Proper 28, Year C | Luke 21:5-19
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
November 13, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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Looking at our Gospel text this morning, not a whole lot has changed. No matter how much progress we like to think we’ve made, bad news just refuses to stop coming. Two thousand years after Jesus spoke the words, we still “hear of wars and insurrections…Nation [rising] against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.”[1] We regularly read of “great earthquakes, and…famines.” [2] And I doubt any of us even want to think about more plagues. We even keep finding new “dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.”[3] Inflation. The continuing chaos of the immigration and refugee crises. The divisive turmoil of extremist politics. The growing, inevitable destructiveness of climate change. All of that, combined with the constant fear mongering from popular figures, would lead anyone to wonder: is this “the end?” Is Jesus’ Second Coming near? Is it now?
You’ve heard me say it before, and I’ll say it again as reminder: the world is always ending, although probably not in the way we like to imagine.
The history of Western Culture records a constant stream of apocalypses: pandemics in our own day, the World Wars of the Twentieth Century, the upheavals of the Reformation, and the fall of the Roman Empire—that’s just dusting off a few from the last 2,000 years. 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. 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.
Take a look at the disciples in Luke’s story today. They’re awed by Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem—its beauty, its grandeur, its social and spiritual significance. This was an enormous complex of sacred buildings. Construction had been underway for more than a generation. Ancient writers tell us that more than the Coliseum or the Parthenon or even the Acropolis—whose shattered ruins still stun us today—the Temple was the most magnificent structure in the Roman Empire. Beyond that, Jesus’ disciples knew it as the home of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God above All Gods, the One their people had been raised to serve properly and continue 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 isn’t going to be here all that long.”
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 social media-style live 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 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—absolutely everybody—already knew it.
The Temple was obliterated, making Israel’s divinely directed forms of worship impossible to maintain. The power and fury of Empire had once again overwhelmed and consumed the God of the Hebrews. 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 this overwhelming evidence that the Lord God of Heaven and Earth had either died or finally and completely abandoned the Chosen People.
The world had ended. Yet somehow life went on, because the world isn’t just always ending. Somehow, it simultaneously continues to be born anew.
We as Christians especially celebrate this reality. It’s one of the gifts we bring to the world’s great religious traditions. We encounter this renewal not only in the extended rhythms of Creation but throughout our church calendar cycles, weekly worship gatherings, and even the traditional daily monastic offices.
The most obvious example is our annual 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 understood 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 rises. 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 each night 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.
So, as people of resurrection, what might happen if Christians could stop worrying about the Second Coming and instead live into the reality that Christ not only has come but is come?
What I mean is that we can look to ancient history and point to the rough time and details of when Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth healing and teaching and mourning and celebrating and revealing the fulness of God. It was a pivotal moment in history, and we do well to remember it. The problem is that we like to contain the Christ, restraining their presence to the 1st Century AD—something we can look back at and admire but something that can only affect our so-called “spiritual” being so many millennia later. But Christ is—very physically—present even today.
What often passes for Christianity in the United States encourages us to worry about an unknown future and a magical Second Coming, all the while forgetting that we are and continue to be the body of Christ—the hands, feet, and mouth of God constantly incarnating in and throughout this world. It’s a great trick: the Church distracts itself into spending all its time searching for signs of the Second Coming in order to keep us from remembering and embodying the trust that we ourselves already are a Second Coming. We who follow Jesus are that same message of peace, hope, and love called to manifest the reality of God’s Kingdom wherever we are. We are the ones sent to the lonely and hopeless and rejected. We are those empowered to raise them from shame to dignity, to “to bring good news to the poor….to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, [and] to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[4]
Imagine what we might do if only we would look to the reality beyond our own fears about “the Last Days?” What could we become if we would stop worrying about the collapse of a fading and dying world? What if we stop squandering our days bemoaning all we’ve left behind and instead embrace the truth: the world is always ending—it always has been, and it always will be? What then if we, Christ manifest in the present, choose to look toward and begin to build the dawning world—the new creation always and ever beginning to be? What might happen once we assume our true identity and join in creating the emotional, spiritual, and physical reality of the Kingdom that Will Come?
[1] Luke 21:9-10 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Luke 21:11
[3] Ibid.
[4] Luke 3:18b-19