This Week: Proper 28B
Gospel: Mark 13:1-8
At the end of the liturgical year, as we finish the festivities of Halloween and prepare for the joyful feasting of Thanksgiving in the United States, we are met at church by some of the darkest readings we get all year.
The end of the year in the lectionary cycle is then met at the beginning of the new year with the same apocalyptic talk.
An apocalypse is a revealing, which, in the Christian context isn’t supposed to be inherently bad or scary. It is supposed to be about the uncovering of the sin in the world and the grace of God. But if we think about that for two seconds, we can see why it always ends up being pretty dark.
My experience of this time of year is dealing with the tension at the heart of apocalypse: that it is speaking the truth. And it is speaking a truth that we might not actually want to face. There is a natural discomfort with the nature of this truth-telling and therefore, there is a natural challenge for the messenger who has to share this truth-telling.
Don’t shoot the messenger!
Let’s be honest, the preacher is in a bind here. Because people want the truth, but not when it conflicts with their presuppositions. This spells trouble for the church in the West in particular, but the rest of the world isn’t immune to this dynamic, because we’ve built the Protestant era on the attraction model, meaning people go to the places they want to go, not to where they need or are supposed to go. The attraction model reinforces attraction, not truth. And truth-telling is only welcome when it is attractive.
What is attractive can change. It does so regularly.
Jonathan Edwards, the great 18th Century preacher was known for his fiery sermons, preaching the quintessential “fire and brimstone” sermon that continues to serve as a template for many American preachers. There is a strange attraction to being told you are rotten and going to hell. But, given an attraction to dictators who will quite literally dictate what people are to do and some people gleefully vote for them, we shouldn’t assume it is only people into BDSM.
And yet, this is attractive precisely because it doesn’t conflict with political views about the role of government, for instance, or the nature of our society. It doesn’t challenge how we actually treat each other in the real world; in fact, it often excuses our worst behaviors with the suggestion that we are all vile sinners in need of redemption. A fact that is no less true for serial killers as for beloved grandmas baking cookies in the eyes of this theological conviction.
For many, the opposite is true. The threat of leaving in response to any bit of truth-telling in anyway is offered as a normal, justified behavior in whole swaths of the Christian church. That suggesting maybe we not be on the side of genocide, for example, is met as “too political” and reason to go church shopping.
The fact that Jesus is pretty clearly anti-genocide doesn’t seem to matter. In a culture in which we’re not allowed to call anything a genocide because it is too divisive chills the opportunity to speak clearly of what Jesus says.
The literalism divide
This raises the hilarious consequence of the attraction era—that it isn’t just evangelicals reading the gospel literally, which creates an impossible dualistic relationship to scripture and reality, but it is the inherent literalism of the mainline that goes unexamined.
Mainliners are fond of speaking of it as literal vs. metaphorical, but even this is a literal examination of scripture, inviting a false binary between how to read something as a choice between one approach or a singular other. But there are more than two ways to see things; just ask three people.
The attraction church is devoted to keeping the words of Jesus in the mouth of Jesus. Meaning, we don’t necessarily want to accept them all as our own.
When Jesus speaks about the wealthy having a nearly impossible path to heaven, the church will let Jesus say that and then turn around and try to say the opposite to one another. Mostly because the wealthy are usually our biggest givers in raw dollars.
As long as the words remain in Jesus’s mouth, we’re OK. When we start to make them be about us and what we want, that’s when people get pissed off. So we often turn to metaphor to keep them literal for Jesus and metaphorical for us, offering an interpretation that excuses wealth, for example, or forgives the exploitative arrangements of our lives.
A challenging example
In recent years, Christians have begun acknowledging who possessed the land our churches sit on before it was “discovered” or “owned” by settlers claimed it for their own. This obviously isn’t a movement that stems from scripture (and we have some Hebrew Scripture that has celebrated similar claims in history), but one that stems from trying to wrestle with the actual living out Jesus values of repentance and reconciliation. And similarly, trying to take seriously commands from Jesus to sell possessions, give the money to the poor, and follow him.
When Jesus talks about the challenges to come, the apocalyptic vision of the end, how honest are we being to ourselves, to our neighbors, and to God that we are listening to him? To things he is showing us?
Jesus just spent the last two chapters railing against the way the Temple’s leaders are exploiting the people. And how do the disciples respond to this? Wow, what a big Temple!
Our willingness to avoid—and to punish those who don’t protect that avoidance—is immense. Maybe as big as the Temple. And, just like the Temple, is subject, not to our fantasies, but to the truth.
As followers of Jesus, our conviction is to listening. Even when we’d rather not. And what he has told us a thousand times before is to love. Would today be any different?