Twenty-Third Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, RCL
November 17, 2019
North Fork Ministries
Gospel:
Luke 21:5-19
When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, Jesus said, "As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down."
They asked him, "Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?" And he said, "Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, `I am he!' and, `The time is near!' Do not go after them.
"When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately." Then he said to them, "Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.
"But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls."
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The temple that the disciples in today’s Gospel reading were admiring wasn’t the ancient Temple that Solomon built. That temple had been destroyed a few centuries earlier when the Israelites were defeated and exiled to Babylon. This temple, where Jesus worshiped as a child, was the larger, more magnificent, second temple, begun by King Herod, and with construction continuing throughout Jesus’ life. It’s beauty and magnificence was legendary, admired even by the Romans who destroyed it – less than a decade after it’s completion. After it’s destruction, people who lived alongside the road from Jerusalem to Rome, learned of the temple’s former magnificence, as they watched triumphant Roman soldiers, marching alongside endless horse-drawn wagons - wagons overflowing with the plundered furnishings and sacred vessels that had adorned the long awaited and now demolished Second Temple.
But as Luke relates this story, the destruction of the Second Temple hadn’t yet occurred, and so the disciples were stunned, shocked by Jesus’ prediction that the temple they were admiring, “would all be thrown down”.
The disciples’ anxious response to Jesus’ dreadful prophecy was to ask, “When will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place”?
The disciples’ request for a sign, resonates with me, and perhaps it does with you as well. We all want to know what the future has in store for us, so we look for signs and a return to the normal. But apparently what we think of as normal is not in the immediate future for America. And I think we are holding our breath, looking for a sign of what is to come. But as Neils Bohr once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it is about the future.”
Today’s reading starts out with Jesus teaching a handful of distracted disciples. Jesus had been telling them the parable of the widow’s mite, a story about giving of one’s self fully. But the disciples, instead of listening, were idly admiring the splendor of the temple.
Jesus, in a way that must have thrown cold water on their idle musings, said, “It’s all coming down.” “The day will come when not one stone will be left upon another.”
Sometimes it’s better that we don’t know what awaits us. Who among us would wish upon our children the knowledge of all the sickness, financial strife, discord in relationships, that we know, as experienced adults, awaits them. Who would want to quash the optimism of youth with the grim harshness of reality?
Yet we want them to be prepared. Just as Jesus wanted his disciples to be ready for what awaited them. He didn’t want them to spend their time idly gawking at the pretty stones. He tells them, that by their endurance “they will gain their souls.” And what they endure, will give them “an opportunity to testify.” Jesus was calling on them to take advantage of the opportunities right in front of them.
Here’s the thing – all that stuff life throws at us, when the walls of the temple come tumbling down. It forms us. It changes us. It prepares us. And all the stuff that life throws our way can move us in one of two directions: we can become bitter over what we have lost, resentful over what we have endured, and fearful of what new destruction waits around the corner. Or we can recognize that uncertainty and hardship is what transforms us into the new creatures God intends for us to be.
It doesn’t matter so much whether the hardship we have endured is the immense kind of suffering borne by such giants of the faith as Nelson Mandela or Archbishop Tutu, or the more mundane kinds of suffering we face when homes or jobs or love is lost. It is all the kind of suffering that can transform us. It gets our attention – and takes our focus away from our usual preoccupation with the pretty stones of the temple – stones that no matter how enduring they seem, will some day come tumbling down.
Martin Luther King said that, “if tomorrow is the Day of Judgment, then today I want to plant an apple tree.”
The endurance that Jesus spoke of was not merely dogged persistence, though the early Christians surely possessed an abundance of grit. It’s an endurance grounded on a trust in God.
As the apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, "We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us."
And that is how we are called to testify, to endure our adversity with the same presence of mind and confidence of spirit. We are called to testify – with our words, with our compassionate hearts, and simply with our way of being present in the world.
Let’s keep in mind that the conversation the gospel writer describes between Jesus and his disciples really wasn’t a prophecy. Luke wrote his gospel in 85 AD. The destruction of the Temple had taken place some fifteen years earlier. The passage from Luke wasn’t predicting the future, but interpreting the present. It was directed at a frightened and beleaguered people. The newly destroyed Temple at Jerusalem wasn’t merely a building where the Jews could worship, it was the epicenter of their faith, the place where the LORD, whose name they would not even speak aloud, was most fully present.
At the culmination of the Roman-Jewish war, the Temple had come crashing down – and the symbol of the unity and faith of a people came down with it. These were the people to whom Luke was speaking. A people seeking to grasp what had happened to them, and attempting to understand what a new relationship with God might look like, now that the Temple was gone.
Historically, those that remained within the Jewish faith shifted their religious practice toward the Rabbinic Judaism that we know today. And other Jews and Gentiles were drawn to a different kind of relationship with God through what they learned from the Apostles of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. They were all on the threshold of something very new.
Now I don’t think it would be fair for us here on the North Fork of Long Island to equate our situation with the first century people to whom Luke addressed his message – a people who had lost everything and were compelled to look for something new.
But for many of us here, the world does seem frightening. But perhaps we are also on the threshold of something new. Leonard Cohen, the poet and musician who shaped my faith like no other, died three years ago last week. He often spoke of a broken world, and once wrote “there is a crack in everything; that is how the light gets inside.”
May every challenge we will face on this journey together provide us, as it did the disciples, with unending opportunities to testify to the light.