Stay Awake (5th Sunday in Lent; Mark 13:1-8, 24-37; March 13, 2016)

Stay Awake

5th Sunday in Lent
Mark 13:1-8, 24-37
March 13, 2016

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

In the far southwest corner of Cornwall, west of Plymouth, west of the Penzance of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, is a headland called Land's End. Popular with hikers and rock-climbers now, it is more a tourist destination than a place to live.

I've often wondered what it would have been like to live in sight of a place called Land's End in the days when it was thought that there was nothing to the west but ocean and possibly dragons and the edge of the earth. Only the very brave or the very foolish or more likely a combination of the two would venture over the western horizon from there. When they sang with the Psalmist "Let the king rule from sea to sea, from the river to the ends of the earth," they might not have know what "the river" was, but they knew the "ends of the earth." They could see it: Land's End.

I wonder how that knowledge, the knowledge that they lived at the end of the world, shaped their thoughts. Did it make them feel more secure or less? Did it limit the world of their imagination, or focus it? I don't think we'll ever really know how, say, a peasant from the thirteenth century thought about living near the end of the earth or if she thought about it all.

I do know that we think about the end of the earth a lot, although we think about it in time rather than in space. Just in the last year or so there have been twelve movies released that feature either the end of the world or at least the end of the world as we know it. Some, like the zombie movie Maggie, were completely forgettable; others, like Insurgent, part of the Divergent Series and Mockingjay, Part 2, the latest release in the Hunger Games series, are worth serious attention. There are a couple of simple formulas for end of the world movies. Either the movie begins with the world altered beyond recognition and the heroes must create an opening in this world for the recovery of goodness and freedom. Or the movie begins with the world as it is but with a threat that the heroes must somehow turn aside or defeat.

One requirement of the end-of-the-world genre is that human beings must either be able to save the world from impending doom or to survive it in such as way as to be able to repair the damage and return the world to its pre-disaster condition, more or less. An end-of-the-world movie that ends with the end of the world will be a box-office disaster (pardon the pun!). We want a story with a happy ending or at very least a happy enough ending, not an ending that is the end.

By long habit--and by disposition-- we want to look on the bright side of things, even when, or especially when the situation looks the most grim. We regard optimism as a virtue. And it often is. But there are times when optimism is a delusion that prevents us from responding to real threats that cannot simply be ignored until they go away.

The end of the world can come in a variety of sizes from the very personal to the global. The end of the world can come in a meeting with our oncologist when we find out that, while others’ lives will go on, ours will not. The end of the world can come, as it did for a friend of mine, when her husband announced on Christmas Eve that their marriage was over. The end of the world can come when you discover that you cannot pass a flight physical and your dream of being an astronaut will never become a reality. The end of the world can come when the factory you've worked in all your life is closing, leaving you at sixty years of age with a mortgage, three kids who want to go to college, and a retirement savings that will evaporate all too quickly. Or the end of the world can happen when we discover that an average of just 360 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will threaten to make vast densely populated parts of the earth uninhabitable and that we're already poking above 400 ppm at times.

For Mark's readers the end of the world came in a form so awful that they could hardly think about it except in images and symbols. They were Galilean peasants under the heel of the Roman occupation force. They had been harassed, oppressed, stripped of their dignity, squeezed off their own land. They watched their children go hungry. They watched their younger brothers and sisters sold into slavery. They watched their friends become beggars or bandits. Galilee and Judea were both ready to explode.

When they did in 66 people hoped that their rebellion against the pagan Romans would prompt God to intervene and give them a supernatural advantage. It looked at first as if God had enlisted on the Jewish side as the rebels crushed two legions even capturing one legion's eagle standard. But the future emperor Vespasian arrived with four legions in 67 and terrorized the countryside leaving Jerusalem and the rebel forces there alone. In 69 Vespasian went to Rome to become emperor and his son and second-in-command Titus laid siege to Jerusalem. Seven months later the defenders were starving and the city fell. The Temple was looted, all of Jerusalem was burned, and its residents either killed or sold into slavery. It was the end of the world.

Nothing that Mark’s little band of Jesus-followers could have done would have made any difference at all. So what were they supposed to do? "It is as if someone took a trip, left the household behind, and put the servants in charge, giving each one a job to do, and told the doorkeeper to stay alert." When faced with the end of the world they are to do the work that is before them, the work they were called to do, the work their master had given them to do. And what was that work? It was to love God and to love their neighbors, even their enemies, as they loved themselves. It was to return blessings for curses, to turn the left cheek when struck on the right, to carry a Roman legionary’s gear two miles when he demanded one. It was to open up a space in their lives and in their relationships for God's dream to come in and be made real.

Could they stop their compatriots from poking at the Roman eagle with a stick? Probably not. Could they stop the Roman response, ruthless, implacable, and cruel? No. What could they do? They could be faithful to their calling.

I think there's some comfort there. They don't have to succeed by winning; they can succeed by faithfulness.

And there is something more. The events that Jesus lays out, the events that lie in the future tense for his disciples, that are in the present tense for Mark's readers, these things are not random events. They are the way that God's dream will work itself out in their midst. History is not out of control. God is not absent. No, God is in the midst of the events of their day, even the terrible events that bring their world to an end. Jesus' hearers are not responsible for the outcome of history.

It is much the same with us. When a doctor tells us that the cancer cannot be cured, only delayed, this is news that our world has ended, that our life as we knew it is over. I don't want to minimize the impact of that kind of news, but in a strange way the most important things do not change.

Yes, what was unknown becomes known. What was murky and unclear gains a kind of crystal clarity that is itself painful. This, incidentally, is what the word "apocalypse" means: an uncovering of what was hidden, a lifting of the veil, an emergence into clear sight.

But whatever apocalyptic news we might get, we are still who we are. Instead of knowing that we will die from something someday, we have the clarity of knowing the probably cause and perhaps something of a time-line. But what does that clarity really change? Will we stop loving our spouses, our children, our grandchildren? Will we be suddenly unbaptized? Will we no longer feel the morning sunshine on our faces or feel dwarfed by the march of the stars through the heavens? No, these things will go on for as long as we do. We will still be called to be who we are, still called to do the work that is before us, still called to be faithful even if we will not complete all that we thought we might.

What the clarity of apocalyptic news brings is clarity of purpose and a recalled sense of what we are here to do. Our plans may change. Our routines will change, most certainly. But our deepest values will emerge with renewed urgency. At least that is what Jesus believed apocalyptic news would bring to his followers. "Keep watch," he says. But that is what they were supposed to be doing anyway!

In the higher levels of the United Methodist Church there is a good deal of anxiety about our future. Our global church has reached an impasse. On the surface the issue seems to be about the place of gay, lesbian, trans-gender, bisexual and queer people among us. In reality there are even deeper divisions that underlie this conflict, divisions over the nature of the Bible and of authority, about the purposes of God and the work of the people of God. In May our General Conference will meet and no one knows what will happen. The guesses range all the way from nothing at all to a split in the United Methodist Church and the formation of new denominations to take its place. What that would mean is anyone's guess.

What if some prophet could tell us what will actually happen? What if the hidden could be uncovered? What if the veil could be lifted? What if murky possibilities could emerge into plain sight? What if we knew that a split will happen?

I would grieve the death of the church that I have lived my life in, that I have given my sweat and tears, if not my blood. I would mourn the losses that would come with that death.
But fundamentally, it would change nothing. I would still be baptized. I would still be called to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves. I would still be Jesus' follower. I would still be called to take up the work in front of me.

Will I still use what meager power is in my hands to prevent the worst of the possible damage? Of course. But finally these events are not in my hands and somehow, quite without our knowing just how, God is in the midst of them. The United Methodist Church, after all, belongs to God, not to us.
What would you say if I dared to say the same thing about First United Methodist Church? Since 1851 we have been God's people in the Methodist style in Decorah. We worry about our future. The church that we were a half century ago is gone, if not forgotten. The strategies that "worked" even a quarter century ago now seem as antiquated as rotary phones or manual gear shifts mounted on steering columns.

The great quest now seems to be to find new strategies that will yield the results that we remember from our youth. A significant number of the books being issued by Cokesbury and other denominational publishing houses have to do with what we can do to make our churches to “succeed” again. by which they mean to grow in numbers. But all the books don't allay our anxiety.

What if some apocalyptic author would tell us our future? What if the picture that emerged did not include First United Methodist Church? What if some soothsayer told us that this church were destined to close in twenty, thirty or fifty years?

Some would be shocked. Some would take themselves somewhere else, although I must say that we are not unique in our struggles, that they are common to nearly all mainline congregations. Many folks would grieve the church that has been the cradle and incubator of their faith over the years and the vehicle by with their following Jesus has been lived out.

But what, really, would the certain news of our congregation's demise change? Perhaps it would make our values and commitments clearer. Perhaps we would see more clearly what the work before us really is and set ourselves to doing it. The things that we would do would be the things that we should be doing anyway.

We would tell our stories to anyone who will listen, to our children most especially, and tell them in such a way that they would be able to tell their children. We would speak the truth to each other and to all who shape our common life in this community. We would stand with those who live at the edges of our shared life, and say "Amen!" to their cries of pain and outrage and to their demands for justice. We would cherish and care for the good earth that God has placed in our hands so that it may be a home for our great grandchildren as it was for our great grandparents. We will would the unlovely. We will would the hungry. We will would absolution to the ashamed. We will would up a space in our lives and in our relationships for God's dream to come in and be made real. The result would not be in our hands. First United Methodist Church of Decorah doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to God. Like Mark’s little band of Jesus-followers, we will not succeed by winning or by growing; we will succeed by being faithful.

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.