Church on Morgan
Little Apocalypse
[MUSIC PLAYING] From Church on Morgan, a United Methodist congregation whose desire is to be a reminder of the beauty of God and each other. This podcast is a collection of Sunday teachings, inspired by the revised Common Lectionary, and recorded weekly in Raleigh, North Carolina. And now a moment of silence before this episode begins. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Well, good morning. My name's Sam. For those of you I haven't met yet. And I told Justin it was my Sunday to wear leather, but he just couldn't-- [LAUGHTER] couldn't withhold himself. Welcome. Hey, if you weren't here last week, I hope you'll go back and listen to the podcast. Those are really special Sunday together. And I learned a lot about our church last week. And this is sort of a part two this morning. Kind of wild what the electionary has for us. This comes from the book of Mark, here now the word of the Lord. As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, look, teacher, what large stones and what large buildings. Then Jesus asked him, do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another. All will be thrown down. When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, tell us, when will this be? And what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished? Then Jesus began to say to them, be where that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, I am he, and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. This must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places. There will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs. This is the word of God for us, the people of God. [INAUDIBLE] I actually sort of wish we had another image besides birth pangs to work with this morning. Feels a little fresh. I also worry I'm beginning to sound honestly a little one note, feeling kind of typecast. I will say that Mark and also Isaiah and Paul throughout scripture all compare the coming of God's kingdom to labor. Just feels like these birth metaphors are especially popular with men who have never given birth. In Jesus' day, I would not have survived the birth of my older daughter. Thanks to modern interventions and skilled doctors, we are both here. Pangs is a weird word and a short one for what it describes. Distinct from pains, I learned, looking it up, pangs are a sudden and sharp attack of anguish. Have you felt a pang in the last two weeks? Have you felt a pang today? How many pangs can you endure? What's a normal amount of pangs before you should seek treatment, how do you treat a pang? Do you find yourself constantly changing positions unable to find any sense of relief, making sounds you've never heard yourself make? Is your vision sort of blurred? Are you riding a wave of pain so intense you've lost all sense of your surroundings? Jesus says new life is like that. It can be like that. That thing that feels like the end of yourself is the beginning of something else. Barbara Holmes calls it a mothering darkness. C.S. Lewis calls God the one who shatters. And what is shattering is the old world as the new one breaks forth. That realm where God's will is accomplished. It's an upheaval so disruptive, one in which all who are at the bottom of the caste system in this life will be exalted. It's a new order so disruptive that it can only come through the fracturing and the splintering of the old. I don't know why. I don't know why pain is the passageway. I wish I weren't haunted on my daughter's birthday. Scholars refer to this passage we just read and mark as the little apocalypse, the runt brother of Daniel, Ezekiel, and revelations. And perhaps that moniker in some way sort of right-sizing historical events that feel final, as in fact, just a prelude to the coming of God's kingdom. But it still feels kind of mean to call anyone's apocalypse little, right? I mean, you wouldn't text your friend whose divorce is playing out to see how their tiny tragedy is going. We wouldn't report on the hurricane in Western North Carolina as yet another pocket catastrophe. Can you feel agony in degrees? I don't think you can. When your world is ending, it swallows you, unless, of course, it isn't. So it doesn't. Yes, some of you floated here today in a bubble that hasn't burst, and that's OK. I'm glad you're here. Our middle and high schoolers last Sunday night were kind of processing some of the election results together. And some of the older kids were quite vocal and upset about how they were feeling. And one of our sixth-grade boys reportedly shrugged and said, I don't know. I don't think this will affect me at all. And I wish we could all be that honest. If you're sitting here thinking that all this talk of apocalypse sounds rather dramatic, your invitation today may be to get curious, to listen, and to move in the direction of the hurting, as Jesus did. We are called to mourn with those who mourn. If your world's not falling apart, your families doing OK, that's great. But my sense is that for many in our community, it is. I don't know if it was just me, but it felt like last Sunday hit really different. I mean, we're usually fighting to talk over you when we get up and welcome everybody. The room was silent. That first song we play is usually like background music as people are walking in and catching up. But it felt like people hung on every word. There was a sobriety in the room that felt distinctive. Felt like the sound of the earth moving beneath our feet. I'm gathering, listening to you that for many of us in this room, not only are we feeling off balance, but the furniture and the walls and the poles that we're grabbing for aren't weight-bearing either. For some of us, that's our trust in our leaders, our democracy, our foundational sense of goodness. For others of us, it's our family and friends requesting their love for us. What can we hold on to? Some of us are finding our God, or the body of Christ, or this church, unsturdy. Not showing up in the ways that we'd hoped for. Yes, there are earthquakes and there are famines, regular run-of-the-mill famines all over the world and in our city too. And then there's this deep, insatiable hunger for words that are almost starting to lose their meaning. We're hungry for justice and unity and hope and comfort and peace. And then there's the wars, of course, played out across countries and kitchen tables. And there's the rumors of wars. I love that Jesus mentions this. They might be worst of all. As we end our days lying in bed staring out at the destruction through our little six-inch windows, guzzling and regurgitating, terrifying predictions. And we wonder why we can't sleep. And apocalypses are impolite. Our national reckoning might find you in the middle of the loss of your marriage or the fade to black ending on your plans to ever have one. They don't wait their turn. You may have been mourning your grown children who stopped calling or the end of your dream to ever have children who would call or the loss of your career or the loss of all the ones you might have had, if not for money or the loss of money or the loss of the end of your education and the built-in friendships it's provided or the ending of a friendship. I have a friend who's losing the function in her right hand. A world ends every time she eats. I wonder what worlds are ending in this room today. Jason Miller, who's a good friend to our church, he pastors a community in South Bend, Indiana, says this about our reaction to suffering. He writes, "Often the ways we react to a breaking world end up breaking us or breaking the world further. We return violence with violence against ourselves or others. We let fear bring out the worst in us and we give our world over to leaders who manipulate that fear for the sake of their power. We stop trusting others because someone wasn't trustworthy once. We hold onto the negative energy that the breaking created and then are surprised to discover that it begins to break us. We become instruments of violence precisely by trying to protect ourselves from it. The world is always breaking, Jesus seems to say. And then, he offers some instructions for how to live in such a time, something to protect us from the pattern, Jason described. Jesus says, "Don't be deceived. Don't be alarmed. This is not the end. You might call this our birth plan. Don't be deceived. We're living in what they're calling the Golden Age of scams, right? You know this. You get the same voicemails I do about being urgently needed down at the courthouse or the police station or owing money or a great new business opportunity or literally as I was working on this sermon, the US Customs Department texted me about a mysterious parcel I needed to attend to. And they're getting more and more sophisticated, right? What's relevant to our conversation here today is that scammers prey on the vulnerable. People longing for love or desperate not to be foreclosed on. Also boomers. You guys, stay alert. (audience laughing) You know, you know the way scammers are getting boomers. Tech support, it's horrible. They're pretending to be tech support. You guys, call me. Or not honestly not me, but Maggie on our team, call Maggie. (audience laughing) It's not real. It's not real. But the worst scam of all is that of a too small savior preying on people desperate to be saved. I don't know what your internet sounds like. Mine sounds like people with a lot of good plans from my thoughts and my time and my money. And they all sound virtuous in a way. Now, I have a very mid 30s white girl mom of littles. Have you taken a picture of your baby in a pumpkin yet? Algorithm? (audience laughing) I'm coming at this from a specific perspective, but I'll tell you the saviors I keep falling for or I'm most inclined to fall for. They sort of fall into three categories as I think about it. These are the lesser saviors that sound most compelling to me right now. There's the team captains. They would say, now's the time to circle up with our tribe and prepare for the days ahead. Don't worry, I know our country's divided, but you really are on the good team. And here's a few strategies to get back out on the field and keep tearing them apart. Play close together, distance yourself from the enemy. Don't read their news, don't be in relationship with them. Don't buy their cars, stay pure, stay loyal. Come to me and I will give you goodness. Then there's the gurus. They say, you know what? I know you're feeling really small right now. So here's how you can get back up on top. No, you can't control the big wide world, but for sure can control what's in arms reach. So here's like six tips to grow your business and seven sensory play ideas for your kids and nine skin products you need and an ideal schedule and fitness regimen and capsule wardrobe and everything you need to continue upgrading your body, your home and social world. Your salvation is found in self-care. Optimize, optimize, optimize. Come to me and I will give you control. And then there's one other group. There's like the absurdists. And this is a scary voice because it confirms some of our worst fears that nothing actually matters. They say it's never been more clear that nothing makes sense. You are too small to count. We do live in a random chaotic world and none of us makes it out of here alive. So we might as well live it up. Bet the farm, collect resources and experiences, excuse yourself from the fight. Move to Mars and watch it all burn. Come to me and I will give you permission to excuse yourself from the pain of caring. The early church father, St. Athanasia says, when you know the truth, you will easily recognize the lie. Maybe the catastrophe is an occasion to come to know God well enough to pick him out of the lineup of humbugs. Our God who says we belong to each other, not just to 50% of our country. Our God who says you do not need to be fixed. Our God who says it all matters. Nothing is wasted. It's all going somewhere. Come to me and I will give you rest. Maybe this is the time when we study the stuff God says, gaze upon the image of God printed on one another and across creation, don't give up needing together as the dictionary passage today in Hebrews commends us. Listen again to the promises God makes. Maybe we get to know this God better while it's falling apart. One of those promises comes up in this passage. This is not the end. This is not the end. My daughter, the one who shattered my body to get here, so wants to watch movies, but she can't handle them yet. Disney is like way too scary for her and all her little friends like Frozen and they talk about Frozen all the time and they were all Elsa for Halloween. And so she begged to watch it and I'd never seen it before. I will never understand our cultural obsession with this film, especially for little ones based on a kingdom in perpetual winter where the parents die in a shipwreck. First thing that happens and the sisters don't speak to each other. And then when they do try to reconcile, one of them chases the other one with a giant snow monster. Eloise was closing her eyes and just kept yelling, "I want a happy ending, I want a happy ending." And so I was just fast forwarding until I got to something that looked remotely not scary or sad. But this feels like a spiritual practice every once in a while. It's one of the things we do together on Sunday mornings. We do it, we kneel down like in front of an old school VCR where you have to hold the button down the whole time. And the screen gets kind of fuzzy and the animation goes into hyper speed. And together we blitz through our history and our future history. One full of shipwrecks and silence between sisters and monsters and earthquakes and famines and wars and rumors of wars and rumors of saviors over and over and over until finally we press play on a glimpse of a kingdom that is finally done with winter, once and for all. This fast forward thing comes up all the time in our liturgy. We anticipate together, eagerly, a really, really, really good ending. And when we do, we imagine as these disciples must have on that long ago mountain ridge in Jerusalem, city of unending endings, we imagine a God who is so far out in front of us, the eager parent preparing the room for the baby who isn't here yet, though the heartbeat is buried in us now. Maybe that's a comfort to you today. That while you endure these endings, the promise of scripture is that God is offering an astonishing finale. But that might be a bit heady. It might be hard to like see things in their infinite character when your Thanksgiving is up for grabs. Don't be deceived. This is not the end. There's one other thing Jesus offers us. Don't be alarmed. We had looked into hiring a doula with my first pregnancy when I was preparing for labor. And we were sort of new to this and we were trying to understand what a doula did. So any doula's in the room this morning? It's more of an Austin thing, it's where I came from. (audience laughs) I remember interviewing a couple of them and it sounded like a nice thing. Like it's like a comforting word. But Will and I couldn't grasp what exactly they would do. I was planning to give birth in a hospital. So what would be the point of a doula? They just kept saying like, they'll be in the room with you. And the good ones had attended upwards of 65 births and they'll sit right next to you and kind of coach you through different birthing positions and advocate for you. But most of all, every single person we talked to said, and we help you breathe. Ultimately we were like, well, we don't need to pay $2,000 for someone to remind us how to breathe. It turns out, we did. Turns out when you're in agony, you actually do forget how to breathe. That's why it's like the main thing they talk about in all the books and the classes are the breathing techniques. This thing that we do every moment of every day without thinking, we suddenly need a technique for. Naive first time parents, we didn't see what all the fuss was about. Friends, if nothing else this morning, I hope you can hear Jesus at the bedside of your apocalypse. Rubbing your head, squeezing your hand, saying, don't be alarmed. This is the way of things. I've attended many births, which is to say I've attended many deaths, including my own. I'm right here. Don't be alarmed. Don't give into terror. Don't succumb to dread. This is going somewhere good. And if you can't see that right now, that's okay. Let's just move through this next wave as it comes. You may know that the Jewish name for God, Yahweh, was not spoken but breathed. The correct pronunciation of God is inhale, exhale. It is our first word and our last, which means the only time we cease to speak God's name is when we hold our breath in fear. This week, this day, may you hear the voice of our loving God in your ear, reminding you to breathe. May you not be above needing the reminder. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. - Thank you for joining today. If this episode has been meaningful to you, would you take a moment to share it with a friend? To support this ministry or learn more about our community, visit us at churchonmorgan.org. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
The good news in the apocalypse. A sermon for the 26th Sunday after Pentecost on Mark 13:1-18 by Rev. Samantha Beach Kiley.