It’s a stark, scary text we just heard from Luke’s Gospel. The time is coming, Jesus says, when the stones, the very foundation of the temple will be scattered, when wars, famines, plagues, and all sorts of nasty things will take place, when followers of Jesus will experience severe persecution, suffering, betrayal. Great pain, terrible tribulations will accompany those who remain loyal to Jesus.
You might rightly wonder how I landed today on such a gloom and doom, end-of-the-world scenario. Wouldn’t it have been better to have gone with, for example, the first four verses of this chapter which depict the familiar story of the poor widow bringing her two paltry copper coins and giving all she had to the temple offering . . . or words of thanksgiving from the Psalmist . . . or perhaps a more predictable message about unity in the body of Christ?
Today, the three-year cycle of lectionary gospel readings places us in the middle of Jesus’s frightening prediction about the end of time as we know it. Next Sunday is Christ the King Sunday, the Sunday when Christians celebrate the reality that one day, God will crown Jesus as the Lord of all creation. But before we get to the coronation, the end times first have to take place; thus, appointed readings for today such as this passage from Luke 21 ask us to wrestle with the prophetic reality of the end times.
Jesus clearly believes that the end times will bring antagonism, betrayal, opposition, fighting, fear, and a host of other not-so-pleasant experiences. While some of us may cringe as fundamentalist Christians attempt to take scriptures like these and apply them to current international events as signs that we are now in the last days, I, and I suspect most of you, have a different kind of hope about how the last days might unfold.
My view is that Jesus is speaking a prophetic word to his own Jewish national context in first century Palestine, and thus I am not too worried about trying to draw parallels with the craziness of our contemporary world.
Obviously, I could have gone elsewhere for a scripture passage. But, I was drawn to two particular thoughts in Luke 21, thoughts I’d like to share with you this morning. The first one when Jesus says, “don’t prepare your words in advance because I’ll give you the words you’ll need” and then the second one, “by your endurance you will gain your souls.”
Jesus is talking about the emotional and physical duress his followers will go through when the end times come. And he says, don’t worry about what you’re going to say when the heat is on, just trust that in the moment when you have to state your case, trust that I’ll give you the words to say.” I must confess that as many times as I have read this passage and its parallels in the other synoptic gospels, I have never lingered on the radical notion of NOT preparing my words in advance. In fact, if we Presbyterians are best known for anything, it’s probably the idea that we think through everything very carefully, often putting our words on paper, avoiding any situation wherein it would seem we haven’t done our homework.
To illustrate this with a personal example: my recurring Saturday night nightmare throughout my professional career has been that I am sitting in the chair behind the pulpit and the congregation is singing the hymn just before the sermon, and I’m sitting there frantically trying to scratch out on the back of the bulletin what I’m going to say in the sermon. My wife keeps telling me I’ve got sleep apnea, but I’ve decided that it’s probably just my subconscious anxiety that I’ll put you to sleep with my words!
Words. We Presbyterians have a love affair with our words, preparing the right words, using our well-thought-out words to solve problems, to convince others that we’re right. Now, obviously, there’s a time and a place for diligence and I have no immediate plans to surrender the prepared manuscript I bring up here on Sunday mornings.
But Jesus says, particularly in times of great distress, don’t focus on your words; rather, he says, I’ll give you the words and the wisdom. Trust the moment.
Sometimes, it’s best to let go of our claim on prepared words in order for the spirit to be fresh and alive, to receive, then share, the words and wisdom of Jesus. I think the most important advice I ever got from my thesis advisor when I was doing my doctorate at Harvard was one word, a word I’ll spend a lifetime trying to apply to my life. That word is, simply, “relax.” Sometimes, we substitute hard work or strongly held convictions about what’s right or wrong for an even more important existential and essential trust that Jesus will give us words and the wisdom in the moment. “Relax.”
Silence, letting go, can be God’s doorway into the ear and the heart.
The basic idea of Christianity, when we’re honest about what we profess, is that in the final analysis, it’s not about us; rather, it’s about being open to God’s will and wisdom reflected through us to a needy world, to a world in crisis.
It’s not about us. That should be a liberating notion. We can take ourselves and our habits so seriously that we end up being a stumbling block instead of a help to what Jesus really desires. Jesus says, “I will give you words and wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.” And so, my advice is to relax, listen to the silence, trust the moment.
My second thought relates to this idea of endurance and gaining your soul. I know that those who wrote down the words of Jesus in the first century experienced faith as literally a life or death matter. To stand against the values of the empire, to stand with the poor and the forgotten, to worship only one God instead of the plurality of gods in the Roman pantheon was a quite risky business, far riskier than anything we experience in our culture of comfort and ease.
So, I can’t, honestly, really relate to the kind of endurance Jesus spoke about. But I am cued on the idea of endurance by the immediately preceding verse, “not a hair of your head will perish.”
Hair, as I’ve mentioned before, is quite a powerful symbol for people who’ve gone through cancer. I am a pretty private person doing a pretty public job, but I don’t mind confiding in you that I’ve felt, at times over the last two years, that I’ve been to hell and back. It just seems like in my own little family there has been one crisis after another, and not just my health, but I’ve watched my father go from being a man 6 feet tall to a man less than 5’ tall because of what Parkinson’s disease has done to his body; and assorted other crises seem to have gotten bunched up over the last year and several months.
I say all this not because I think I’ve had to endure any more stress than you’ve had to endure – there are plenty of trials and tribulations to go around, some that we all know about and other situations known only to you.
But I share my perspective and experience because I do believe that it takes some real concentration on our part not to let our particular personal problems or challenges cloud our ability to make good decisions, to trust that Jesus will speak to us in our direst moments of distress or need.
In fact, I believe that the health, even the fate, of our souls hangs in the balance. How well can we focus on remaining loyal to Jesus when our own little worlds seem to be coming to an end, flying apart, or crashing down on top of us? I often wonder how many political and social crises around the world and across our own nation and community could be averted if each person would just take time to tend to his or her own soul?
My favorite verse in Luke’s Gospel says that “the kingdom of God lies within you,” that is, there is all this power, this incredible resource, enough of the divine within each person to move mountains, to change the world. What would it be like if we could work hard on gaining our own souls instead of spending so much inordinate time and energy in the blame game or being worry warts or feeling ashamed or practicing obsessive behavior or whatever crutch it is we’ve found to avoid an honest look in the mirror?
The Bible talks a lot about the soul, and to be honest, I don’t know exactly what the soul is, where it is, or even necessarily how best to tend to its needs. Soul care is a life-long work in progress, the journey and not the destination.
But the more we can, as the old saying goes, “let go and let God,” the more stamina and conditioning we will gain in order endure and gain our souls.
I just started reading yesterday a book by William Cope Moyers, the 35 year old son of Bill Moyers. Bill Moyers, the father, is well-known for his work with PBS, as a liberal Baptist minister, and as an advisor to President Johnson. In fact, Bill Moyers once said famously, in 1964 at the Thanksgiving meal at the LBJ ranch in Texas, when saying grace and the president interrupted him, telling him to speak up, Moyers replied, “I wasn’t speaking to you, Mr. President.”
Well, his son, the author of this book I’m reading, had all the advantages of a loving home and education and solid spirituality, but the son becomes addicted to crack cocaine and writes about his life story. I haven’t gotten to the addiction part yet, but I’m almost sure he will recognize that his problem is something called Reward Deficiency Syndrome, which I have learned is related to the absence of a naturally occurring brain chemical that about 10% of the population lacks, which leads to various addictions as a way to compensate for the absence of that brain chemical, what most of us have without having to seek it elsewhere.
Anyway, he repeats a little rabbinic tale at the beginning of his life narrative. The Jewish tradition, which formed the spiritual identity of Jesus, often associates the heart with the soul, so I’ll end with this story and hope you’ll see a connection with your own life.
A disciple asks the rabbi, “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts?’ Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?”
The rabbi answers, “it is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words inside our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks, and the words fall in.” Amen.
Let us pray.
