Choosing the Better Part because God Did so First

Season after Pentecost, Year B
Proper 28 (33)

1 Samuel 1:4-20
1 Samuel 2:1-10
Hebrews 10:11-14, (15-18), 19-25
Mark 13:1-8

 

Some may think that this week’s Gospel reading is perfectly suited to describe their dismay at the election south of the border. Thankfully, that is not why we are given this reading, and we will see that the reading tells us something quite different.

Together with most other churches in the world we follow a lectionary, a prescribed cycle of readings, repeating every three years, saving the congregation from a preacher repeatedly hammering their favourite readings, and quite possibly saving the preacher from doing violence to a biblical text by making a passage say what we want it to say.

We have this reading because at the end of the liturgical year we focus on the world that is coming.

The Bible is the Word of God, and in the Church’s collective reading of the scriptures (and when we read the Bible on our own, we still read it with the Church) God speaks.

As a book, the Bible is also literature. That the Bible is the Word of God does not mean that it cannot also be literature. Literature knows different genres:

• poetry, like the Psalms and some of the prophets
• history, like the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles
• prophecy, like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Hosea,
• Gospels that tell the story of Jesus,
• letters to congregations and on one occasion to an individual,
• instructions about how to live,
• genealogies to show how God has been at work all along,
• and finally, what is called apocalyptic literature like the Books of Daniel and of Revelation, and today’s passage from Mark.

Apocalypse is a Greek word meaning not catastrophic events but revealing, which is why the Book of Revelation is called Revelation. The curtain will be lifted and we will be able to see things as they are.

And this is the first reason why today’s Gospel passage is not a comment on our politics particularly.

The destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D. was traumatic for the people of Israel. However, Jesus does not say that these events are God’s punishment, which is how the word apocalypse is popularly understood.

We may say instead that the Christian apocalypse reveals a different way of life, life with God, life in the Kingdom of God, life that knows that in Christ God has defeated death.

Jesus responds to his disciples twice. First to their awe at the temple itself. The awe at the temple is not the same as being in awe of God, it only gives expression to our admiration of human accomplishment. Jesus says that the temple will not last.

One of my brother’s friends was born in New England. His parents, at least his father, was an ethnic German from the Soviet Union. The father of my brother’s friend died when this friend was ten years old. His mother took him and his sister and moved to Germany. After he graduated from high school this friend moved to Norway where he lives today. Someone asked him about his ability to leave a place and move to somewhere else. He answered that his family knew no permanence. His grandparents had lost everything in the war, and following the loss of his father his mother had moved the family to a place he had never lived before. At least at that age he considered non-permanence normal.

Peter, James, John, and Andrew then ask Jesus privately, about when this will be. It is not clear to me that there is any mention of the end of everything by the disciples. And if there were, it would be the disciples who made the connection, not Jesus.

Jesus warns them not to be led astray by false prophets, TV Evangelists, and those who claim to be him or to speak for him. How would they be led astray? By believing violence and destruction were God-ordained, required them to raise the sword instead of turning the other cheek, to ascribe divinity to human actions or the nation state.

In Abbotsford, when our small group of volunteers served a weekly breakfast to the local homeless population at Jubilee Park, one of our volunteers, Anna, shared how she had been homeless during the tumult at the end of WW II and following. For her, homelessness was deeply regrettable but nothing to be ashamed of. In her eighties she remembered when she had been homeless and she identified with those who were homeless today. There was no othering.

And then there was Marguerite whose granddaughter had gone missing some years earlier. Marguerite served our friends at the park with joy not only because she had the hope that her granddaughter may also experience the kindness of strangers.

The things Jesus names, wars, rumours of wars, nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom, earthquakes and famines are all terrible things but sadly they are not unusual. Only people like us who have enjoyed much stability and prosperity would think so. Only last Thursday friends shared with me how much devastation remains in parts of North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee following Hurricane Helene.

We live in peace but sadly, wars remain a reality for many people. And so what Jesus is talking about is not the end but what it means to live in a fallen world before God has restored all things, however, knowing that in Jesus God’s Kingdom has broken into our world.

When Jesus says that these things must take place he is saying that these events have no theological meaning, other than that they are expression of a fallen world.

So, whether your name for the end of the world is Trump or Harris, or anything else, Jesus instructs us not to be reactive, not to fall into the pattern of retaliatory violence. When a few verses later Jesus instructs that for our own persecutions we not prepare a defence in advance because the Holy Spirit will testify on our behalf, he is also saying that if we are preoccupied with our defence we are still prisoners of the violence of the world. Learning to live free amidst the turbulences of this world is what discipleship looks like.¹

This takes us back to last week, to the widow’s offering of everything she had which told us less about giving lots of money to the church but more importantly, that our lives are not our own but that they belong to God.

And if our lives belong to God then it is not conceivable that we would treat each other as enemies, for our fight is not against God’s children, but against principalities and powers (Romans 8; Ephesians 6), and we fight principalities and powers not by demonizing others but by loving our enemies. This is counter-intuitive, it seems implausible but we know the Good News of God in Jesus is foolishness to us gentiles. (1 Corinthians 1)

Thus Jesus says to us not to be reactive, not to interpret tragedies theologically, and not to follow anyone but him.

This is a life that is not indifferent to suffering but works to relieve suffering for it knows that suffering is not God’s will but that God is merciful and scatters the proud, brings down the powerful, and lifts up the lowly.

We turn toward those who are lowly remembering that Paul taught us that God’s power is made perfect in weakness, and remembering that Luther taught us that we see God’s glory on the cross. Thus we neither seek power for power’s sake, nor are we not indifferent to suffering yet we remember that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. (Matthew 26)

Such non-reactive living requires us to believe in the resurrection, for those who believe in the resurrection need not fear death.

This past Tuesday premier John Horgan died. The tribute his family released ends with, “live long and prosper,” the first part of which sadly was denied Horgan.
It is not my intent to criticize Horgan or his family. It is however, interesting to see which stories and metaphors animate our lives.
While we may be entertained by Star Trek, Star Trek is not our story, nor is Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, or the opposition to them or people like them.

The story that animates and guides the life of Christians is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It is the story of our redemption and of the world’s redemption. It is also the story that reminds us that our lives are not our own but belong to God.

Amen.