All Fall Down

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

11.15.2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 13:1-8

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

It was a very peculiar moment, bordering on the surreal.

It’s one of those things that happens when you’ve lived in an area for a while, I suppose, but I didn’t expect it to sneak up quite like that.  Back when I was a teenager, living in Virginia, I spent a whole bunch of time in malls, which is I think what suburbanite teens are just genetically programmed to do.

The back side of the Mall looked a certain way.  You went through a pair of doors, and you were in a parking lot.  On the far side of the lot, there was an electronic store, a place where I had once purchased a state of the art double tape deck for the giant speakered stereo that graced my room at home.

I’d been through those doors dozens of times, twenty, thirty, times.  Every time, the same thing was on the other side.

That was twenty years ago.  And I knew, conceptually, rationally, that things weren’t the same.  I’d experienced the construction, driven past it, watched from other angles as the area had changed.  I’d been elsewhere in Tysons, as it grew and expanded.

But those doors?  I’d never had cause to walk through them.  My mind, being a human mind, locked down that memory.  If you go through those doors, this is what you’ll see.  Object permanence, it’s called, if I remember correctly from my psych classes.  One of the most important things humans learn as they transition out of babydom is that things don’t just disappear when you can’t see them.  They remain, even when outside of our perception.  Admittedly, this takes pretty much all the fun out of peek a boo.  But as pioneering 20th century psychologist Jean Piaget described it in the last century, being able to do this is one of the great feats of human cognitive development.

Which is probably why walking out the mall doors messed with my head.  I knew what was on the other side, a strong echo from my memory.

And it just wasn’t there.  Instead, two towering midrise skyscrapers blotted out the sky across a new plaza.   I felt like one of those apes waking up during the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.  How the heck did that get there?  Because the towers weren’t supposed to be there.  It was wrong, the wrong thing, because I was sure I knew what had been there.

It should have been right there, only it wasn’t.  It had all changed, completely, like a twenty year game of peekaboo, only when the hands move away Daddy’s face is different.

We make that mistake, we do, when it comes to the structures of the world around us.  We assume, for some inexplicable reason, that the stuff we make is both what matters and what sticks around.  We confuse

As they wandered by the Jerusalem temple in the story told by Mark this morning, the disciples were just as confused as we are.   

This was the Herodian Temple, one of the most overblown and intentionally ostentatious structures in the ancient world.   Herod the Great looked at the temple that the Jewish people had built when they came back from exile in Babylon, and deemed it too small, too pedestrian.  It lacked boldness and aggression.

So he rebuilt it one hundred years before Jesus showed up on the scene, supersized and double extra-shiny.  The entrance was a great sweeping arch in the style of Roman monuments.  The temple itself was built on a new and huge raised foundation, the new Temple Mount, a flat surface that spanned over thirty six acres, for which Herod enlisted the help of over 10,000 workers.  The temple building itself was determined to be inadequately fabulous, so Herod had the whole thing wrapped in gold.

It was striking, a remarkable and seemingly unchanging edifice to the incestuous Herodian dynasty.   It was willfully, intentionally, over the top.  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, looking up at the gold and the rocks and the whole self-assured bluster of it.  None of it mattered.  None of it would remain standing.  “It all falls down,” he said.  And he was right about the temple.  

The temple itself, for all of its golden shine and super-sized construction, got helped in the falling down part by the Roman Empire, who left pretty much none of it standing.  Except for the Temple Mount, which now sits in Jerusalem as one of those sacred, holy places that people fight about.

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.   Other things will rise to replace them.  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?

Ours is a culture that is always growing and changing, and that’s part of it.  That change can leave us feeling wildly disoriented, like walking out a door one day and finding that the content of our memory no longer matches the reality we’re encountering.

Finding our ground, then, can be hard.   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 taken in by the promises of edifices, 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.  They do not stand.  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.

God does not care about those objects, to be frank.  Our memories of place, and our attachment to place, those things are of far lesser significance to God than the nature of what we do in that place.  Because the purpose of the places and spaces we build and inhabit is just as temporary and fleeting as these mortal bodies we find ourselves in.  It’s not that they’re bad, but that they exist to serve others.  Not their own glory, not their own power, but the furtherance of God’s love for us.

And sure, that can be unsettling.  One of the cornerstones of our sentience is the ability to grasp that things remain the same, and realizing it goes further than that is hard for us.  When our desire to hold things fast and unchanging prevents us from turning ourselves towards loving and caring for our neighbors.

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.