The Big Picture

Scripture: Luke 21:5-19

Our gospel reading this morning is pretty dire. It starts out innocently enough. There are some people gathered around in the temple admiring it. “Look at all those beautiful, precious stones!” “Isn’t the architecture stunning!” “So many people donated wonderful gifts!” “This place is wonderful!” Have any of you been to the National Cathedral down in DC? Just think of the tourists there, wandering around to look at Woodrow Wilson’s tomb, or to ooh and ahh at the stained glass.

So Jesus’ response is a little bit of a downer, to say the least. “The temple might be impressive to you now,” he says, “but soon it’s going to be totally destroyed – not one stone is going to be left standing on another. This magnificent building is about to become rubble.” Not exactly the kind of thing you’d want to hear about your favorite house of worship, is it?

I think it will help us understand Jesus’ declarations for today if we take a look at what the original hearers of Luke would have heard. As you might or might not know, the book of Luke was not actually written down right at the time of Jesus’ ministry. In fact, although there was a strong oral tradition of Jesus’ saying and stories, many scholars believe Luke’s version of the gospel wasn’t written down until about 90 AD, sixty years after Jesus’ earthly ministry. Why is this important? Because in 70 AD, Jesus’ prediction about the temple came true. There was a rebellion in Jerusalem, and the Roman army swept down on the city, defeated the Jewish rebellion, razed the city, killed anyone who wasn’t able-bodied, and forced everyone else to leave. The temple, too, was destroyed, and all those stones and beautiful gifts were stolen or destroyed.

The people in Luke’s church were mostly Jewish. In the early church, many Christian went to synagogue on Saturday and celebrated the Lord’s day on Sunday. It wasn’t seen as a conflict. Jerusalem was home for many of these people, or the home of their ancestors, and the destruction of the Temple was a tremendous blow. Before it was destroyed, the Temple had been the center of worship life. Synagogues were helpful, but the Temple was the real deal, kind of like how Mecca is for Muslims – irreplaceable and unique. Now, without the Temple, it was as though Judaism’s heart had been cut out.

So imagine the people of Luke’s church, hearing this story read out loud. Teacher, they ask, won’t the world come to an end, now that the Temple has been destroyed? Isn’t it time for God to just bring everything to an end?

Jesus’ response, then, is: Don’t be led astray, don’t be afraid, don’t go after the ones who say, “the time is near!” There is still a lot to happen between now and the end of the world, so don’t be discouraged. God is looking out for you. Keep at it.

So, what does this mean for us? It has been a long time since most Christians waited anxiously for Jesus to return and for the world to end. Not that we don’t have folks today who say, “the time is near”, and others who go after them. But look at the descriptions Jesus gives of the signs that the end of the world is upon us. Nation will rise against nation. Check. Earthquakes, check. Famines and plagues, check. Wildfires in Southern California, check. Okay, that’s not really in there. But my point is, when in the history of the world have at least some of these things not been happening? Plagues, wars, earthquakes, catastrophes. It would probably be more of a sign of change if there weren’t any conflict going on.

The early Christians thought that Jesus was coming back right away, in a big cloud with lightning and plenty of judgment to hand out to everyone. Which doesn’t seem to be what ended up happening. At least so far.

So what are we supposed to make of this end of the world talk? For one thing, it helps us focus on the big picture – the scope of history, and our connection to Christians past, present and future. Along with that, I think the key to understanding the scripture for today is a question, more so than an answer. And that is: how does God really work in peoples’ lives? Is it catastrophic and sudden, with revenge on enemies and evildoers meted out? Or is God a beckoner, a seducer, a patient and confident pursuer?

My hunch is that the end of the world will come to us gradually, not suddenly. Not that we can’t have flashes of insight and sudden leaps forward, but that force and cataclysm will not ultimately be the source of God’s revelation.

In my work with Lutheran Volunteer Corps, the volunteers come to a city to spend a year in service working full-time at a social justice-oriented nonprofit organization. While they are learning about social justice work, the volunteers live in intentional community with each other and explore simple and sustainable living. For those of us with a heart and a calling for social justice work, it is often very difficult to deal with what often seems like the glacial pace of change. And in some cases it seems like we are moving backward, rather than forward, as political calculations strip away gains made in the past, and changes in the economy make life harder for those living at the bottom. “When will this be?” we wonder, “and what will be the sign that we will finally live in a just society?” Change comes slowly, with a letter written, a child encouraged, an addict staying clean one more day.

Simplicity is a way of caring for ourselves and the earth so that we can be about the business of God’s kingdom for the long haul. For many of our volunteers, I think they expect that living on a small stipend will be their greatest challenge. But truthfully, this is a temporary constraint. Learning how to simplify our time is a continuing struggle, one that doesn’t end after a year of service.

Intentional community is another source of strength in our journey to the end of the world. Through intentional community, volunteers seek to build relationships of trust, respect, and mutual support. This requires a set of skills that we don’t always learn in a larger culture of individualism and separation. Volunteers are challenged to learn how to deal with conflict constructively, to share decision-making among each other, and to respect difference without avoiding each other.

By following these three guiding principles, social justice, intentional community, and simplicity, many volunteers get to the end of the year realizing that their lives have changed. I know it can be a little bit of a cliché to say this is a life-changing experience, but it is. And it’s the whole experience, and the many small nudges and tugs, along with the sudden flashes of insight, that make it so.

God is out to get us all. There’s a reason why there hasn’t been a second coming yet. Because God wants all of us to experience love, to become everything we can be, and to learn to be the community of beloved followers that God knows we can become. My prayer for you today is that you will be blessed with wisdom to find the right path, endurance to follow it, and joy along the journey. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Heaven on Earth (and other important details)

Scripture: Luke 20:27-40

Good morning. Friends, it is a pleasure to be here with you today. As the Baltimore and Wilmington Coordinator for Lutheran Volunteer Corps, I always enjoy the chance to meet the congregations who support us. Thank you for the ways that you have welcomed our volunteers coming in this year. It is also a special treat to be here with your pastor Kristi. As you may or may not know, she and I were both in Lutheran Volunteer Corps at the same time. I served in Washington, DC, and Kristi served here in Baltimore. It has been great fun renewing our relationship, and I should also say I’m very grateful that you loan her to us in her office as the chair of our Local Support Committee. Long story short – it’s good to be here with you, Our Savior Church, and to thank you for the many ways you support the volunteers and their work.

Will you pray with me? God, open our ears to your voice. Open our minds to your word. Open our hearts to your touch. Open our lives to your guidance. In the name of the one who spoke to us and speaks to us still, Amen.

I have to say, I feel some sympathy for the Sadducees from our gospel reading this morning. The passage we read this morning comes in the middle of a whole section of match-wits-with-Jesus contests, and as you heard, Jesus triumphs in this contest, too.

Which is probably hard for those ol’ Sadducees to take. After all, these guys are the establishment types. They go to wine-and-cheese receptions with the Jerusalem priests. They have the framed degrees and the fat Rolodexes. People look up to them and respect them. These guys run this town. And with that comes certain expectations. They’re supposed to know what they’re doing. They’re supposed to be the experts.

And as experts, they’re also supposed to keep the rabble-rousers in their place. So here comes this Jesus. I like to think that if I had been there, back then, I would’ve sided with Jesus from the beginning – throw down my nets and come running, you know the drill – but on the other hand, hindsight is 20/20. Because here’s this Jesus. He’s basically homeless, moving from couch to couch and teaching these radical new ideas. And the people he associates with! Some of them are respectable, but the bulk of them are just fishermen, or – worse – drug dealers, prostitutes, alchoholics, and other problem personalities.

So here comes this Jesus, acting like he knows what God is all about, when the Sadducees are pretty sure that Moses finished that book about 500 years ago. And you can’t just let somebody like that go unchallenged. So the Sadducees challenge Jesus on a particular point of doctrine: the resurrection. It seems perfectly ridiculous to them, so they come up with a question to expose Jesus’ ignorance.

Can you imagine the crowd of Sadducees gathered in a huddle? “Okay, Hal, ask him this” and then Hal gets up for the group, shifts his belt around his middle a bit, and then paints a scenario: “Let’s say there’s this woman who marries the oldest of seven brothers. But then he dies before they have children. According to the law, his brother is supposed to marry her so that she can have a child in his name. So the next brother marries her. But then he dies. So the next brother marries her, and then the next and the next, but they all die. And then she dies. If your resurrection is real, then you’ll have a simple answer for this question: which brother is the woman married to after the resurrection?”

Can you see how this might be a little bit of a smart-alec kind of a question? The scenario is outlandish, as if to say Jesus is a little outlandish, too. They’re pretty confident, at any rate. Confident but, as it turns out, wrong.

And yet, I can see in my own life how much easier it is to be a Sadducee than it is to be a follower of Jesus. The Sadducees have things mapped out logically. There is an order to the world – a set of rules that God has mapped out and that we can learn and follow. There are no surprises, and for the most part, if you do everything right, you have control of the situation.

Except! Except, that’s not really the way things are. Allow me to give a few examples from my work with Lutheran Volunteer Corps.

The way Lutheran Volunteer Corps works is this: volunteers come to a city to live with each other in intentional communities, practice simplified living, and work for social justice. Our three guiding principles, then, are community, simplicity, and social justice.

Intentional community means for us that the volunteers living together in a house aren’t just roommates. They agree to spend time with each other, getting to know each other and building relationships. They share their food money and cook for each other, and they meet at least weekly to spend time together. They also share chores. Now, I don’t know if it ever happens in this church, but at least in other churches there is the occasional disagreement about how things should be done. And the same is true for our intentional communities. People disagree. Each person has different needs and values. There is no set of rules that you can follow like a recipe, in order to get the desired results of a true community of people who support each other. It’s impossible for one person to truly control the process.

And yet, many people coming out of LVC after a year of intentional community find that they have been changed in important ways by that experience. I would say, God has used that experience to surprise and change them. There’s no formula for making it work, but when God gets involved, wonderful things happen.

Simplicity encompasses a lot of different things, from cutting down on time commitments to cooking from scratch. And related to it is sustainability, which means making decisions that are sustainable for the earth and for us as human beings. But one of the big challenges the year presents is our food stipend. Each volunteer gets $85 per month for their food. Which for many of the volunteers seems like a very small amount. Last weekend, at our fall retreat we were talking about hospitality, and one of the volunteers said, “You know, when Amy was getting ready to come over to our house for dinner, we were thinking about charging her for our food because we get so little money. So, 15 cents for the milk, a dollar for the enchilada, 20 cents for the rice. But you know, the stipend really is enough money for us to eat. And to have people over.” The volunteers are surprised to learn that there is enough for them and more than enough. (I should let you know that when I go over for dinner, I do usually bring a food contribution of some kind.) Living on limited funds helps the volunteers learn the difference between what they need and what they want. It is an opportunity to trust God to give us our daily bread and to let go of our need to be in control.

Finally, the volunteers’ placements are intended to give them an introduction to working for social justice. This is certainly an area that can be unpredictable. For many of the volunteers, this is their first year out of college. Not for everybody – in fact, we have a recently retired volunteer here in Baltimore this year – but for most people. And many times, they’ve done a lot of studying in school about how the world needs to change for there to be social justice. If you follow the rules laid out in your classes, you’ll be able to make a difference and change the establishment.

But it is a lot harder to achieve social justice than some of those textbooks might lead you to believe. And there are some problems that are so deep and so wide – poverty, racism, injustice – that to keep from being totally discouraged we have to recognize that change is beyond our own personal power and that it in fact belongs to God. Not that we don’t have responsibilities, just that we don’t have control.

And I think for folks who have been through deep tragedies, and somehow gotten over to the other side of them with our faith, somehow we know that it wasn’t us who got us there, it was the grace of God. As the hymn goes, “through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come. T’was grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”

Jesus responds to the Sadducees by pointing out how narrow, unimaginative, and untrusting their question is. “God cannot be put in a box,” he reminds them. “The resurrection is not going to be like anything you’ve ever seen. People will be like angels, and the human institution of marriage will be a thing of the past.”

It might not seem like good news that God can’t be put in a box, and that there are some things that don’t have set rules, but I want to assure you that it is. Because when God is truly alive in our lives, when we are able to do our part and trust God with the rest, when it is possible for Jesus to surprise us, that is when we will know that we are on the right path – the path that leads us to heaven on earth. Amen.