Boy Jesus

Text: Luke 2:41-52

Perhaps, when Jesus and the scholars in the Temple were talking about scripture, they were talking about sea monsters.

In the Hebrew Bible that Jesus knew, there are a lot of sea monsters. As there are in psalm 148 which we just sang. And in Job: the Leviathan that God made for fun.

And other great stories: There are giants in Genesis and Deuteronomy, like King Og (which is a great name for a giant king).

There are battles won with courage, with bravery, with trickery, and with technology (like the one at Jericho). And there are stories of other remarkable twelve-year-old boys, like David, the shepherd who defeated another great giant and who turned out to be a king, or Samuel who was the first great prophet.

The Bible has some terrific stories for a young man or woman of Jesus’ age. Plus, that age is a time of real and intense wondering about God and how the heavens and the earth all fit together. It is not all that surprising that Jesus liked to spend time with the teachers in the Temple, talking about scripture and asking questions and listening to the answers.

This strange interlude on the First Sunday after Christmas falls in the lectionary between two birth stories: the first on Christmas Day with the shepherds and the manger and the second on Epiphany with the arrival of the three kings. So we jump in our readings from birth to emerging adult and back to birth.

This story about young man Jesus appears only in Luke. There is some thought (based on the words and writing style) that it might have been inserted into Luke from some other source. In many ways this story duplicates the one that appears in Luke just before it. That story, in which Jesus is still just a baby, happens in the Temple as this one does. People are amazed at his presence, just as in this one. His parents don’t get it, just as in this one. His mother Mary treasures in her heart the things she hears and sees, just as she does in this one. And in the end, the story notes that Jesus got older and wiser, just as this one does.

So, why is it here? There are other “Jesus as boy” writings, but in books which never made it into the canon of the Bible because of their questionable authority. The best known is called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. In it Jesus does miraculous and sometimes not very nice things, things appropriate to a energetic, curious child who is a little unruly.

These stories are almost certainly written to help people fill in a not very complete picture of the person of Jesus. We know him from the birth stories in Luke and Matthew, and as an adult preacher, but nothing of the years between that in our own lives are so influential and revealing.

The purpose of these stories is not, as we sometimes suppose, to prove that Jesus as a boy was really God. It is rather the opposite: to show that Jesus whom we now know as God was really a boy. Did boy-things. Was 100% human even as divine, even when a young person.

In the story in Luke, Jesus amazes the teachers and confounds his parents. It does not take a divine child to do that. Twelve-year-old children are amazing no matter what. They are as able as young king David or young prophet Samuel. They know lots about many complicated things. They become geeks (even church geeks, like Jesus) or fledgling scholars or jocks—all at once. They read and remember like crazy. They have sophisticated ideas about things. They ask penetrating questions, as I’m sure Jesus did, and listen closely to the answers, and are good at finding bugs and flaws in arguments.

And they can be adventurous and unruly and as oblivious of their parents as Jesus was. And as mysterious to their parents as Jesus was to his. They did not understand him, it says. Others saw in him what his parents did not, as often happens.

What we celebrate in these stories is not the adult Jesus who is teacher and savior and divine presence among us. There are lots of other times to do that. What we celebrate is the child of promise that is in every human young man or woman. We see and treasure in our hearts the amazing present and potential future in these children. None of us know any more than Mary did for sure what will happen. But we expect and pray that every twelve-year-old, not just the divine son of God, will grow in years and, we hope, in wisdom and divine and human favor.

These stories remind us forcefully that Jesus was human as well as divine. It seems weird that we should have to do that. It would seem that we would be called more often to defend the divinity of Jesus, not his humanity. But Christians have long had a tendency to embrace the God side of “God incarnate” and to deny or evade the incarnate side. Early heresies made it as if Jesus were God in human clothing—or like Zeus, a god disguised as something else—and we sometimes speak and act even now as if that were how it worked. Lutherans can claim to be virtuous in this regard, being especially adamant about the 100% human, 100% God doctrine. But not so consistently that we can pat ourselves on the back about it.

There is in church jargon something called the “scandal of particularity.” What this means is that Jesus was not a general God-presence in the world but a particular person in a particular time born to a particular family. It was scandalous because how could the infinite God be in a finite person. He was a particular little baby, with round cheeks or not, bald or not, chubby or not, cranky or not. He was a particular twelve-year-old boy, doing twelve-year-old things, getting into trouble, knowing stuff, fighting (maybe) with his brothers, amazing his parents and astonishing his teachers in a particular way.

There is no scandal in particularity. All creatures, all humans are particular, individual, great and strange. If God is to be human, God must be, for us, a particular one.

It is important to our faith that we do not let Jesus become a God who is just a kind of divine, magical, privileged tourist in our foreign, human land. We need, and thankfully we have, a God who likes to read about sea monsters as much as likes to create them.

A Tough Kid, God Remembers

Text: Luke 1:39-55

The story of the Bible is the story of God. Not the whole story of God, which starts long before us, and ends long after us, and encompasses much more than we will ever know. But it is the part of God’s story that has to do with people on this earth. Can we tell a story of God that has nothing to do with us? Maybe. But maybe not. What we do affects God and changes God; we are part of God’s story. But can we tell our story without God in it? Probably not, being creatures of God; though we do try.

The story of the Bible is the story of God. The story of Jesus is, for us, a big part of that story. The story of the birth of Jesus is a high point in that story. But it is by no means the only point.

And for Luke, at the beginning of the story of Jesus is the story of Mary.

Mary was a tough kid from a rough neighborhood. Joseph, her fiancee, was a carpenter—not an admired craftsperson but low on the economic ladder, a rung below subsistence farmer. She was probably a young teenager, thirteen or fourteen years old. It was not a good time to be a Jew in Palestine. Roman soldiers walked the streets, crucifixion was common for minor crimes, like not knowing your place or talking out loud about a time when Israel would be restored to its former greatness. Or your hope for a messiah, a descendant of great King David, to rescue you.

We rightly celebrate what we see as Mary’s willingness to do God’s will in the matter of the birth of God into this world. But this is not a no-brainer for Mary. It is clear from the story that Gabriel’s announcement is really more like an invitation than a command. It is a mark of Mary’s character that she agrees: I am the Lord’s servant, Mary answers. May your word to me be fulfilled. And she sings a song, called Mary’s song, which we also call the Magnificat.

The miracle of Mary as mother of God is not that she was a virgin. In those days stories of virgin birth were a dime a dozen. The miracle was that God would choose someone with such low net worth in the currencies that mattered: property, heritage, gender, education, and age. The scandal of Mary was not about her virginity but about her lot in life and her political position. We see a poetic beauty in Mary’s story, but people of Jesus time found the whole thing to be, as one scholar said, just another reason to think that Christianity was bizarre. The only status she had in the world was, it turned out, her relationship with God. This would have been a big reason why her relative Elizabeth was so surprised.

Mary’s song starts with Mary. It is all about her at the start. Me, me, me; the word appears five times in the first four verses. Great things for me. All generations will call me blessed, and so forth. Really, this seems fair. Mary is as non-plussed as Elizabeth was and as future readers would be. But these verses are just joyful preamble.

Mary knows, as all prophets know, that calls like this rarely benefit the prophets. God’s choice of Mary does not stem from some special goodness in her, but rather from some special goodness in God. The world is about to change, and Mary has a part. But as a prophet, Mary knows that the going will not be easy. Even as young as she is, it seems to me that she understands that being the mother of Jesus will be hard and come to a difficult end. She answers the call out of courage.

God is using Mary to change the way things go. Something is out of kilter. The poor are hungry and the rich have much. The powerful abuse their power over the lowly. The poor are not poor because they are just unfortunate, victims for whom circumstance has not been kind. They are instead victims of ungodly acts of others. This was not God’s plan for things in the story of God and us. Prophets had condemned Israel for this before, and God had intervened before.

The hungry, the lowly, and the outcast are needy. They need something. For them, the world is broken. Things need fixing up, they need repair. The people need salvation, which means rescue and healing. The poor and lowly need a savior, someone to see that God’s plan is enacted.

The rich and powerful do not. They have no sufficient need to plead for help. They do not welcome the same savior as the poor. They are proud in the imagination of their hearts, says the King James version of the Bible. In their inmost thoughts, says another. In their haughty thinking of their hearts, say one more. This is not about their feelings; the heart was the center of thought. It is how they think. They think they do not need God or to do what God wishes. They give themselves credit. And they do not think that by oppressing and exploiting others they oppose God. Or they do not care. Either way, it’s an issue.

This imbalance between those who need much and those who have much is a central theme of Luke. As we have heard in the Gospel readings all Advent. And of the ministry of Jesus in general. And before that, of the law and the prophets. It runs through the story of God and us in the Bible.

It is political, for it is about power. But it is not revolutionary in itself. Luke is not hoping for the obliteration of one group of powerful, wealthy people to be replaced by some other group of people who then become powerful and wealthy. The hope is that the vertical becomes horizontal. The distinctions we make that allow the rich and the poor to have such different lives are not distinctions that God makes.

In Mary’s song God remembers God’s mercy, and recalls the promises made to God’s people. It is God’s memory that is being celebrated here. And justice is a part of God’s story and of God’s promise to God’s people. It is the prospect of broken justice repaired that is celebrated here.

We think of this song as a hopeful predictor of the future. Mary sings, we think, because she has high expectations for the child she will bear. But as someone mentioned in Bible study last week, the verbs are all past tense. This is a song about what God has already done. It is hopeful. It proves that our hopes are not foolish or bizarre, but grounded in the story of God and us up to now. God has been effective. We trust God will continue to be.

This song is the reading for this last Sunday in Advent because it anticipates the birth of Jesus. But Jesus is not even mentioned in Mary’s song at all. He appears only by reference discovered by the imaginations of our hearts. All the hopes of which Mary sings are met in the coming child. God continues to be with us.

Christians live under a promise of a new way of being. For some, that seems absurd, yet another reason to think Christianity to be bizarre. Things go on, and what has been is what will be. There may be hope, but to the cynical we are whistling in the dark. But it is part of the fabric of our faith, the plot of God’s story, to be naive enough to think that God has something in store for this world that will save it and will heal it.

Thanks be to God.

The Shame on Us Good News

Text: Luke 3:7-18

You brood of vipers! You sons and daughters of serpents! You children of snakes!

What kind of people would find these words to be good news? What kind of person would take the scolding that John gives them and interpret it as gospel? Who after hearing such reproaches would then turn to John for guidance?

Recognized as a prophet, imagined by some to be the savior of Israel, John draws huge crowds in the wilderness. He preached repentance, a change of direction; and he baptized people in the river. All sorts of people came to see and hear and be washed by him. Crowds of Jews and probably pagans, despised and cheating tax collectors, Roman soldiers enjoying the wicked privileges of an occupying army. All came to hear John.

By calling them children of vipers, John shames them. He makes them ashamed of themselves. John is not trying to create ill will among the crowd, within the people of the crowd. Instead, he is exposing what they already know. John is not creating a feeling in the people that they do not already have. He is naming an unpleasant conviction that they already hold but have forgotten, or have hidden, or are denying.

The people are ashamed because of what they have done and allowed to be done. Sorrows they have caused and injustices they have let happen. Injustices caused and sorrows they have not prevented. They should be ashamed. We should be ashamed. Shame on us that people starve. Shame on us that people have no place to live. Shame on us that people wage war. Shame on us that some have very much and some next to nothing. Shame on us for obscene violence.

Shame is not the same as guilt. Guilt is in the acts done or left undone, and the relief is in forgiveness. Guilt is the result of works. But shame is Sin with a capital “S.” Shame is about our being. It is how we are saints and sinners at the same time. Forgiven and shamefaced at the same time. We are forgiven our sins, but we remain sinners.

We can feel—or be—not guilty, innocent, and still feel shame for our group, institution, nation, or the world.

Guilt moves us to remorse and apology. Shame moves us to seek a new way of being. We confusingly use the one word, repentance, for both things. But the repentance that comes out of guilt is regret and the repentance that comes from shame is transformation.

The crowds do not apologize. Instead, they ask “What then, should we do?” It is revealing and important that they do not argue with John. They do not equivocate or explain or defend themselves. They do not mock his unreasonable idealism. Nor do they fall into despair or discouragement. They are ashamed. They know that John knows them. John has spied them out correctly. Their eagerness to know what to do now comes straight from their recognition that John is right. In that case, they ask, what shall we do? What, then—in that case, and in particular—what then shall we do?

John responds in the spirit of the question. His answers have nothing to do with feelings and nothing to do with belief. They have to do with what to do. There are three groups in the passage—perhaps standing for the large variety of sorts of people. And for each, John has a different answer. To the crowd: Be economically fair. If you have two coats, give one to a person who has none. To the tax collectors—who in these times ran a kind of protection racket: do not use your position of authority to rob from others. To the soldiers: do not use your threat of power to oppress the people and exploit their fear of you. John advises in favor of fairness, generosity, and humility and against injustice, greed, and dominance. But not in the general—which gets us nowhere; it is like saying “be good”—but in the specific.

Lutherans make the distinction between law and gospel. But this does not mean that the law—rules of behavior and ethics—are inferior to and superseded by the Gospel, or are trivial in light of God’s grace and forgiveness. There is good news in the law, and the law is useful. There are lots of exhortations and advice and commandments and teachings about behavior in the Bible and are part of our faith.

The law, things that tell us what is good to do, convict us. That is, they remind us that what we are doing is not always so great. In that way, they shame us as John’s words shamed the crowd. They discover us hiding behind ramparts of privilege and wealth, ancestry (“We have Abraham as our ancestor!” the crowd thinks), and also competence, good will and good intentions and fine gestures. All the things we use to duck from our shame. The law does not condemn these things—they are often a part of us—but it does treat them as beside the point. The laws reveal us inside the ramparts, which is both embarrassing and good.

And the law also keeps us attentive to other things and places and people of the world. If we are to share our second coat with people who have none, we have to seek and see those people. If we are to visit the prisoners—a kind of law Jesus mentions—then we have to find them. If we are to avoid cheating people, we have to see how what we do cheats them. We have to be aware of how things work and, in our world, how we are connected. The law is a pointer in the right direction.

The law tells us how to live good. It is a rudimentary but fundamental set of instructions. We need to know this stuff and pay attention to it.

The reason the crowd responds with eagerness and not with anger or dismay is that what John is saying is calling to them. That—a calling—is the root of the word “exhortation” in this passage. The people are ashamed. They—we—know this deeply. We are called to act, moved by what we already know deep within us and from the conscience of our traditions. We are given instructions, which are a gift to us.

These words are good news—gospel—not so much, or not only, because they are a summary of what John has just said. But because they are an introduction to the story about to unfold.

This expectation of a coming guide, a trustworthy companion, and an unfolding of a new world, is what makes Mary and the shepherds and the kings we are about to encounter in the next ten days so joyful. In times of trouble and shame, they represent a hope that we are at the beginning of a new way to live.

Out of the Puddle

Text: Luke 3:1-6
Other texts: Luke 1:68-79

In the middle of today’s psalm there is a hinge. On one side, the song looks back at God’s promises to God’s people. A reminder to us and to God. A quoting of past prophets. On the other side, it looks forward to the fulfillment of that promise. A new prophet. A new way.

The psalm connects the past to the future. The psalm sits in the middle of the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth and their new son John. In the verses before it, the mood is dark. There is sadness in Israel, occupied by Rome, living under a repressive power. There is sadness in the family of Zechariah and Elizabeth, who wish to have a child but cannot. The story is seamed with national and personal doubt, disappointment, and discouragement.

Into this mood steps an angel, Gabriel. Gabriel announces that Zechariah and Elizabeth will have a son, even though they are old. Gabriel announces that their child will restore Israel, even though it is defeated. Zechariah does not believe the angel on either count, and for this he is rendered mute. He cannot speak.

Yet things change. Elizabeth becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a son, and Zechariah, now both humble and joyful, is freed to speak, and he sings the song that is the psalm.

Zechariah sings a song both of memory and of restoration. In the first half, he gently reminds God in our hearing that God had promised to protect Israel and keep it safe from its enemies. He mentions Abraham and great King David. He recalls God’s oath to free Israel so that it might worship in freedom.

Yet, by the time Luke’s Gospel was written, it was pretty clear that things had to change, were changing. Conditions that had prevailed for centuries no longer did. Things that had once worked no longer did. Trying to do the same things over and over and expecting different results had proved fruitless. The Temple in Jerusalem, God’s house, had been destroyed twice, and for good this time. The land which once was Israel’s was occupied by someone else. Jerusalem, the city of David, no longer ruled. Israel was bullied and oppressed. This was not how it was supposed to be.

So in the second half of Zechariah’s song, he explains that the promise of God is to be renewed. His son, John, will be a prophet to the people. Teaching them how—giving them the knowledge, it says—how to restore God’s people. And John does teach them.

John, after he grows up a bit, preaches, it says, a baptism of repentance. It is the right message for the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth and for the times. Repentance means to change direction. To change one’s thinking, or to discover a new way of thinking.

It was no surprise that John was out in the wilderness. For Israel, the wilderness was a fertile ground for transformation. The wilderness was the stage on which the exodus from Egypt was played. In the wilderness the Law was given to Moses and the people. In the wilderness the people of Israel were transformed from a enslaved, nomadic people into a nation with a permanent home. The home the Romans now occupied.

For Israel, the wilderness represented both a reminder of Israel’s beginnings and a reminder that when God steps in, the world can be transformed.

John preaches about transformation—a baptism for the repentance of sins. For us today, and for the people who heard John, the word repentance has many meanings.

It could mean, for one, personal regret—that you were sorry for something you did or didn’t do. Or it could mean that you changed your mind about something, based on new knowledge. Or it could mean (though not so much these days) that you’ve taken part in a rite of penance. A lot of John’s audience would have heard it in theses ways.

But its unlikely that that’s what John meant.

The word that we translate repentance means a change of mind, a change of thinking. But not just the intellectual mind, also the emotional mind and the spiritual mind. For John, the word means a change in the whole being of a person. To repent means to see things in a whole new way. It means conversion. To repent is to be more than fixed up; it means to be transformed.

In trying to explain what John is doing, Luke quotes Isaiah about road building, about trying to get across valleys and over mountains.

We can fall into places as dark and depressed as a ravine. There we find ourselves with all the trash that gathers around us in our lives. Bits of envy and hatred. Pieces of greed and self righteousness. Tangles of worry and obsession.

And we can be flummoxed by obstacles as tall as mountains. Things that once seemed easy seem difficult. Things that were once challenging seem impossible. We are afraid to move ahead, fearful of the beasts that might lie ahead, imaging what will happen. What if we take a risk and get into trouble? We are not so sure we can find a way through.

It happens, to institutions, to systems, to nations as easily as it happens to us.

It is tempting at times like these to fix things with minor adjustments to the way we have always done things. To make improvements. Or to deny the need for repentance.

For John, and for Jesus following him, repentance is not business as usual, only in a better, nicer way. For John, and for Jesus, to repent means to change what is important to you. To turn your back on those things which so far have demanded your loyalty. It is to turn to God unconditionally and to turn away from all that is against God. Not just things that are evil, but all things that make it impossible to turn to God.

Luke was right to quote Isaiah here. For John, trying to change your life in the ways we usually do is like building trestle bridges over the ravines, constructing hairpin switchbacks on mountain roads, and putting better signs at the confusing intersections. What John preaches is a world in which the ravines are all filled up, the mountains all made low, the crooked roads made straight. It is a world transformed.

What makes Zechariah so joyful is not that his son John will berate people about their past evil—although he does, as we’ll hear next week. The song is joyful because the repentance that John will preach promises—as to Zechariah sings at the end—promises to bring light to those those who live in darkness and despair, and to put our feet on the path of peace.

There is a purpose to John’s preaching, and it is not to make us feel bad. It is to encourage us not to sit in a puddle of discouragement and defeat. It is to remind us that we are not condemned to live out everlasting disfunction.

God visits us, it says in the psalm. We can take God seriously. When God comes to visit, the world cannot remain unchanged.

Kings and Truth

Text: John 18:33-38

Today is the last Sunday in the church year. It is called Christ the King Sunday. You may think it is an ancient feast day of the church, as most of our Sunday feast days are. But it is not. The name (and the topic) was an invention of Pope Pius the XI in 1925. That was a tough time for the Western world, and especially Europe, which had just recently fought the first World War and was on the verge of the Great Depression. Peace and justice did not reign. Pius felt that faithful people needed to be reminded that Jesus was their guide, not only on the heavenly trail but in people’s private and public lives in this world. In a time when earthly kings were falling, we needed a more trustworthy one.

We modern types do not have much respect for kings and kingship. So people have—and I have—sometimes called today the Realm of Christ Sunday, or the Reign of Christ Sunday. In one sense, this is more to the point. Jesus never liked or wanted the title of king, referring when necessary to the kingdom more than the king. He does it in today’s Gospel verses. But in another sense what people are looking for, talking about, and afraid of in the Gospels and especially in John, is King Jesus. A person with power who can command fealty, who is wise, and who leads us with goodness to mercy and justice.

The question of Jesus as king dominates this part of the Gospel of John. In a couple of dozen verses John presents seven scenes declaring or questioning Jesus’ identity or ambitions as king. In today’s verses, the issue puts Pilate on the spot.

Pilate is the emperor’s—Caesar’s—man in Palestine. Pilate seems confused. He walks back and forth. He cannot really imagine that this man Jesus pretends to be a king—or The King in John. Are you the king? You can see Pilate’s disbelief and disdain. How could this poor preacher and teacher be king? Yet Pilate cannot afford to ignore Jesus. What would happen to Pilate if the Jesus movement caught hold? Any threat to Rome is a threat to Pilate.

But when Pilate asks Jesus: are you the king? Jesus responds instead with talk about the kingdom and about truth.

Pilate did not take this answer to be about some future time or some heavenly place. Jesus speaks about the kingdom in the present tense and in the present place. Jesus says his kingdom is not from this world, but it is in this world. Caesar’s authority comes from this world; it is a mortal authority. Jesus’ authority does not come from this world. It is not founded on mortal authority. But it is a kingdom in this world in the sense that it applies to our mortal lives here and now. Pilate is right to be worried. Jesus represents and presents an alternative set of moral and political guides. Different from Caesar’s and his cronies throughout history. More truthful, as Jesus says. Pilate asks about kings. Jesus answers about truth.

To testify to the truth, he says. Jesus is not talking about a competition between ideologies. Not a debate about policies, doctrines, or beliefs. Not true facts. More like trustworthiness. Like being true blue. Or devoted. Like a true friend. To be true is to be in alignment with the world as God created it to be. To move smoothly and effortless with God. Like a wheel that is true.

But things rarely go as smoothly as we hope. At times—maybe most times—life is a little vague. A little foggy. Edges and boundaries are uncertain, and we cannot always tell one thing from another, the good from the evil, risk from foolishness, love for others from love of self. We need a way to see what is true. We need clear vision.

The kingdom of God and truth are related. Jesus relates them. Truth is a good answer to Pilate’s question: are you the king? The kingdom Jesus talks about is a world—this world—in which we see things clearly. The life and teachings of Jesus present to us a picture of the way things are and they way they might be. Rulers of this world present another. The question we have to ask ourselves is which picture seems to us to be a convincing reality? Truth should reveal what actually is, what is real. Which picture seems true?

We humans have had a lot of experience living according to the truths of the world—political, philosophical, cultural institutions. And now here we are. Does it seem to you that we see things clearly? This is a practical issue, not a metaphysical one. Which portrayal of the world is most useful to us and to the world?

We desire to belong to the truth, as Jesus puts it. We long for a kingdom of peace, well-being, and contentment for every person. We are drawn to Christ because he seems to us to be trustworthy, deserving of our loyalty, and a true guide.

The opposite of truth is not falsehood but fantasy. We often live in a way that is at least a little fantastic. We think a lot of ourselves, or too little. We deny the suffering of others. We imagine motives where none exist. We hide from ourselves our own sorrow. These kind of things are the fog machines of life. They blind and confuse us.

The opposite of truth is fantasy, but the enemy of truth is indifference. If it makes no difference, why bother? What good is truth in that case? If the truth does not change me, what good is it? If the truth does not lead me to action, what good is it? If the truth does not guide me, what good is it?

We are mere creatures. Truth guides our actions. We need to know what to do day to day. We need to know at each crossroad where to turn. Left, right, straight ahead, or turn back. We need to know when to speak up and when to shut up. We need to know when to take risks and when to play it safe.

Pope Pius was right in a way. Maybe not about kings, but about our need for something like a king. About our need to know how to live.

Peace and justice do not reign. Who comes to guide us? Who says the truth? Whom shall we follow?

Apocalypse Revealed

Text: Mark 13:1-8

In a learned discussion about this reading a while ago, the general consensus was: What the heck?

For two thousand years we have been hearing the same old predictions about the end of time. The signs of things to come by now are cliche. Nation against nation. Famines. Earthquakes. How can these be signs? Wars and rumors of wars, hardship and hunger, natural disaster, and let us add disease—these are the story of civilization.

Buildings are not supposed to fall down. Floods are not supposed to wipe out villages and cities. Crops are not supposed to be lost to drought and bugs. But they do and they have always done. For centuries people have tried to fix the end of time by using events like this as markers. But the events are so common that they do not distinguish one time from another.

When these particular words were written by Mark, chaos ruled. They were probably written during, or just after, the First Jewish-Roman war, in which Israel attempted to rebel against the oppressive Roman occupation. It was not a successful revolt. The result devastated the Jews. Many fled Palestine, and many others were enslaved.

Like hicks visiting the city, the disciples earlier had been amazed by the grandeur of the Temple and the size of the stones. But the stones were pulled down, just as Jesus predicted, by the Romans, a prophecy that Mark in hindsight was confident reporting. The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. This massive and elaborate structure was God’s house and the geographic and spiritual center of life, and had been standing for five centuries.

Jerusalem had been the center of commerce, politics, and faith. Imagine New York, DC, and—I don’t know—the Vatican rolled into one. To see Jerusalem destroyed was to see the end of a nation, and the certain end of an era—a centuries-long era. It would have seemed like the end of the world. There would have seemed to be no more future.

When the things and people at the center of our lives are destroyed and taken away, clocks stop ticking. The future disappears. Day follows day, but nothing advances.

People who suffer trauma—wars and floods and fires, but also loss of someone they love—feel that the ground under their feet is no longer trustworthy. The things that keep them safe cannot be counted on. The seawalls will not hold. The skies are no longer innocent. There is no shelter. There is no protector. Things are no longer in their right places. It is chaos.

You can therefore see how the prospect of the end of time might seem to be not horrible but comfortable. A relief from suffering and from the struggle against suffering and from the exhaustion of hoping.

The destruction of the second Temple was, it turned out, the end of something old and the birth of something new, just as Jesus foretold. The center of faithful life continued its slow turning toward the rabbis; and some instead chose to follow a preacher, prophet, and healer named Jesus. Little ended up to be the same as it had been. It was a new age. Just not the one people expected.

Events need to have meaning. We are not comfortable thinking that things just happen for no reason. Not one stone was left upon another; all were thrown down. But here we are, two millennia later, living ordinary lives. Life does go on.

Yet to know this would not have helped the people in Palestine. It was not the continuation of the world that they longed for—but rather some scheme that would place their present mess in God’s context. When you see all these things, Jesus tells them, do not be alarmed. These are not just bad things. They are part of a larger plan. They are just the beginning of a new beginning. (Not even the labor pains, but just that beginning of contractions when you think it is maybe time to get the hospital suitcase out of the closet.) They—these events—make sense because they point to the future.

When there seems to be nothing more than day to day, when every day seems to be a copy of the dark day before, then even a tiny glimpse of the future—any future—is life-saving. That day when you see that tomorrow might be different from today is the day when you can begin to hope for salvation and healing.

When we read scripture, we have to think: where do I stand in relation to this text? Is it written for me? Is it about some particular thing or some general principle? Apocalyptic texts like this one in Mark—the whole chapter is like this, not just the verses we heard—texts like this make us ask those questions more urgently.

We might decide that we are only observers to a long-ago event. It’s a story. The lesson we take then is what it tells us about Jesus with his disciples. It tells us about how what kind of leader Jesus was, for example.

Or we might decide that since Mark was written decades after the death of Jesus, it only tells us what kind of thing the writer Mark was interested in about Jesus. That Mark sees the events in Jerusalem as having to do less with Jewish-Roman politics and more to do with the nature of Jesus. Events in history are subordinate to the story of Jesus and are more like props in that drama.

Or we might decide that this text describes something not so much in the life of Jesus but in our lives. That the text is prophecy for us. It describes a time in history, but it is our history. If we do that, as some do, we search for clues in the words that help us determine when all this is going to happen and, in particular, whether it is soon. So Jesus’ advice to his disciples—be aware! watch out!—is really advice to us. We need to be attentive.

Or instead, we might decide that the text is (for us) not about Jesus’ time or Mark’s time or our time. It is rather a way for us to know God, to know who we are, and to get an idea of what we are to do. It is grist for the mill of our faith. It has the same force and effect as the parables Jesus tells, the words from Paul in his letters, the stories of king David, the songs of the psalm. We might decide, then, that this apocalyptic story is timeless, just as all those other ways we hear God’s word are. No more, and no less, than those other ways.

Our response to this story and other apocalyptic stories like it in Daniel, for example, or in Revelation, reveals much about us: it reveals our own deepest hopes and most profound worries about God. It tells us about ourselves as well as about God. It tells us about guilt and shame and about gratitude. About whether we accept God’s forgiveness. And about where God is.

So you might in the end decide that this particular story tells us the same old thing, the same old thing that the Bible has been telling us for more than three thousand years. That God is here in the workings of the world. That all things in the world are God’s. And that God is good.

The Trust Network

Text: Ruth 3-4; Psalm 146

Put not your trust in rulers. This from today’s psalm is hard advice to hear after just finishing an exhausting but resolved election campaign. Though some are unhappy with the result, the ferocity of the campaign tells us that most people are willing to put their trust in rulers; the only question being which ones.

Psalm 146 is usually described as a psalm of trust. God is trustworthy because God keeps God’s promises, brings justice, feeds the hungry, lifts the downtrodden, and frustrates the wicked. Yet in another way the psalm is about distrust. It starts with the admonition about rulers, which it extends to all living creatures, or at least all humans. We and our thoughts perish. We are mortal, short-lived, and imperfect. And because of that, not worthy of trust.

Yet, we are creatures of the earth. The sun rises and sets, fortunes change, unexpected joys and troubles find us. We need to eat. We are social creatures, binding ourselves to others or fighting against them. Is it even possible to trust God without trusting humans? If we never trust other people, how can we actually in our day to day life trust God? When we trust others, we trust God.

Ruth is a foreigner, from Moab, married into an Israelite family. Yet when her husband dies, her mother-in-law Naomi, urges her to return to her own people. Ruth will not, and she famously says to Naomi, “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.”

There is a two-way connection of trust here. Ruth trusting that she will be safe with Naomi, and Naomi trusting that Ruth will act as a daughter to her. But it extends beyond these two protagonists. Later, Ruth trusts Naomi’s family to provide for her, which they do. And in today’s story, Ruth trusts Naomi’s scheming ways, which turn out in the end to be good for everyone. Naomi trust’s Boaz’s good nature and sense of duty. Boaz trusts Ruth’s good will and in God’s providence. It is a complicated network of trust. God is hardly mentioned in it—just in passing, really—yet trust in God is its foundation. Just because God is hardly mentioned does not mean that God is not present. Just because we do not always talk about the work of God’s hand does not mean that we do not feel it to be there. Too many negatives in that sentence; let’s try this: we know God’s hand guides us even when we do not chatter on about it.

There are strong cultural, local, and family connections in the story of Ruth. In the story of the Bible, for that matter. There is a tension between—or better to say a cooperation between—between the personal and the community in our relationship with God and what we hope from God. The church (not this church, the whole church) has been arguing for centuries about whether personal piety—one’s individual connection with God, with Jesus—or community behavior—how we as a culture are guided by God—is more important. But clearly the answer is Yes. Salvation is both singular and plural.

The community welcomes Ruth, an outsider, gathers around her, and takes her in, and feeds her (it is no accident that so much of the story has to do with grain, food, and drink). She and her mother-in-law Naomi are redeemed, it says, meaning claimed. As a consequence, the family line is extended on to David, Israel’s greatest king, and according to Matthew’s Gospel, on to Jesus.

Ruth and Naomi come to the story with nothing. They are impoverished and without stature. The widow who trusts Elijah in the second reading has nothing. Just enough food to eat one last meal. The widow in the Gospel story has nothing. Just a little to give all of it away. We don’t know what happens to that woman. But we do know that Elijah and the widow, and Ruth and Naomi, survive. They do so because of a mixture of God’s intervention plus God’s actions implemented in the actions of other people. People acting together and trusting one another as much as they are able.

In the Gospel reading, Jesus has contempt for the scribes. They are both arrogant and cruel, devouring widows’ houses and who knows what else. In their cruelty, they deny God’s commandment, reiterated by Jesus, to care for those who are in need. In their arrogance, they forget that God is the creator and source. They congratulate themselves, patting themselves on the back, think themselves especially worthy of respect and places of honor. They imagine themselves to be responsible for their lives of abundance.

They do not recognize how they are the product of God’s grace and the many graces of the people of the culture in which they live. They forget somehow—something that the characters in the story of Ruth would never forget—that people are interdependent. The fortunes of each of us are tangled up with the fortunes of all of us. The scribes in Jesus’ story are the rulers the psalm warns against.

The genealogical line from Abraham to Jesus that begins the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew goes through Ruth. This is remarkable. Ruth is an outsider, a Moabite. The rules and tradition among Israelites against intermarriage were very strong. Yet Ruth marries Boaz, and they give birth to a child, even though Boaz is getting on in years. And that child becomes the grandfather of great king David.

The line runs through Ruth plus three other gentile women: Rahab, Tamar, Bathsheba, plus Ruth. Without these foreigners, these people otherwise despised, there would be no line. (In fact, Tamar is remembered by the townspeople as they give a blessing to Ruth). The righteous scribes need to remember that they would not have wealth and power without these four women.

We can conclude from Ruth’s story and the story of the others that God is not inclined to stand on ceremony when something needs to get done. It is not so much that God has a plan and finds the best people to implement it. It is rather that God makes good use of the people who happen to be there. It seems that God extracts the plan from the events that have already unfolded.

A corollary to this is that God works in the daily lives and decisions of people, and lots of different kinds of people—even leaders. And also that the interdependence of people is a form of God’s grace. A means of grace.

I’d like to say a word about Veterans Day, which is today. It used to be called Armistice Day, when the first World War ended. The eleventh hour on the 11th day of the 11th month. It was meant originally to celebrate the end of war in general. We see how well that worked out. But hoping for an end to war especially on this day is not foolishness.

We continue to hope for peace because we learn from these stories and others that even the very unlikely—the inconceivable—is possible with God. Using us, God’s children. And showing us again and again that we are all in this together. And teaching us to trust in God by trusting one another, God’s daughters and sons.