“I’ve got bad news/good news jokes……..”

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples the shocking news that the beloved temple will be destroyed. Amid wars and rumors of wars, nation rising against nation, there will be a great cataclysm. This is bad news. And yet, Jesus ends today’s Gospel saying these events will be “birth.”

The Temple Mount was considered by the Jews to be the very center of the earth. The temple was built to look big, heavy, and eternal. We still do that with our religious buildings. Most of our churches are built to look much, much older than they really are. We bolt down the pews and make everything look heavy and substantial. Perhaps we do this to our churches because there is so much in life that is unsubstantial and in flux. So much in our life gets disrupted, confused, and dislodged. Isn’t it nice to know that this church will always be here, just as it is, eternal and forever?

And then Jesus told his disciples outright that the temple would not always be there, that it was going to be utterly destroyed. And Jesus called that bad news…GOOD news! He is always messing things up, getting us all in trouble. Why, if he is having a bad day, does he have to drag us into his own swirling storms? And then he has the nerve to say, FOLLOW ME!!!!

You don’t hear a text like today’s Gospel often in a church like ours. Most mainline, mostly white, well-off, Protestant churches stay away from “apocalyptic,” or end times, Biblical literature. Why? People on top, people in power, people whose children are well fed, well housed, and well futured do not care for apocalyptic literature that speaks of endings and of the destruction of the present order. After all, the present order has been very good to people like us. To hear that God plans to allow the destruction of all our eternal-looking achievements is bad news indeed.

I want to make a couple of observations about a passage like today’s Gospel. These are simple…like the fundamentals of baseball…you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball. Here it is: For one thing, that Jesus so dramatically announces the utter destruction of the temple says that present arrangements are not necessarily what God intends for the world. We tend to think of God working to create the world, to set things in motion, then God retires. But what if God keeps creating? What if God intends to get the world that God wanted in the first place? What if not everything that happens in this world happens because God wants it to be that way, but that God means to take everything that happens, even the bad things, and turn them toward God’s intended good?

What if church is not where we come to get everything tied down, eternal-looking and fixed, but where we come to keep looking for God’s intended new heaven and new earth? Perhaps church at its best fosters a sort of holy discontent in us, when we try to settle in and settle down and content ourselves with, “Well, this is the best of all possible worlds, don’t look for anything better; this is it.”

The great theologian and writer, C.S. Lewis says that most of us Christians are “too easily pleased.” There is this human tendency to paint human institutions and humanly created situations with divine permanence, as if God created everything that now is. Passages like Mark 13 remind us that God isn’t done with us or the world. Episcopal Bishop John Spong said that “churches will disappear out of boredom before they die from controversy!” And sometimes things can’t be made new until the old is destroyed. Sometimes there can’t be birth until there is death. Sometimes we are too attached to the “temple” we have, and can’t think of letting it go for the temple that God might be trying to offer us. Has anybody here had to die in order to live? Does someone here know what it’s like to have your “temple” destroyed, only to be replaced by something much better? Has your very bad news ever become very good news?

Years ago a church member shared with me: “When my husband died, my life was over. I told God, ‘I’ve got nothing to live for now. My world is destroyed.’ But wonder of wonders, I didn’t die. I went on, not with the same life, but with a new life. I wouldn’t have chosen for my marriage to end, to be alone, yet that was the life I got and I must say, it’s turned out for the best.” That’s someone who knew the move from bad news to good.

The Gospel of Mark, which we have been focusing upon this year, is a Gospel that contains many sad events – the incomprehension and infidelity of the disciples, the growing hostility of the religious and political authorities, and finally, the bloody crucifixion of Jesus. And, yet, Mark’s Gospel begins by saying that all of this, including the bad, is “the beginning of the Good News.” If we choose, we can read Mark 13, foretelling the destruction of the temple, as bad news, Jesus having a rough day!! But to the person who has been abused, betrayed, shamed, thrown down by this world, been the victim of racial profiling, beaten up or worse because they are gay, for the family getting the news of their son or daughter’s death in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Fort Hood, marginalized by a church preaching love for all, struggling for relief from pain or grief, loss or anger, to that person thrown down hard by this world, the news that this world shall be thrown down is GOOD NEWS!! For God to say, “This world is not as I intended. This world is not your ultimate home. I am still working, and will work, to make this world, my world in all of its goodness and fullness,” this is good news, the beginning of THE GOOD NEWS.

I think it is possible to say that in spite of all its extraordinary variety, the Bible is held together by having a single plot. It is simple, like the fundamentals of baseball: 1) God creates the world; 2) the world gets lost; 3) God seeks to restore the world to the glory for which God created it in the first place.

Amen.