A sermon preached at Putnam United Presbyterian Church November 17, 2024
Text: Mark 13:1–27
Well, we can say this much: another presidential election is over. Roughly half of the country is pumped and feeling bullish about the future, while the other half is collecting canned foods and researching bomb shelters online. But we can say this pretty confidently: no matter who you were rooting for, this election cycle was brutal to endure. I made the comment last month during the concerns and joys that the only thing that seems to unite Americans these days is the nausea we all were feeling about the election.
A cloud of doom settled in over this election and the perception many of us have about the health of our country and state of the world, and this pessimism really was a nonpartisan experience. We saw it in Republican TV ads that depicted the US as being overrun by marauders from the south and cast into a new Great Depression by an economy allegedly driven into the ground. Democrats matched those doom-and-gloom pictures of the country with their own predictions of the end of democracy and Western civilization if they lost. And since the Democrats lost (in spectacular fashion), the anguish has only intensified with Democratic leaders and voters wearing black, crying openly, packing go bags, and either doomscrolling addictively or retreating from social media as if it were the comforting days of the 1990s.
Wherever you are on the political spectrum, if you’ve been paying attention to politics, our reality has felt ominous to you at some point recently. Today’s Gospel reading fits right into our current collective mood, because there is a lot of doom in this story, too.
This is one of those moments when it is important to remember that the Gospels aren’t news accounts or court transcripts of the life of Jesus. The author of Mark’s Gospel—we can call him Mark, though no one really knows who wrote it—is writing his account of the life of Jesus about forty years after the crucifixion. When he tells his story of Jesus’ life and death, Mark can’t help but bring some of his own world into his telling. And nowhere is that truer in this gospel than in Chapter 13.
The events that Mark depicts Jesus as “predicting” actually reflect things that were happening in or around Mark’s time. Mark 13 reveals as much about Mark’s world as it does Jesus’. Mark depicts Jesus predicting a Mediterranean world at war; that’s what Mark’s generation was going through. About twenty-five years after Jesus’ death, the Jewish frustration with Roman occupation that was so much a part of Jesus’ life erupted in full-out rebellion. Militant false messiahs rose up, each claiming to be the chosen one of God, uniquely equipped to fix what ailed the Jewish people, to bring peace, and to make Jerusalem great again. Stoked by these false messiahs and their own suffering, Jewish fighters rose up in arms against Rome—and the Roman response was catastrophic. Rome laid siege to Jerusalem, overcame the Jewish resistance, and destroyed the Temple, the physical center of Jewish religion.
The effect of the Temple’s destruction on first-century Jews can, without exaggeration, be compared to how we felt when terrorists took down the Twin Towers in New York and attacked the Pentagon in DC—times ten. It would be more comparable to the terrorists taking out the Capitol building, the Supreme Court building, and the White House all in one. Gone was the architectural symbol of ancient Judaism, the heart of who they were as a people, the place where Jews could come closest to God on Earth.
The destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70 is what the opening of today’s story indirectly refers to when Jesus talks about the tearing down of great stones. But that wasn’t the only tragedy of his time that Mark let seep into his telling of this story about Jesus. In Mark’s time, while Jews mourned the loss of the Temple, they also suffered the sacrilege of Rome’s mocking installment of a statue of the emperor in the Temple’s ruins. They suffered intense persecution. Mark even throws in references to natural disasters. And Christians, this new little group of Jesus followers, were caught in the middle, suspected and hated by everybody. The conflict of the day tore families apart—parents would not speak to their children, siblings disowned one another. Conflict, division, and despair ruled the day.
And yet, into that world of conflict and despair, Jesus insists that God will come:
But in those days, after that suffering,
the sun will be darkened
and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in the clouds” with great power and glory.
(Mark 13:24–26)
Just when it seems things cannot get worse, Jesus says, that will be the time to look for the Kingdom of God breaking into the world.
In fact, Jesus suggests that all of the bad stuff that was happening might be stage-setting for the re-emergence of the Reign of God. He likens the suffering he predicts, the suffering that Mark and his friends experienced years later, to the contractions of childbirth—great pain that nonetheless brings life and great joy.
A number of years ago, I had a kidney stone that made me sicker than I have ever been in my life. Waves of sharp pain that would then subside, tempting me to think it was over, before they came again. The pain was nauseating, and when it hit I would crumple to the floor in agony. I went through this for a day or two before it passed, and relating the experience to some friends soon after, I said, “I guess I know now what it feels like to give birth.” To which my friend Peggy retorted, “I’ve had kidney stones and children, and you still don’t know what it’s like to give birth. Childbirth is worse.”
Jesus predicts that the suffering to come is this kind of pain, a pain that feels unequaled, like it will go on forever, like the world is ending. But this pain will usher into the world something wonderful, something glorious and beautiful. All the suffering you are experiencing and witnessing, says Jesus, is the pangs of the rebirth of God’s Kingdom in the world. The trauma is stage-setting for the re-emergence of grace and love.
What is Jesus driving at here? Put simply, he is encouraging his listeners then and now to not give up hope. Things are as bad as you think they are, he says. Jesus is not denying the badness in the world. But he is reminding us that the world is not our source of hope. Our source of hope is the One working behind all of the badness of the world, the One who assures us in Christ that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, that the endgame of history is community and love, even if it seems we are taking a dangerously scenic route to get there. Put your hope in God, says Jesus, who is powerful enough to work through the bad, powerful enough to put the bad to work for good, and persistent enough to keep working and keep moving until God’s Beloved Community triumphs over all.
A lot of Christian fundamentalist preachers take passages like ours today and think that the point of them is to predict when Jesus is going to burst back into our world, riding on the clouds. The predictions often include specific dates, and when that day comes and goes with no sign of Jesus in the sky, they conveniently revise the forecast like a TV meteorologist. But I don’t believe the point of this text is to predict a moment when the sky will literally darken, stars will fall, and Christ will come out of the clouds.
I’ve never been one to expect Christ to return to the world in an airborne chariot. I could find out one day I am wrong, but I don’t think that’s how Christ breaks into our world. I don’t think the Kingdom of God breaks into our sinful world with flashing lights and celestial displays. I think the Kingdom of God breaks through in miraculous displays of kindness and friendship in the face of hostility. I think the Kingdom of God breaks through in works of mercy and advocates for justice in a culture of injustice and apathy. I think the Kingdom of God breaks through in moments of boundary-breaking, when people of some faith and people of no faith live as if “there is no Jew or Gentile, there is no male or female, there is no slave or free.” I think the Kingdom of God breaks through in people, people who embody the principles of love and grace even when the world seems to be flowing entirely in the opposite direction.
I think the light of Christ shines in the darkness when we carry that light and when we refuse to let the darkness of the world set the terms for our lives, our relationships, and our visions of tomorrow.
Lots of us are bruised, saddened, frustrated, angry, and despondent over the state of our nation and the world. For many of us, it is hard to find hope in this present darkness. We worry about wars and rumors of war. We worry about economic security (ours and others). We stress over finding the right balance between hospitality and security when it comes to immigration. We despair over the multiplying examples of indecency and criminality not only going unpunished, but actually being rewarded in this morally upside-down world.
If we are not careful, the circumstances of our moment can lead us to profound despair.
But as Christians, hope is the gift and the responsibility we receive from the God shown to us in Jesus Christ. Hope is a gift because our knowledge of God’s grace reminds us that this world isn’t the source of our confidence. We hope in the God of persistent love and grace working in, through, behind, and against the hostilities of this world, and we know that God will not be denied. Hope is our gift, and it is our responsibility, to offer ourselves as instruments of that persistent love and grace, to work a little of God’s magic in our lives as a response to the chaos and criminality around us. Hope is our responsibility to share in a world full of people who cannot find a source of hope. Hope is the gospel our world needs at this moment, and it is our privilege and our duty to speak that gospel and live that gospel to the extent we are able.
It is fitting that today’s Gospel reading includes the text that was read at the beginning of this church year, way back in December on the first Sunday in Advent. Appropriately, the church year begins and ends with the same message: hope. You could say that this passage not only speaks to where we are this month, it points us toward next month, when we will be in the season of patiently, eagerly waiting on Emmanuel, the embodied promise of God with us. We may be in the middle of painful pangs right now, but that will make all the sweeter our celebration of the birth that assures us that God so loved the world.
As Christians, our hope does not lie in ideological agendas or political parties, or even a naïve optimism about the moral potential of human beings. As Christians, our hope is in God, and we know who God is because Christ showed us who God is. If we believe that God is in control of this world, then we must believe that God is able to overcome the darkness that may threaten to subsume us.
Friends, the good news we cling to is that
God’s loving grace is more powerful than wars and rumors of war.
God’s loving grace is more powerful than detached or deranged political leaders.
God’s loving grace is more persistent than destructive greed or the tribal fear of anyone who is different.
God’s loving grace is more powerful than all of that. It is powerful enough to work and weasel its way through all of that. It is powerful enough to part overcast skies and bring the dawn of a new day. As Christians, that is the source of our hope—not this broken world, but the promise that God never stops working for good in this broken world. What a gift it is to witness to and live out that hope in this moment. Amen.
James Calvin Davis 