So, as Jesus turned the corner onto Wall Street, one of his
disciples, who had never visited the City before, said to him, “Wow! Look,
teacher, what immense stones, what huge buildings! It looks like they reach all
the way up to heaven ….!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great
skyscrapers? Not one stone will be left here upon another, all will be thrown
down.” Once they were settled on a grassy hill in Central Park, Peter, James,
John and Andrew asked him privately, in voices filled with both fear and
complicity: “Tell us, did you really mean that Wall Street will soon fall? It’s
the Fiscal Cliff, isn’t it? It’s all going to come toppling down as we fall
with it into chaos in January, right? The devastation of Superstorm Sandy was
surely just a sign of the ruin that is upon us?”
I don’t think
that it takes much of a stretch of the imagination to replace the
power-structure of the Jerusalem Temple, over 2000 years ago, with the power
structure of Wall Street these days. The Temple, like our stock market and our
banks, was a powerful institution; some people lived from its thriving, and
others recoiled from it as a center of political and religious corruption. The
Temple, with its immense stones and its holy origins, looked invincible. The
prediction of its fall by Jesus signaled more than the collapse of a building;
it signaled an entirely new way of being in the world. Indeed, only some forty
years after Jesus’ death, the powerful Temple and the world of Jesus’ Jewish listeners
lay in ruins—destroyed by war with Rome—yet ripe for amazing new beginnings in
both Judaism and, of course, in Christianity.
The imminent
collapse of the foundations that structure our world—that is something that we
can identify with these days. Wall Street, the institutional Church, family,
industry, even our climate and coastlines … all look like fair game for some
kind of massive divine reordering. Even the sensible Christian writer and
humorist Anne Lamott posted this week on Facebook: “It’s all hopeless. Even for
a crabby optimist like me, things couldn’t be worse. Everywhere you turn, our
lives and marriages and morale and government are falling to pieces. So many
friends have broken children. The planet does not seem long for this world.
Repent! Oh, wait, never mind. I meant: Help.”[1]
Apocalyptic language, such as we see
today in Mark 13, is a powerful response to the kind of despair that Lamott
describes. God hears the world’s cries of pain and injustice, this language says,
and God is going to act. “Apocalypse” does not mean the end of the world; it means
“uncovering,” the revealing of what has been hidden. It is powerful language
for urgent times, for times when something new simply must be born, for times
when the “birth pangs” of change can no longer be held back. Wild, apocalyptic
language screams, “Repent!” “Pay attention!” “Watch out!” “Hold on!” God is
coming soon with power and great glory…. and urgent change!”
However, before we get swept away
into too much fear or too much drama, I would like for us to catch ourselves, following
Anne Lamott’s lead in the quote that I just read. Our first lesson for today
offers us another kind of language for desperate times, a quiet language just as
urgent and just as powerful as “repent,” a quiet language that can herald
earth-shattering change just as much as the apocalyptic can: the little word,
“help!” uttered in prayer. These are words of prayer for new birth, rather than heralds
of the labor pains to come. Listen to Hannah’s story.
Hannah is trapped and in trouble. In
a world in which a woman’s worth and security are tied to her ability to give
birth to sons, Hannah is a loser. Year after year, despite her prayers and her
efforts and the love of her husband, she endures shame and ridicule for her
childless state, and she has become “bitter of soul,” angry at her destiny, and
at the end of her rope. She refers to herself as a woman of “hard days” and
“troubled spirit,” a helpless servant of the Lord, imploring God—and us—to
“see, yes, see” into her misery and despair. Eli the priest, representing the upstanding
religious structures of her society, certainly feels as if he has the right to
treat her sharply, watching her suspiciously, calling her drunk, and then
ordering her to get rid of her wine. Surprisingly, however, Hannah speaks to God with firmness and confidence.
She speaks of what God will do for her, bargaining with the Lord about what God
will give and what she will give in return. As she prays and makes her vow to
God, this powerless, doomed woman speaks as if there is hope for her future, speaks
as if God is listening to her prayer, and she even finds the strength to stand
up for herself to Eli. A life of continual misery, prolonged in time and
carefully described in the first half of the story, evaporates quietly like
mist in a single moment of baring her soul to God. In response to her silent,
heart-felt “help,” God transforms and heals her. As soon as she prays, her
countenance lifts, and Hannah knows that God will act. It is as if her unborn
son is already snuggled in her arms.
After her son is born, in the verses
that follow today’s lesson, Hannah fulfills her vow to God, leaving baby Samuel
at Shiloh as promised, and she continues her prayers in the beautiful poem that
later gives rise to Mary’s Magnificat, praising God for raising up the lowly
and bringing the mighty to their knees. Hannah’s strong, quiet prayer soon becomes
Hannah’s powerful song …. a song that sounds an awful lot like Jesus declaring
that the great stones of the Temple will fall and like Mark proclaiming in the
vocabulary of apocalypse that the Day of Judgment is at hand. For Hannah, the birth
pangs of change follow her labor, rather than precede it. “The bows of the
mighty are broken,” Hannah cries, “but the feeble gird on strength …The Lord
will judge the ends of the earth … and exalt the power of his anointed.”
Apocalyptic language says, “Look at
the outside world and hang on, because God is going to fix what is broken!”
Hannah’s prayer says, “Know in your heart that you have been heard, that God is
going to fix what is broken!” Looking from the outside in or from the inside
out, we hear today that God’s presence means change, God’s healing action means
measurable transformation, a total shaking of the foundations.
Three years ago, before beginning
Year B in the lectionary, diocesan clergy were invited to spend a few days at
All Saints’, studying the Gospel of Mark with a New Testament scholar in order
to prepare for the upcoming year in preaching. After listening to her lectures
and reading chapter 13’s “Little Apocalypse,” I escaped for a walk in the woods
before dinner. Walking through the barren winter landscape, I was given the
gift of a spectacular sunset, a burning, frightening glory of a sunset that
could have come straight out of the best apocalyptic literature. I went back to
my room and wrote the following poem:
Heart fire,
Embers of divine
vindication
Ablaze in a
dark, icy plain
Like an urgent
secret
That silently
devours the horizon,
Looming red
intensity
Tamed only by
the delicate
Slivers of
branches raised
Like hands
outstretched
In welcome--
Or to keep the
change
At bay?
With Hannah, we cry out
for saving change. With the disciples, we tremble and ask when it will come.
Behind our cries of “help!” or “repent!” lies the urgent intensity of a God who
holds us, and all of our fragile constructions, in a strong and merciful embrace.
[1]
Anne Lamott, “My secret little prayer,” found at
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/13/anne_lamott_my_secret_little_prayer.
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