Transcript
What will be the signs that all these things are about to be accomplished? Please be seated.
How many of you love a good disaster movie like Twister, or The Perfect Storm, or The Day After Tomorrow? That’s one of my favorites. Movies where natural disasters happen, and we get to spend two hours watching some rag tag team of characters trying to survive. I guess the remade Twisters, which was released in the big summer blockbuster this year, was really the last big natural disaster movie, and one of the only natural disaster movies made in the past several years. Maybe we’re tired of watching natural disaster movies because they’re getting to be a little too close to real.
After all, a movie like Contagion released in 2011, which is about the spread of a highly contagious virus transmitted by respiratory droplets, including attempts by medical researchers and public health officials to identify and contain the disease. The loss of social order as the virus turns into a worldwide pandemic. They just seem a little too real now. Seriously, that was an action thriller blockbuster movie released in 2011, nine years before Covid. Like I said, perhaps we’ve gotten away from the natural disaster kind of movies or really any disaster kind of movies because they seem a little bit too real. After all, it’s so easy to project whatever Hollywood creative mind comes up with onto what is happening in our world today. Or, like the case of Contagion, to look back and think a disaster movie from the past foretold our reality now.
I think that is also what happens when we read Revelation or other apocalyptic passages in Scripture. The difference, though, is that we assume Hollywood movies are just that: Hollywood movies. Made up, created from the dark corners of someone’s very twisted imagination. I mean, come on, Sharknado is definitely from a dark corner of a twisted imagination. And we believe Scripture is the Word of God inspired by God, interpreted through the help of the Holy Spirit. That’s the official stance of the Episcopal Church. It’s published in our Book of Common Prayer on page 853 and 854, in case you wanted to look it up. And thus, Scripture holds a lot more weight than some Hollywood blockbuster movie. Instead, Scripture tells us about God the Father and about Jesus, and about how to live our lives, how to follow Jesus, how to live according to God’s expectations for us in order to be accepted into God’s kingdom. So when we get passages in the Bible that seem a bit more like scenes in a disaster movie, it can make us uncomfortable.
And today’s gospel reading is no different. In Mark’s gospel, this is the last public appearance of Jesus before his arrest and trial. The very first line is Jesus came out of the temple and Jesus will never return to the temple again. At least not in Mark’s gospel. This reading is Jesus’s soliloquy about the end, not just the end of Jesus’s life, although he does get to that later in the chapter. Also, the end of the ages. That would be the eschaton from the Greek word éskhatos meaning last, as in the last of time or the end of time.
Reading today’s gospel, especially since I already mentioned doing this, it’s easy to place the prediction upon our world today. Jesus says you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. Nation will rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom. Yeah, just look at Ukraine and Russia or Israel. Sudan. In fact, according to Armed Conflict Location and event data or ACLED,. you can look it up, there are currently six major wars happening in the world right now. A major war being 10,000 or more combat related deaths in the current or previous year. According to the UN, there are 11 active peacekeeping operations around the world. So yes, while those numbers do seem low compared to some movies, we are definitely seeing nations rise against nations and hearing of wars and rumors of wars. Not to mention the other pieces that Jesus predicts: earthquakes and famines. If we dig into Revelation, then we get even more disasters, destruction and woe beasts and serpents, earthquakes, rising seas, raining fire. You get the idea. Even if you haven’t read the book of revelation, you get the idea. But here’s the thing.
We can look back in time and see these predictions realized at other times too, just in our own living memories. We have Covid and 9/11. The Gulf wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We literally had a war that we called the Great War, as in the biggest and last war ever. And then we had to rename it because less than 30 years later, we had World War Two. I could keep going. A dive into a significant history and wars and conflict or natural disasters or plagues or famines or diseases. And each of these major events in history, we could say, see, that is the eschaton. That is the apocalypse. That is the end of the world. And yet it wasn’t. And it isn’t. Because when Peter and James and John and Andrew asked Jesus, Jesus says, this is about the beginning of the birth pangs.
And to be honest, the author of Mark was most likely talking about the Jewish Roman War of the years 66 through 70, when the temple was destroyed in Jerusalem and never rebuilt. You know when not one stone will be left upon another, all will be thrown down. Because to a Jewish audience at the time, the destruction of the temple would have been the end of times. But it’s not our end of times. And this today, I think it’s safe to say we are not in the end of times now either. As scary, it is to say this, things could get worse. And also things can probably get better too, since things usually do get better.
And this doesn’t just apply to macro living the global humanity of the world. This also applies to us individually, intimately. We each have our own apocalyptic realities. Things that we love so much that losing it or them- because for most of us, it’s probably people- losing them would really, truly feel like the end of the world. This could be people. Yes, the people we love. Spouses, children. Our families and those who love us. It could also be our health, our security, our well-being. Things that have taken away would redefine our very existence. After all, that is what Jesus is talking about in this gospel passage. Things that will force us to redefine our very existence. The beginning of the end of this life, this world, this reality, and the beginning of the next, whatever that will be.
I don’t want to end on such a downer note. This sermon has been kind of depressing. So I’m going to give you a hint, but you have to come back next week to get the whole picture. Next week is the last Sunday of the lectionary cycle. It’s commonly called Christ the King Sunday. It’s a reminder to all of us, no matter what, Christ is King, no matter what apocalyptic realities we think we are living in, no matter what eschatological experiences we think we are having, no matter what pain or heartbreak or anger or fear or whatever we are witnessing or experiencing, it is not the end. It is not how life will be forever. Because Christ Jesus, the one who overcomes death and the grave, who shows us the way to God the Father and God’s kingdom. Christ is King. Above all. The Messiah, the Savior, the one who saves each and every single one of us from all the various imagined and projected and perceived evils that, according to Revelation, will befall the world next week. You’ll get that uplifting sermon, I promise. The one that proclaims, no matter what, we are safe in God’s kingdom, where Christ is King.
Today, I pray we simply know that this gospel reading is not the end of the story. Today, the gospel reading, as well as what we witnessing around us. This is not the end. So please come back next week. Hear the good news. The gospel that Christ is King.
Amen. Amen.