| November 18, 2001 Malachi 3:19-20 + 2 Thessalonians 3:7-12 + Luke 21:5-19 |
| We like permanence. We like to pretend that things will last a long time, and we get impatient when they wear out. Yet, we live in an economy based upon obsolescence There is a light bulb in a fire station somewhere in this country that has been burning for more than 100 years, and the company that made it is gone!Adolescents live as thought they are indestructible and will live forever. They become impatient with those who have passed fifty or so seasons and might suggest seatbelt, helmets and caution. In this country, we consume the resources of this earth as though they were permanent and inexhaustible. There are some who resent and ridicule anyone who would suggest caution and care. |
| The Jews at the time of Jesus hada history of destruction and desolation. Yet something about that Temple was beginning to suggest otherwise to them in spite of the fact that they were an occupied nation under the control of the Romans. That place must have been something, the biggest and the best of everything. Herod had doubled it’s size. It was big before he started. You could see it from a long way off. No expense had been spared in its construction. It was older than most of the pilgrims who came there to pray, lacked nothing that could astound the mind or the eye. It was covered on all sides with plates of gold. When the sun would shine on it, people for miles would have to tum away their faces because the light was so intense. The suggestion of Jesus that it would come down was intolerable, unacceptable, and a little over the line of loyalty. It struck at their very identity. |
| Since September 11, 2001, what goes on in this piece of Luke’s Gospel has a different ring to it for us, especially in this country. Now what Jesus explores and suggests is a little bit more than just history and squabble between himself and the Jews in the Temple. It is a little harder to avoid what he is proposing, and the Lucan image is a little more real to us. That Temple came down, all the way down just like those buildings in New York City. It didn’t come down without the cost of human life either, and the experience of those people who lived to see it was not much different than our own. |
| It raises big questions about what lasts and what doesn’t, what matters and what matters not, about whether or not bigger is better, and about how much control power really has, and what makes us secure and what makes us afraid. |
| Faced with their experience, those early Christians thought that it all was a sign that the world was going to end. Here we are, a couple of thousand years later looking at their expectation and wonder with a little more experience. There are some these days who, like those first Christians, think it’s all over, and we’d better get ready for the rapture. In time, by prayer, grace, wisdom, and the power of the Spirit, they came to understand and hear what Jesus was telling them: “that not a hair of their heads would be harmed.” “By patient endurance you will save your lives.” |
| What he promises is not that we shall be free of risk, danger, death, and destruction; but that we shall have the strength to endure what comes and victory when it’s all over. Our identity is not in the things we have made nor built; but in what we have become through our relationships with Christ Jesus andeach other. Since we all die sooner or later, there is only one possible interpretation of the promise Jesus makes there in Jerusalem. It is the guarantee that no one can destroy us within, take away our faith or our integrity, or cause us to lose our eternity with God. |
| We have heard all this before, but we need to thrill to the promise again, to react the way a lover does when the beloved is speaking. That lover, the one who delivers us, is Jesus, and he has many names. The old testament prophet we just heard calls him the SUN OF JUSTICE. When we are wounded by life, beaten down, or simply tired, when we are ill and unable to avoid that final darkness, then those words come true for us: “The Sun of Justice will arise with its healing rays.” This is the Word of the Lord. |
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