Wrecking Ball (Mark 13:1-8, Proper 28B, November 18, 2012)

Wrecking Ball

Mark 13:1-8
Proper 28B
November 18, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

“Gosh, Teacher!  Look at all those huge buildings made with really big stones!”  They were tourists, country folks visiting their nation’s political, cultural, and religious center.  They were overwhelmed by the crowds, by the variety and quantity of the merchandise for sale in the booths that lined the squares, by the aroma of the cooking fires.  But most of all they were overawed by the buildings, by the architecture.  They were almost speechless and could only muster, “Big buildings!  Big chunks of stone!” 

And that’s what was supposed to happen.  All buildings are statements in stone, brick, concrete and wood.  One building may say, “The person who lives here is rich enough to afford more house than they need.”  Another may say, “This is a house that ordinary people can afford to raise a family in.”  Another building may say, “This is a place where you can leave your money with confidence.”  Every building is a statement.

Our county courthouse is as imposing as we can afford.  It is as solid as we like to think that we are.  It says that the business of governing the county is something that we take pretty seriously.  Set back on all sides from other buildings it announces that its purposes are important.  It intends for us to experience something just a little short of awe—respect, maybe.  Like all public buildings it is what some have called “propaganda in stone.”  Our county courthouse advocates for life in our community.  It says that we are not frivolous people.  We take community seriously.  It tells a story about us that we want to tell.

I’ve heard Washington, D.C., described as the greatest home-court advantage of any head of state in the world.  Washington was designed to be impressive, even intimidating.  Its neo-classical style announces to all visitors that we see ourselves as the fulfillment of ancient dreams of justice and liberty given modern form and expression.

In our day there are so many different forms of media that we may not notice what message our architecture is sending.  We may even think that it’s not saying anything at all.  But the ancients were not deluded; they knew that the visual impact of a city is as important in projecting power as its armies.  Nothing was left to chance.  The approaches to the center of a city, what could be seen, and from where things could be seen: all of these things were planned and executed deliberately.

The disciples reacted just as the movers and shakers in Jerusalem intended that they should react.  And what was the message in stone that bombarded them into incoherence?

The Temple complex that the disciples experienced was the work of Herod the Great.  Herod had rebuilt the Temple some fifty years before the disciples’ visit, although work on some of the courtyards and outbuildings would go on for another thirty years after that.  Herod’s Temple, as it is sometimes called, announced that Herod’s kingship and Judaea’s status as a Roman territory were perfectly compatible with life as a Jewish community.  The Temple declared in stone that all one had to do to reconcile those competing identities was to obey Herod (and his Roman masters), tend to the sacrificial system of the Temple, and follow the Torah and all would be well in the Jewish world. 

The Temple was a bold statement by a master of politics, but at its heart were deep contradictions.  First was the matter of bringing together the Jewish worship of one God and one God only and the Roman system of many gods and goddesses and especially the requirement that subjects of Empire demonstrate their loyalty by offering sacrifices to the divine spirit of the emperor.  Jews could not do this because the Torah forbade it.  The brilliant compromise that allowed the Romans to recognize the Jewish religion was that daily sacrifices were offered, not to the emperor, but for the emperor, for his benefit and welfare and on his behalf.

There was a deeper contradiction, though, that wasn’t so easy to work out: the Roman system of governance was based on values that stood in marked contrast to the values of the Jewish tradition.  The “good life” for Romans was based on Prosperity.  Prosperity was the gift of Peace.  Peace was the fruit of Victory.  Victory was the result of the Roman ability to bring crushing violence to bear on any enemy inside or outside of the Empire and to bring that violence to bear on very short notice. 

The Jewish tradition on the other hand valued a “good life” that was founded on justice for the poor and the marginalized.  Social justice led to peace and peace led, not to limitless riches, but to abundance, that is, to “enough” and a little more.

The Temple looked and sounded Jewish.  But the product of this ideology in stone was not the shared abundance that the Torah demanded.  Wealth flowed to the Temple and it never came back.   The Temple became, not a proclamation of God’s and of God’s people’s intention to protect the poor and the marginalized, but an apparatus for extracting what little wealth the poor had managed to produce and retain.

The disciples were taken in by Herod’s propaganda: “Gee, teacher!  Look at those buildings!  Look at those huge blocks of stone!”  Jesus saw through the propaganda to what was really going on, to the contradictions that Herod’s Temple was trying to paper over: “You see these buildings?  They are impressive aren’t they?  You must recognize that the whole complex is unstable.  It rests on a contradiction.  It is a lie.  It will all come down.  The wrecking ball will spare nothing.”

Herod offered this propaganda in stone because it helped him secure his power.  People accepted the propaganda because it made them comfortable.  It let them go on living without facing the inner contradiction of their lives.  But that was not a stable arrangement.   And in forty years history’s wrecking did swing and it spared nothing except a retaining wall that today is called the “Wailing Wall.”  The instrument of that destruction was the Roman Empire, but the cause was the contradictions that the people of Jerusalem refused to face.  “Jerusalem, Jerusalem!” Jesus said, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!  See, your house is left to you, desolate.”

I wonder what Jesus would say of what we have built, of our houses, of our churches, of our stores and businesses, of our civic buildings in Decorah and Des Moines and Washington.  Would he find them impressive?  Or would he see through them to the contradictions we don’t want to face? 

And what of what we have built, not on our streets, but in our heads: the patterns of thought that we have built up until they have become a mental house that we live in, in which we have found safety and made ourselves comfortable?  Would he admire them?  Or would he see through them to lies that we are telling ourselves because it makes our lives easier and more comfortable?

I don’t know.  Or rather, I’m afraid that I do know.  The trouble is I see the contradictions in others’ lives more easily than I see them in my own.  It is easier to be outraged at others’ behavior and to demand change from them than it is to confront my own and commit myself to change.  And yet, I have no reason to believe that I am immune to the wrecking ball.  Just because I don’t want to be aware of my inner contradictions does not mean that they aren’t there. 

All I can do, my brothers and sisters, is to confess to you that I am broken and that I need your help in uncovering the lies that I am telling myself so that with God’s grace I may find my way to the integrity that will prevent my life from collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. 

This is a painful place to be, as anyone who has been there can testify.  But it is also a hopeful place.  When I come to the end of my own resources, God is still there, seeking to build something new and better.  Jesus called it the kingdom of God, or the reign of God, or God’s “empire.”  It’s hard to know how to translate it.  The writer of the Revelation calls it the New Jerusalem.  That is what God is about.  But first the ground must be cleared.  The wrecking ball must swing.  And then God will begin to build.

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Making All Things New (Revelation 21:1-6a, All Saints' Sunday, November 4, 2012)

Making All Things New

Revelation 21:1-6a
All Saints’ Sunday B
November 4, 2012

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

How many of you learned that there are five senses?  That’s what I learned in school.  But it isn’t true.  There are a whole lot more than five.  Sure, sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing are important ways of getting along in the world around us.  But there are other senses that somehow didn’t make the cut. 

There is the sense of balance.   That is a good thing, I think.  So is a sense of rhythm.  A sense of wonder or awe might not be a tool for bare survival, but it is certainly necessary for being fully human.  A sense of humor is a capacity that we need both to survive and to be human. 

Another sense that is not always appreciated, especially by parents, is the sense of justice.  You can tell that it has begun to work when you first hear a child protest, “That’s not fair!”  Since that is likely to happen when we are trying to impose some semblance of order in our household, we are often not terribly open to hearing their grievance.  We just want their compliance.  So we may not appreciate how important a sense of justice really is. 

Think about it.  “That’s not fair” asserts two things.  First, it says that the world is not working correctly, at least it is not working according to my notion of how it should work.  Second, it says that the problem does not lie with me.  Those two bold statements are both implied in “That’s not fair.”

 

Now, of course, we can say that one or both of those statements is not true.  Sometimes we sense unfairness when there is none, when the world is working as it should and, really, I’ve caused  my own problems.  A sense of justice can see injustice where there is none.  Maybe that’s why I have said something like, “Every four year old knows that life isn’t fair.”  An overdeveloped sense of justice can be a real detriment.

But I am just as concerned with an underdeveloped sense of justice.  I am just as concerned when there should be a sense of outrage and there is none, when people humbly submit to evil instead of resisting it as our baptismal promises direct.  When, for instance, there is a recession and the company that I work for has shuttered its doors and there are ten people who are unemployed for every job vacancy so that, if every vacancy were filled there would still be nine out of those ten still unemployed, then I have an underdeveloped sense of justice if I imagine that my being out of work is my fault.  Sometimes the world does not work as it should and the fault does not lie with me.

A woman who is being abused in relationship is very likely to experience damage to her sense of justice.  She may come to believe that abuse is something she has come to deserve and that, if only she would behave differently, the bully in her life will stop abusing her.  A child who grows up being molested is very likely to have an underdeveloped sense of justice.  If the poor in our world had a fully developed sense of justice there would be rioting in the streets.

A sense of justice is socially disruptive whether it’s coming from a four year old, an abused woman, or an oppressed group.

The book of Revelation is what happens when someone gives free reign to the poetic expression of their sense of justice.  The book of Revelation is subversive stuff.  That’s why the church has worked so hard over the centuries to make sure that people don’t notice.  We’ve had two basic strategies.  The first is to keep people from reading it at all.  We say things like, “It’s all very symbolic and almost impossible to understand.  Besides it’s pretty violent.  You don’t want to worry yourself with it.  Read other parts of the Bible.”  Failing that, we give people false clues about how to read it.  We say things like, “This book holds the timetable for the end of history.  The one who works it all out can be ready for the end of the world, because they will know when it’s coming.”  We tell people to treat the Revelation as if it were some sort of coded newspaper from the future.

But in fact Revelation is neither impossible to understand nor a coded prediction.  It is the poetic imagination of a sense of justice.

If we’ve experienced a four year old protesting the unfairness of parental policy, the Revelation shouldn’t surprise us all that much.  There is anger.  There are tears.  There is much muttering of revenge fantasies.  There is the stomping of feet and even a tantrum or two.  All of that is there.  But there is more.

A sense of justice is able to hold the world as it is up against an image of the world as it should be and compare the two.  It’s like trying to solve those puzzles in which there are two nearly matching pictures and you are asked to find ten differences.  Those puzzles are hard.  A sense of justice works by using a very sophisticated mental operation.  The Revelation’s rejection of the unfairnesses of its world is the result of holding the Greco-Roman world up against an image of the world as God intends it.  Not surprisingly, it finds some stark differences. 

Revelation adds up to an indictment of Empire in its Roman form.  Rome is oppressing the people of God.  In particular it is oppressing and persecuting the communities for whom the book was written.  As empires do, Rome looks out at the world and seeks to turn everything into a source of cash.  Pasture land, vineyards, and olive orchards have been turned into commodities that can be bought and sold without any regard for the welfare of the people who depend on them.  In short, Rome has defied God’s intentions in order to do as it pleased. 

Rome is out of control and as its punishment God will release the forces of chaos.  Death, famine, and disease will be let loose to uncreate the world that Rome in its pride and vanity imagined that it had built.

But Revelation is more than a revenge fantasy writ large.  The sense of justice in Revelation is haunted by its image of the world as God intends it.  Yes, it uses that image to condemn Rome.  But it also holds that image for its own sake, as a hope, a dream and even a promise. 

The world will not always be as it is.  Rome is not forever.  No empire is, not even ours.  Someday, the world will be made new.  The work of creation will be completed.  The sky above and the earth below will be renewed.  Life will no longer move toward death.  There will be no more sea, says Revelation, because the sea in Hebrew imagination is the world’s clearest manifestation of chaos.  If that seems a little far-fetched, ask our friends on Staten Island and up and down the Jersey shore whether it seems far-fetched to them.  We will no longer belong to Caesar, but only to God.  We will be God’s people and God will live among us.  And, with chaos banished at last, there will be no pain and no need for grief or tears. 

This is how the story of our long struggle to live fully human lives in a humane world ends.  No matter what we face in the meantime we’ve peeked at the ending and we know what it is.  Defeat is not possible.  The saints whose lives we celebrate this morning have not lived and died in vain.  We do not live and die in vain.  We live and die as victors.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.