Faith Survives the Falling

Mark 13:1-8

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

That is the collect of the day, the prayer intended to collect our individual prayers and draw them into conversation with the prayers of the whole community and the assigned scriptures of the day. This particular collect is often recommended for praying before studying scripture, or preparing a sermon, or leading a Bible study. This prayer reminds us of who inspired Holy Scripture to be written and for what purpose. It allows us to petition God for a well-rounded and in-depth relationship with our sacred texts, not for their own sake but for the sake of the hope we have been given in Jesus. It places us in the posture of disciples, of students who must take responsibility for our studies while also acknowledging the source of all our knowledge and the well-spring of our desire to keep learning. I’ve prayed this prayer each time I sat down to read or write for this sermon, and I have repeated it again this morning in the sure and certain hope that God hears and responds to prayer. May God grant us so to hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the living Word this morning and every day of our lives.

Our Gospel passage this morning sets us a challenge, if we are to faithfully read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it. It is short and with little context, with multiple settings and a somewhat perturbed Jesus. It is a preamble to a much longer sermon of Jesus that we rarely hear read in church, both because it is so long and because it’s honestly a bit scary. Jesus is mere days from his arrest and execution, and his preaching gets a bit dark. He goes on to warn his closest friends of the violence they will endure, the persecution and martyrdom of believers that will impact every one of them. It is clear that the good teacher is doing what he can to prepare his unwitting disciples for the chaos and grief that is to come, as well as the joy and new life that follows. We hear one small snippet of this long goodbye lesson, and are called by our prayer to find the blessed hope within it.

“Look teacher! What large stones and what large buildings!” God bless the dear disciple who stood awestruck before one of the greatest wonders of the ancient world and wanted nothing more than to share in its beauty with his teacher. The temple in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus was magnificent, a marvel of architecture and design built of impossibly large stones hewn and moved by countless human hands, embellished with gold and bustling with activity at all times. Given that most of Jesus’s disciples were small town folks, we cannot blame the unnamed disciple for being a bit bowled over by the magnitude of the temple complex. It must have seemed invincible, indestructible, as big as God himself. To stop and stare was inevitable. But Jesus is never one to miss a teachable moment.

“Do you see these great stones? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” The temple in which Jesus read scripture and preached and taught and debated with fellow Jewish leaders took nearly 50 years to complete, and would be destroyed by violence within one lifetime. Perhaps Jesus is in this moment looking upon the same structure as his friends and seeing what is to come, the revolutions and rebellions and persecutions and desecrations and conflicts that would continue to take place on the ground beneath his feet. Where his disciples see with starry eyes walls as solid as mountains, Jesus may see only stones that will become rubble and faith that will be shaken. The things we believe to be most permanent, most immovable and unchanging, Jesus knows are fragile. He sees how everything will come down, fall apart, change, and be made new. This is the sermon he is moved to offer, the lesson for his disciples. You see these stones? They will come down. It will all come down. But it will not be the end.

When they have come away from the crowded streets of Jerusalem, with the Temple still in view in all its splendor, the disciples ask Jesus for more. When will this be? How will we know the time is coming? In the face of the unknown, they grasp for a sense of control, a sense of certainty about what is to come. What Jesus gives them in answer does not satisfy them, nor may it satisfy us today. False witnesses and self-made prophets capable of leading the people of God astray? History is full of them. Wars and rumors of wars- too many to count. Earthquakes, famine- it seems there are more by the year. Jesus doesn’t even mention plagues or pandemics or extinction or climate change or arms races, though plenty of the faithful have made the connection. The disciples asked, how will we know? And Jesus tells them that when the sky feels like its falling, when the world feels like it is ending; that is only the beginning of the laboring. Terrible and scary and devastating and disappointing things will happen, Jesus assures us. It will all fall down. Do not be alarmed.

Do not be alarmed? It seems to me that Jesus spends an awful lot of time saying alarming things like “I’m going to die” and “You’re going to suffer” and “The world as you know it will come crashing down.” Do not be alarmed? This is the part where I have to go back to our collect for the day, before I get stuck staring incredulously at Jesus just like the rest of his disciples so often did. That we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ. We have to look again, and look a little harder, because we have been assured that where Jesus is, there our hope can be found. When Jesus stands up and says it will all fall apart, he says it on the path to the cross. He’s not only talking about the world as we know it. He’s talking about his own life. He’s talking about Easter.

Jesus was arrested and falsely accused, betrayed and abandoned by his friends. Jesus was executed by the state for the crime of giving hope to the poor and the oppressed. In the devastation and destruction of the tomb, Jesus was buried. And in the morning he rose.

Do not be alarmed when it seems the world is ending. Do not be alarmed when it seems we have been left alone. Because faith survives the falling, and God rises in the rubble. The Word of God survives the persecution of Empires and the violence of colonizers and the desecration of temples and the closing of churches and the changing of the times. Love survives even the death of our bodies. This is the message Jesus offers his disciples in the face of uncertainty, change, and chaos. This is the blessed hope to which we must hold fast. We are called to bear witness in the ruins, because God has promised that something new will always rise. The world will shout that the end is nigh, the sky is falling and we have been forsaken. But not us. Not you, and not me, and not the Church. We will stand sure in the knowledge that resurrection comes in the morning, that our God is faithful and in Christ even endings are only the beginning.