Things That Last

Isaiah 65:17-25

Luke 21:5-19

Recently, a friend described to me how it felt for him when he saw his childhood church building on fire. He was well into adulthood, married, and ordained to ministry. He no longer attended the church he grew up in. He was pastoring a different church in another city. But when he heard that the old church was on fire it shook him to his core. 

He said to his wife that he wanted to be there. He knew he couldn’t do anything, but he just wanted to bear witness. So he got behind the wheel, his wife in the passenger seat, and he began driving back to his old hometown. As they got close, he could see the flames as they overtook the old building. He told me it was so shocking he almost wrecked the car.

He said, “I knew that it was only a building. I knew that it is we, the community of faith, that are the church. But even knowing that, the feeling was overwhelming.” 

Because places are important to us.

I imagine that Israel felt that way, and even more, every time they endured another hardship.

The Old Testament book of Isaiah tells us of the trials that Israel endured during the 6th century BCE when they were invaded by a powerful enemy – the Babylonians. The city of Jerusalem was protected by strong walls, but the Babylonian army was big enough, powerful enough to wear them down.

They laid siege to the city, surrounded it, trapping the Israelites inside. No one could go in or out. The enemy waited. The people inside the walls went through all their food stores, and the Babylonians waited. They waited until the people inside were starving, and then they waited a little more. 

Finally, they attacked. They trampled, they killed, they set fires. They destroyed the holy temple. The temple that Israel had built with the idea that it would last forever. But now it was no more. It did not last. 

The Babylonians took the Israelites as prisoners and marched them off to Babylon. Which is where they stayed for around 50 years. 

But empires do not last forever; they come and go, and eventually the Babylonian empire was weakened and destroyed by a more powerful ruler. This ruler had a different plan for dealing with its captive Israel.

The plan was to let them go back home. To make them rebuild what had been torn down. And so they did, some of them, 50 years after they have been forced out, return to Israel. They are sent back to rebuild Jerusalem.

Some decades passed, little progress was made, and the people’s resolve was waning. They fought amongst themselves, and they turned away from God. The rebuilding they had accomplished seemed so much less than what they remembered from the glory days of Jerusalem, before the Babylonian invasion. What they had now was a mere shadow of its former self.

And in the midst of this the prophet offers them hope. Isaiah speaks to them of how God will set to right all things, and it will happen imminently. The deliverance of Israel and judgment on their oppressors. Things so glorious … well some might say the prophet went a bit too far, because these things he speaks of, they defy credibility.

He is speaking to them about things that last. And after all they have been through, that might have been hard to imagine. But he gave them hope – hope enough to carry on. 

The temple was rebuilt. The religious life of Israel was restored.

Several hundred years later, there was another new oppressor – the Roman Empire. This oppressor had taken an interest in the temple. King Herod was keen on rebuilding and refurbishing the temple for his own glory, rather than for the glory of God. But it was indeed beautiful, and the people of Israel appreciated it. Worship, study, sacrifices of all kinds still took place there; it was still the center of religious life for the people of Israel. 

But they clearly had a sense now of how things could fall apart. And so they handled their relationship with Rome delicately – treading carefully with the oppressor, so that they might not interfere with their rituals and traditions. The priests, the scribes, the Pharisees and Sadducees went to tremendous pains to maintain a peaceable relationship with the Romans. If they manage it right, they thought, this accommodation, this truce, it might just last forever.

And then Jesus tells them it will not. This temple, it will not last forever either. The day will come when not one stone will be left upon another. Once again, it will be left in ruins. All thrown down.

But a people who have lost so much, so many times, are alarmed when they hear this. No, they think. This cannot be. “When will this happen?” they ask him, “How will this happen? What will be the sign?” Can they prepare for it? Can they possibly avoid the calamity this time?

When Luke was writing, these things had already happened. Those things that Jesus described – the destruction of the temple – were already in the past. This beautiful temple, like the ones before it, did not last.

As many times as we build glorious monuments and as many times as we see them go down – in flames or in dust – we persist in imagining that they should last forever.  But they don’t. I have seen churches die – not from enemy attacks, though. What happens now is that people drift away. Members grow older and eventually die. Sometimes conflict takes over and newcomers shy away. And one day there are two or three people left, and they begin to wonder if this is the end.

We may find it unbearable, the idea that a church could die, because we believe in eternal things. But sometimes we confuse our forms – the things we make – with God’s everlasting promises. 

Nothing made by human hands lasts, no matter how good it is. Temples are destroyed, our church buildings might be emptied, sold, and even torn down to make room for something else. 

Nothing of human creation lasts forever. Our steeples and bells, our stained-glass windows. Our pews. Someday they will be gone. 

None of our human ideas or preferences last forever. Our orders of worship, our musical styles, the things about which we say “we have always done it that way” – even these things will fade.

The church of Jesus Christ is not immune to loss and hardship. Jesus warned his disciples that it would not be easy, and if anyone tried to tell them otherwise? Well, they had better run away from those soothsayers and false prophets. They best not be led astray by anyone who comes along with such false promises.  

But do not be terrified, he says to us. All things on earth will come to an end, but this will not be the end because God’s promises are everlasting.

Not a hair on your head will perish, he says. By your endurance you will gain your souls, he says. For God is making a new heaven and a new earth, and it will be filled with things of life and light and joy.

We see things end … we sometimes are called upon to rebuild, to make something new, like Israel did after their Babylonian exile. Like Jesus’ disciples did after his crucifixion and the empty tomb. Things come and they go, and the Presbyterian Church USA will not last forever, either, I assure you. But that is alright, because God’s promises are everlasting.

We are at a place right now where decisions must be made. Session has shared with this congregation some ideas that are still in development about changes that can be made to the chancel when we receive our new organ console. We finally have architectural drawings, which are a vast improvement over the crude graph paper models we saw a couple months ago. 

We must make some decisions – carefully, thoughtfully, and faithfully. And the honest truth is, we can take as much time as we need to take with this. To act with neither undue haste nor undue delay is the good Presbyterian way. I know that some would like to make the changes yesterday, and some would like to make them never, and some of you really don’t care what the chancel looks like – and that is fine.

I would only ask that, if you do care about this matter, you show a willingness to be a part of a conversation. Share your wisdom and keep your mind open to all the possibilities. Do you believe that God is doing a new thing, just as God has done throughout all history? 

I know that change is hard, all kinds of change, but especially change we don’t want. Perhaps for this reason we have often treated church as a refuge from change. But how could that be so when we know that change is how God ushers us through life?

Whenever we confront change there is risk and also benefit.

The risk when we confront challenges like this is the potential harm to the body of Christ. We can choose to lower the chancel floor, expand it, and any number of other things, and it will not be harmed. Or we can choose to do nothing except make the necessary changes to the floor for the new organ console, and it will not be harmed. Perhaps some of us will be disappointed, whichever way we go.

But there is benefit also. There is actually a hidden gift in times like this. When we find ourselves shocked by change that feels like loss, when we are afraid of what might come or angry about decisions others make, we are given an opportunity to practice faithful disagreement. 

Faithful disagreement is not something we often see. In our culture and in our politics, we see mudslinging and rumor-mongering. On social media we see a style of disagreement that says, “If you don’t agree with me then I don’t want you in my life anymore. Bye!” I see an approach to everything as a zero-sum game, as in, if you win that means I lose. And it saddens me deeply to know that all these things do not stop outside the church door. These unfortunate styles of disagreeing seep into the church too. 

But I see this current disagreement as an opening for us to take a better path, a faithful way. My invitation to you today is to take that path together, because this is what we are called to do in a time such as this. Really, if we paid attention to what Jesus said to his disciples we would surely know that church is no place for complacency. 

The question for reflection I offer you this week is this: If your home or your church home were on fire, what would you prioritize getting to safety. I very much hope that every one of us would say the people. That our priority would be the people.

We are near the end of a season.  Our church year is about to finish. In two Sundays, a new Advent will dawn, with all its anticipation and hope. The vision of the prophet, the promises of Jesus, these are our hope for all eternity.

What are the things that last? As Jesus said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” As Isaiah says, the former things will not be remembered or come to mind.”

Yet, be glad and rejoice forever in what God is creating, for God is always doing something new. 

We Have Some Questions

Job 19:23-27

Luke 20:27-38

I just read a book called The Brief History of the Dead. It takes place in a city that is very much like cities we know. It has cafes and libraries and shops and parks and apartment buildings. There are taxis and delivery trucks, people in cars, people on bikes and skateboards. The city is full of people, all kinds of people doing all kinds of things that people do. 

New people are arriving all the time, this is how it is in a big city. Everyone has a story to tell about how they got there – every journey different from the others. But one thing they have in common is that they are all surprised to find themselves there. They are all from somewhere else. And when they arrive, each one has to begin their life again in this new place. Some of them find a new opportunity to do the work they have always done, others take this chance to try the one thing they always wanted to do but never had the chance before. 

Sometimes people leave the city, but no one knows where they go. They’re just gone one day. But even with the departures, the city seems to keep growing, sprawling out farther in every direction with new apartments, new businesses, new roads.

It’s a city like any other big city. All kinds of people – young and old, from every culture in the world – all just living their lives, forming community. Looking for meaning, as we all do. They are much like us, really. The only thing that makes them different is they no longer have a beating heart. Their hearts are perfectly still.

This is a city of the dead, and none of them are sure why they are here. Or what’s going on. Or if there is anything beyond this.

They figure out pretty quickly that it’s not heaven, because there are still irritating garbage trucks with their beep-beep-beep and their grinding gears waking them too early in the morning. There are still unpleasant odors from garbage that sits out too long. They still encounter rude and nasty people on occasion. Surely there would be none of these kinds of annoyances in heaven. 

But they know that it’s not hell either, because there are bakeries with incredibly good croissants and dogwood trees that blossom in the spring. By process of elimination, they come to the conclusion that this is someplace they’ve never heard about before, someplace they never knew existed.

Someplace between heaven and hell, between life and nothingness.

The people in this city have questions, not surprisingly. Every time a newcomer arrives, they get peppered with questions from people wanting some news from the world they left behind. Do you know my sister? My brother? I’d like to know what happened to them. What’s going on with the wars? Who is fighting who these days? Are there any new sicknesses? Epidemics? Pandemics? What’s it like back there?

They have many questions. In that way, also, they are much like us and people of all times and places.

In both our scripture readings today, human questions live loudly. 

In the gospel story we have the Sadducees. 

If you’re not clear about who the Sadducees were, it’s because we don’t talk about them nearly as much as the Pharisees. But one thing we know about them, because Luke tells us so right here, is that they do not believe in a resurrection. Life after death.

The resurrection was one thing the Pharisees and the Sadducees disagreed on, but there were other things. The Sadducees were the originalists of the time. They insisted that the written law – that is, the collection of laws written in the Torah – is the only law. Nothing could be taken from it or added to it. And it must be interpreted literally. 

The Pharisees, on the other hand, seemed to regard the law as something like a living thing, that needed to be continually examined and reinterpreted. But for the Sadducees, it was carved in stone. Literally and figuratively.

So on this particular day Luke writes about in chapter 20, the Sadducees approached Jesus about the vexing question of marriage in the so-called hereafter. Assuming that there is a hereafter. They come at him with a complex hypothetical that reminds me of a word problem in a math textbook. 

Their question is based on the written law of Moses, of course. If a man dies leaving his wife childless, his brother is obligated to take his deceased brother’s widow as his wife so she may have children. But if he also dies, still leaving her childless, then the next brother must marry her. And so it goes, as long as there be brothers to marry, as long as she remains childless. You’ve heard of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers? This is the Bible version: One Bride for Seven Brothers.

The point of their question, I suppose, is to prove to Jesus that the idea of life after death just didn’t make sense. Because they couldn’t work out the details. This was a math problem with no solution. 

Another reason for this particular question is also worth noting: this law existed because of the importance of carrying on the family line through the generations. A worse fate for a man of Israel would be hard to imagine than to die childless, with no one to carry his name. And, of course, this was particularly important for the Sadducees, who believed that this was the only form of eternal life there could possibly be. To have children who would bear children, and on down the line, was the way one would live on after their death.

This is the searching need behind the Sadducees’ question – legacy. And among the many causes for Job’s distress, this was one of them. In the story of Job, this man lost everything that he had – his livestock, his home, his health, and his children. He lost his present and his future. And, therefore, his past will be lost because there will be no one to carry his memory forward. 

The premise of the story of Job is a flimsy thing, but the point of the story is how we human beings understand suffering. How we respond to loss.

Job responds with questions. He demands some answers.

Job had been raised to believe that if he lived a careful and righteous life, he would reap the rewards; that good fortune follows goodness, and bad fortune befalls the wicked. Job knows quite well that he has not been wicked, because he is a careful, reflective man. He has been obedient in the law, scrupulous in his piety, and up to now, enjoyed all the blessings he had accrued. He has done nothing to deserve this ill fortune, so now he is searching for the complaint department.

His friends are more than glad to step right up. They have nothing more interesting, more urgent, to do. They will pull up a stool, listen to all his complaints and then cheerfully tell him that, in spite of what he thinks to be true, it is obvious: all this harm has come to him solely because of his own transgressions. They don’t know what those transgressions were – they haven’t the slightest idea – but they know that, as sure as night follows day, punishment follows sin. And it’s as clear as anything that Job is being punished – for something.

But Job simply won’t accept that answer; he can’t make that square peg fit into the round hole. He needs new answers. His friends might be full of theological knowledge, but their answers simply don’t ring true. Job knows he did not deserve to suffer so greatly. He knows it in his bones. Job is still searching for answers. 

In the story about that strange city of the dead, the people are also searching for answers. They wonder a lot about the why of it all. Why are they here in this place, together? Why do people sometimes just disappear? And why do they sometimes hear that rhythmic, beating that sounds so much like a heartbeat? The theory that gains the most traction is this: each one of them is living in someone’s memory. That there is at least one human still alive who remembers them, and as long as that person lives, they will not be completely dead. 

I think the writer of this story was perhaps longing for the same thing the Sadducees were longing for, and the same thing that Job was longing for. The same thing that so many of us long for – to have a legacy here on earth. To somehow live on in the only reality we are certain about.

But Jesus suggests we shift our attention elsewhere. Jesus offers an alternative.

His answer to the questioning Sadducees who are so skeptical of the concept of eternal life, is this: Our God is a God not of the dead but of the living. To God, all of the ones we remember are alive. 

Life eternal is in God’s eternal memory and it is offered right here and right now. It will go on, beyond this world, into a realm we are yet to discover. But let us not forget that Jesus, the incarnation of our God, brings eternal life to us, right where we are.

Jesus would like to steer the Sadducees away from their preoccupation with this word problem they have concocted to win their argument. I think he would like to steer them toward more worthy questions. Like, why are we here, now? There are actually many ways we can live to increase love in the world, to walk the path that Jesus laid for us, to walk toward other people, to make caring connections and make more love. This is what the realm of God is all about, and if we seek to enjoy life eternally, in the hereafter, perhaps it would be good to begin allowing ourselves to be shaped into this form right here, right now. Jesus came to bring eternal life, and he didn’t say we needed to wait until we die.

We have a lot of questions. So many questions for which there are no earthly answers. Why do we suffer? Where do we go after we die? Will it be a direct flight, or will we have to make connections along the way? I don’t have the answers for any of these questions.

But here is a better question: What is eternal life? Look at Jesus and you will see. Listen to Jesus and you will know. And here is another question: When does eternal life begin? And the answer: It begins with Jesus; it is right here, right now – because this is where Jesus is – and to infinity and beyond.

The Blessing and the Woe

Luke 6:20-31

There is a story called Ordinary Grace, written by William Kent Krueger. Some of you may recognize the title, because we read it in our monthly book discussion group several years ago. The story is told from the point of view of a man named Frank looking back on one particular summer in his childhood. It was 1961 in a small town in Minnesota. He was 13 years old, his brother Jake was 9. And in that summer, they confronted death for the first time.

It wasn’t as though they knew nothing of death, actually. Their father was a minister, and they had been to plenty of viewings and funerals in their childhood already. But this summer was different. There were four deaths this summer for these young boys: lives taken by tragic accident, by violence, by unknown causes. Four deaths they met at close proximity. All four, lives taken too soon.

And throughout the story there is the question of faith – and grace. How does faith carry us through times of loss? How does God’s grace bless us in such times?

The experience of loss is one of the inevitable elements of human life. No matter who you are. No matter how much your life might be characterized by blessing, no matter how much it might be characterized by woe. 

No matter who you are, you will know loss.

The experience of pain is something that comes to all of us – physical, spiritual, emotional. We will all, at some time, have the need for relief, for healing, for comfort.

Here is a dimension where life is leveled out. You know it when you go to a hospital. The rich, the poor, the young and the old. No one is exempt. There isn’t necessarily a hierarchy for suffering. We all share it in common.

And this was the make-up of the crowd that gathered around Jesus that day Luke writes about in chapter 6. There was a great multitude of people who came to Jesus – to hear him, to be healed by him, to be rid of the unclean spirits that troubled them. So he came down to a level place to be amidst them – all of them. The blessed and the woeful.

The weeping and the laughing, the hated and the admired, the rich and the poor, the full and the hungry. Everyone who had need were there. They were all represented in the crowd that day.

They have to be there. Because Jesus is speaking to all of them.

I think perhaps when we read the list of blessings and woes in these verses we try to locate ourselves in them, and the people we know. Who am I? Am I one of the poor who can look forward to seeing the kingdom of God, or am I one of the rich who has already received my consolation? Am I one of the hungry who will, someday, be filled, or am I one of the full who will be hungry? The crying or the laughing? The reviled or the respected? 

And I have to say, in these forced-choice questions I don’t know if any of them are all that appealing. You know? 

Would you like your reward now or later? Yes, please. Thank you.

But perhaps the reality of this scene is that you can’t sort the people into these groups – the blessed on the right, the woeful on the left. Because they are all together there in their need, their urgent need for Jesus. 

Picture this scene. A great multitude gathered on a level place, a plain. All of them after the same thing, all of them pressing against one another. There is no way of sorting them into categories, they are all one – one mass of humanity. And Jesus steps down into the middle of it. To be among the blessed and the woeful.

All of them, no matter how blessed are how woeful they feel, need something. Comfort, healing, wholeness, peace.

Perhaps Jesus wasn’t really contrasting two categories of people. Perhaps he was speaking to the truths that co-exist in every human life. Poverty and riches, tears and laughter, fullness and hunger, fellowship and loneliness.

In Ordinary Grace Frank looks back on that summer of 1961 from the vantage point of his years. In the beginning he tells us that, even though you might think that he would look back on that summer as tragedy, this was not the case. Yes, it was tragic in some ways. But there were also blessings, there were lessons, there were miracles.

The story he tells includes the stories of the deaths, but also the stories of love and unfolding glories; the stories of small triumphs, like when Frank gets the better of the town bully – but then also the fear of how the bully might get his vengeance. The story leaves sparks of light throughout, giving the boys glimpses of goodness where they had previously only seen ugliness; of weakness where they had only seen strength; of vulnerability where they had only seen toughness. All falling on Frank and Jake like little drops of grace. 

It is a story of growing up to learn that the world doesn’t allow the sorting of lives into categories of the blessed and the woeful, for each life is touched by both blessing and woe. And the miracle is that in the sorrows we sometimes even receive some blessing.

At the end of the story we catch up with Frank as a mature man, as he describes the Memorial Day ritual he, Jake, and their father carry out each year. They all gather at the cemetery in that small town where they lived in the summer of 1961. They carry with them lavish amounts of flowers, for all the graves they will decorate – a multitude of lives they will remember. The dearly beloved, those whom they were close to; the man whose name they didn’t even know – an itinerant whose body was found near the river where the boys liked to play; the ones whom they might have felt some responsibility for; and the town bully – the one who tormented them throughout their childhood, about whom they discovered only at his death just how alone he was in his life.

We are all, every one of us, among the blessed and the woeful. As the writer of Ecclesiastes says, there is a time for every purpose under heaven – a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. We will all walk through all these things, and we are all in this together.

There is no better place to discover this than in church, where we gather together to celebrate our joys and hold one another up in our grief. We share tears and we help each other see the glimpses of blessing to be found everywhere. We sing and laugh together – and sometimes even dance – all of this in some melding together of delight and wistfulness.

We are all together in this, and Jesus is right here with us too. On that day when a great multitude clamored to reach him, he stepped down onto the plain to be right in there with them. 

He is always right here with us too.