Luke 21: 5-19
This is one of those lections where it feels ironic to read the passage and then proclaim, “The gospel [the Good News!] of the Lord.” And yet we do.
Every year as the church year approaches the reign of Christ, which we will observe next Sunday, the lectionary features one of the synoptic gospels’ apocalyptic texts. Here, we are in the third and final section of Luke, that has Jesus in Jerusalem, speaking to his disciples.
In today’s lection, Jesus prophesies the destruction of the Temple which was the place of God’s presence at the center of God’s people. He wants his disciples to recognize how
in the course of history…something that has been good will be no longer, something that has served as a reference of faith will vanish away stone from stone.[i]
The disciples’ reaction to Jesus is to question him, asking, “When will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?" (Luke 21:7)
But Jesus redirects them, pivoting instead to the question of how they will respond to the disasters and calamities in their lives. Where will they direct their attention? Will they despair quietly with fear and a sense of foreboding about the upheavals, or will they bear witness or testify to the faith that sustains them?
Luke wrote his gospel sometime after 90 CE, more than 20 years after the Jews witnessed the actual destruction of the temple. The prophecy that Jesus spoke had happened and the Jewish and Christian communities had been living with its repercussions. In his poem “The Second Coming” William Butler Yeats wrote, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”[ii] Yeats describes the anxiety we feel when we hear Jesus’ words and we know that Luke’s audience, too, would have felt it viscerally. The question is, “How do we cling to God’s hope even in the midst of disasters, past, present and future?”
Hearing Jesus’ description of devastation, I was reminded of stories I listened to last weekend on public radio. Last Saturday, the 9th, was the first anniversary of the Camp Fire that burned 153,000 acres and destroyed the rural mountain town of Paradise, California. NPR had a series of interviews with people who have remained in the Paradise, which, before the fire, was about the same size as the City of Shelby. They talked about the barren land where buildings and shopping centers had once stood, and about the community that has been lost. More than a dozen churches and worshiping communities lost buildings including one congregation that had stood since 1909.[iii] Truly, “Not one stone stands upon another.” (Luke 21:6)
Today, the town that had 26,000 people is just 3,000 people and where 11,000 homes burned in the fire, only 11 have rebuilt. But the people in the interviews, the ones who have stayed, see themselves as pioneers, as witnesses to the hope that they hold onto. [iv]
Each of us has experiences in our life when we have felt devastated and disoriented, endured prolonged suffering or unimaginable loss. In this gospel, Jesus reminds us that faith is not silent at those times. Faith testifies in the emptiness and loneliness, in the confusion and disappointment, and in the places where fear lurks:
God is present and at work and while the things of this earth, including our mortal bodies, will pass away, we will not perish. (Luke 21:17)
And that IS good news!
Let us pray with the words from one of the ancient Christian fathers Saint Ephraem Syrus:[v]
Let us turn in continual prayer toward you, our only hope, O Lord.
Our heart is filled with sadness: bring joy to our sadness, Lord, and give refreshment to our burning hearts.
Day and night sorrow and affliction surround us: cool, O Lord, the flame of our hearts.
For apart from you we have no hope to comfort us in our grief.
Place your finger, that gives life to all things, on the pain concealed in our heart.
Let our soul not be robbed of your strengthening, O Savior, so that we may not be plunged into the waves of despair.
Amen.
[i] Dirk Lange. “This Far by Faith.” Dear Working Preacher. Luther Seminary. http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=5393, accessed November 15, 2019.
[ii] William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming.”
[iii] Kate Shellnut. “Paradise Fire Burned Most Church Buildings, But ‘the Church Is Still Alive’.” https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2018/november/paradise-california-churches-camp-fire-revival.html, accessed November 15, 2019.
[iv] Kirk Siegler. “The Camp Fire Destroyed 11,000 Homes. A Year Later Only 11 Have Been Rebuilt.” NPR. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/09/777801169/the-camp-fire-destroyed-11-000-homes-a-year-later-only-11-have-been-rebuilt, , accessed November 15, 2019.
[v] Ephraem, in Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, IV, 350.
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