Proper 28, Year C
Luke 21:5-19
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
November 17, 2019
Jonathan Hanneman
“That’s great, it starts with an earthquake,
Birds and snakes, an aeroplane
Lenny Bruce is not afraid….
“Wire in a fire, represent the seven games
In a government for hire
And a combat site….
“A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies.
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives
and I decline….
“It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.”[1]
No matter how much progress we like to think we’ve made, a thirty-year-old song still sounds like it could have been written today. The bad news just keeps coming, doesn’t it? Humanity can’t seem to catch a break. Sometimes it feels like the whole world’s fallen into some sort of distorted sci-fi mirror universe. (Some days I really hope it has.) Events across the globe challenge both our daily trust in God and our continuing faithfulness to the Way of Love. Two thousand years after Jesus spoke the words, we still “hear of wars and insurrections…Nation [rising] against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.” We regularly read of (and worry about when we will experience) “great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues.” We even see the occasional “dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.” The chaos of the immigration and refugee crises. The divisive turmoil of impeachment hearings. The growing, inevitable destructiveness of climate change. Pandemics. Even the now-recognized risk of asteroid impact. All of it leads us to wonder: is “the time” near? Is it now?
Today I’m going to confirm for you something you may have suspected deep down but never spoken aloud. I want to shine a light on the shadow dancing at the back of your mind, the fear that downtown street preachers with the scary signs both prey on and unwittingly give voice to every day:
the world is always ending.
From yet another school shooting (close to the 250th in the past twenty years!) to the World Wars of the Twentieth Century to the upheavals of the Reformation to the fall of the Roman Empire—and that’s just dusting off a few highlights of Western culture. Other societies and especially native populations around the world could add unending stories of upheavals and atrocities. Throughout recorded history, and long, long before, the world has always been coming to an end. The one invariable constant of existence is change. No matter when you are—the best of times, the worst of times—no matter where you look, things never have been, never are, and never will be the same again.
Consider the disciples in Luke’s story today. They’re awed by Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem—its beauty, its grandeur, its spiritual significance. This was an enormous complex of sacred buildings. Construction had been underway for over a generation. Rumors say that more than the Coliseum, more than the Parthenon, more even than the Acropolis—whose shattered ruins still stun us today—the Temple was the most magnificent structure in the Roman Empire. Beyond that, the disciples knew it as the home of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God above All Gods, the One their people both knew how to serve and continued to worship as faithfully as they could. Israel had learned its lesson of commitment from one of the last times the world ended, the one that led to the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the Babylonian Exile almost 600 years earlier. It would be like us going to Washington, DC, and touring the U.S. Capitol, the White House, the Lincoln Memorial—all the buildings that represent the greatness and generative mythos of the United States—only to have our trusted guide say, “Yeah, don’t get too attached. This is all going away soon enough.”
And the fact is, by the time most of Jesus’ followers saw this Gospel’s words, it had all gone away.
It’s easy for us to look at the Bible as if it were some sort of live-tweet compilation of events, to assume Jesus was significant enough in his own day to have reporters running around recording everything he said and did verbatim. But we know that isn’t true. It’s simply an illusion left by the passing of time. While Jesus’ stories and teachings are drawn from records of faithful witnesses, Luke didn’t compile his Gospel until several decades after Jesus’ ministry, roughly a full generation after the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem and leveled the Temple. The days weren’t coming “when not one stone [would] be left upon another.” By the time anyone heard these words read aloud, “all [had already been] thrown down.” The world had ended, and everybody—everybody—knew it. The Temple was obliterated. Israel’s inspired forms of worship were impossible to maintain. The power and fury of Empire had once again overwhelmed and consumed the God of Israel. And the descendants of Second Temple Judaism, the early adherents of what would become both Christianity and rabbinical traditions, were struggling to pick up the pieces and fill the religious vacuum left by the overwhelming evidence that Yahweh had either died or utterly abandoned the Chosen People. The world had ended.
Yet somehow life went on.
And this is where we start to intuit the second half of the downtown street preachers’ secret, the part of their message that even they likely never recognize:
the world is always starting anew.
We as Christians especially celebrate this truth. It’s one of the gifts we bring to the world’s great faith traditions. If we’re willing to pay attention, we encounter this renewal not only in the extended rhythms of Creation but yearly in our church calendar cycles, weekly in our worship gatherings, and even daily in the traditional monastic offices. The most obvious annual example is our observance and celebration of Holy Week and the Easter season where we follow along with the disciples as they experience their teacher’s suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension. The world as they knew it collapsed in turmoil while an unexpected new world of wonder and gratitude began to coalesce. We encounter it seasonally in baptism: the death and burial of self and sin in the churning waters of chaos followed by the sudden emergence of a new creation in Christ. An old world dies as a new one is born. We experience it weekly as we abandon our daily routines of work and school to gather before God, find our fears met with mercy, join the table at the Supper of the Lamb, and leave empowered “to love and serve the Lord” as a collectively renewed body of Christ. We succumb to it daily in the gift of sleep, as our tired minds release the victories and struggles of the day while the world of dreams refreshes us to rise once more with the sun.
The world is always ending. It always has been. And as far as anybody can see, it always will be. In the same breath, the world is always just beginning.
In times of change (and time is inherently about change), people naturally seek out comfort and security. It’s no sin to do so. In its proper place, walking hand in hand with humility and submission to a loving God, security offers us the stability to continue looking for the best path forward. However, security left to itself quickly proves a liar, and a malicious one at that. It whispers promises of pleasure, alluring us with the gifts of certainty and safety. But once we’ve paid its price in money, relationships, and human life, we discover all it really sold us was stagnation, the remains of a fading past suspended in formaldehyde. Ultimately, like every other false god, security given too much devotion simply reveals itself to be another mask for Death. Too late we find that it binds us to itself, and in doing so, drags us with it into the world that’s always ending.
But we gather today as disciples of Jesus, servants of the God of Life, and people of the Resurrection. Our security is bound to Christ, who guides us out of the decay of what is passing away toward the dawning of what can possibly be. The path is rarely easy: construction takes more energy than demolition; birthing new life always involves significant pain. But Jesus leads us on the way of faith, the way of hope, and the way of love.
What might it look like for us to abandon the lies society and security offer? In what ways does our world need to end? Can we let go of the things that chain us to a dying past in order to takes steps toward God’s promise of a new creation? Presently we walk in a paradox of faith: the world is always ending, and the world is always starting anew. Committed to the love of Christ and with God’s help, what kind of world might we build? How might we witness to the coming Kingdom?
Walking in faithfulness, singing together, we are assured:
“It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it
and I feel fine.”
[1] R.E.M. “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”, by Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe. In Document. I.R.S. Records. CD, cassette, LP, DVDA. 1987.