Sermon Text

November 15, 2009

DYING TO BE BORN
Mark 13:1-8

I remember it like it was yesterday. After a rigorous labor and an emergency C-section, Betty Anne gave birth to our first child, a girl. We named her Sarah, and that was the beginning of our life as parents. Then, a couple of years later, Christopher was born. Now we have four grandchildren, and each of their births is a highlight moment in our lives. Each one has brought change, but each one has been good, good news.

The deaths of each of our parents brought changes, too – those were deep losses, and our lives, once again, were forever changed, and we are still discovering the meaning of those changes.

I think most, if not all of you know what I’m talking about – we all experience births and deaths, at different times in our lives and at different distances, but they still have their effect on us. We’ll come back to these thoughts in just a moment.

But now to the story we just read in Mark’s Gospel. In Jesus’ day, the Temple in Jerusalem was one of the most impressive sights in the world. This version of the Temple was begun by Herod the Great before Jesus was born, and it wasn’t completed until after his crucifixion. So, as Jesus and his disciples were walking around and marveling, discussing the Temple, they were speaking of the beauty and destruction of a brand new building.

The Temple and its surrounding complex were staggeringly large. It had a perimeter circumference of two-thirds of a mile. Its marble walls stood 150 feet high and were constructed of blocks weighing many tons. There were ten gates to enter the outer courts, each covered in silver or gold plate. Two of the doors stood 45 feet in height, and one of the gates, called the Beautiful Gate, was cast out of Corinthian bronze. The white marble, gold, and silver made the Temple seem to glow in the Mediterranean sunlight.

But Jesus knows that it isn’t going to last. He says it’s going to be knocked down, so that one stone is not left standing on another. Amid wars and rumors of wars, nation rising against nation, there will be a great cataclysm. This sounds like bad news, and to Jewish ears, perhaps the worst news ever.

And we are, in our modern world, more acquainted with bad news than we would like to be. Particularly, I think, since September 11, 2001, we know about bad news, and about fear. It’s not enough that we have to hear of the natural catastrophes – the storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and such. We also have people who fly airplanes into buildings, who drown their children, who walk into supposedly safe places of work and living and mow people down with automatic weapons. No, we know about bad news, don’t we? We know about fear.

But strangely, after giving this grim vision of the future, Jesus refers to it as “birth.” And aren’t births all about new beginnings? Is Jesus trying to tell us that something is about to be born out of what looks like death?

We know, I think, how Jesus’ disciples must have felt. The Temple was built to appear heavy, massive, and eternal. We still do that with our religious buildings. We still make things look heavy and substantial. We even bolt down the pews! Maybe the reason we do so is because so much else of life is ephemeral, about change and loss, disruption and confusion. In the midst of all that, isn’t it nice to think about this church always being here, just as it is, eternal and forever?

And yet, Jesus says it isn’t going to last. Maybe he’s saying, as many of us would be able to echo in the children’s Sunday School rhyme, that the church is not a building, it’s people. But actually, I think that Jesus is saying that the point isn’t the people, either – it’s God, and God is not through creating, and the way things are is not necessarily the way God wants them to be.

What if? What if God intends to keep on creating until God gets the world God wanted in the first place? What if not everything that happens in this world happens as God would have it happen, but God continues to work in what does happen, even the bad things, to turn them toward God’s intended good? What if church is not where we come to get everything bolted down and eternal looking, but where we come to learn how to keep on looking for God’s new heaven and new earth?

It’s only human to cling tightly to what we know, what we have. Maybe it’s divine to give birth, and sometimes painful birth, to a future that is new. Perhaps we come to church to learn how to look for God’s hand, even in the news that seems bad, and even in the news that is bad, to expect God to work, to continue to create good news.

In a book entitled “Necessary Losses”, psychologist and writer Judith Viorst says that all of the changes of life, both happy and tragic, are perceived by us as loss, as a little death. Whether or not something good gets born out of these little deaths is heavily dependent on how we respond.

C. S. Lewis wrote that we Christians are often “too easily pleased.” Perhaps church at its best is supposed to foster in us a kind of holy discontent, anytime we fall into the notion that “this is the best of all possible worlds, so don’t go looking for anything better.”

Passages like Mark 13 remind us that, no matter how things might look at the moment, God isn’t done yet, with us or with the world.