What Lasts
Mark 13:1-8

November 16, 2003

Nothing gets the heart beating, blood flowing, adrenalin pumping more than a good old fashioned end of the world. We haven’t had the world about to end for almost four years and it’s been positively dull. Even September 11th can’t match the world ending. We’ll have to do it again soon.

If you have been keeping track, the Christian year is near its end, next Sunday is the last Sunday after Pentecost. This year we have been focusing on the Gospel according to Mark, and we are running out of Gospel. Appropriately, right before the beginning of the Passion, Jesus stands with his disciples on the Mount of Olives like so many millions of tourists since, looking across the valley at the Temple in Jerusalem. What a building, what gigantic stones set one upon another. We gasp in amazement at the crumbling ruins of the mighty Pyramids in Egypt whose stones are almost beyond our imagination. How did they get them there? Same thing at the Temple Mount, and a lot of the stones are still there in the Wailing Wall.

Jesus was not to be sucked into such admiration. Not one stone will be left on top of one another. Taken literally, the Wailing Wall shows that many stones are left on top of one another. But there is no building, and what good is a wall without sides?

The disciples were horrified, yet fascinated. This is the stuff real prophets speak about. Jesus keeps on going, talking about the collapse of everything. Beware of false prophets above all - though we have never had an idea of what the criteria is for a true prophet. Still it will be a mess: wars of all sorts and of all dimensions, local and world-wide; famines and earthquakes, such are the beginning of “the birth pangs” - the new age that Jesus is ushering in.

No wonder that there have been so many doomsday prophets with precise calculations to the day: the world is always in such a state of turmoil. Our modern communications simply inform us how incessantly catastrophic events can appear. The world should have ended countless times by now.

Undeniably, Jesus made this observation about the stones of the Temple as a metaphor for his own body. During his trial before the Sanhedrin Council he is reported to have said, “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands” (Mark 14:58). Prosecution and defense are not talking about the same temple.

Jesus is also stating the obvious few of us want to admit or can comprehend. Nothing lasts in our physical world, certainly not ourselves, perhaps not even the world itself. We cannot build our lives and our religious faith upon the stones of even the most magnificent sanctuary because they are not eternal. The Temple in Jerusalem has not been worshipped in for nearly 2000 years. No one uses the Pyramids of the Pharaohs for anything except a tourist venue, marveling at the large stones, but nothing else. What will they think of the west stand at Taylor Field?

What does last is the quiet question of one of the greatest of modern science fiction novels, A Canticle for Leibowitz, written in 1959 by Walter Miller.

Those who are old enough can remember that period of time when the end of the world was no stretch of the imagination as the Cold War fueled by the nuclear weapon race hurtled on at breakneck speed. Miller’s novel was perhaps the lone one to approach the prospect of a nuclear war and its aftermath from the perspective of organized religion.

The novel is set 600 years in the future, long after a 20th century nuclear holocaust referred to as the Flame Deluge. Humanity barely survived the fires and nuclear fallout, and much of the remnant population were rendered genetic mutants. War arose as a result of science and learning, so before long the Simplification was instituted, when people of learning were hunted down to near extinction and almost all knowledge was deliberately destroyed and erased.

The Catholic Church survived, but at a surreal price. A monastery in the Utah desert founded by the blessed Leibowitz housed monks who spoke a revived Latin and collected and catalogued as best they could manuscripts from before the Deluge. The problem was that they could not understand what the manuscripts were talking about or what they meant.

One day a certain Brother Francis made the equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery of a cache of writings by the blessed Leibowitz himself. One of the principal finds was a memo book in which Leibowitz had scratched out several shopping lists. This would be studied and pondered by the monks, wondering whether “pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels” held the meaning to life.

Quite a few ancient Near Eastern writings from the 3rd and 4th millennia B.C. preserve for us little more than this about their grand civilizations - “blessed shopping lists.” Brother Francis’ discovery does lead in an odd way to a renaissance of sorts, only a millennium later to find the earth consumed in another nuclear war, worst than the first.

When the walls come tumbling down, when our western or eastern civilization has disappeared, what lasts? The profundity of our blessed shopping lists, our itemized phone bills, tax records, maybe an idle page of a love letter, a ticket stub to something called the Grey Cup - were drinking cups so rare you needed a special ticket to sit and gaze at one?

What lasts is not our best ideas, nor our deepest memories, nor even our most beautiful rituals, at least with any meaning we can recover. What lasts is that uncanny irrational human impulse of compassion for one another as human beings. It’s not yet love for a particular person, but that drive that pushes you and me to sacrifice our own bodies, even lives, for the sake of another suffering human being. “No man is an island unto himself” (John Donne), so our compassion reaches out to another person and includes their dilemmas in ours. Jesus was trying to give an object lesson to his disciples with his own body and life.

In time we interpret this deep compassion with our ideas. We particularize our compassion with our love towards particular people. We rehearse and revive compassion through our rituals and ceremonies and liturgies. We make sure it lasts.

Martin Luther King, Jr., preached on Palm Sunday in the Washington National Cathedral, a few days before he was assassinated: “We shall overcome because the arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. We shall overcome because Carlyle is right - no lie can live forever. We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right - truth crushed to earth will rise again. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair the stone of hope.”

Lots of stones around that Temple Mount: the Wailing Wall of liturgies long ago; the stone of Calvary, the Skull, of compassion for humanity; the stone moved from the garden cemetery cave, the stone of resurrection and new life. Out of these stones God can raise up human beings who love a lasting love.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan