dawn ... happens

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

ORDINARY SUNDAY 33 (14^th 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.