babels crumble

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 33

 

READINGS

 

Hebrews 10: 19-25

Psalm 16

Mark 13: 1-8

 

In the Hebrews readings of recent weeks we have been catching glimpses of the Christ who goes before us through the entire range of human experience. Not, of course, the specifics of driving a Mitsubishi or hang-gliding or, yes, running a marathon, nor of being female or wealthy, but the whole range of human emotional response to the world we live in.

I mention “wealthy” because, guiding our understanding of the life of Jesus is the profound insight we can gain from a few sentences in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, that this person who the earliest Christians knew, following the resurrection, to be divine, was also voluntarily emptied of what we might call the privileges of divinity. He emptied himself, as Paul put it, and became obedient to the forces of human existence, to the will, too of God, even to death on a cross. Gods do not generally enter the fully human experience of alienation from divinity, and even of death. I say this because in the Gospel reading just now we see the pre-resurrection, pre-crucifixion even, disciples getting that badly, humanly wrong. The comment made by the unnamed disciple was innocuous enough. The Temple was a massive building, ostentatious, opulent, a far cry from the early Jewish understanding of a God who was comfortable with just a tent.

Which is not to say God did not permit the building of the Temple. Sometimes humanity needs to learn harsh lessons. Sometimes our cathedrals fall down. Sometimes our temples are torn down. Sometimes even our planet heats up, falling foul of human greed, as it accelerates the harsh cycles of nature. Even then we must follow in the footsteps of the One who has experienced all, from conception to birth to annihilation and all in between.

Some of us remember the poem almost always thrown at us in public examinations for literature, Ozymandias. In that poem a megalomaniacal figure, a Trump on steroids, has built immeasurable monuments to his own self-importance. Allusion to Trump is not altogether accidental. Having stood at the foot of one of his opulent towers I cannot ever forget the crushing feeling of revulsion – at that stage I had never heard of Donald Trump – that a person could so ostentatiously proclaim his worth.

But not just him; businesses outdoing each other by pushing their glass towers to the skies to proclaim the majesty of Mohamed Kajoor Alabbar’s Burj Khalifa in Dubai, or the finance company Permodalan Nasional Berhad’s Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur, or Shanghai Tower’s proclamation of it and its people’s self-importance. Those are secular buildings, some proclaiming greed, perhaps at best some proclaiming business success.

Sacred buildings too are vulnerable to the warp and weft of time, nature and politics. The cathedral of which I was briefly dean is facing condemnation, likely to be the second time that building has come down. Christchurch’s Roman Catholic and Anglican cathedrals, however magnificent, fell in a few seconds of natural terror. Darwin’s and Coventry’s were destroyed in war.

 I have no idea of the earthquake status of our stone building (St. Peter’s) but a decent wobble of the Alpine fault, or a careless flame at St Paul’s, could shatter the dreams of our forebears. They are not necessarily acts of God, as insurers used to like to call them, but they are reminders of the vulnerability of existence. And our mokopuna and mokopuna’s mokopuna may or may not survive the ravages of an overheating planet that we are bequeathing them.

And all of this was at least notionally in the mind of Jesus as he reminded his immediate followers of the vulnerability of human existence, and indeed of all existence. “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” The poem “Ozymandias” tickled the raw nerve of human arrogance; surveying the wreckage of the narcissistic Ozymandias’  shrine to self-importance with the caustic comment, “nothing beside remains. / Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Jesus warned that it would be ever thus. He warned too that human conflicts would go on, and that they would be misrepresented as harbingers of the end of time. The nature of energy and existence is such that one day all that we see and know will collapse around our ears, and the nature of humanity is such that some will make outrageous and misleading claims to be the servants of God during such apocalyptic times.

Have none of this, Jesus indicates but trust in the greatness and the compassion of the unseen God, revealed in him, Jesus, trust in his warming human footsteps through whatever military, ecological, economic, and even medical crises dwell ahead. And always just ahead of us the footsteps of the Christ who has been through it and conquered it all remain warm and secure as we tread our paths.