Pentecost 24(C) – Malachi 4:1-2a, Luke 21:5-19
It must have been shocking when Jesus stood in the temple and announced that it would be coming down. You need to understand that when we talk about the temple, we’re not talking about a building like this church. Yes, its shape and purpose are the same, but a whole lot bigger. Just this enormous structure that had room upon room upon room, a central little room where God dwelled among God’s people, were only the High Priest was allowed to go. And a room beyond that where all of the priests would gather for worship, and a room beyond that where the men of the community would gather, and a room beyond that for the women of the community, and a room beyond that for foreigners and the sick. Side rooms for banquets and dinners and special offerings, and chapels, and closets, and living quarters. This was an enormous structure. Not the sort of thing that people in the ancient world put together in a day or so. The bricks can still be seen if you go to Jerusalem today, stones twenty feet wide. For Jesus to say that not one stone will be left upon another is a great and terrifying prediction. People must have been shocked at it. And yet, in the year 70, when the Romans came into Jerusalem and laid waste to the city, and destroyed their temple, it must have been at least some comfort to Jesus’s followers that He said this would happen. Jesus promised this, and His promises came true.
It must have been shocking to His followers when Jesus said that they would be hated because of his name, that sister and mother and brother and father would be destroying one another. That’s not what we sign up for when we follow Christ! That’s not what we want from Christianity. We don’t want to be at odds with our family and hated by the world, persecuted by those who surround us, handed over to synagogues and prisons, brought before kings and governors because of Jesus’s name. Jesus is supposed to give us joy, an abundance of life. That’s why people were following Him. Well, we have a record in the book of Acts that says that the disciples were handed over to prisons. Paul and Silas sat in a prison cell and sang and the doors came flying open. Peter and the apostles were gathered around facing the religious leaders and had exactly what Jesus had promised them: The words and wisdom that no one could withstand or contradict. Jesus promised them that in the worst of times that were coming, He would be with them, inspiring them. And Jesus’s promises come true.
It must be shocking to go out into this world every day, you and I, and see what the world is really made of. I’ll tell you when it gets me most, is when I’m driving. I don’t know if it’s Massachusetts drivers or people in general… (No, I think it’s people in general!) The other day I was in Marlboro, and was getting on route 290, and right behind me on the on ramp–I don’t know what it was that I was doing to annoy them. But they pulled up around me in my lane, and practically ran me off the road. And so, where else was I to go? My lane. They kept driving and eventually pulled up around me in the next lane and gave me such a dirty look. And I gave one right back to them.
How terrible of them, to be so rude to me! How terrible of me to be so rude to them. That’s when it gets me the most is when I’m driving, because I get angry at other people, and find that I am just as rude and awful as everyone else.
Because we are! We’re captive by our sin. We are held down by that, and what can we do? Whether it’s the way we abuse the resources of God’s beautiful world, or the way we treat one another, or the people around us, or our families, or ourselves! We seem to constantly devalue God’s creation. God made us, and God called us good, and we deny that every chance we get. What hope is there for us? What can come from that?
Well, the good news is that God promises us, and God’s promises always come true. This morning, we’re going to baptize Thomas Wyatt, a beautiful, energetic little boy, and he, like us, will enter into a covenant with God. A promise that our sins have been washed clean. And not once, because as Thomas’s mother well knows, after his Baptism, he won’t be a perfect, saintly, angelic child every moment from then on. Lord knows, we all sin again and again and again. But that they will be washed clean again and again and again. That every day, every hour, every moment, our sin will be drowned, and we will be born again, new and holy and beautiful people, righteous before God.
That’s the promise that God makes us. It’s a promise that we can trust, one that frees us from having to worry about how horrible we are in the driving lane or elsewhere, and to go out into our world and change it for the better in the name of God. That’s the promise that God makes us, one He made long ago through the prophet Malachi, who tells us that the wicked and evil will be destroyed, burned up. And not those other wicked and evil folks in the world, but us–the wickedness and evil in us will be destroyed. And the holy and righteous will be freed, and liberated, and renewed. And so we are.
God promises us. God’s promises always come true. How has God made good on that promise for you today?