Sermon on Mark 13:1–8. Preached at Zion’s Lutheran, Shoemakersville, PA.
The end of the world. With all the work I did with teenagers in my ministry up north, I learned that there were a few things that would always come up when we’d just get talking. This was one, and no surprise. We’ve been fascinated with the idea forever. I am no exception; I can remember as a teenager reading the book of Revelation over and over again. I had heard about one way to “decode” the visions in that book, and was confused. It didn’t quite make sense, and it certainly didn’t match with the rest of the faith I had been taught. But I couldn’t imagine an alternative.
In some ways, Jesus’s sayings in today’s Gospel reading, and the rest of chapter 13 of Mark, are even more confusing. At least in Revelation and Daniel, we get a whole book to puzzle over. It’s harder, too, to imagine it coming from Jesus. True, Jesus isn’t exactly known for saying the most comfortable things. “The first shall be last,” he says. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” But at least there he’s not talking about wars and rumors of wars.
Maybe it would be easier to close the Bible, and turn on the news instead. At least there we know what wars and rumors we are talking about. More bombings in the Gaza strip. North Korea hiding its nuclear technology. An Arab-American journalist killed in the Saudi embassy in Turkey. Great Britain and Ireland fighting about Brexit. 300 mass shootings in America this year! Hand recounts for Florida elections, and allegations of voter fraud, as if we were a third world country.
Yes, Jesus says nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes and famine and natural disaster. Fires in California, 71 dead and hundreds missing. Hurricanes repeatedly devastating the American southeast. Famine in Latin and South America, sending people north to search for food and work, meeting soldiers at the border. Contaminated water in Michigan for 4-1/2 years now. And even the earliest little Pennsylvania snowstorm in 22 years has me a little worried.
Are we living in the end times? The earliest Christians thought so. In fact, many in the first generation of Christianity thought it was a waste of time to marry and have children. Jesus would be back any minute. So they waited. And waited. After 1900 years, we’ve gotten tired of waiting. It doesn’t seem like Jesus will ever be back. At the end of this chapter, Jesus tells us to “keep awake.” But we fell asleep at the wheel long ago, and there are plenty of people that would say we’re careening off course. And Jesus promised it would get worse: Family members betray each other. There will be great suffering, and people will flee for their lives. False messiahs will appear. The sun will grow dark and the stars will fall. Yes, things get worse.
But wait: All this starts with Jesus pointing to the temple and says that it will fall down. Which is interesting. The temple is an extremely important location for Judaism and nascent Christianity. We can’t quite relate, in our world, with churches sitting on every corner, just down the road from from another church. Our Lutheran denomination has almost 10,000 congregation in this country, but in the ancient world, there could only be one temple. Because while we may call our churches the “house of God,” in ancient Israel, they really meant it. A church is a place where people come to worship. But they believed the temple was the place where God lives when he comes to visit humanity. The temple was holy because it was literally God’s house, God’s dwelling. The job of the priests was not to lead worship. They made sure the people and the temple stayed holy, so God would keep living there. The priests were literally God’s housekeeping staff.
So when Jesus predicts that the temple will fall down, it means that God’s house won’t be there anymore. Perhaps God will move out, live somewhere else. It might seem that way. Wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and famine— It sounds like God has stopped protecting his people, like God has abandoned us.
But Jesus says something else. He says, “This is but the beginning of the—” Of the what? “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” Jesus isn’t talking about death. He’s talking about birth.
Jesus affirms something that we, as Christians, have often forgotten over 2,000 years of the faith. When it comes to the end of the world, we know that there is no such thing. In the ancient prayers of the church, we used to say the words, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, world without end.” Even in our prayers now we say “thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.” Not until the end, but always. There is no end. Jesus wants to make sure we know that when it seems like our lives are falling apart, or it seems like our world is falling apart, it doesn’t mean that the world is coming to an end. It means that our hope for the world, for our future, should be just beginning.
God is giving birth to a new thing. God is creating new life among us, and in response, the world is writhing in labor. Yes, we see anger, fear, despair, destruction—but this is not God’s. This is ours. It is the way we push back against the beautiful new creation God is working. Because it is large and terrifying to see that newness, that change, and we dare not hope, because we think we are in it alone. We look at the temple and we see the stones fallen in upon themselves, and we think God has abandoned us, and we cry out in pain and terror.
There is no temple, it has collapsed, but not because God has abandoned us. It is because God does not need a temple. God never did. We needed a temple in order to know God was with us, but now, God has decided to dwell with us instead. In our synagogues and in our churches. In our homes and in our hearts. God has promised to be among us forever, and nothing can separate us from him. Eternity begins now. The world cannot end. We cannot end. Because God is love, and will not let anything he loves come to an end.
What if we acted like we knew God’s love, and God’s world, will last forever? Would we live our lives the same way we do now, if we knew we had no end to fear? What would it look like if we remembered that God is still here? What would these wars and rumors of wars be like if we confronted them with the reminder that God dwells among us? And how could we remind the world that God is present, and God is love?