Remembering the Past...
        Planning the Future

    Park Christian Church
                                                                    (Disciples of Christ)

November 15, 2009

Scripture:         Mark 13:1-8

Sermon:           “Rumors of War”

            Turning our hearts and minds now to the word of God, let us read together the scripture lesson for the day.  Turn with me to the Gospel According to Mark, chapter 13 where we will read together verses 1 through 8.  You can find that easily on page 67 of the New Testament in the pew Bible.

            As we are reading this together, I want you to get a picture in your mind of the folks we are reading about.  They live way out in the middle of nowhere, really.  They aren’t city folk.  They don’t particularly like crowded places.  And if they had their choice, they’d just as soon stay home than get in the car and deal with the traffic as you go across the bridge into Louisville.

            Maybe that’s you.  That river might as well be a hundred miles wide as far as I can tell.

            But, I’m really talking about folks who live out in the country.  They’re just fine without the hustle and bustle.  You get them to venture out into the city, though, and you’ll get reactions pretty much like what Jesus’ disciples did and said when they were in the big city of Jerusalem.  They were all county folk, too, you know.  Coming from up north in Galilee, Jesus’ disciples were a bit out of place when they arrived in the holy city.

            They kind of stood there and gawked at the big buildings there.

            I like to picture that.  It reminds me of some tourists in New York City.  They’re just overwhelmed by the magnitude of the things that people have built.

            Jesus, though, used this moment to say something about how all of these impressive things in Jerusalem will one day be destroyed.  And the whole thing sounds ominous and foreboding.  From a historical perspective, Jesus was correct.  Within forty years of his death and resurrection, the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman army.  Seems they’d had enough of the unrest and uprisings among the Jewish people there.

            But, what we are reading is confusing.  It’s the kind of stuff that has lead folks throughout time to come to all sorts of conclusions that the end is coming.  And they want to believe that the end is coming soon.

            Let’s listen to the word of the Lord.  Let it speak to our hearts.

            As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!”  Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings?  Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

            When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?”  Then Jesus began to say to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray.  Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray.  When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.  For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines.  This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

            He wasn’t the first one to ever say that the temple would be destroyed.  ‘Ole Jeremiah once said, “Zion will be plowed as a field.  Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house a wooded height.”  (Jer. 26:18) Jesus wasn’t the first one to say such a thing.

            Micah did it, too.  He said the very same thing as Jeremiah.  (Mic. 3:12)

            And those prophets were correct.  The first temple, you know, was destroyed.  The Babylonians did that.  Eventually it was rebuilt.

            It just seems like such a blasphemous thing to say.  God’s house is going to be toppled.  The holiest place on earth will be ravaged.  Who dares to say such a thing?  That’s the kind of thing that folks take offense to.

            When Jesus was on trial there were folks there yelling out things like this:  “He said he would destroy the temple.  He said it’s nothing but the work of human hands.  He said he would destroy it and then build another one in three days.  We heard him.  That’s what he said.”

            That’s not what he said, of course.  He didn’t say that he was going to do it.  He just said that it would happen.  But, nobody likes to hear that stuff.

            It sounds like something so awful that if it did happen you’d think the whole world was going to pot.  And sometimes, you know, it sure feels that way.  Doesn’t it?

            I went to get a haircut the other day.  The barber was making small talk, you know, talking about the weather.  And it’s been unusually gorgeous for this time of year.  Hasn’t it?  70 degrees in the middle of November.  You have to take that whenever you can.  He said, “What do make of this weather we’re having?”

            I said, “It’s something else.  I can’t hardly work on a day like this.  I’m afraid, though, that we’re going to pay for it in a few weeks.  Some people say we’re in for a nasty winter.”

            And then he stopped cutting for a minute, kind of scratched his chin, and said, “You know what?  I think we’ve already paid for it.  To be honest, I think we had this coming to us.”

            He pointed out that in the last year-and-a-half we’ve been hit with some of the craziest weather you could imagine.  “I think it all began last year,” he said.  “We got hit with a tornado in February.  Remember that?  Then in March there was an earthquake of all things.  An earthquake.  Right here in the middle of the country.  Shook me right out of bed that morning.  Then we had another tornado the next month.  We had a hurricane hit us like we were living down there on the beach.  An ice storm a few months later.  Between the two I didn’t have power for a month.  And then we got floods.  All within a year-and-a-half.  So, yeah, I think we’ve earned this.”

            That’s something else, isn’t it?

            Then my barber, who is as much a scholar of the bible as anybody, he said, “And Preacher, that’s the kind of stuff that’ll make you wonder if the world isn’t coming to an end.  I was half ready to pack it all up and start looking for Jesus.  Know what I mean?  Especially when that earthquake hit!”

            Jesus did mention something about earthquakes.  Earthquakes.  Famines.  Wars.  And even rumors of wars.  Terrible stuff, really.  Doesn’t it all sounds eerily familiar?  Does the weight of that’s taking place in the world ever get you to thinking that the end must be near?  There’s just no way things can continue on the way they are going.  Do you ever think that way?  Things are just so awful bad that God must be up to something big.

            You’d find yourself in pretty good company if you did.  Folks have forever been convinced that they were living in the last days of this earth for all the terrible things they’ve lived through.  Even Jesus’ disciples.

            Is that what happens to us when we are overwhelmed with life?  We look for a way out?  We cling to the hope that God is on our side and will provide some kind of escape from all that ails us?

            “Don’t be lead astray,” Jesus said.  Maybe he knew that we would look for easy answers when we got overwhelmed.  “Don’t be lead astray.  You’re going to see a whole lot of stuff, and hear rumors of even more things that might happen.  Don’t be lead astray.”  Sounds to me like he was telling us to hang in there and be just a little suspicious of anyone with an easy answer.  “The world is going to be a difficult place much of the time, but don’t you go thinking that any one thing is a signal that it’s all going to come to an end.”  That’s what I heard him say.

            “All of that is just the beginning of the birth pangs.”  Just the beginning.

            I’m always a bit troubled when men start to talk about the pain of childbirth.  Do you know what I mean?  As if any of us really have a clue what that’s all about!  But, Jesus headed down that path as if to suggest that none of what we witness going wrong in the world is anything but a minor contraction compared to what it would really look like should God be stepping in to call an end to it all.

            Don’t be lead astray.  Hang in there.

            Jesus even went on to say later in this same speech that not even he is privy to the information that the disciples were looking for.  “When is it going to happen?  Tell us what to look for.”  And Jesus said, “I don’t know.  God knows.  But, I don’t know.  Not even the angels in heaven could tell you that.”

            Maybe that’s not the answer we’re looking for—not when we’re confused, not when we’re lonely, not when we’re scared.  The answer we’re looking for in difficult times is that there is a plan in all of this.  Everything happens for a reason and so on.  God is in control.  That’s what we’d like to hear.  But, it’s not what Jesus gave us.  Is it?  He just said that our difficulties are only the beginnings of childbirth.  The real stuff is further on down the road.

            Yikes!

            You know, it helps to have a little perspective on life at times.  I think, perhaps, that is what Jesus is trying to give to those looking for answers.  It helps to have some perspective on things.  “Do you really think that you have it so bad?”  Read between the lines a little bit, here.  That’s the question he’s asking.  “Do you really think you have it so bad?  So bad that you’ll concoct all sorts of explanations and theories about the end of the world because your own piece of it seems to be collapsing?”

            To say that all sorts of terrible things happening is nothing more than the beginning of the birth pangs, well, that’s like saying, “Get some perspective on things, folks.  And hang in there.  Don’t be lead astray.”

            We, who live with the world happening in real time in front of us all the time—it would help to have some perspective.  It sure is easy to get overwhelmed with the tragedies of the world.  We see them as they happen.  But, get some perspective.

            On September 24, 1915, for example, there appeared on the second and third pages of the New York Times a report about the killing of some half-a-million Armenians.  It was half a world away.  A genocide.  And it was buried inside the front cover months after the whole thing took place.  500,000 people.  And it was hardly enough to catch the attention of the front page of one of our nation’s most influential news sources.

            No one captured a single video of it with a cell phone.  And no one saw it on the evening news as it unfolded.  No one blogged about it.  No one forwarded a single email about how it was evidence that the end times had, in fact, arrived, and that Jesus would appear in the clouds at any moment.

            Perspective.

            I hear the kind of perspective that Jesus is calling us to have every now and then.  I don’t know why it amazes me.  It’s what he wants us to do.  But, it does amaze me.  Someone will be in what seems to me unbearable circumstances and they’ll say to me, “Oh, I know there are so many other people who have it so much worse than I do.”  Perspective.  Do you see that?

            There are little rubber tubes sticking out of someone’s arm so that their doctors can administer chemotherapy for that cancer eating them up.  “Oh, there are so many other people who have it so much worse than I do.”  I don’t quite understand it when they say that.  But, maybe they get what Jesus was saying in ways that I can’t.

            A woman whose house was destroyed in the floods of Hurricane Katrina?  She stood there in her front yard as some folks I was with hauled out her ruined belongings out one by one to the curb.  “I’ve seen children starving in the streets, young man.  This ain’t nothing that can’t be fixed.”  I’d have been losing my mind!

            Get some perspective.

            You get lead astray into believing that everything is coming to an end because of the difficulties in your own lifetime and you just might become resigned to letting things continue on the way they are going because there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.  But, if you can connect your own pain and difficulty to that of the world around you, and all that it experiences every single day, you might just find that God will use you as an instrument to heal some of it.  So, hang in there.

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)