thinking back to a book that did extremely well waaaay back in the year 2000. It was written by James Glassman, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the current Undersecretary for Something Something Something in the outgoing administration. Mr. Glassman suggested that stocks were hugely undervalued, and that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was going to soar high up into the heavens, more than tripling in value in the near future. The book was entitled: Dow 36,000. Glassman was not alone in this prediction. There were books calling for the Dow to be at 40,000. There were books calling for the Dow to be at 100,000. An investment advisor by the name of Robert Zuccaro was pitching a much more specifically dated book back in 2001. It was entitled: Dow 30,000 by 2008.
It’s easy to be cynical. Sure, the market has plunged wildly this last year, dropping from close to 14,000 to under 9,000. But we have, what...still a bit over a month left in the year! You never know!
For Glassman and Zuccaro and others like them, those totally incorrect predictions are likely to make most of us rather skeptical about taking their advice in the future. Any future they might have had as a market prophet is shot. That’s fine, though. There are plenty of other jobs out there in retail. Oh...wait...not any more. Ooopsie.
Our reluctance to take the these self-declared market gurus seriously anymore actually follows a biblical rule about prophecy. How do you tell whether or not a prophet is truly from God? In the Torah, those first five books of scripture that are the highest law of the Hebrew Bible, the measure is pretty clear. In Deuteronomy 18:21-22, we hear that the measure of a prophetic truth is...whether it comes true or not. From those verses we hear this:
"How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD ? If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him.”
Pretty easy to remember. While this law works well for weeding out delusional prophets of God and crackhead financial advisors alike, it also leads us to a great fuddling question. If you were listening to today’s scripture from the Gospel of Mark, one verse should have whacked you straight in the forehead.
Beginning at the start of chapter 13, Jesus has begun to describe the things that will happen as the end-times come. We hear of trials and tribulations that will be endured. We hear that Judea will undergo all manner of bad things, and that people will flee to the hills. In today’s passage, which follows on all of this talk of apocalypse, we hear that the Son of Man will come in his glory, and gather up the chosen. It’s pretty standard “Left Behind” book fare.
But then things get odd. In verse thirty of chapter 13, as he wraps up his we hear Jesus say this: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” To which any of us who are actually listening might say...what? Huh? Ex-squeeze me?
Jesus is talking to his innermost circle of disciples. He is telling Peter, James, John and Andrew about the fulfillment of the Kingdom and the coming of the Son of Man, and saying that it will happen in their generation. That generation, of course, lived 2,000 years ago. So...um...how does this teaching of Jesus...which is as clear and as straightforward as could be...fit within the measure of truth laid out within Scripture itself?
To put it more plainly...is Jesus wrong? I mean, we’re happy to snicker at the dolt who claimed that the Dow would hit 30,000 this year. Are we equally happy to laugh at this nutjob from Nazareth who claimed that the Kingdom of God would come 2,000 years ago? If you talk to many atheists...as I do...this is one of their very favoritest passages. Look, they say, parading around triumphantly. Jesus said the end time would come, and it didn’t. Naany Naany Noo Nooo!
Yet I think that approach to what Jesus is saying misses several vitally important things about his teachings. The first...quite frankly...is that most of what was described in chapter 13 of Mark’s Gospel did occur. Within the lives of most of his listeners, Judea was completely destroyed by the Roman Empire. The city of Jerusalem fell, burned into nothing in the year 70 by the combined assault of three Roman legions. The second temple was razed, and Israel as a nation was shattered for nearly 2,000 years.
Yet though that “suffering” which is described earlier in the chapter and is referred to in verse 24 seem certain to have happened within a generation of Christ’s saying it, the passage seems to go further. Jesus suggests strongly that somehow Christ’s kingdom may be something that the disciples will experience...and yet it clearly hasn’t happened yet. The Son of Man descending? Has he? Angels gathering the elect? They can’t have. Can they?
It is that tension between the arrival of the fullness of the Kingdom and the anticipation of it’s arrival that is why this passage gets served up on the first Sunday of Advent. What Jesus is saying is not to be understood as being true only for the generation that heard him first. The reality he is describing isn’t something that occurs at one moment in time, or at one place. The arrival of God’s Kingdom does not belong to one particular generation...it belongs to all of them. It’s not a reality that happens at one moment, and then passes on. As Christ says, though Heaven and Earth will pass away, my words will not pass away.
What Jesus is doing is not predicting a future, for this generation or some future generation. He is declaring something that is happening, right now, for you and for me and for those who came before us and for those who will come after.
As we move towards the celebration of the coming of the Christ child, let’s do all that we can to live into that moment.
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