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There are times, aren't there, when everything seems to be crashing down around us. There are times when things are crashing down around us. The prophet Malachi speaks to this in today's Old Testament reading. He is speaking to a people who sense that all order has abandoned them and the world, speaking to a people who are asking what good it is to obey God's commandments, because in real life they have seen that the good often suffer, and the bad, even those who scoff at the very notion of God, often do well. Today's collect is Cranmer's wonderful prayer about the Bible: "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." But what does the Bible have to do with real life? What word does the Bible have for us who struggle with events that seem to make no sense? What kind of answer does it offer us who struggle with what someone has called "miracles in reverse": convent roofs collapsing on congregations of praying nuns, church buses filled with happy campers plunging off cliffs, deaths of loved ones we do not and cannot understand, good people suffering while the wicked prosper? Jesus points toward an answer in today's Gospel reading. Jesus is teaching in Jerusalem shortly before his death, and some of the local establishment were talking about the Temple, about how grand it was, and about the size of its stones and the beauty of its ornaments. And Jesus warns them that it will all come crashing down: "These things you are gazing at", he said, "the time will come when not one stone will be left upon another. They will all be thrown down, and you will hear of wars and insurrections, and nation will go to war against nation and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be earthquakes, famines, and plagues in many places, and in the sky, terrors and great portents...." What we have here is a group of first-century Anglicans who were doing what many of us do today when we make our pilgrimages to our symbols of stability and decency and order, our pilgrimages to National Cathedral or Notre Dame or Canterbury or Chartres or St. Peter's, or to the White House or Congress or the Pentagon or Wall Street. The Temple was the symbol of stability in the world to the Jews of Jesus' day, and they were standing around admiring its apparent strength and the security and decency and order it stood for, the decency and order of God and his world and of their whole system of worship and life. And Jesus tells them, and he is telling us: Your sense of decency and order is a delusion. It is not real life. The Temple is going to be destroyed, and a whole series of large-scale miracles-in-reverse is going to come: wars, famines, disease, family disruptions, persecutions. Your tidy Temple faith, he said, isn't going to survive real life. So you're going to be looking around - as indeed many people today are looking around - you're going to look around for prophets with a new answer, for prophets with another "decency and order" plan, another assurance based on some desperate prediction. That's why cults and TV evangelists and fundamentalist churches and self-help books and law-and-order types do so well in a world of chaos and "miracles-in-reverse." They offer tidy answers, answers that are decent and orderly. But Jesus warns us this morning, the Scriptures warn us: don't go there. Don't go after these easy answers. They, too, are going to fail in the face of real life. Well, fine, I guess most of us understand that, at least most of us here. But then what kind of answer does the Bible offer us? Just what is it in the Bible that we are meant to "hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest"? What the Bible does from beginning to end, what our three readings today do, is encourage us to trust God, to trust God in the midst of real life, with its miracles in reverse and all, even in the midst of 9-11s and crashing Pentagons and crashing wars and crashing markets. Live with hope. Keep living a life of hope and love in the real world, a life that is faithful to God's promise. You know, modern physics tells us something similar to what Jesus is telling us this morning: The second law of thermodynamics, as it has been explained to me, maintains that energy flows from a state of greater organization to a state of lesser organization. It flows from stability to disintegration or chaos. The natural world - temples and cathedrals and pentagons and trust funds and insurance companies and banks, everything - is winding down, down, down. Not in a hurry, to be sure. It will take several billion years for it to wind down completely, but when it does, it will devolve into shapelessness and formlessness, into a blob of disorganized energy, into a state of blobdom scientists call entropy. What the Bible asks us to "hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" - what Jesus is saying to us again this morning - is that God alone has survivability. Everything else is passing away, either suddenly or slowly, but nonetheless surely. Therefore, hold on to the world lightly. Cherish the world; it is a gift from God. But do not clutch it. Embrace the world, but do not try to capture it. Build and use your temples and churches with their fine silver and linens and their wonderful windows, but do not worship them. Build your banks and trust funds, but do not rely on them. Cling only to God. Rely only upon God. "The world minus God equals zero," as William Temple puts it, but "God minus the world equals God." God alone prevails. Flannery O'Connor said that the task of the novelist is to deepen mystery. That's the task of worship as well. We dare not come here seeking the easy answers of street corner prophets or fundamentalist preachers, whether of a religious or a political stripe. Jesus warns us this morning that their tidy answers, like the Temple, will fail the test of real life. We come here to participate in the mystery that is real life, and in the mystery that is God. And to trust that it is good, even amidst the things we do not and cannot understand. We come here to share our confidence that death does not reign, God does. We come to share our confidence that our future belongs to God, whether at the world's end, or at our end. "Faith, hope, and love," these three abide, St. Paul assures us. What are these virtues St. Paul speaks of, these virtues we are to "hear, read, mark, and learn," if they are not also virtues we are to "inwardly digest"? What are they if not reality, real life? What are they if not assurance, genuine confidence, given breath and life in human beings in the real world of crashing temples and entropy? What are we human beings but a way God has of giving life to faith, to hope, and to love in the world? The virtues of faith, hope, and love are not answers to a question; they are opportunities, opportunities for life, opportunities to live within the mystery of the real life God has given us. Here's how Father Andrew expressed the mystery: "God would not weaken a person by making things clear and easy for him. He would not bribe a person by some glittering promise of a reward. He would not frighten a person by some threat. [Instead], God would win a person by the revelation of his love, love that was tested by faithlessness and [yet] stayed faithful... "Gold is tested by being put in a crucible and letting the fire prove it to be gold. God willed that we should test him on Calvary, and the fire of hate and sin wrapped round the body of God as he hung there on the Cross, but nothing came forth from him but love.... "It is not the will of God that, because of bad drains, typhoid fever should become prevalent, but it is God's will, God's desire, that doctor or priest should love patient or parishioner better than life... " ...and so, if, in going where love calls him, a man meets death, he need not think that it was God's will that he should die, but he may be sure that it is God's will that he should love, and [he] can therefore know that death cannot matter very much" and will not prevail, because love, being of God, is stronger than death. This assurance is what Jesus promises us from the Cross. It is the assurance that we can trust the Giver of Life regardless of circumstance, regardless of crashing temples. This assurance is what we come here to receive and to share in our worship. God is not conquered by crashing temples, nor even by death. Trust God, and know that the enduring gift he gives us is the opportunity, no matter the circumstance, to live in confidence and with hope, and to love without fear. This is that everlasting life the Holy Scriptures give us a blessed hope of. The Bible - those Holy Writings which we ask God to grant that we might "hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" - the Bible is not a handbook of easy answers. It is the story of trust and hope and love alive in the midst of history, a story we can make our own. This story of real life is also what worship is about. The Eucharist is not a performance to be observed. It's not a magic rite to be "done" correctly. The Eucharist is real life, as Christ teaching in the Temple is real life. It is real life, as life in Thessalonika is real life, where St. Paul told the folks to take some time out from praising Jesus with their hands in the air and get down to work, or else they won't eat. The Eucharist is participation with God in the mystery of life, just as Christ walking his way to the Cross is real life. The Temple did not endure, and neither will National Cathedral or Wall Street or the Pentagon or the Chapel of Our Saviour. Neither will Caesar, nor Democrats nor Republicans. But the mystery of life, the mystery of the opportunity to trust, to hope, and to love, being of God,will endure. Because God is, and what is of God endures. The Eucharist is our thanksgiving for this enduring mystery and life, and for God who grants it to us. So come, now: let us take part in that mystery, and live. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |