Poolesville Presbyterian Church
11.18.12; Rev. David Williams
Years ago, when I was working at my last secular job and had just started seminary, my boss told me that he needed me to travel with him to a meeting. I was psyched. Travel? Adventure! Excitement! Where are we going to be going, I asked?
We needed to go and meet with the muckity mucks at the headquarters of a large foundation, he replied, one that would be supporting one of our projects to the tune of several million dollars. Cool, I thought. Where are we going, asked I. Out to wine and dine our way around Napa Valley? Or perhaps to some private island in the West Indies?
As it turned out, we were going to Flint, Michigan. In November.
Well, I’d never been there. So it was still sort of an adventure. I started looking for tickets. There weren’t a whole bunch of flights to Flint, for some reason, and getting there and back was amazingly expensive, as expensive as flying to Paris. Through the peculiar randomness of airline ticketing, I discovered that if I stayed two extra days, I would save my organization five hundred bucks, even with meals and hotel factored in. Any opportunity to save money for any reason whatsoever just stirs my Scots blood, and I couldn’t resist. I’d just bring a laptop, a stack of proposals to review for my job, and some seminary work to fill out my days, and I’d be fine.
When I shared that plan with my boss, he looked at me kind of funny. You’re going to spend two extra days in Flint to save us money, he asked. Have you ever been to Flint, he asked? No, said I. Ah, he said.
Flint used to be one of the centers of the American auto industry. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, it was a bustling, prosperous industrial town, flush with the paychecks of the well-paid workers at the town’s crankin’ Buick plant. That plant was part of a massive industrial complex nicknamed Buick City, which sprawled across 235 acres of towering smokestacks and whirring assembly lines. The downtown was full of shiny shops and bustling restaurants and small businesses, and there were dozens of neat little suburban neighborhoods built up all around that downtown. In those neighborhoods, there were row upon row of modest but comfortable houses with neat green lawns, filled up with families who were living the perfect vision of the Leave-It-To-Beaver American dream.
That downtown is still there. Those neighborhoods are still there. I know because in between working and studying, I left my hotel and walked through the streets of Flint on two cold and cloudy November days. My longest walk was two hours late one afternoon, and it was one of the more memorable walks I’ve ever taken. I meandered around the streets of the downtown. I crisscrossed through neighborhoods. In those two hours, I didn’t see another living soul. I walked down streets on which there were nice little ramblers of the same vintage as my own home in Annandale. Every single house was empty, every lawn overgrown, every window dirty and faded. In the downtown, every storefront was shuttered, many long ago gutted by fire or collapsed by rot. There was graffiti, but even that seemed tired and old and faded, as even the vandals had long since given up.
It felt like I’d somehow wandered onto a set for Season One of the Walking Dead. There was nothing alive, nothing human, anyway. I started looking over my shoulder now and again, half-convinced that some brains-hungry undead locals might be shambling my way. It was eerie.
At the height of the life of this community, it would have bustled and thrummed with life. It would have been filled with energy and dynamism, a town that built cars for a nation that lives most of its life in cars, and had been building cars since 1904. It would have seemed unimaginable that it wouldn’t just always be that way. How could it not last forever?
Looking up at the grandeur of the towering temple in Jerusalem, the disciples were equally impressed. This was not the temple built by Solomon, because the Solomonic temple had been torn to rubble when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem in the year 586 BCE. It wasn’t even the temple which was built on the site of Solomon’s Temple during the reconstruction of Jerusalem following the return from exile. That temple, which was finished in 515 BCE, is what scholars call “the second temple.” Because, well, it was built second.
This was the Herodian Temple. Herod the Great, in an effort to prove that his rule wasn’t the bizarre corrupt inbred mess that it actually was, decided to do a little bit of refurbishing to the Second Temple, which was getting a little rough around the edges.
So he rebuilt it in the first century before Christ, supersized and double extra-shiny. The entrance was a vast arch in the style of Roman monuments. The temple itself was built on a new and huge platform which measured almost 170,000 square yards. And to top it off, having decided that the original temple just wasn’t quite fancy enough, Herod had much of the renovated temple covered in gold leaf, which I’m sure was tasteful by Las Vegas standards.
It was striking, vast, and imposing. It was mean to impress, and it did. One of the disciples was as overawed as a five-year-old in Times Square, and remarked on it to Jesus.
Jesus was rather less impressed, and offered up his own assessment. None of it mattered. None of it would remain standing. On the most basic level, he was right. When the uprising against Rome failed a few decades after Jesus, Roman legions would besiege Jerusalem, and would raze the temple to the ground and burn it completely.
But he was right on another level. Nothing we make on earth will withstand the passing of time. Nothing. All those things we imagine to be cast in stone, permanent, unchanging, and everlasting? They will one day crumble and fade. We have trouble grasping it, trouble realizing it. Surely something we make will stick around.
We look to the spread of our culture around us, and imagine that it must always be as it is. We look to the great edifices of our republic, just two hundred years young, and it seems impossible that they won’t endure. We see the sprawling malls and the shine and the sparkle, and we can’t visualize that as impermanent. How can anything that to us seems so vast not be sticking around?
But as impossible as it seems, it won’t be the case. Not even Twinkies will be around forever. Not. Even. Twinkies.
Finding our ground, then, can be somewhat difficult. It is particularly difficult in a society that values both the supersized and the immediate. To us, and to us in particular, Jesus offers the reminder that clinging to that which appears the most impressive and spectacular does not serve our best purpose in the Kingdom.
In the heart of what Jesus taught us, we find something rather different. Instead of allowing ourselves to be distracted by the great towering golden edifices of power and profit, Jesus asks us to look to very different things. We are to attend to our relationships with those around us, showing care and grace and kindness to every soul we encounter. We are to attend to our relationship with our Creator, whose presence is so vast we struggle to see it, and so subtle and quiet we have to hold very still to hear it.
These things might, to us, seem rather less impressive than superhighways and malls and the shine of the world around us. But our encounter with time and space is not the same as our Maker’s, and our understanding of what is significant is not the same, either.
So turn your attention from the distractions, from the large stones hewn by the Herods of our own time, and turn it instead towards what matters.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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