Collect
Sovereign God, on the brink of chaos Your Son urged His disciples to live in the present with eternal peace untouched by an uncertain future. In these unsettling times, grant us the grace to bear each day’s burden with unshakable faith in Your perfect plan, that in us a world in turmoil might see the peace that passes all understanding, the peace of Christ in Whose name we pray, Amen.
In 1817 the British Museum announced that it had acquired the wrecked fragments of a statue of Ramesses II, a thirteenth century Egyptian Pharaoh also known as Ozymandias.. The Romantic poet Percy Shelley pondered this strange twist of history: A colossal monument to the former king of the greatest empire of the ancient world now amounted to nothing more than a historical curiosity in the collection of yet another mighty monarchy. The thought inspired him to write his most famous poem, “Ozymandias,” a meditation on the fleeting nature of political power.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
In the text we have read this morning, Jesus confronts first century Israel with a similar prophecy about the architectural, geographic, political, and religious center of their people, Herod’s temple in Jerusalem. The great builder-king had spared no expense in this lavish monument to his power. Elaborate carved branches snaked through the massive stones of the passageways. The porticoes of the purest marble flashed in the sunlight. A golden vine entwined itself about the entrance to the sanctuary. The temple bestrode the peak of Mount Zion as an indomitable monument to the greatness of the God of Israel and the hopes of that proud people that one day they would again rule the region, as in the times of their hero-king, David.
Jesus primarily refers here to the destruction of the temple which took place during the Jewish revolt against Rome in AD 70, when the Roman general Titus did, in fact, pull the temple to fragments. When Our Lord dismisses the temple with a lurid prophecy of ruin, the crowd reacts with the same shock and disorientation depicted by Shelley in his poem. If Americans imagined the utter obliteration of the capital mall in Washington, D. C., we might have some understanding of the shock this prediction created. Not surprisingly, his audience responds with the predictable question of timing: Teacher, when will this be? Jesus, however, ignores their inquiry and instead tells them, not when this will happen, but how they should live in a world whose greatest stability rests on the shifting-sand foundations of human events.
What Jesus spoke as prophecy is, for us, history. The point of contact for us is that Jesus stresses the inevitable upheavals of life through which Christians always have and always will live. It is interesting that, in this context, Christ gives three negative commands, prohibitions, things NOT to do in times of crisis, and ends with a single positive imperative, one thing TO do. He issues three negative commands before concluding with a final active commandment.
Last Tuesday America elected a president. A campaign of scorched-earth rhetoric has given way to a post-mortem of apocalyptic prediction. For some, the incoming administration holds the promise of renewed national greatness and religious resurgance. For others, it heralds the rise of a social moonscape of wrack and ruin. This is a good time for us to turn to the words of our Teacher to learn how we are to live as we move forward into these uncertain days. I believe that Jesus gives us, as he gave his original disciples, three warnings of things NOT to do, and one word of what we MUST do.
First, Jesus says, in uncertain times, do not abandon your POSITION; v.8.
Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, "I am he!” and, "The time is near!” Do not go after them. Jesus refers, of course, to the many military messiahs, the religious warlords who did, indeed, arise to challenge Roman power in conventional revolution. You can find a catalogue of a few of them in Acts 5.35-36. “Don’t throw in your lot with the local militias,” would be a fair paraphrase. But something more is at work here.
The phrase I am he is, literally, “I AM.” This title harks back to the original name of God revealed to Moses before the burning bush on Mount Horeb (Exodus 3). Jesus uses this name for himself in the seven famous “I AM” statements of John’s gospel, culminating in the bold claim of John 8.58, Before Abraham was, I am. The claim, The time is near! is exactly the phrase Jesus uses to summarize his own ministry: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near (Mark 1.15). Taken together, they amount to a warning against any earthly leader who claims a mandate from God to bring about earthly perfection. The reason not to listen to such claims is the Christian’s prior faith that Jesus, God in the flesh, has already arrived, and that His kingdom, far from being some future utopia, is a present reality for all who dare to live the Christ-life in the present moment.
In troubled times, Our Master warns us not to abandon our eternal position in the present moment just because some political party or person claims to offer perfection in the future. The question for the Christian is never, “What will happen next?” but always, “How should I live now?” And the answer to that question always comes from the teachings of Christ, not the expediency of the moment. Our task is not to make America great again; our task is to proclaim the present greatness of Christ.
C. S. Lewis’ arch-tempter Screwtape counsels his bumbling protege Wormwood that “we want a man hagridden by the Future - haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth - ready to break (God’s) commands in the Present if by doing so we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other.” When tempted to despair over defeat or declare final victory, as Christians we must return to our unchanging position: The only thing that matters is what the teachings of Jesus command me to do right now.
Next Jesus says, in uncertain times, do not abandon your PEACE; v. 9-1l.
When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified. He does not mean we should assume the rumors are false; he means we should remain calm even though they are very likely true.
Jesus’ words leap across two millennia from that day to our own by pointing out that the one reliable constant of history is chaos. Isis will arise in the Middle East; fracking will fragment the very bedrock below our buildings; global warming will devastate the world’s food supply; random comets will threaten our entire planet in the stellar shooting-gallery that is our galaxy - but the end will not follow immediately. The various and unending upheavals of human existence are, in the phrase of Barbara W.Tuchman, only “the unfolding of miscalculations,” the inevitable results when nations take whatever actions they believe necessary in order to secure whatever peace and prosperity they think they deserve.
Do not be terrified. This word occurs in only one other place in the Bible, also in Luke. It describes the disciples’ emotions when the risen Lord suddenly appears in their midst on the first Easter Sunday: They were startled and terrified. (Lk 24.37) Jesus immediately calms their fears but the contrast makes a point: The unchanging truth of the resurrection of Jesus brings a peace that casts out all earthly worries.
You’ve all seen those little signs that show the British crown and say, “Keep calm and carry on.” The British Ministry of Information created this meme back in 1939 and planned to use it only if the Germans actually invaded. That never happened, of course, and the slogan lay dormant until sixty years later when a bookseller discovered it on a poster among some volumes he had purchased at auction. It caught the public imagination and is now, of course, seen everywhere, along with some humorous variations. In our home, we have two little refrigerator magnets based on this theme. One is the original design and slogan. The other is green and reads, “Now panic and freak out.” We keep them on the inside of our front door and place one or the other on top according to the scheduled events of the day.
Well, Jesus does not deny that there will be times of panic, times when we have good reason to panic and freak out. He does, however, insist that the original sign always remain on top of the front doors of our hearts: We live in the Kingdom of Heaven and, no matter what happens, we hold fast to our peace. We keep calm and carry the cross.
Then Jesus says, in uncertain times, do not abandon your PREPARATION; v.12-15.
So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.
Some of our more fundamentalist brethren have read this text as a prohibition against preparing sermons ahead of time. That is clearly a misreading of the text: Jesus does not speak here of a planned teaching session among assembled believers but of an impromptu deposition in some kangaroo court. Jesus warns his followers, under such circumstances, not to calculate their testimony in light of the prevailing preferences of the age, but to speak the same, unchanging, eternal message of the Gospel that Christians have always shared. This will give you an opportunity to testify. In other words, your goal is not to save your skin or win an argument, but to bear witness. We see this literally fulfilled when Peter and John, though “unlearned and ignorant,” argued the Supreme Court off it’s feet in a reply that reeked of Jesus. (Acts 4.13) We see it in Stephen, whose presentation of the Gospel left his opponents speechless. (Acts 6.10)
Jesus does not forbid sermon preparation. What he says is that our ability to speak with
power to our times lies in our relationship with the eternal Christ. It is by seeking to walk with Jesus daily that we find the ability to offer our world hope in any day and age, and learn to see times of trial as an opportunity to offer timeless testimony. Faithful witness does not lie in getting in the last word on Facebook or spouting the latest pronouncement of our favorite cable news talking head. It lies in living so daily and so deeply with Christ in God’s Word that instead of winning arguments, we bear witness.
My pastor, Scott Higginbotham at Lexington Baptist Church here in Corpus Christi, once told me a fascinating story about his seminary Greek class. He was a student when the planes hit the towers on September 11, 2001. All the students could talk about as they came into class that day was the events of the morning. The professor, Dr. Schatzmann, entered and though the class’s minds are elsewhere, ploughed right on through the lesson for the day, including a vocabulary quiz, which the entire class bombed. Dr. Schatzmann returned the graded quizzes the next day and asked, “What affected your performance?” Really?! Planes, buildings, death, an existential threat to the life of the nation: that kind of stuff! Dr. Schatzmann replied in effect: “This is the world we live in. Towers fall, lives end. Grieving people need well-equipped ministers to offer hope and solace. Take out your textbooks. We have work to do.”
What was he saying to the students? That they should turn calloused hearts to the tragedy of the nation? No. Instead he challenged them to see that the most compassionate thing they could do was to delve deeper into the task of learning the Word of God so that they could bring its unchanging truth to the ever-changing and never-endings sufferings of their world.
And now comes the single positive command. Do not abandon your position, your peace, or your preparation: Instead, conquer by your PATIENCE; v.16-19.
By your endurance you will gain your souls. The NRSV translates the verb as a future tense and makes it sound like a prediction. A one-letter change in the original text, however, would turn it into a commandment, as the King James translates it. I believe this to be the correct reading. And the command comes at the end of a harrowing series of predictions of betrayal, hatred, imprisonment and even death in which the single bright spot is that the very hairs of our head are numbered by a God who promises us an eternal reward.
The key to victory in these circumstances, Jesus says, is endurance. That word refers, not to a passive, stubborn, putting-up-with, but an active, hopeful anticipation of ultimate reward. The Christian does not stump, sullen and stoic, through the slings and arrows of outrageous events, but marches steadily and joyfully into the future, never flagging in the belief that God will grant victory.
And I think the reward is interesting: you will gain your souls. The word really means to possess or acquire what you do not yet own. Elsewhere in the Bible it refers to getting hold of cash or real estate. Does this mean that our endurance of life’s trials earns our salvation? No. The word soul is the idea of one’s true, inner self. When I anchor my life in the present reality of the indwelling Christ, I give up the buzzing anxiety which has me chasing a thousand contradictory schemes which promise me peace. Instead, of being pulled in pieces by the unknown future, I sit in peace in the present. I stand steady in the midst of the bombardment of persecution and calamity, realizing that whatever comes my way will serve to make me more like Jesus. When I quit pursuing my soul like a dog chasing its tail, I realize that I possess it at last.
And that’s the answer. When the seemingly unshakeable monuments of our security crumble into the vast and measureless sands, do not abandon your position; when two vast and trunkless legs of stone are all that are left of the symbols of political power, do not abandon your peace; when inscriptions of authority become mere hollow mockery, do not abandon your preparation. Instead, conquer by your patience. Perhaps the beautiful old hymn by Catharina von Schlegel says it best:
Be still, my soul; the Lord is on thy side;
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain;
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
In every change He faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul; thy best, thy heavenly, Friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.
Be still, my soul; thy God doth undertake
To guide the future as He has the past.
Thy hope, thy confidence, let nothing shake;
All now mysterious shall be bright at last.
Be still, my soul; the waves and winds still know
His voice who ruled them while He dwelt below.
Amen.
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