A Birthing Center.

Mark 13:1-8

November 18, 2018

I.

The early church emerges in a time of crisis and catastrophe.  From the perspective of Jesus’ followers, the biggest indication of this rolling disaster was the destruction of the spectacular Temple in Jerusalem by Roman armies in the year 70.  It was around 4 decades after Jesus’ resurrection.  It was the most traumatic event in the lives and memories of any Jew, and that includes the followers of the Way of Jesus.

Jesus himself lives, preaches, teaches, and heals in a situation of colonialism and oppression.  A lot of his advice in the Sermon on the Mount is about how to survive in an oligarchical police State.  Eventually, of course, the leaders arrange to crucify him for blasphemy and sedition.

In the course of his ministry the Lord foresees the destruction of the Temple and warns his disciples that things are going to get very, very bad.  That’s what’s happening here in Mark 13.

This cataclysm is fairly predictable to anyone who knows the Hebrew Scriptures.  Jesus is not being miraculously prescient here.  The process repeats itself throughout the history of the Israelite people.  Over and over we see how a nation and its leadership falls into idolatry, that is, the worship of things that are not God, and that leads directly into situations of deepening inequality and injustice, and that finally leads just as directly and necessarily to a reckoning in which they bring down awful and terrible judgment upon themselves.  We see it in Genesis with Sodom and Gomorrah, and in Exodus with Egypt; we see it in the conquest of Canaan, and in the subsequent history of the Israelites, culminating in their horrible defeat and exile in Babylon.  They miraculously return from that experience and proceed to fall into the same disastrous pattern: idolatry - injustice - destruction.      

We live now in a time of crisis and catastrophe.  Instead of Rome, we have our own version of a global economic behemoth, busily distributing wealth taken from the workers who create it to a few wealthy owners, a process which is wreaking unprecedented havoc on the whole planet, spawning wars, genocides, and famines.  You don’t have to be psychic to see where this is all going.  It’s going to end the way it always and repeatedly ends.  “Not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down,” says Jesus. 

He doesn’t say this with any relish or satisfaction.  I imagine him practically in tears, because he knows the amount of horror and suffering that will be involved.  He has no smug complacency about always being right.  His own disciples will endure it as well… and no, they will not be “raptured” into safety.  They will “wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb,” which is the book of Revelation’s way of saying that many will die as martyrs.

The early church would be living in the “end times” in the sense of times that see the decay and collapse of a powerful, wealthy, dominant imperial system.  The wrecking of Jerusalem is just one part of this.  A world order that lives by the sword will inevitably and necessarily perish by the sword.

II.

It kind of reminds me of the Titanic.  The grand and glorious ship, a pinnacle of European civilization, that hit an iceberg in 1912.  And Jesus offers the alternative of a lifeboat.  The lifeboat is himself and his new gospel community of people who have been thus pulled out of the icy water, like a kind of baptism, and gathered in for the future.  

The baptismal covenant, symbolizing our passage through death and change, and our emergence into new life, is what keeps the early church together through the “wars and rumors of wars,” and nations rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, with earthquakes and famines and all kinds of related mayhem.

And our sacramental participation in his body and blood, thereby becoming Christ’s Body in the world, is what keeps us fed and strong to continue his mission.  It is what enables us to see through and not be led astray by the many false leaders that Jesus warns his disciples about: ideologies, philosophies, and theologies that come in his name, claiming to be him.  The real Messiah is he: the One who doesn’t claim to be a Messiah.  

The good news in all this, as Jesus insists, is that no matter how rough it gets all around us, all this is “but the beginning of the birth pangs.”  All this is about birth!  It is the way the new future is being born.  Paul talks about how the whole creation is in labor.  Yes, it is terribly painful; but the purpose and goal is the good and beautiful tomorrow that is beginning to emerge within and among us.  It is about hope!

That is our name: hope.  This is our lifeboat, our good ship Hope.  We in the lifeboat of the church are the emissaries and ambassadors from the future that Jesus has for us and shows to us.  As the old order of wealth, power, fame, corruption, violence, and condemnation ignominiously disintegrates and sinks into oblivion, we are the ones called to live together in God’s new community of compassion, generosity, forgiveness, healing, justice, and love.  Do not rely, says Jesus, on architecture and technology.  Great monuments and even spectacular religious edifices like the Temple don’t last.  

In the meantime Jesus is saying, that we have a choice.  We may choose to identify with the institutions, traditions, and buildings that reflect and express human glory.  We may base our lives on what feeds our ego and makes us feel good about who we think we are.  Or we may notice that all that stuff is breaking apart and going down.  We may therefore choose instead to get into a considerably less glamorous and luxurious lifeboat, and make our way together into the future with the other ordinary, broken, traumatized people huddling therein.

These are the gentle who inherit the earth, the poor in spirit to whom God’s Kingdom belongs; these are the grieving, the hungry, the merciful, and the peacemakers.  These are the disciples of Jesus, the church, the gospel community.  They receive a special blessing from the Lord who calls them.  

III.

This is the day we have set aside to be about renewing our covenant together in Jesus Christ, to each other and to the living God.  We are reaffirming our place in the lifeboat and our commitment to the voyage of discipleship, as we follow Jesus into his future.  We are remembering our baptism, when we are delivered from the perishing old order, and from our perishing old selves, and welcomed into God’s new order and our new selves in the Spirit. 

And we commit ourselves anew to each other, promising to be there for each other with support and feedback, with forgiveness and welcome, with energy and intelligence, imagination and love.  

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