Sermon for November 13

Pentecost 23-C

11/13/22 St. John’s

 

Luke 21:5-19; Mal 4:1-2b

 

There is an Episcopal Cathedral in NYC where I used to live called St. John the Divine. It’s a magnificent structure, not quite finished.  Sometimes it takes centuries to finish a cathedral – this one they’ve been working on this thing since for over 100 years. And like some ancient cathedrals they’ve trained people from the community to work on it – stone masons and cutters. It’s really part of the community and a real part of the city.

 

So, like many ancient cathedrals, at the tops of the columns, the capitals, are very intricate carvings of angels and gargoyles and saints of the church

 

The most striking to me is a carving that depicts the apocalypse, what we are reading out in today’s reading, here near the end of the church year, depicted as the destruction of New York City. It’s very graphic statuary of  the Brooklyn Bridge falling into the East River, the Statue of Liberty, the Stock Exchange and even weirdly, the world trade center collapsing into dust, which is really eerie, because it was carved  in 1997 – 4 years before the attacks on the World Trade Center.

 

A reminder to all the faithful, that this material world is transitory. that all this will be gone someday, even the Cathedral of St. John the Devine even the Statue of Liberty. Even as it is being built, the church knows that someday this will be thrown down. Nothing is forever, not life on this earth, certainly nothing built by human hands. Only God and God’s reign are eternal.

 

Jesus and his disciples are outside the great temple in Jerusalem admiring it in today’s  It too was a work in progress, being rebuilt by Herod the Great. The original, King Solomon’s version from 1000 years earlier had been magnificent and had been torn down by the Babylonians. It was rebuilt when the people of Israel returned from exile in Babylon.

 

In Jesus’ time King Herod started renovating it, trying to return it to its former glory, and Herod’s version was finally finished thirty years after Jesus’ time on earth, but even while it was being built, Jesus knew that it would be thrown down.

 

And sure enough,  Herod’s temple was thrown down to the ground by the Romans who got fed up with Israel fussing and causing trouble for the empire so they destroyed the entire city of Jerusalem: 70 AD.

 

So, we see everything will fall to the ground someday.  And that’s just the way of creation. And though it may seem to be the end, even if it seems like it when something we love dies, it is not. I’m sure if you asked some of the people in Ukraine whose homes and lives have been utterly torn about by this tragic war, some of them surely would feel as if their world were coming to an end. But  only God knows when the real, the final end of all this will come. But even those words lack meaning because time does not exist for God, who lives in eternity. And as God has shown us in the Christ, all creation exists in a cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth.

 

On that nice sunny day 30  when Jesus and his friends were sitting and looking up at the magnificence of the Jerusalem Temple, this temple was the absolute center of the universe for those people. If anything was forever, this had to be it. Where they brought their children to be dedicated to the Lord. Where they brought their offerings during the celebration of the Passover, where they came to teach and learn of God’s word for them. To them, this was where God lived. And in fact, they had come to confuse this temple with God’s self; had come in some ways to worship the temple instead of God. And Jesus tells them, but this will all be thrown down. This is a thing, like everything else. Not one stone will be left upon the other. But, he also says, elsewhere in John’s gospel, tear down this temple and I will raise it up in three days, meaning himself. Because Jesus knows what is eternal.

 

I saw a photograph taken by I suppose the old Hubble telescope back in the day of two galaxies one spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way and one spherical one, each made up of billions of stars, and presumably planets and moons, some of which must surely have life on them. And the spherical galaxy is crashing through the very center of the spiral galaxy and the energy that is generated by that unfathomable destruction is emanated like a halo around these two galaxies. And this event, happened millions of years ago because it took that long for the light to reach us so that we could see it.

 

Nothing is eternal except God and God’s reign, and us, to the extent that we are part of God’s reign

 

The love people share with one another, the beauty of creation we share with all other life all reflects the truth that God is real, and our connection to God is real, and it is for all eternity. Everything else is transitory.

 

Christ is eternal, and as live in Christ, even when all else has is gone, our lives are eternal too.