Expectation

a Sermon for Proper 28B
Text: Mark 13:1-8

God of Hope and Wonder, you share with us your miracles and allow us to participate in your miraculous incarnations. Help us to behold them in the world around us and in one another. Amen.

Growing up in a pretty small town in northern Michigan of about ten thousand and going to a liberal arts college of 1,300, it wasn’t until I moved to the Boston area that I could appreciate the size and scope of civilization. The way you have to crane your neck up to see the middle of buildings, and then hitch it again to see the tops. The small feeling you get walking between skyscrapers—like a mouse or an ant, scurrying to find what you need or marching into your place in the system. The enormity of our creations is incredible. We need drive 30 or 40 minutes to get that feeling here. Incredible.

Many of us have had this experience. This is the same feeling the disciples no doubt felt entering Jerusalem. They’re villagers, not city folk. Fishermen and laborers. Small town people, coming to the big city. It must have been an overwhelming experience. Like the times we entered the big city for the first time, that sense of confusion takes over. “Everyone moves so fast, and they know where they’re going! I’m just in their way,” we think. The size and scope of the city stops us and keeps us stuck; our feet stick to the pavement. We couldn’t feel more different. At the same time, there’s also an energy—an excitement in the city. You start to move and go where the people are going, adapting to the pace and so quickly learn to go with the flow—naturally. The first time in the big city can be a transformative experience.

Now imagine this moment. The disciples walk up to the Temple Mount, walls that go up several stories in some places, but it’s the vastness that’s most impressive: they extend 488 m along the western side and 470 m along the eastern side. And 315 m along the northern side and 280 m along the south side. In relative terms, 5 football fields by 3. 1,500 feet long. The disciples have never seen anything like this. And on top of that, the site means something to them. This is the center of their worship. We can only begin to understand this sensation when we walk into the National Cathedral in Washington DC. Huge place of worship—major connections with our faith. Awesome. And they are there with Jesus, preaching and teaching. They must have been on such a high from this. This is the big time. Like a violinist playing Carnegie Hall or a rookie walking into Yankee Stadium. Big time.

So imagine the world-shattering experience they get as they leave. They’re jumping up and down, they can hardly contain themselves. “Jesus preached at the Temple! This is it! This is what we’ve been waiting for, this is what we’ve been building this ministry toward, we have finally arrived. We’ve made it. Aren’t you excited Jesus?” Calmly, Jesus responds “Yeah, it will call come down. Every last brick.”

The Disciples are left with this tremendous gut check. “Really? All of this?” The skyscrapers that are so incredible, testaments to human innovation, will be so utterly devastated that not one piece will be left in its original place. Everything will be upturned. The disciples are left to process this as Jesus continues walking. They essentially cross the street to the Mount of Olives and sit down. And the four most prominent disciples (Peter, James, John, and Andrew) sort of check on Jesus. They want to know if he really meant what he said. So they ask: “So, this destruction you were talking about, when does it happen?” What Jesus proceeds to say is troubling. He gives markers that are so vague, that they are perpetually present—they are always in the “right now”. And this talk goes on for many more verses after our reading for today. Many scholars refer to this as the “Mini Apocalypse”. For readers of Mark, including us, as we’ve been working through this whole gospel, we are all thrown by this sequence as much as the disciples were about the Temple. It feels different, scary even. This is a hard pill to swallow as it is, let alone when we compare it to what we’ve read so far. Jesus is telling us some pretty bad news. It doesn’t seem like “good news” at all!

What he seems to be telling us, however, is not a ghost story designed to scare us, but a statement about change: that the Temple, this physical, enormous testament to human innovation, would be overturned so completely that every piece would be affected and the world would change forever. A world with a Temple ends and a world without one will begin. That the Temple was really destroyed forty years later is almost irrelevant, because the metaphor is so powerful. Jesus ushers in an age in which everything goes topsy-turvy, shattering that cozy image of imperial peace. Rome and the Temple authorities brought oppressive certainty and Jesus brought chaotic freedom: a true revolution.

A second useful image comes to us in the final verse: “This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.” That this scary, and frightening time is difficult, but allows for something miraculous to happen: childbirth.

When Rose and I found out that we were going to have a baby, we joined natural childbirth classes. Our hope was that we could give Sophia the best opportunity for success. We wanted what was best for her, and we knew that might require some…sacrifice…on our part. Perhaps more on Rose’s part, but, you get my meaning.

What we learned from these classes was a whole lot more than what was about to happen; we also learned a bit about why.

I know that there will be at least one woman in this room that will say “He’s not going to talk about pain, is he? What does he know?” And there are a few more that are about to cross their arms and lean back a little bit, eyes narrowing in anticipation. Yes, I am going to talk about the pain of childbirth. But this is the root of it. Pain isn’t bad. It isn’t evil. It hurts, of course. But pain itself isn’t bad. Our Registered Nurse Midwives talked about pain as our bodies’ communication system. Just as the pain you feel when you touch something hot warns you of danger, the pain of childbirth communicates to the expectant mother what stage she’s in. It tells her what is about to happen.

Our tendency is to eliminate pain, and therefore, ignore its message. Medically, childbirth is approached as a problem—as a disease—that must be fixed. That a mother must be rescued from her condition. But what happens when a child is born? The pain disappears as hormones rush through the new mother’s body. And as her eyes see the new baby, and hold her in her arms, everything has changed. The world is made new.

This is the story of new creation. Of a time when the old transitions into something new. When out of the past, we claim a new future.

Jesus gives us this fearful vision today, not to frighten us, or get us to think bad thoughts. He doesn’t hope to scare us into salvation or condemning our neighbors for not seeing the signs. But instead to see the present age as the preparation for a better tomorrow. That we are laboring for the coming birth. That all of this that we are doing may be difficult and may take every ounce of strength and courage that we have, but in the end, a beautiful baby is born. Born into a world that is ready to nurture this new creation into childhood and then adulthood.

And for St. Paul’s as it approaches the end of another year and the start of a new one in two weeks, with Advent, may we do so with excitement, anticipation, and the awesome realization that we are active participants in miracles.