Not the End of the World

Not the End of the World

Proper 28B    Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25, Mark 13:1-8

November 18, 2012

The Rev. Canon Anne E. Kitch

Hear. Read. Mark. Learn. Inwardly digest.

Our collect today reminds us of the gift of our Holy Scriptures. I suspect our ancestors in the Episcopal tradition wrote this prayer because they knew that even faithful people don’t always pay close attention to what scripture has to offer. And today’s reading is known for being difficult. In fact, this passage from Mark’s Gospel even has it’s own name: the Little Apocalypse. So, perhaps especially it is useful for us to pray, as those who have gone before us have, that we may hear, read, mark and inwardly digest the Good News that Jesus has to offer. 

I remember encountering particular moments of anguish as a young adolescent: when I was rejected by a friend, or mortified by some public humiliation, or failed at an important task. And I remember what my mother often said, “It’s not the end of the world.”  These were meant to be words of comfort—and to give me a little perspective. I believe she wanted to remind me that no matter how awful I thought the situation was. it was not as bad as it seemed. Or even if it was that bad, there would still be life after it.

I think in the Christian life these words are worth giving some more thought. Why would we, as Christians, assure one another that bad times are not the end of the world? Perhaps because the end of the world is, after all, part of our story. And part of God’s story. And we know at some level that God’s story ends in triumph and glory. Who told us the world was going to end in fear, despair and destruction?  The end of the world for Christians is not death and destruction, but life and hope.

Jesus’ friends asked him what the end of the world will be like and Jesus tells them not to be fooled.  Beware that no one leads you astray. You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but that it not it. Nation will rise against nation, there will be earthquakes and famines. But that is not the end of the world either. This is not the end, but just the beginning. The beginning of what? Of birth. Of new life.

For those of us in God’s story—in other words, for all of creation—the end of the world is nothing less than life. Why else do you think that Jesus not only died, but destroyed death and made all of creation new? As Christians we can look to the end of the world in hope, because it means the completion of God’s creation. It means rest and beauty and glory. For Christians, the end of the world is not to be feared, but to be celebrated.

This has to do with Christian hope. What is the Christian hope? The Christian hope is to live with confidence in newness and fullness of life. The Christian hope is to await the coming of Christ in glory. The Christian hope is to anticipate the completion of God’s purpose for the world. [The Book of Common Prayer, Catechism p. 862]

We seem to want to know, like the disciples wanted to know, when it will come and what it will look like. Why? Perhaps so we can be prepared. But Jesus’s point it this: First, this is on God’s time, not ours. We cannot know the when. Second, it is not about wars and destruction. Nevertheless, we are asked to be prepared. But the preparation is not about hedging our bets. The Christian hope is to live with confidence in newness and fullness of life.  We are not to live in anxiety, but in the assurance of Gods’ love for us. We are asked to be ready, to be prepared all the time for the coming of Christ in glory. And we are ready when we exercise our Christian hope.

As it says in Hebrews, let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. We are to confess our hope. And let us consider how to provoke on another to love and good deeds. Part of living in hope is to provoke one another to acts of love and good deeds. To provoke means to stimulate or incite. We usually associate provoking with making someone annoyed or angry. But it comes from the Latin vocare:  to call forth. We live in Christian hope when we call forth in ourselves and one another simple acts of kindness. Perhaps this is the stance to take not only in times and places when it seems like the world is falling apart (or that our lives are barren or just plain difficult), but in all times and in all places. As preacher David Lose puts it, “We are not called simply to live our lives with no thought of God or neighbor but keenly looking for the sign of God’s imminent coming so that we can clean up our act. Rather, we are called to live always anticipating the activity of God. * 

As we enter the season of Advent, we will hear the message loud and clear to get ready, to be prepared, be alert for the Kingdom of God is at hand. We are meant to be alert and ready at all times, because God is acting and loving us at all times. David Lose continues, “Because when you live looking for the activity of God here and now, you begin to see it. In an act of kindness of a friend, in an opportunity to help another, in the outreach ministry of a congregation, in the chance to listen deeply to the hurt of another. God shows up in all kinds of places, working with us, for us, through us, and in us. You just have to look.

Let us go forth, anticipating the end of the world, and provoking acts of love.

*from the blog Working Preacher, by David Lose, homiletics professor at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN.

Bishop Marshall's Sunday Sesquicentennial Sermon

Nativity at 150
Sermon by Bishop Paul Marshall
Sunday, Nov. 4, 2012
It has been a week that demonstrates who the people of Nativity are. Patiently preparing for the worst, hoping for the best, and when trouble came, handling it with grace and charm. It is a good celebration of a great church.
During the week, we have been given envelopes from children in the Sunday School of your daughter church to help with relief on the south side, and I was deeply touched by their generosity, because the north side has turned out to have its own problems. I have a little gift of my own later, from a bank vault in Wilkes-Barre: it’s a piece of wood from the first structure in Bethlehem, probably the first place God was praised here.
If we think about the dozens and dozens of people who prepared this weekend, culminating a year’s celebration, it is important to hold in on mind the big question, why do it? There are old churches all over the land, many for sale.
The answer is, of course, we celebrate Nativity because it is still doing its ministry, doing it creatively, faithfully, and in service to Christ and his flock.
What kind of a message did it send to the community to build a house of God in 1862, a year of death, a year when The United States was losing a war on its own soil? A number of future rectors and lay people would have seen service in that terrible war. Can you imaging their relief to come inside the shelter of this church in 1865, giving thanks for their safety, thanks for their country, and shedding before God quiet tears for those who did not make it back with them. Again and again in Nativity’s history it has been a safe place for widows and veterans to pray and give thanks. And in no time of major conflict has Nativity failed to remember those who bear their country’s arms.
To build a church in 1862 was an act of faith and an act of service.
As we maintain and gratefully receive what our ancestors have placed here, we may well ask what is next. We have all been doing our part to preserve this wonderful place. Why?
Ordinarily I would say that the gospel passage is not so great for ALL Saints Sunday, but that’s another sermon, and here we have it and it meets our purposes very well.
Jesus’s friend is ill and he mysteriously takes his time in getting to the sickbed, announcing at one point, “our friend Lazarus is dead.”  When he shows up, sure enough, his friend Lazarus is not sick, but like a certain Norwegian parrot, is completely dead. They’ve wrapped him in burial sheets, laid him in the tomb, and covered it with rocks so the odors stay in and the robbers stay out.
Jesus comes before the tomb of his friend and cries. Some are unimpressed because he had plenty of notice to heal him, his friend. He tells them to open the tomb. Despite their fear of odor, they obey Jesus. And with a loud shout, “Lazarus come out of that tomb.”
If you had a hard time imagining Blind Bartimaeus stumbling up blind to find Jesus, this week we are to imagine a man tied hand and foot with his face totally covered responding to that compelling voice.
WHAT HAS TO HAPPEN? For the healing to be of any use to him, the community has to unbind him. They must set him free so he can stumble out into the sunshine to live out the miracle.
Do you know that the Hill-to-Hill Bridge was lined up with the cross on Nativity? Everyday thousands of aching people aim their cars needing Jesus to heal them and needing us to do the perhaps longer job of unbinding them—and they don’t know or have forgotten how to ask. You do know that from either end of that bridge you can walk to hovels where people are entombed in violence, drugs, and even murder. The skilled care they get from our partners in ministry at New Bethany and Trinity may be their only chance to come out of those tombs. We can be there for them with our cash and with our volunteer time.
What about our own Lazarus moments? I remember when my younger brother died in 1995, just over a month before the dog and pony show—now they call it walk-about—in this diocese. In the weeks after Ron’s death, I was as good as dead. I showed up from the Yale chapel because it was my job, but I was paralyzed with grief. I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t talk, I was mostly hurt and hugely angry. Then I realized two things. The real reason I came to church was to be hurt and hugely angry—there was no other place big enough to take it.  Eventually I realized that my stony silence in worship was not merely being tolerated by those around me: they were loving me, believing for me, singing for me, and at those moment when I thought I would choke on the bread and wine, they were receiving Christ for me.
Slowly I was exhumed by followers of Jesus, who offered me not one word of advice, but who loved me and lent me their faith. Talk would come much later.
That is one way the church has saved me—through its ritual and those who share it. Others are saved by having a place to come to be counseled, absolved, or to knit, teach, guide youth, sing in the choir, and dozens of other ways to get, like Lazarus, less tightly wrapped and closer to the love of Jesus Christ.
Just think of how many new ways there will be to do that in the next 50 years in this house! I wasn’t kidding the children; their ministries may be much different, yet showing the love of the same Jesus Christ.
I want to give you something: lines from Psalm 84: “How dear to me is your dwelling, O Lord of hosts! Happy are they who dwell in your house! They will always be praising you. Happy are the people whose strength is in you: whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.” May those next 50 years be an astounding pilgrimage.

Bishop Marshall's Sesquicentennial Evensong Sermon

Rejoice in the Lamb
At the sesquicentennial celebration
of the Cathedral Church of the Nativity
Friday, November 2, 2012
First, a word for those of you not familiar with Evensong. There is no more appropriate way to begin these sesquicentennial celebrations than with choral evensong. Since 1549, Anglicanism’s unique contribution to protestant life has been daily morning prayer and daily evensong with sermon. In many churches, especially in England and Africa, this tradition lives, and you still find it in many North American and Antipodean cities and in traditional churches everywhere. Just across the river from us, Trinity, Bethlehem, prays the office day-in and day-out, with a goodly congregation. Clergy and many lay people mark their day with these two services. Masterpiece Theatre fans know evening prayer is the core of the day at Oxford and Cambridge.
Morning and evening prayer are our backbone way marking the day as lived with God. Yet these services are very simple stuff, a bit of the psalms, lessons and canticles, and prayers. There can be a hymn added at the end. The optional addition, in Cranmer’s immemorial words, is that “in quires and places where they sing” there can be an anthem. And tonight we are grateful to have one of our region’s great and historic choirs sing the service and add an anthem in this hallowed place, adding a moment of exceptional beauty to a form of daily worship most of us know privately or in small groups.
Easily the worst aspect of theatre or music in the some parts of the country, besides unearned standing ovations, is the playing of the serious for laughs--a kind of aesthetic blasphemy in the name of amusing the groundlings.
So I want to assure you solemnly, that when Kit Smart wrote of “my cat Joeffrey,” he was not inviting knowing chuckle or laughter from cat fanciers. He was invoking his only companion in solitary confinement in fashioning the praise of God. He wanted every creature, in fact, every letter of the alphabet, assembled in that praise.
Not that he was always in prision. Christopher Smart, who wrote several of the hymns now in our hymnal, spent most of his life as a well-recognized poet, was the mainstay of two magazines, winner of multiple awards at Cambridge, translator of ancient texts, and so on. “And so on,” includes devoted high Church Christian. He died in debtors prison in 1771. Most of his works were well known, but the 32 manuscript pages, Jubliate Agno, from which a tiny selection we know as “Rejoice in the Lamb,” were published only in 1939. Much of them were written in what we would euphemistically term a mental hospital.
That is, late in his life Smart suffered from something between bi-polar disorder and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, either one of which our age would treat with meds, and he spent some time in solitary in a hospital that makes Nurse Ratchett look like Florence Nightingale. There he wrote much of Julbilate Agno, and it is easily worth your time to look the whole thing up on Google because it asks a big question. It asks a question that reaffirms our gathering in worship and provides our anthem something more profound than program notes. It asks, how do you keep it together when your mind is tortured?
Our anthem was commissioned by a parish priest for the fiftieth anniversary of his parish, a priest who went on to commission other important music, architecture, and sculpture.
Why an anniversary piece from the near-ravings of an Obsessive-Compulsive?
Benjamin Britten was, as we know from pieces like his War Requiem, on the side of the outsider, but I think there was more
First, I think, the text puts us to shame. Most of us don’t know the Bible well enough get most of the text’s allusions, let alone to assemble a prayer-rave like Smart’s. When Smart fell ill, he had something to fall back on. When Muslims call us people of the book, it’s an exaggerated compliment. Smart had the resources to summon Biblical figures to surround him like angels, archangels, all the company of heaven in the time when he needed company the most. If all the heroes you can recall are the starting pitchers of the Phillies for the last fourteen years when you are tormented, Christopher Smart is your man when you want to turn insomnia into prayer. It's All Saints—get to known them and invoke their prayers. It is never too late to learn the story in the Book that shapes our language and civilization.
Let’s come back to Cat Joeffrey. In context, he appears with all the creatures of God summoned to praise their maker. But there is drama, too. In the next lines, Joeffrey has attacked a little lady mouse, and her mate stands defiantly between Joeffrey and his prey, and Smart praises his valour, too. The entire order of nature is invoked to praise God. For the sake of his own sanity, Smart has found a way of seeing the world.
All of this is to say that Smart shows the Christian soul how to be mad, or at least, how to endure the mad moment. Who of us has not known racing thoughts, insomnia, the occasional obsession about an upcoming wedding? What if, on those moments we called together everything that we know, everything that has breath and everything that doesn’t -- to praise the Lord.
Ultimately Smart finds refuge in identifying with Jesus, who was also judged, rejected, and considered mad. Smart knew well the Bible’s claim that we have in Jesus a high priest who can truly sympathize with us, and relied on that.
Kit Smart lived in the world of Isaac Newton, so his imaginative possibilities were limited by modern standards. We who live in a post-Einstein, post-Heisenberg, Post-Steve Jobs and even Post-Harry Potter world have minds inhabited by so many dimensions, so many characters, so many possibilities. What would be our comforts, our solace in our waking and sleeping hours if like the Song of the Three Young Men or Smart’s raving we collected from all that populates our mind the voices that praise God and in doing so give us the courage to go on? Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord: Praise ye the Lord.
My one wish for Nativity is that it remains a house where all people can praise God while they have their being, with whatever voice God gives them.