Each Week Fr. Scott's sermons may be read here on line.
Sermon for the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost – November 15, 2009
Well, the end of the world hit the multiplex last Friday in the form of the cinematic spectacle 2012 and, while the box office figures are not yet in, the critics have had their say. The reviews are, at best, mixed.
Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars, although lately he seems to like just about every movie he sees. He called it “fun,” an odd choice of words for planetary destruction but there it is. “It’s not so much that the earth is destroyed,” he writes in his review, “but that it’s done so thoroughly. ‘2012,’ the mother of all disaster movies (and the father, and the extended family) spends half an hour on ominous set up scenes (scientists warn, strange events occur, prophets rant and of course a family is introduced) and then unleashes two hours of cataclysmic special events hammering the Earth relentlessly…You think you’ve seen end of the world movies?” he asks, “This one ends the world, stomps on it, grinds it up and spits it out.”
Indeed; if you buy a ticket for this movie you know what’s in store for the two hours and thirty-eight minutes you’ve given up of your life. If you’ve seen the trailer - and I don’t know how you can have missed it; it’s on TV all the time and received over seven and a half million hits on YouTube alone – you know that the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy surfs a Tsunami straight into the White House. You know that St. Peter’s Basilica crashes to the ground in Vatican City; the director adding a close up of Michelangelo’s God and Adam splitting apart just where their fingers touch.
“Then,” Ebert notes, “when the director gets warmed up, the globe’s tectonic plates shift thousands of miles, water covers the planet and a giraffe walks aboard an ark.”
Okay, you’ve got your Old Testament style symbolism and destruction tied into a reading of an obscure, so called “long count” Mayan Calendar which comes to an end on 2012, prompting some to infer that those ancient peoples knew something we did not and, just to be on the safe side, as the year 2011 winds down, it’s best to avoid standing near such structures as the Washington Monument or the Eifel Tower. Actually, according to one anthropologist, the reason the calendar ends on that date is because the Mayans ran out of space, but that hardly makes for a compelling storyline.
Even in the midst of all this special effects driven wrack and ruin, a storyline is necessary. The New York Times critic, who did not like the movie nearly as much as Mr. Ebert did, writes, “…so the dust swirls in ‘2012,’ and debris and bodies fly…it all looks fairly convincing and also familiar: if you don’t repeatedly flash on September 11, (the director) will surely be disappointed…alas,” this critic writes, “the clichés of the disaster narrative remain in place…the larger catastrophe of ‘2012’ functions as both the trigger and backdrop for a soap opera about a fractured family, standing in for the rest of humanity, which heals as the world falls apart. That’s the idea, anyway.”
So in the midst of our consumption of this ratcheted up wreckage - like apocalyptic addicts, we seem to require more and more mayhem to satisfy our appetite for destruction – our sympathies are supposed to center on one dysfunctional family featuring a divorced dad, an embittered ex-wife and what the “Times” critic calls “two irritating children.”
But do we really need to see everything in creation come apart to realize that some families’ worlds do indeed seem to come to an end, again and again, and yet, the world itself goes on. I know I’ve shared this story with you before but it’s worth repeating as a reminder that apocalypses occur while the sun keeps shining and the monuments keep standing.
Years and years ago, when I was very small and my younger brother David was slowly dying of leukemia, my mother, in an effort to cope with this impending catastrophe, would turn the radio on obsessively every hour, like clockwork, to check the news and to ensure that there were no Soviet ICBMs soaring over the ocean, setting off a full scale holocaust. This was as the Cold War was heating up; before the Cuban missile crisis and school children were led to believe that we would survive an attack if we just crawled under our desks.
Convinced that a nuclear destruction was imminent, my mother believed that such compulsive checking for even a rumor of war actually prevented the world from coming to an end. If she did not turn on the news, all sorts of horrors would be unleashed. Nobody thinks straight in such a situation.
What her frequent news checking really did, she realized later when hope and stillness returned to her life, was protect her from feeling the full impact of the apocalyptic event that was going on right in her very house. Her impending loss was so great that the end of the world seemed preferable to it. It’s possible that contemplating the end of everything helped her get through her own particular loss. This was a revelation that took a while to arrive.
Apocalyptic writings – the word “apocalypse” means “revelation” – are born out of times such as these; times of great trials, great tribulations, in which people, witnessing the extent of their suffering, believe that surely the end of the world must be near. And, as scary as the impending destruction may be, the intention of the writings, ultimately, is to encourage the readers to endure, to persevere, to hope.
The Gospel of Mark was written during a time of great persecution for the fledgling Christian Church, a time when congregations were struggling to survive against what seemed like overwhelming odds; a time when believers and would be believers needed all the encouraging words they could get.
Today they get them, as do we; but our encouragement comes more from what happens to Jesus later than from what Jesus says today. For the thirteenth chapter of Mark, from which our Gospel comes today - known by some as “the little apocalypse” – serves as a dramatic introduction – a preview if you will – of the passion narrative which begins in the next chapter; an awful, world-ending time for the disciples, but a time that does not end in defeat or despair. The sorrow over the death of the one hung on the tree would not long linger; hoped dawned anew with the resurrection morning. So it did then for Jesus, Mark wants the church to know; so it will now for us.
It happened before, and it will happen again and again and again. “For everything there is a season,” says Ecclesiastes, “and a time for every matter under heaven; a time to weep, and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.”
“When will that time be?” the disciples wonder today as they sit with Jesus on the Mount of Olives and ponder the magnificent temple in Jerusalem, a wonder of the Roman imperial world and a center of Jewish pilgrimage. It will all come crashing down, Jesus tells them, and not through the magic of special effects. “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” Indeed, the emperor Titus would burn the temple to the ground in the year A.D. 70, following the Jewish uprising; the heat of the fires causing the foundation stones to crumble, the walls collapsing under their own weight into great piles of stone.
“For everything there is a season…a time to break down, and a time to build up…a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together.”
The disciples beg him: “Tell us when this will be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?” They are eager to know, eager for any news, any sign of impending destruction.
But Jesus will not tell them. Instead he lists a series of events – earth shaking, cataclysmic events: wars and rumors of war; nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom; earthquakes, famines – all of which must take place. But these are not signs of the end, he says, for the end is still to come; instead, these are the beginnings of the new life that is yet to emerge. It will come, he says; but, as he shows us on Calvary’s hill; it won’t be easy.
My friends, even the most superficial reading of history reveals that there as never been a time when the earth has not been shaken, when cataclysms of one kind or another have not reigned; there has never been a time when wars and rumors of wars have not formed the backdrop of our lives. Worlds are ending all around us; it has always been so.
While Jesus refuses to give us specific times and signs of the end – TV preachers and Mayan calendars notwithstanding – he does tell us what we are to do until the final appearance of the Son of Man, until heaven and earth passes away. “The one who endures to the end will be saved,” he says in the verse immediately before our text for today. And how are we to endure through all the suffering, all the groaning, while we await our redemption? Paul tells us simply, we wait in hope. For it is in hope that we are saved.
Ultimately, as Christians, we wait for the coming of God’s kingdom, a kingdom that endures through all time and beyond time. That is the kingdom spoken of by the Book of Revelation – the big apocalypse – a time in which all history will culminate and a new heaven and a new earth will be born. As we have yet to see this kingdom – and it will probably not look anything like the movies – we wait for it with patience.
As we do so, as we endure our own sufferings – our little apocalypses – hope does not disappoint us. For we have seen hope and we know that it is real. All those times we thought our world was coming to an end, it did not. We struggled, we endured, but we did not struggle alone and we did not endure alone. We had help; the help of each other and the help of the one who suffered and then soared for us; as Paul said, “Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
Those endings and beginnings are a lot less dramatic than what we see in the theatres but they are, I believe, far more real. Our newness of life may take some time to arrive, but that does not mean that it never will. And the fact that the world seems to be crashing around us, does not mean that it always will. As Jesus will tell his disciples in just a few more verses, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”
I think some of his words were expressed by a teenage Jewish girl, who, 65 years ago, wrote in her diary: “It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness…I feel the sufferings of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better…that peace and tranquility will return once more.”
It will; the one who shares our sufferings has also promised to share with us his peace. May that peace be ours.