Good morning, friends. This time of year, as the trees are losing their leaves and going dormant, as Advent approaches, we have a few weeks in which we’re led to contemplate something we Episcopalians don’t think about much: “eschatology,” the doctrine of “last things.” Lest we be tempted to ignore this subject, the Collect reminded us that all holy Scriptures, even those we find uncomfortable, are written for our learning. So let’s read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, and hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.
If you’ve ever been to Jerusalem, then no doubt you’ve been awestruck by the enormous size of some of the megaliths that form the Temple Mount, a huge flat area the size of 29 football fields, built up about 100 feet above the Old City. Even the smallest of the stones of which it was constructed weigh more than eight tons, and the largest one is estimated to weigh well over 570 tons. How the construction crews managed to wrangle all those huge stones into place remains a marvel of ancient engineering. It was built by king Herod the Great, yes that Herod, the one who plays a prominent role in the Christmas story. Herod’s temple was renowned throughout the world, equally as famous with the Roman Colosseum and the pyramids of Egypt.
So it’s understandable that the unnamed disciple of Jesus was moved with wonder at the spectacle as the group walked from Herod’s temple across the ravine to the Mount of Olives a little over a mile away. “Look, teacher!” he says, “What large stones! What magnificent buildings!” Jesus responds that even the largest of them would be “thrown down” so that “not one stone will be left on another.” Jerusalem’s temple had a long history, even then, of destructions by invading powers, so His prediction may not have seemed supernatural or even particularly unusual. What is built, deteriorates.
What was true of this magnificent temple is true of much else: we imbue things like temples with symbols of unchanging timelessness, but the fact is that they are human institutions and subject to the same forces of atrophy that affect all things. Sometimes institutions don’t last because they are thrown down violently by conquerors; sometimes it’s because the cultural or physical environment make them less relevant; but sometimes it’s just a matter of the decay that suffuses all things. There’s nothing we can do to stop these processes. Our only recourse, the only way the ravages of time can be kept under partial control, is maintenance. Like all things human, from roads to relationships, temples must be repaired and rebuilt almost constantly, or else they crumble.
After Jesus’ prediction that the temple would be torn down He launches immediately into a more general apocalyptic vision that everyone would have understood depicted the end of the world. Apocalyptic literature, for example the book of Revelation and the second half of the book of Daniel, combines events in the observable world with mythological stories and fantastic visions to present the real-world events as signs of the end. Take a look at that list of disasters in today’s Gospel: wars, insurrections, earthquakes, famines … false teachers. It sure sounds dire, and people of Jesus’ day could hardly be blamed for their certainty that they lived at the end of times. Along with many other peoples in the Roman Empire, first century Jews and Christians read and wrote elaborate stories about the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil that, they were sure, was about to culminate with God’s final victory in their generation. They perceived the events of their own day as signs that the end was near. They were the first, but certainly not the last, to say, “Christ is coming soon!”
And Jesus himself seems to have preached often enough in apocalyptic modes of thought. So when some of His disciples asked Him what signs they should be looking for, and when to expect the end, He warned them against being deceived by false teachers. Probably this is a reference to the itinerant preachers who claimed to have divine foreknowledge and, of course, divine authority. We know from first-century sources that there were many such preachers. Jesus gives a conventional list of disasters: wars and earthquakes and so on — calamities found in all apocalyptic texts of the period. But just about the time His audience is thinking they’re going to get insider information, Jesus says “When you see all those things, it’s not the end yet.”
What Jesus says next is intriguing: Those afflictions are the beginning of birth pains. Birth pains. What the apocalyptic preaching in the rest of Mark 13 shows is that things get worse, much worse, than the “ordinary disasters” named in verses 1-8. It’s possible that what Jesus is thinking of in saying “birth pains” has more to do with pain than with birth: Not that I know personally, but I have the impression that labor pains get much worse after “the beginning of birth pains.” Sometimes the word we translate “birth pains” just means “really bad pain.” But I’m convinced that Jesus actually had birth in mind, that there’s something inherently hopeful about endings because they are new beginnings just as much as they are endings. Labor pains, as terrible as they are (so I hear), are eclipsed before very long by the greater joy of birth.
I’ve been thinking a lot about whether the Church in America will survive the tide of secularism and apathy, and sometimes outright antipathy, that besets us. These forces made Europe’s churches more like museums than houses of worship over the last hundred years. It seems to me that America is on the same path, about sixty years behind Europe. Our present crisis is made more acute by COVID-19 and the fact that in the past two years we’ve all grown accustomed to “church” being something “watched,” passively, and mostly in isolation. The symbols of Christian fellowship — singing together, praying together, chatting over coffee, exchanging peace with one another — are either badly damaged or lost altogether. What will happen when we’re able to go back to the status quo? Will we find that we have become accustomed to our hermits’ life and no longer need or want the Church? Will we ever be able to drink from the common cup again? Having got out of the habit of corporate worship, it seems likely that some will find resuming church attendance unimportant. But make no mistake: this trend long antedates the present crisis and won’t be fixed just by recovering from the pandemic. It’s not exactly a persecution such as happened in the centuries after Jesus, but it feels like the danger to the Church is equally grave.
To those of us who love the Church, it can be distressing to contemplate such things, but contemplate them we must. The advice we get from today’s reading of Daniel is to keep doing the works of the Kingdom, trusting in God to protect God’s people. Hebrews is even more direct about how best to meet the end of the world: we should provoke one another to good deeds, we should continue meeting together for worship, and we should encourage one another; as it says, “all the more as you see the Day approaching.”
I think we in our church and in the larger community are living in a similarly portentous time. It feels like signs of the end of the world are all around us. The old, dependable world’s-end scenarios of nuclear war or viral plagues are still with us, of course (think about the phrase “zombie apocalypse”). We also have calendrical apocalypses, like the speculation based on the Mayan calendar that the world would end in 2012, or the panic about the Y2K global meltdown. The bonds of moral cohesion feel like they’re unraveling, with citizens of our nation and many others divided almost equally between those considered “good” by their fellow citizens, and those demonized as “evil.” Who belongs with which label depends on whom you ask. Global warming causes more, and more dangerous, storms and wildfires and floods, and we’re told they will only get worse. Turn on any popular discussion of global warming and you’ll hear apocalyptic rhetoric from start to finish. We need to listen to Jesus: the final end is not yet; something new and good is about to be birthed. God is not finished creating. Having labored six days and rested on the seventh, God resumes creative activity the next week and all subsequent weeks, and invites humanity to participate. We may not be able to see how anything good can come of our present tribulations, but God does. The “new heaven and new earth” probably won’t be just a better version of what we have now. There really is an end coming, a reversion to entropy. But what will God create afterwards? Creation always begins in chaos. Let’s stick around and find out, shall we? Let’s repair what needs repairing, not afraid of the new course on which God sets us.
If you go to Jerusalem today, you’ll see with utter clarity that, although the Romans destroyed in A.D. 70 the temple where Jesus worshiped, there are still many stones that did not get thrown down. Those stones became the foundation of the famous Dome of the Rock and of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which are among Islam’s most sacred spaces. The Western Wall of the Temple Mount, a hundred feet below where Herod’s temple once reached heavenward, remains Judaism’s most holy site. Long after the Roman Empire fell, human beings of different cultures and religions cooperated together to preserve and rebuild. What we have now is not Herod’s temple but something new and beautiful in its own right. Whatever God has in mind for us and the Church in the present age will be different from what has gone before. But if we trust the Creator, and if we do our part as co-creators, what comes to birth will be what we need.
