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There is no greater tonic for us human beings, nothing more eye-opening and nourishing, than a change of perspective. Consider time, for example. There are days when time drags its heels, as it does when a child waits for Christmas, and there are days, there are years, when time flies by. When I was five years old, that I should ever be as old as my grandparents was unimaginable. From the perspective of today, being five years old is only yesterday. The passing of time offers a change of perspective. There are times, aren't there, when everything seems to be crashing down around us. There was time before September 11, and there is time after September 11. There are times when prices are going up and salaries are not. There are times of war and threats of war, with people in one part of the world telling people in other parts how they ought to live, and enforcing their will with guns. There are times when it looks like the bad guys are going to win, so that no matter the outcome of elections or wars, we just hunker down to expect more years of divisiveness and bitterness and rancor and political posturing, with little being done about all those promises made during the campaign except to promise more of the same... ...while people in other parts of the world face famine and starving children and the pressure of refugees being shunted from place to place, and still others taking to the streets to defend their homes against tanks with rocks no larger than tennis balls. Like David against Goliath. There are times when lots of things are crashing down around us. Jesus speaks to this in today's Gospel reading. Jesus is speaking to people who are wondering if all order and meaning hasn't abandoned the world, speaking to people who are asking what good it is to be God's people anyway, because in real life the Romans always seem to be in charge, and the good always seem to suffer, and the bad, even those who scoff at the very notion of God, get all the power and often do very well. And in just such a time, in our time, it's no accident that the collect for this day is that wonderful Anglican prayer of thanksgiving for 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 kind of answer does it have for us who struggle with events that seem to make no sense? What kind of answer does it have for 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, and good people suffering while the wicked prosper? What kind of answer does the Bible have for us when the pagans are at the gates? The Bible offers a fresh perspective. The Bible offers the perspective of God. It invites us to consider what real life is from God's perspective, and no one, I think, has summarized this divine perspective better than Teilhard de Chardin. "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience," he said. "We are spiritual beings having a human experience." Jesus points us toward this perspective this morning. Jesus has been teaching in Jerusalem shortly before his death. He is in the Temple area, and some folks are talking with him about the Temple, about how grand it is, and about the size and beauty of its great stones and 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." "You ain't seen nothin' yet," is what Jesus means. "There will be wars, and rumors of wars. Such things are bound to happen, but even so the end is still to come. For nation will go to war against nation, kingdom against kingdom, party against party, and there will be earthquakes and famines, and you'll be handed over to courts and beaten in synagogues and summoned before governors and kings.... Brother will hand over brother to death, and father his child. Children will turn against their parents and send them to their deaths, and everyone will hate you for your allegiance to me. But whoever endures to the end will be saved." What we have here is a group of first-century Anglican types 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 Canterbury or Chartres, or to National Cathedral or the White House or Congress or the Pentagon, or to Wall Street. They were all standing around admiring the great symbol of strength and security of their day, admiring its decency and order, which symbolized the decency and order of God and his world and of their whole system of worship and life, and which gave them a sense of stability in their world. And like Anglican types in every day, they weren't used to hearing people speak in church the way Jesus was talking to them, because what Jesus was saying, in effect, and what he is telling us, is this: Your tidy decency and order is a delusion. The Temple is going to be destroyed, and a whole series of large-scale miracles-in-reverse is going to come: wars, famines, diseases, family disruptions, persecutions. "Your cherished Temple faith isn't going to survive real life," is what he means. So you're going to be looking around, as indeed many people today are looking around, for prophets with a new answer, 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 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 after these easy answers. Remember that you are not human beings having a spiritual experience; you are spiritual beings having a human experience. Human answers, especially easy ones, are going to fail in the face of real life, because as W. H. Auden says, "Nothing can save us that is possible." Not Romans or Greeks, not rocks or tanks or missiles guided by GPS systems, not temples or churches, not stocks or bonds, not even Democrats or Republicans. Well, fine. I guess! But then what kind of answer does the Bible offer us? Just what is it in the Bible that we should "hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest"? Just what can save us, if anything that is possible cannot? What our readings today do, what the Bible does from beginning to end, is encourage us to trust God. Trust God in the midst of real life, with its miracles-in-reverse and all. Put your hope in God. Keep living a life in the real world that is faithful to God's promise, knowing that we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience, because it is the spiritual that will prevail, because it is the spiritual that is of God. Modern physics offers a perspective similar to what Jesus is telling us this morning. The laws of thermodynamics, as they have been explained to me, maintain that energy flows from a state of greater organization to a state of lesser organization. That is, it flows from stability to change. The physical universe, in other words - temples and cathedrals and pentagons and trust funds and insurance companies and banks, trees and planets and moons and paper clips, everything - is constantly changing, winding down into a state of equilibrium. Not in a hurry, to be sure. It will take several billion years for it to wind down completely, but when it does, the order of all created material things will devolve into shapelessness and formlessness, into a blob of disorganized energy, into a state of blobdom scientists call entropy. Like Iraq. Like Sudan. Like us. 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 surely. Even red politics and blue politics, even red chips and blue chips. Even the United States of America. 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. Use and admire your great temples and churches with their fine silver and linens and their wonderful windows, but do not worship them. Use your trust funds and banks and create your political parties and visions, but do not rely on them. Cling only to God. Rely only upon God. God alone prevails, which is what William Temple meant when he reminded us that "the world minus God equals zero; God minus the world equals God." Flannery O'Connor said that the task of the novelist is to deepen mystery. That's true for worship as well. We dare not come to God's altar seeking the easy answers of street corner prophets or fundamentalist preachers or dot-com entrepreneurs, or even of our political candidates. Jesus warns us this morning that their answers, like the Temple, will fail the test of time and real life. We come to God's altar in this temple this morning knowing that nothing can save us that is possible. We come to participate in the mystery that is real life, to participate in that mystery that is God. And to trust that it is good, even amidst the things we do not and cannot understand. To trust that death does not reign, God does. To trust 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. And what are faith, hope, and love but enduring spiritual reality having a human experience, enduring spiritual reality given breath and life in human beings in the world of crashing temples and entropy? "What is man that you should be mindful of him, the son of man that you should seek him out?" asks the psalmist. What are we human beings but a way that God has of giving life and breath and bodily form to faith, to hope, and to love? There simply are no human explanations for these abiding realities. There is only the opportunity to live these realities within the mystery of the real life God has given us. And of this mystery Father Andrew reminds us that "God would not weaken [us] by making things clear and easy for [us]. 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. Hear it this morning. Read, mark, and learn it. We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience. That is the assurance Jesus gives us from the Cross, the good news we come here inwardly to digest today. Nothing can save us that is possible. Nothing that is possible can save us from the bitterness of party against party, from the bitterness of Roman against Jew, of Jew against Palestinian, of brother against brother, of father against son, of Democrat against Republican, of straight against gay, of documented against undocumented. Only the love of God can do it, only a spiritual being having a human experience on the Cross. At Calvary, and now. This is the everlasting life the Holy Scriptures give us a blessed hope of. Trust God, and know that the enduring gift he gives us is the opportunity, no matter the circumstance, to live trustfully and hopefully, and to love without fear. The Bible - those Holy Writings which we ask God to grant that we might "hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" - is not a handbook of easy answers, or even of human answers. It is the living story of trust and hope and love in the midst of real life, a story of spiritual beings having a human experience that we, with God's grace, can make our own. The Temple did not endure. And neither will National Cathedral, nor Wall Street, nor the Pentagon, nor the White House, nor the Chapel of Our Saviour. Neither will Caesar. But the mystery of life, the mystery of the opportunity to trust, to hope, and to love, being of God, will endure. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |