26 Pentecost

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: 26 Pentecost
PROPER: 28B
PLACE: St. John’s Parish, Kingsville
DATE: November 16,1997

TEXT: Mark 13:14-23 - The Little Apocalyse - “But be alert; I have already told you everything.

ISSUE: Be alert and keep the ways and teachings of Jesus Christ foremost in our hearts and minds. The world knows many times of calamity and tribulations. Our lives know extraordinarily difficult times. False messiahs and feel good philosophies can be very attractive. Yet it is Christ who leads us to God, to God’s love and hope. The scripture readings today are all written out of difficult times of various forms of persecution. Yet the Good News of God revealed in Christ is that in being faithful we shall never be lost. Our hope resides in the Christ.
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I began talking with you last Sunday about the fact that the passage from the gospel was somewhat disturbing, in that it challenged us to look hard at the ways in which we spend our lives both in terms of our abilities and our finances in being people who are truly giving and serving people who embrace Christ. Well, this morning’s passage is also one which is indeed a distrubing passage. It is what we refer to as apocalyptic scripture which deals with the end of things, as in the end of the world. Such notions can be disturbing. The end of the world is often pictured as a time of great disaster. You get something of the disastrous imagery in the gospel passage this morning: “Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! Pray that it may not be in winter. For in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that god created until now. . . .”
There are often two basic reactions to Apocalyptic writings. The first is to take them so very seriously and so literally as to end up kind of looking ridiculous. These are the types who get into predicting when the end will come, and often look foolish when their appointed date passes. They make such silly predictions that 666 stands for Henry Kissinger or Ronald Regan, that Prince Charles is the anti-christ. Jim Jones in Guyanna, David Koresh in Waco, The Heaven’s Gate crowd in California led their flocks to unnecessary disaster through their apocalyptic foolishness. The other reaction is not to take apocalyptic literature seriously at all and to pass it off as having no worth. I believe that when we try to appreciate the scripture and its cultural and historical background we will come up with a better understanding of what it all means for us.
In the Old Testament reading this morning from Daniel, he is predicting and prophecying that Israel will come through a very difficult period in her history with God’s protection given through the Archangel Michael. The Jewish people suffered greatly at the hand of a conqueror, a Syrian King, Antiochos Epiphanes. He was trying to force Greek culture upon the entire kingdom and did all he could to eradicate Jewish cuture. He forbid Jews to practice their ancient custom of circumcision, which was a basic covenantal liturgical practice in Judaism. He forced them to sacrifice pigs, unclean animals in the Jewish temple. In fact, Antiochus set up images of pagan God’s in the Jerusalem Temple and turned it into a brothel for temple prosititution. It was a time of great agony for faithful Jews. It marked the end of a time of peace for the Jewish people. It marked a period of their faith being almost completely wiped out. It was a time of horrendous spiritual disaster for God’s faithful. Yet Daniel called the faithful to persevere and a time of reward and hope would come. This time of spiritual devastation was some 170 years before the coming of Christ. Antiochus was eventually over come by the Maccabean revolt.
When Mark is writing his gospel, about 65 A.D. Israel and the Jewish people were ruled by the Romans. The hostilities between the two peoples was significant. Crucifixions were common. The Romans were oppressive. The outcome for the Jewish people did not look good. It was quite grim. Mark reports that Jesus says: “But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be, then those in Judea must flee to the mountainsl the one on the housetop must not go down or enter the house to take anything away; the one in the field must not turn back to get a coat.” Historians report that one of the Roman Emperors, Caligula was planning to place of statue of himself inside the Jeruaslem Temple. Such an act would again have caused great turmoil, revolt, and war. Caligula never did get the statue put up in the Temple, but the Romans did destroy the Temple and all of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Israel became a totally destroyed nation, never to gain any semblance of being a sovereign country again until the recent 1950’s. These times were seen as very difficult agonizing periods in the history of the Jews and the early Christians. Orthodox Jews were at odds with the early Christians. Roman power was in the process of destroying Judaism. People of the period lived short lives, Jesus himself being an old man at age 30. Disease was rampant. It was an honor dominatedculture in which it was hard to trust anybody for the lying, secrecy, and deception. It was for many people a time thought to be approaching the end. And when people are desperate they grasp for anything that will give them some kind of hope. Varieties of kinds of cults developed. People longed to escape the disasters of these forbidding times. But through it all in Mark’s Gospel account Jesus simply says, “Do not believe it. False messiahs and false prophets will apprear and produce signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, the elect. But be alert; I have already told you everything.” It is a great call to trust in, to believe in, to place one’s confidence in Jesus the Christ to be the deliverance from the disaster. This message was strongly proclaimed by the early church. Faith in Jesus as not only another messiah, but the Christ, the anointed of God, would be the hope of the faithful. It does not say that there will not be times of turmoil, upheval, and anxiety. There will be. But the gospel message reveals hope and resurrection. Out of the ashes God who is the creator and maker of all things can and will renew the face of the earth and his kingdom is now and is coming now and will come to reclaim those of faith. Be alert and ready for the renewing presence of God that comes in and through Jesus Christ, Our Lord.
Every age has had its apocalytic signs. Our great grand parents, grandparents and parents came through some bloody revolutions. They saw the horrors of war in World War I and II with all the suffering caused by bombings, infantry fighting, toxic and noxious gases. They saw the abominations of sacriliege of Hitler murdering six million Jews and other so called dissodents. Some of us hid ourselves under school desks in anticipation of atomic war. So many men today suffer the painful, awful, memories of Korea, and especially the Vietnam conflict. Many have seen the horrors of earthquakes, fires, and floods taking away their homes and possessions. Some in Hiroshima saw the skies turn black and a world turn to dripping blood.
Today we may seem somewhat relatively complacent in a world that seems to be mostly at peace. But today the signs of the end may be more subtle. Today we see the breaking down of the family as we once knew it. It is period in which it is hard to trust anyone. Fewer people are dependable: clergy, church, parents, fathers, mothers, sports heroes, and politicians. Their hypocisy is often a let down. Their messianic hope is false. Today there is a more subtle and sometimes an almost undetectable enemy. There is the fear of the unknown terrorist and the unpredictable violence that stalks our city and county streets and neighborhoods. There is the abomination of desolating sacrilege the great idol of secular materialism that provides us with a new kind of religion. Material possessions will give us honor and happiness we are told to believe. Or is it Science that will be our salvation that will give us longer years to live and all kinds of miracles and new body parts. But how shall we live at peace in a world that becomes over populated, and polluted beyond hope? What does a world whose temperatures is rising have to offer when severe weather conditions could be catastrophic? Wherein does our salvation lie?
Our only hope lies in seeing ourselves ultimately in the hands of a loving God. Turning to God to with faith and surrender that God will use us to be his instruments of justice and his people who embrace the caring and compassionate ways of Christ is our hope. Mark has Jesus telling us that we cannot go back. There is no turning back. There is no hiding. All we can do is face the future whatever it may be, and be alert to the world’s need for God, for the renewing presence of Christ Jesus who gives the stamina to face the world with hope and the trust that it is God who is ultimately making all things new. How and when the world will end is not ours to know. Jesus himself did not claim to know, but that such knowledge belonged to the Father alone. All we can do is be faithful, trust in God. We read, we learn, we mark, we inwardly digest the scriptures of God’s mighty act and works. We look for his coming again. We are called upon to be alert to what is good and precious. We trust that Christ has led us in the way of God and that we shall be his people of love and compassion and a people of hope. We rejoice in the glory of God around us.
Not everything around us is perfect nor will it be. L:ife to be truly valuable and meaningful will have its challenges and its hardships. We will not be perfect, and we will not be living in a perfect world. Yet we trust that God is with us and in us. The purposes of God in time will ultimately be revealed. We rejoice in what is good and hopeful. Meantime we live by faith and not phoniness nor false messiahs that would have us believe that everything will be or should always be wonderful and happy. Yet we stand at the edge of new hopes and new beginnings when our faith is in God.
We have about come to the end of the church’s year. Next week will be the last of Pentecost, before we begin the new church year in Advent. The scriptures have us looking at the end of things which sometimes and for some people have an element of disaster. Yet through the eyes of the faithful, life does not end but is changed, and we begin looking for the renewed coming of Christ into our lives and world as its catalyst for change. We begin thinking about repentance, which means change of mind, and receiving into our lives the renewal of the ways and teachings of Jesus Christ who leads us to the Father who has created us in His image, in the image of Love.
We wrestle with these apocalyptic issues in a way this is not just thinking of them as silly, or as unimportant. Facing the hard times and what seems hopeless is a matter of dealing with the turning points in our lives that enable us recognize our need for God and our hope in turn to God.