A Mighty Long Time

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.28.2015;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 11:1-11

“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” we reflected on last week, and then, that little prayer goes: “Forever.”

What do we expect, when we say, “forever?”  Because our expectations of what it means to be in relationship with our Creator for all time, for that prayer to hang in the air for all time?  They may not quite be completely thought through.  Forever, in the event you hadn’t noticed, goes on rather longer than we have the ability to wrap our heads around.

It’s unsettling, honestly, given the tiny little flicker of our lives, to even begin to try.  I remember as a lad, on a warm day in the summer between third and fourth grade, wandering about with nothing to do by anything I wanted.  It was Fire Island, a place without cars, in a time where kids could amble about blissfully with the sand between their toes, lazing about, the kind of summer afternoon at the beach that seems to be forever.  I wanted ice cream, two scoops, chocolate chocolate chip with chocolate sprinkles in a sugar cone, and...as a sign of how old I am...a dollar would buy that.  And I had a dollar.  Wouldn’t it be awesome, I thought, if every day I just got a dollar?  Just like that.  I’d be rich.  I wondered, then, how long it would take me to save up a million dollars, if I got one every day.  

I’d be just a couple of years shy of my three-thousandth birthday, or so my faltering math told me.  Urk.  That, um, wasn’t going to work out.  What about a dollar an hour, I thought?  Almost.  But not quite.  Even then, I wouldn’t make it to a million bucks.  I wouldn’t live that long, even if I lived as long as anyone ever in the history of ever.  And the breezes of that summer afternoon blew a little colder, because I was suddenly aware of how very finite my life on earth was going to be.  Plus, it was summer, and I was doing math.

I had my ice cream, and the day got back to being better.

The scale of forever can be more than a little scary, something I was reminded of these last few weeks as my evening reading led me into an anthology of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas.  I can’t tell you how nice it is to have a break from reading churchy books every once in a while.

Lovecraft himself was an early 20th century writer of peculiar horror fiction.  He was an odd fish, Lovecraft, a strange and isolated soul, the sort of writer who lived awkward, poor, and alone.   His stories, of alien and ancient horrors, are written in a very particular style, in which every moment is filled with horror of inhuman madness, as monstrous things of mindshattering scale, who for a countless depth of inconceivably immense eons have woven their eldritch and inscrutably vast machinations around the helpless, irrelevant, and shallow mortality of an oblivious, frail and fleeting humanity.  

Those writings profoundly products of their time, and of the growing realization on the part of humanity that everything we know--our whole history, everything that we are and have been--occupied only the tiniest sliver of a fraction of creation.   Before history, there was a yawning chasm of time, time on a scale that our minds can barely comprehend.    And as late 19th and early 20th century astronomy peered more deeply into the recesses of space, we realized that the universe fell back farther than we had ever imagined possible, our sense of the hugeness of it all was overwhelming.  How, in all of what we are, do we fit into this?

Lovecraft’s writing, strange and gothic, was the creation of that era, when we suddenly stood in encounter with a reality that was so much more than we had thought that the first reflex was to block it out, to recoil in terror, the way we might if we glanced over a ledge and realized that it was a 10,000 foot drop.  It wasn’t horror with vampires and werewolves.  It was “cosmic horror,” fear at our encounter with something so different from our expectations that we didn’t have any way to process what we were encountering.  We don’t want forever, not really, because it reminds us how small we are.  And we both hate and fear things that make us feel like we’re small and fleeting, or that we’ve got it wrong.

When the early church taught us to add in our affirmation of the forever of God to our praying, I think they grasped this.  Prayer, if it is to be a real connection, must shake us loose from ourselves, drawing us away from the the shallowness of our expectations.  If it does not, then we don’t really put ourselves in a position to receive what Jesus was offering.

Like, say, in the story we heard repeated twice today, of Jesus arriving in Jerusalem.  It’s the recounting of Palm Sunday, that annual tale of how a gathered throng managed to filter the arrival of Jesus through their expectations, and come out with a completely skewed grasp of why he was there and what he was there to do.

We’ve heard two of those stories today, the one from Mark’s Gospel and the one from John’s story of Jesus, and they reflect remarkably similar accounts of a single event.  Here, Mark, who lies as the storytelling foundation for both Matthew’s Gospel and Luke’s Gospel, shares a memory of Jesus that is exactly the same as John.  This is important, because they came from completely different lines of tradition, with harmonious but different lenses on the story of who Jesus was.

If you’ve ever been to a Palm Sunday service before, or if you learned about this story as a child, then you probably have a mental image of what was just doubly read to you. There’s Jesus riding into town on a humble donkey, and he’s coming through the gates of the city, and it’s a great celebration, after which the boys in the crowd would immediately start whacking each other with the fronds and turning them into frond-swords.

For most of the crowd, in either of these tellings, what they were crying out for was the arrival of the thing that they expected.  That crowd had a very specific understanding of what it would mean when their anointed one arrived, when the great king showed up to finally set everything right.  

For centuries, the people of Judah had been kicked around, battered by one empire after another, and they were looking hungrily for the person who was going to set it all aright.  They knew exactly what that would be.

That savior would neatly meet every expectation that had been formed over the course of their thousand year history.  He would be a King with all his Kingly glory, just like Solomon or David from eight hundred years before.  He would be a mighty warrior on the field of battle, wise and handsome and strong.  He would express the will of their God, by delivering a divine whupping on each and every one of their enemies, and liberate them through the force of the sword and/or a sustained campaign of angelic carpet bombing.

From hundreds of years of oppression and subjugation, their anger and desire for a big fierce setting right burned bright and strong.

That was not what Jesus was bringing.  His arrival in Jerusalem, and his teachings throughout his brief time among us?  They were something that bore no resemblance to that

He saw, as the Judeans in Jerusalem did not, that Jerusalem itself and the power struggles around it meant nothing.  Why would he want to overthrow that power?  Why would he desire to take it for himself?  Soon enough, it would be nothing, shattered and smoldering after Rome had annihilated it.  And then, in just a blink of an cosmic eye after that, the false glory that was Rome would tear itself to pieces, just as Babylon and Assyria had torn themselves to pieces.

What Jesus had been teaching was different.  What he saw was rather different.  Seen from the perspective of the Creator of the Universe, everything we fight about and every reason we have to war and hate on each other seems pointless.  Jesus saw redemption and love, and the path of compassion.  And in the cheering of that crowd, in their yearning for victory, Jesus would have heard them not getting it.  

They didn’t get that compassion, radical and fundamental, was at the heart of the message that carries through this most holy of Christian seasons.  They didn’t understand that the reconciliation and hope Jesus brought was not just theirs, but was also intended to restore all of humanity their enemies.  It was meant for them, but not only for them.

It was a message that was not just relevant in a particular time, or in a particular culture.  What Jesus brought, and what he claimed?  It was something cast out of the deeper purpose of humanity, something that runs far beyond our smallness.

That’s what we pray, when we pray with the early church, asking for this to be “forever.”  Those ancient Christians prayed this in the Greek, and in that language, “forever” is three words:  ais tous aionas, meaning “into the ages,” or, more exactly,  “into the eons.”  An eon, in geologic time, ranges from 500 million to well over a billion years. It means, roughly, a billion years.  For those first Greek-speaking Jesus folk, it just meant a vast and almost immeasurable amount of time, time on God’s scale.  And it’s eons, plural, all of the ages, all times and all spaces, billions and billions, as Carl Sagan might have put it, time beyond count, time beyond measure.

That’s why people misunderstood.  That’s why, when those who held power realized what he was doing, they became frightened and violent.  What happens in our evoking of this prayer, like that moment when Jesus came into Jerusalem, is a reminder of the scale of things, against which what matters is our care for one another, our forgiveness of one another, our forbearance and grace towards one another.

That, more than anything, is the joyously eldritch truth, the strange magic of this day, and this Holy Week.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.