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.