SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU
and St Alban’s, Kurow
ORDINARY SUNDAY 33 (14th November) 2021
Readings:
1 Samuel 1:4-20
For the psalm:
1 Samuel 2: 1-10
Hebrews 10:
11-25
mark 13: 1-8
There’s not
many things – well there’s a few! – that I can say I never do, but I do
not revisit old sermons. Without checking I can’t see whether I preached on this
opening of Mark’s little apocalypse three years ago, when I presume it last
appeared, or even three or nine or twelve et cetera years ago, though I
keep all my sermons and have even blogged them for years.
In fact this
passage from Mark, as we break it open in 2021, serves as a powerful example as
to precisely why I don’t revisit old writings. Assuming I did preach on
it three years ago or six years ago, or … I was a very different person then
and the world I lived in was even more different. In the three decades or so I
have been preaching I would have, for most of the time, referred to and prised open
Jesus’ teachings on the tearing down of the temple, and the subsequent apocalyptic
sayings, in the light of a potential nuclear annihilation, and nuclear winter.
Perhaps three years ago I would have been shifting my focus very much to climate
change and global warming – and ecological and economic implosion. Today those
threats remain – as if, we might say, apocalyptic was accumulative. But how can
we speak of apocalypse in 2021 without speaking of Covid, of lockdown, of
bitter divides growing (reminiscent of the Springbok Tour) even in our sleepy part of the world?
The
circumstances change. As I often mention, since the American military dropped
the obscenely named Trinity nuclear bomb in the New Mexico desert in 1945 they
have probably changed irreversibly. Humanity has the potential to destroy
itself and its host planet. But in the rapidly accumulating paroxysms of the
last few years even that threat has faded in our consciousness. Perhaps 9/11
was another watershed. Then slowly the words “global warming” and “climate
change” grew in our consciousness. We became aware that the oceans and waterways
are turning into a toxic sludge, that the death of species is accelerating, and
yes, most recently, that microscopic viruses could sweep the surface of the
earth – as they have many times before – and devastate all our expectations of
life and death and commerce and recreation. As a parent and grandparent I feel
the turmoil deeply.
So the power
of apocalyptic is deeply relevant. When Mark was setting down these words of
Jesus the world was collapsing around him. When Jesus spoke these words his own
personal apocalypse was imminent – he didn’t need a crystal ball to know that
his prophetic ministry would soon end in tears, or indeed as we know it, in the
cry of dereliction from the cross of execution. We may be in a worse place than
we were when last or first I preached on the little apocalypse of Mark, but we
are a million miles removed from the cry of dereliction from the cross, or the
threat of Roman storm troopers smashing our prayer meetings and our Sunday
services. For that I thank God. I’ve never pretended to be brave – nor a
martyr, nor even a hero of faith. I will not know how I will behave under
duress unless, God forbid, that time of trial that we pray to avoid – save us
from the time of trial – comes my way or ours. It probably won’t, though it may
come the way of our children or our grandchildren. Apart from anything else,
Greta Thunberg is right: COP-26 has achieved, I suspect, a big fat zero, blah
blah blah, and that was always going to the case as the rich and the powerful
flew in on their future-guzzling jets to talk about saving the future.
So what does
the strange passage from Mark’s gospel account whisper to us? It does not give
us permission to hang up our brains and do nothing. Christian groups who rejoice
at an apocalyptic future and the demise of Papatuanuku have missed the point. Christian
groups who are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good have missed the
point. To some extent most of us have missed the point. Yet even in apocalyptic
times, Mark tells us, God is, and God is in control.
That divine control
may not stop the house of cards or the house of bricks falling on us. Faith is
not a prophylactic against Bad Things. It is our however the belief that the bad
things, as Eurythmics singer Annie Lennox called them, will not have the final
say. And that, Mark’s Jesus tells us, is the hope to which we must cling, even
when our personal apocalypses or a global apocalypse seem to have the final
say. Our task is to pray – and even if our prayers appear totally on the deaf
ears of an empty universe, to pray believing that darkness is not and will
never be the final word.
Within a few
days of these apocalyptic words of Jesus the greatest darkness covered the
hearts of all who knew Jesus, and even of Jesus himself, and yet within three days
of that, light was born again. Against all odds the rumour of resurrection hope
has whispered down through history ever since, even into a time of Covid and a
melting planet.
