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.