Reading this week’s rather intense Gospel reminded me of a sermon I preached, six years ago. It was 2019, a year before our world felt dismantled by words that had never entered our consciousness before – “COVID-19” – it was Good Friday, the day we are forced to see Jesus’ humanity at its most vulnerable, its most heartbreaking and most heartbroken. Right now, at the edge of Advent and not too far from Christmas, Good Friday seems very, very far away. And yet, Jesus is speaking these words:
“‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’”
The Good Friday lectionary doesn’t actually include any of the texts – from the Gospels of Matthew, Luke or John – that mention Jesus talking about the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, or comparing it to his own life, death and resurrection, but back in 2019, on Good Friday, that image was probably first and foremost in many of our minds.
Just days before, the world had watched the Cathedral of Notre Dame burn, and so many of us, whether we were Christian or Catholic or atheist or French or American, were in shock and grief, watching this beautiful architecture fall in flames, listening to Parisians sing hymns as the day ended and the smoke rose. It reminded me of the churches that fell in European cities all around it, 80 years before that, bombed in World War II.
There is something about the loss of a building – or what ended up not being the total loss of that cathedral it’s not just the building that falls, not just the stones. When the structure disappears, especially a beloved place of worship, it feels like everything within it disappears too – the histories it holds, the prayers that it lifts, the music it echoes. In Paris in the year 2019, or in Jerusalem, in the year 70, the destruction of a place of worship, a place where we feel close to God and the infinite, the destruction of a monument that has anchored the landscape of our days, shakes our world, shakes us, turns our understanding of reality and permanence and stability upside-down.
The Gospel of Luke was most likely written after 70 A.D., when the Temple was already destroyed – so the words in it would have taken on a deeper significance, and given that Jesus doesn’t stop there, and the words that followed must have been even more troubling:
“Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes and famines and plagues and great signs from heaven… you will be arrested and persecuted, betrayed even by parents and brothers… You will be hated by all because of my name,” says Jesus
This is not the voice of the baby Jesus of the manger – this is the voice of the Jesus who is facing his own persecution and death, and the deaths of his friends, telling them that this following Jesus thing is going to be difficult and dangerous.
And I’ll give you a bit of warning – as move toward and through the beauty of Advent, this time of contemplation, haunting music and candlelight and starlight, the Gospel readings aren’t going to get any easier – because Advent is not just about the anticipation of the Christ child and the joy and peace of Christmas – it is about the anticipation of the kingdom to come, and the struggles of this world in the meantime.
Those things which seem indestructible, untouchable, to us are often, so often, not – stone will not always remain on stone, and we are not always able to count on things which seem like anchors. Cathedrals may fall to fire, homes to hurricanes, entire towns to floods; we lose a job, a spouse, a parent or our health. We observe changes in government – the actual tearing down of historic buildings, like the East Wing of the White House. Literally, not one stone left upon another.
And yet.
Jesus also says in this passage: “do not be terrified.”
These are the words we will hear the angels say to the shepherds, in just a few short weeks: “Do not be afraid.”
Jesus says, about all of these troubles: “This will give you an opportunity to testify.” Jesus says: I will give you words and wisdom so that you can, in the midst of what seems like irretrievable loss, see and share a message of hope.
So in the midst of what seems like the end of our worlds and their worlds, in the midst of destruction of beloved sacred spaces, in the face of the arrest and death of a friend and teacher, in the grief of failed relationships or serious illness or debilitating depression, in the midst of events that feel like that life as they know it and as we know it is shattered beyond repair, Jesus says, “not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”
If you go back to the chapter that this passage comes from, it is interesting that it follows another familiar story, just a few verses back. Jesus and his apostles are in the Temple. He looks around and observes a woman, a poor widow, who is giving the only money she has left, two small copper coins, to the Temple, while all around her wealthy, self-important people are giving large amounts, showing off their wealth. It might be that Jesus was trying to tell his disciples something by telling that story first and then saying this temple would be torn down one day. He might have been saying that amidst the impressive architecture of the Temple and its expensive gifts, what might have been more pleasing to God was this small gift of two copper coins. Jesus might have been saying that we should be paying more attention to the acts of selflessness and love that happen inside the temple walls and less attention to the walls themselves.
Jesus tells us, “Blessed are the poor – blessed are the meek – blessed are those who weep.”All are beloved, even and especially the least of these. The walls are not the important thing. The building is not the important thing. The love, and the prayer, and the living, that goes on in them, and in the world that holds them – that is where God is – that is where the Holy Spirit never stops moving.
And that is the story of Advent, too – that in the waiting, in the uncertainty, in the quiet, God is always there. Just as we awaited the coming of the Christ child and all of the promise that dwelled in him 2,000 years ago, we await the coming of Christ’s kingdom, of Christ’s peace, today.
And so in the coming season, and in our present season, of waiting and quiet, of different kinds of loss, in our seasons of change and uncertainty, whatever they are, we can remember that even when temples fall, even when cathedrals burn, even when the things in our lives that seem solid prove not to be, we remember that God is, and that God is in the midst of it, that the Holy Spirit moves in the rubble, that Jesus came to shake up the world and to build a new one – that our hope lies not in the accomplishments of this world, but in the love that lives in and beyond them, that comforts, speaks and acts through us.
We can rebuild cathedrals; God rebuilds us. Amen.
