2024.11.17 | Things Fall Apart
“Things Fall Apart”
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost,
November 17, 2024
Mark 13:1-8
Sometimes, when I’m studying the lectionary texts assigned for the Sunday that I am preaching, I’ll read one of the texts and think, “Oh, no way. No way am I preaching on that text.” I’ll move on to the other texts, I will find them uninspiring, I will move back to the one that repulsed me, look at it again and say, "No, really; no way, no way am I preaching on that!” And then I will sigh and realize that the Holy Spirit is telling me that that’s exactly the text I’m going to be preaching.
That’s how I felt about today’s text from the gospel according to Mark. This text is difficult for a variety of reasons. It makes me uncomfortable in the way it prophesies destruction and war and famine. It sounds too mysterious and inscrutable and too much like the Book of Revelation. In fact, it so resembles some of the imagery and language in the Book of Revelation that it is known by biblical scholars as the “Little Apocalypse.” As a progressive Christian, I’m just not sure how I feel about predictions of the Second Coming, except as a study of academic interest. So, I figured that is where we’ll start today, with a little refresher course on apocalyptic literature. Because the Bible is full of it, and so is the rest of the world.
Will you pray with me? Holy God, as we approach this difficult text and make sense of it for ourselves, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
When we hear the word apocalypse, I think most of us think of a catastrophe of cosmic proportions—an earthquake, a tsunami, a category five hurricane, a war. But the word “apocalypsis” in the original Greek means “revealing.” The original name for the Book of Revelation is the “Apocalypse of John.” The Book of Revelation contains so much strange and destructive imagery, that we have come to associate the word “apocalypse” not with revelation, but instead with world-ending cataclysmic destruction.
The Book of Revelation is not the only book in the Bible that contains this sort of literature. In fact, there’s a whole genre known as apocalyptic literature that we can see scattered throughout the Bible and in extra-biblical texts that didn’t make it into the canon but were widely read in ancient times. Although the book of Revelation is the only book in the Bible that is completely a work of apocalyptic literature, there are other books in the New Testament that have sections that are considered apocalyptic. There’s our text here today from chapter 13 of Mark’s gospel, and a similar passage also appears in chapters 24 and 25 of Matthew’s gospel and chapter 21 of Luke’s. there’s also apocalyptic language in 2 Thessalonians 1 Timothy, 2 Peter and the Epistle of Jude.
In the Hebrew Bible, there are some passages in the prophets that have apocalyptic flavor, including Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel and Zechariah. And the entire second half of the book of Daniel is an apocalyptic text.
Then there are the dozens of apocalyptic texts that didn’t make it into either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. In fact, the Book of Revelation was quite controversial when the books of the New Testament were being chosen by the early church fathers. There were some who opposed including it as part of the canon, because, it was feared, people would misinterpret it and wouldn’t understand its true meaning.
All of this is material I learned in an elective course I took in my last semester of seminary, cleverly named “Apocalyptic Then and Now.” One of the things we talked about in class is that apocalyptic literature is a tradition in religious texts – not just Judaism and Christianity, but other religious traditions as well – that comes and goes throughout history. And as though the universe wanted to prove that this was the case during the semester I took this class, we who live in the Bay area started seeing these billboards in the Bay Area. There were at least two of them along the 880 freeway. You could see them if you were commuting between Hayward and Berkeley as I was either by car or on Bart. As you can see, the billboard says that the Bible guarantees that judgment day is coming on May 21, 2011.
Now, being the irreverent, progressive Christian seminarians that we were at PSR, some jokes started circulating about this billboard. You see, our commencement was happening on May 22 2011. So we thought if judgment day is coming the day before, well that would mean that God Almighty is going to give us loan forgiveness and we wouldn’t have to pay our student loans back. Or maybe, since Jesus would be done with all the judgment work on Saturday, we could get Jesus to be our commencement speaker on May 22. Well, needless to say, none of that happened. May 21 came and went, an ordinary day. People had to pay back their student loans, and we had the Very Reverend Jane A. Shaw, the Dean of Grace Cathedral, as our commencement speaker. She was good. But she wasn’t Jesus.
And it wasn’t just the billboards. It was also the tabloids. This week I went out to the garage and dug out my notes from seminary, and I found that I had saved a cover from one of the supermarket tabloids from March 2011 among the notes from my apocalyptic class. Did you know that President Obama had a secret book full of proof that the last days are here?
All joking aside, this is evidence that apocalyptic thinking is not just part of ancient history. It finds its way into the present, often when things feel most chaotic. One of the important things I learned in my class is that apocalyptic literature is a way of managing chaos. Life is chaotic, and, in some ways, the purpose of religion is to do away with the chaos, to give us a map for making a way through a dangerous world and for making sense of the turmoil we experience. Apocalyptic literature is a way that religions had of acknowledging that chaos and assuring people that God is in charge of history and creation. In difficult times, times so chaotic it seems almost too hard to bear, apocalyptic literature promises that something new will be born from the chaos. And the most important thing to remember when we go about interpreting apocalyptic literature is that context is the key. We can’t understand or interpret apocalyptic literature without understanding the context, the social location, and the history of the people from which it comes.
And the time of Jesus was filled with chaos. Many scholars propose that Mark is the earliest of the four gospels in the New Testament, and that it was written sometime between the year 65 and 75 in the first century. If so, it was written a whole generation after Jesus lived, but it was written during the devastating Jewish-Roman war that began in the year 66 when the Jews in Jerusalem had had enough of Roman occupation, and they rebelled:
At first, it seemed like the Jews might have won, mostly because there were a whole bunch of political events back in Rome that kept the Roman army occupied in other parts of the empire. But once Rome woke up and they realized what was going on out in Jerusalem, there's no way that they were going to let rebellion stand.” (1)
By the year 70, the Romans had enough of the scrappy little rebellion:
They took an army into Jerusalem, and they crushed the Jews. They knocked that temple off of its foundations, stole all of its holy artifacts and marched them in a parade back across the Mediterranean Sea and into the streets of Rome, the pagan imperial city. This wall relief on the Arch of Titus reveals Roman soldiers carrying spoils from the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in the year 70. The temple was indeed destroyed. The unthinkable actually happened.
They did their worst to Jerusalem. And when the Roman army did its worst, it was horrible. Thousands and thousands of innocent Jews were slaughtered in the streets of Jerusalem. Thousands were captured and sold into slavery. And thousands were taken from their homes and exiled into other parts of the Roman Empire.
And when they were sent into exile, many of them became sport for Roman arenas. The Jews were thrown in with lions and they became just another spectacle to be eaten for the pleasure of the Romans. The Jews at this time were being made martyrs as much as those who believed in Jesus were being made martyrs. We Christians were in the same boat with the Jews.
This text, [this “little apocalypse,”] comes from the heart of despair when the Jews and the Christians who were Jews and the Christians [who were gentiles,] when all these groups of people were under the heel of Roman oppression, under the will of Rome. At any second, in a moment, everything that they believed in, everything they trusted, everything they thought was stable and permanent, and everything that expressed the presence of God in their midst, like the big, amazing temple, could all be destroyed by Rome.
Everything could be taken. Everything could be burned down. Everything they treasured, destroyed.
[It is possible that in Chapter 13,] Mark was remembering something that Jesus most likely said, something that sounded very prophetic in hindsight. But that very thing had become the reality of the first people who read this book. It must have shattered them. And now when I read it, when I hold that moment in my own heart and I think of the pain, I know that they can relate to where we are. (2)
In his book A Grief Observed, author C.S. Lewis referred to God as one who “shatters.” The God who births something new is a shattering God. Anyone who has ever given birth knows this. The part of birth we like to talk about is holding the tiny beautiful newborn after it’s all over. But women who have given birth will talk about their bodies feeling shattered. That their bodies would never be the same ones they had before birth:
That's the work of God. The one that shatters in order for birth to happen. And C.S. Lewis went on to say this: ‘Could we not say that this shattering is one of the most important marks of God's presence among us?’ It’s no coincidence that C.S. Lewis wrote during World War II.
And that's what Mark [has been saying throughout his gospel, culminating here in Chapter 13]: a new world is being born.
And it may feel to you like everything that is stable, everything that is permanent, everything that once housed the presence of God, that it's all being destroyed. That's the birth. The shattering of this age happens so that a new one will be born. (3)
Over and over, we live through times of chaos. How many of us are feeling shattered today? We are reeling from a difficult and divisive election, which, for most of us I suspect did not turn out the way we had hoped and prayed for. We are shattered from the images of war in Gaza and Lebanon. We continue to feel shattered by living through the worst global pandemic in a hundred years, and we are shattered by the personal chaos in our own individual lives: a health crisis, a job lost, a daily sadness that won’t go away. It feels like things are falling apart.
But Jesus says to us, “Do not be alarmed.” It’s hard to believe him here; he’s just told us that there will be war and earthquake, and cataclysm. But he tells us not to be alarmed, because these are the beginnings of the birth pangs, and God is present in the birthing. God is present in the destruction. God is present in the rubble. God is present in the rebuilding, and God is present in the birthing of something new. Thanks be to God for this good news. Amen.
Diana Butler Bass, “The Rock That Births You,” The Cottage, https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/sunday-musings-532
Ibid.
Ibid.