My mum was a worrier: she worried about the state of the world, she worried about everyone’s health, she worried about the neighbors, and she worried about me! I used to tell her that all her worrying couldn’t and wouldn’t change anything and she would tell me it was in her nature to worry!  

Do you worry about things beyond your control? Do your worries keep you awake at night? If so, today’s Gospel is for you. There’s plenty to disturb us: we’ve got a temple falling and wars, earthquakes, famines and dreadful portents from heaven. It’s all very apocalyptic. You can thank the lectionary!!! 

Jesus is at the Temple in Jerusalem. Everyone is amazed at its beauty, including his disciples. As they are talking about all the beautiful stones, Jesus takes their thoughts in a different direction by predicting its destruction: “not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” The crowd presses him about when this will happen, perhaps so they can prepare; emotionally or spiritually, and perhaps financially. What’s really interesting, historically speaking, is that Luke’s gospel was written some ten or twenty years after the Romans destroyed the Temple, which means that Jesus is accurately predicting the future here. His message is prophetic, but it’s also a message to comfort and offer hope to encourage those on the other side of the disaster. On the other side of any disaster, really.  

Jesus adds that other terrible things will happen, there will be false prophets, wars and insurrections, nations rising against nations, natural disasters, persecutions, even betrayals by friends and family. It will look like the end times. Scholars suggest that Jesus is not describing particular events here, but how the world works in general. There are disasters, which we are certainly witnessing in our own time, but Jesus says ”when you hear of these things, do not be terrified.” Which, you may recall, is a pretty standard move for him. He has a tendency to offer a word of peace in rough times. When his friends are scared in a storm or in a locked room, or whenever the people around him are worried about the direction things seem to be going, he says “peace be with you”, he’s telling them not to feed the fears. 

That is not his only message. He also says that difficult times give us the opportunity to witness to our faith. To speak words of hope and trust in God. In the parish where I served as a deacon, a parishioner was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. She told me that however her diagnosis played out, she wanted to live it with hope, to be a witness to her faith in God. And that was exactly how she lived the next few months as her health declined and she eventually passed on. She is remembered as a person who lived joyfully to the very moment of her transition to eternal life. A woman who put her faith in God even as cancer ravaged her body. 

In his letter to the Hebrews, Paul describes faith as “The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”. As followers of Jesus, we are called to hope in God’s abiding presence and love, to hope in resurrected life, to have hope for the lost and the least, and to hope in the coming kingdom of heaven and our citizenship there. Jesus calls us to testify to our hope. When everything is falling apart, how will you tell the story of your hope in something greater than what we see in this present time? We are sometimes shaken by momentous events, division, and at times, impending disaster. The world needs our hope no matter what is happening. That’s the call that comes from any good biblical apocalypse. They are not meant to scare us, but to make us bold in our hope.  

Theologically, Luke distinguishes the end time from particular historical events: the temple may have come to an end, but it is not the end, peace will be swallowed by war, but war is not the way the world ends, security will end but fear and uncertainly are not the end either. Some people may take the name of Jesus and misconstrue his words, but the world does not end with these impersonators. 

So if, by chance, you ever get anxious about the future, today’s gospel is for you. If you ever get stuck in a kind of worry loop about your own life, or about our community, or nation or planet, Jesus’ message is for you. His divine word of peace has the power to cut through our spinning thoughts and remind us of God’s faithful presence with us. And God waits for our response. Will we be faithful in return? Will we speak of our hope? Things can and do get rough. and sometimes even grand temples fall. Whenever disaster strikes, or whenever we worry that it will, the false god of fear shows up and wants our allegiance. Fear wants to be fed, and it wants to be in charge. But we get to choose. The choice is ours, to serve our fear or to serve a steadfast God.  

Just as the destruction of the temple testified to the truthfulness of Jesus’ words when Luke’s Gospel was written, so do these words spoken in the worship of our parish community bear witness to Christ’s unshakable promise. The stones of the temple collapsed long ago, the temple is destroyed, but these words spoken by Christ endure and their promise is not diminished by earthquake, war or famine, or even by the passing of years.  Amen.

 

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