St. Paul's Episcopal Church

St. Paul's Episcopal Church
425 Cleveland Ave SW
Canton, Ohio 44702
Phone: 330-455-0286
Fax: 330-455-9818
E-mail: office@stpaulscanton.org

24 Pentecost
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Canton OH
Mark 13:1-8

November 15, 2009
The Rev. Barbara L Bond

Revealing New Life

The apostles are admiring the Temple in Jerusalem – which is newly completed and is indeed a very impressive building. “Look at this gorgeous thing!” they say. Jesus says, “It will be in ruins before you know it.” And he wasn’t speaking metaphorically. In the Year 70, the Temple was destroyed, along with the rest of Jerusalem.

Jesus then described other unrest, other “signs” that would come: wars, earthquakes, famines. He makes more dire predictions as the scripture continues: the sun will be darkened, the stars will fall. By now, we are clearly getting into metaphor. This is apocalyptic language, familiar to his followers from their Jewish tradition. It never meant, and still doesn’t mean, the End Times. This is not about the End of the World. Rather, it is about the Revealing of God. Apocalypse means Revelation – a greater understanding, and, as Marcus Borg says, A Great Divine Clean-up of a broken world. Jesus sees this as Good News, saying, “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” Birth is good. Something new is going to happen, and in fact, has already begun.

Despite the fact that we seem fascinated by disaster, such as the new disaster movie 2012, that is not what Jesus is talking about. We can’t make the Gospel into one more disaster movie, despite the efforts of some fanciful and popular novelists. Physical cataclysm is just not the point. This is about Change, Change that is Good For Us. There will be symptoms that are not comfortable – wars and famines are certainly not a good thing. But if they are symptoms of a better time to come, then we must not lose heart. God works through all kinds of agency.

There is a Big Change, a major seismic shift, happening right now in our culture. It has been gathering steam for about 150 years, and by now, the effects are hard to deny. It probably started when our notions of scientific certainty were shaken by Charles Darwin – the Creation is not one big event, but an event that continues to happen, as species continue to evolve. Dang! Where is the certainty in that? And just when we thought we had physical science all figured out, like Isaac Newton dropping apples and discovering gravity, Einstein and others tell us that actually, it is all relative, and that solid object you are holding is made up of tiny atoms that move around; what you are seeing and believing is not half the story. Dang! Where is the certainty in that? In medical science, wonderful discoveries are made and we think we can fix anything with a scalpel and some good drugs, but then Freud came along and said many of our ailments were in our minds. Dang. The sand shifts again. We thought the good guys win the wars, and we were so glad when the last world war ended in Europe – only to find ourselves horrified three months later by destructive nuclear energy unleashed on the world. There seems to be a cost to all our so-called advances, from private transportation messing up the air, to energy use warming up our planet. We thought this earth was here for our use, but lately it is as if the earth is fighting back, or at least fighting those proud assumptions of our ownership. Huge societal shifts are going on, often reflected at the ballot box, and my gosh, even the church is changing. Did you know that the Episcopalians have women priests?

Virtually all of our assumptions are being challenged these days, and it is taking fancy footwork to even stand upright. But I agree with Jesus. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs. As we become more aware of how we are damaging our planet, we can work to heal it. As we become more aware of injustice and violence, we can work for justice and peace. As we learn more in the sciences, perhaps we will develop some humility.

When we encounter challenges, or even disasters, let us meet them with courage and know that these are but the birth pangs of something better. Our Big Story, of triumph overcoming death, sustains us. The death of Jesus looked like disaster, but his Resurrection came in many forms, including the rise of his body the church. The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem was definitely a disaster, but it necessitated a huge change in Judaism, decentralizing the faith, and bringing forth the birth of rabbinic Judaism, a good thing. On a personal level, perhaps you get a scary medical diagnosis, but its discovery spurs you to action and brings you new health. In our parish, we have identified some financial challenges: perhaps we will be spurred to make changes that will bring us new life. The current national frenzy over health care, while confusing and often angry, is going to give us something better than we have now.

I have a follow-up to last week’s Berlin Wall sermon, a story which seems pertinent to this theme of greeting change with courage. When I was visiting Berlin in February 1990, I called on an old friend who told me about her experience of the fall of the wall. She was a very private person, and missed the whole thing, curled up in her apartment, listening to music. The Berlin wall came down on Thursday night, and on Friday and Saturday, West Berlin was swarming with folks from the East. My friend Jeanette knew nothing about this until Saturday morning, when she left her apartment to buy groceries. She went to a small shop, where she saw a strange man, poorly dressed, holding up a carton of yogurt. He was staring at it in fascination, like he had never seen such a thing. To Jeanette, this was odd, eerie. She went to the door and looked into the square – she said it was black with people – swarms of people everywhere. Her city square had never looked like this before. She was stunned, couldn’t figure out what was going on. She walked back to her apartment, in a daze, wondering if she were in the Twilight Zone. She called a friend, who told her about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jeanette went into her bedroom, pulled a blanket over her head, and stayed that way the rest of the weekend.

Well, that’s one way to respond to change. But I think we can do better than that! We know that God is with us, and no matter what we encounter, with God’s help, we will live into the challenges and work to build a better world. The Great Divine Clean-Up is in progress, and we are a part of it. Let us greet the dawn of this new era with awe and excitement, and work for God’s divine plan of justice and peace.