I preached this sermon to the good people of Davis Lutheran Church while their pastor was on vacation.
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Good morning! If you are just tuning in on the livestream, or watching this back at a later time and are surprised to see me instead of Pastor Jeff, hello! I am Pastor Casey Kloehn Dunsworth, and I am currently serving as the Interim Assistant Rector at the Episcopal Church of St. Martin here in Davis. I am filling in for Jeff this week, as he is away being celebrated for his birthday.
We clergy types often joke that you bring in a guest preacher on the really tricky weeks of the lectionary, so that they can wrestle with them and you don’t have to. Or, conversely, that it’s a risk to have a guest preacher on one of those weeks, because they can say something controversial to your congregation and leave you to deal with the repercussions. Stay tuned to find out which of those this turns out to be!
Our stories this week are apocalyptic, which puts us on the onramp to the season of Advent, a time when the past, present, and future overlap in the coming of the Christ child. This week, we have a story from Daniel, which is the “most apocalyptic book in the Hebrew Bible” and, weirdly enough, we only hear from Daniel three times in our whole three-year-lectionary cycle! This week, next week, and next All Saints Day. Since apocalyptic literature is so much a part of early Christianity, it is really odd that Daniel is so left out. But I guess that’s a story for another day.
We have verses from the Gospel According to Mark that are part of what is known as “The Little Apocalypse”, because they do not reflect the storied end of the literal world, but they reflect an unveiling, a revelation, a seismic shift.
My favorite college professor offered a class called “Revelation and Apocalypse”, and it was just about as epic as that title sounds. But the best thing I learned from it—sorry, Dr. Fogg, if you’re reading this—is that those words mean the same thing. Revelation and apocalypse are synonyms! Revelation comes from Latin, which I have never studied. But it comes from revelare, which means “lay bare” to revelatio, which means “reveal”. Those cognates make sense to our English-speaker ears.
Apocalypse comes from the Greek, which I studied in college and in seminary! Apo- which means “un” and kaluptein, which means “cover”. So, together, apokaluptein, uncover. When Greek merged with Latin into French and later English, we got apokalupsis, and eventually apocalypse. Uncover. Reveal.
When we hear the prophets talk about the apocalypse, we are much more likely to think of end-of-the-world disaster movies, and earthquakes and wars and zombies and stuff. But for Jesus’ first-century Jewish audience, and the eventual hearers and readers of the Gospel According to Mark, that was not what they would have in mind.
Prophecy, in the Hebrew Bible and in the words of Jesus alike, is not fortune-telling. It is not a prediction of future unknowns, discerned from the stars or from tea leaves or from any mystical source. Prophets do not hypothesize about what may come, they tell the truth about the present. They “lay bare” the harsh realities of human brokenness, and “reveal” what is probable and possible as a result.
The Gospel According to Mark was written in approximately 70 CE, either right before or right after the destruction of the temple. The one that, in this story, the disciples are marveling at. We don’t know if this exchange between Jesus and the disciples reflects the downfall of Herod’s empire as it happened, or the prophetic knowledge of its likelihood.
Either way, the disciples enter the scene, so impressed by the temple’s majesty. It is the pet project of Herod the Great, who presided over a sort of Gilded Age. As this massive structure is towering over the people of Jerusalem, they are suffering immensely. The wealthy are showing off while the rest are without work, without food, without the power to change their circumstances. There is a massive Jewish revolt against Rome during this time. This juxtaposition of power and poverty is not unique to this story or to our time.
But as is typical of the disciples in Mark’s telling of the story, they are 100% not on the same page. They are gaping at this epic building, so impressed by how cool it is. I hear them, like kids on a field trip, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” (13:1) Jesus replies, with, I presume, an eye-roll, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” (13:2)
Later, and sort of abashedly, Peter, James, John, and Andrew follow up on this apocalyptic pronouncement. They’re a little dim, but they’re not completely unaware of the tension in the city. They see the Roman occupation with their own eyes. They see the public executions, the shows of military force, the fear mongering. They worry, then, about what Jesus means by his claim that the Temple will fall. What act of war could bring down such a structure? What else would fall with it?
They are being overly literal, here. Jesus is trying to explain to them the difference between the power of God and the power of Rome. This empire, this institution, this human construction, this will not last. The reign of God will outlast any earthly kingdom. And true power does not oppress. True power liberates.
We have to be careful here about slipping into an antisemitic understanding of these verses. Jesus is not saying that Judaism is wrong or that Jews have misplaced values and practices. He is, like all the prophets before him, critiquing his own house from squarely inside it and critiquing the false and ultimately impotent power of empires.
It is not appropriate for us as 21st-century Christians to extrapolate this story of the temple’s impending destruction to be a stand-in for our institutional church’s decline. These are not analogous. The trauma that the Jewish people continue to suffer because of the destruction of the temple and its continued absence from their collective practice is not the same as our wish for a return to the glory days of American Christanity. Maybe that didn’t even cross your mind, but it’s going to be what some sermons are going to be about today, and that’s inappropriate, and I just wanted you to know why that’s not what we’re going to do.
What we are going to do is critique the false and ultimately impotent power of empires.
As 21st-century American Christians, most of us live a completely unrecognizable life compared to Jesus and his contemporaries. Our religious tradition, though it is one among many in our culture, enjoys a hegemonic ubiquity that is truly opposite of their experience. We are free to practice as we please; our holy days are honored on the national calendar; some version of our general tenets is inscribed in the governance of this nation and much of the world, for that matter.
But when we look around, at the systems and structures of our so-called Christian nation, what do we see? When we lift the veil from our eyes and truly see?
We see so much done—sometimes even done in the name of Christ—that makes an absolute mockery of God.
We see white supremacist insurrection at our nation’s capitol.
We see erasure of Indigenous peoples, languages, and cultures.
We see extrajudicial killing of predominantly Black Americans at the hands of the police.
We see climate refugees from one once-in-a-lifetime disaster after another.
We see housing costs and evictions skyrocket in the midst of an unemployment crisis.
We see a mishandled pandemic claim the lives of nearly 800,000 of our fellow Americans.
We see degradation and marginalization based on perceived gender and sexuality.
We see glorification of wealth for the few, made possible only by the exploitation of the many.
We see death.
We see death.
And I know I said that we were gearing up for Advent and so I’m leaping across the church calendar but we are Easter people. We are resurrection people. We are not the people of death. We are the people of a God who lived and who died and who lived again! So what do we, people of life, death, and life again do when the world around us crumbles?
We hold fast to hope.
We do not cling to a hollow and weaponized optimism!
We do not cling to false promises from false prophets!
We are not fooled by those who would lead us astray, who claim to come in the name of Christ, and say, “I am he!” but promise death, and only death.
In our world of death, in our continued suffering, it can be quite easy to wonder, what is the good news?
The good news, my friends, is that the reign of God will come. Jesus will return. The dead will be raised. And the only way out is through.
“The good news of Jesus [can seem false] in the midst of crisis and disaster, and this place is precisely where [we] can imagine a different way forward for humanity. Whenever we hear reports of disaster, [the Gospel, and more precisely, this Little Apocalypse] reminds us to not be led astray by messianic claimants that can not save us; [instead], we [must] look for Jesus.” [1]
It is Jesus the Christ whose reign on earth and in heaven we will commemorate next week, on Christ the King Sunday. It is Jesus the Christ whom we will spend the season of Advent anticipating coming among us as a baby and again at the last day. It is Jesus the Christ whose life, death, and resurrection we tell and retell every week, every season, every year.
There is no other. We cannot be persuaded by American Exceptionalism, by a prosperity gospel, by any shiny version of do-it-yourself pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps salvation. It is the grace of God our Creator, poured out for us in Christ Jesus our liberator, that carries us through.
Jesus knew that this risk would befall us, as it would befall his own friends and disciples. Throughout human history there have been so many who have called themselves saviors, leaders, kings, messiahs, prophets, and gods among men. All of their empires have fallen. In our present and in our future there are more and there will be more. Jesus knew this and we know this.
But we know that there is no God but God, no salvation other than the grace in which we stand firm. And that, dear ones, is the best news there is. Amen.