Endure

Somniodelic Workshop

Propers: The Twenty-Sixth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 33), AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Why were the Gospels written? Well, it’s because the world was ending. Thankfully, this wasn’t the first time, so we had some helpful examples to follow.

For the first several decades after Jesus’ Resurrection, the only written records that Christians left behind were letters. The Apostles spread out from Jerusalem, travelling along the roads of the Empire and beyond. And as they went, they founded communities, congregations, churches both Jewish and Gentile. And these congregations stood out. People noticed, how we shared resources, how we cared for the poor, how women and slaves and foreigners held positions of authority.

It was a new way of life, this Way of Jesus Christ, sinners called together to live as members of His Body, sharing in His Spirit. When conflict or questions or troubles arose, these congregations petitioned their founders—Peter and James and John and most especially St Paul—who wrote back to them epistles meant to be read before the assembly. The oldest New Testament writings are those of Paul, who dictated letters both public and private, still read in churches today. There were as yet no Gospels, for there didn’t need to be. The witnesses of the Resurrection yet were among us, telling their stories first-hand.

But then in the seventh decade came the Neronian persecution. Rome burned. The Emperor, pleased as punch, fiddled before the blaze, for once the smoke had settled he claimed the ashes for his own, building the Domus Aurea, a private palace spanning hundreds of acres, taking up about a quarter of the city. This understandably angered the Roman people, such that Nero needed a scapegoat, someone whom the citizens could hate in his place. So he blamed the Christians for the fire. They were a new and relatively vulnerable sect, mostly consisting of riffraff, conveniently rumored to eat human flesh and drink human blood.

Thus descended the hammer of the state. St Peter they crucified upside-down. Paul, as a citizen, received the honor of decapitation; while back in Jerusalem, James, the Brother of the Lord, had been tossed from the top of the Temple and bludgeoned to death with clubs. The entire first generation of senior Christian leadership—with the notable exception of St John—all died within a decade. And then Jerusalem, the heart of the movement, home to the Temple and the tomb of Resurrection, fell to a Roman siege and burned the ground.

The world as they knew it had ended. Christianity teetered upon the brink. How to make sense of it? How to survive? Well, the first thing they did was write the Gospels. That second generation, who had learned from the first, wrote down Jesus’ teachings for the third. Thus the sometime-saying that the Gospels are for grandchildren. Hadn’t Jesus said that this would happen? Hadn’t He warned them that the Temple would fall? Isn’t that why Christians had escaped the razing of Jerusalem, fleeing to the nearby city of Pella?

None of this is new, the Gospels assured a frightened Christianity. Many times throughout the Bible, the world as God’s people knew it had ended: when Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise, when the people of Israel were enslaved in Egypt, when the Babylonians exiled Judea, when the Greeks profaned the Temple. Over and again, they thought it was the end, only to find that God was with them, forever faithful, forever true, leading His people to new life, to new birth, to a resurrected world.

They came to understand this pattern not simply as historical but also metaphysical: that it reflected the nature of God and our reality as a whole; that all of life in this fallen world is in a sense an Exile, an alienation from the love of God; and that even death itself could never have the final say, that there had to be more, the final victory of life and truth and love and right. For Christians, all of this culminates in the Cross. There, says John, is the judgment: God giving everything to us in Jesus Christ, even His own life, for the redemption and salvation of His world.

This idea—that evil never has the final say, that love outlives even death—proves so powerful as to have its own genre. We can see it arising in the pages of our Bible, a new literary form, beginning with the prophet Daniel, and giving voice to our uttermost hope: apocalypse. Apocalypse is a genre, a type of literature. As such, it comes with its own conventions and tropes and interpretative lens. We don’t read poetry the way that we read history. Similarly, to understand an apocalypse, we must know that we’re reading apocalypse.

Apocalypse means revelation. And people write apocalypse in a time of crisis. The world is listing upside-down, certainties are overturned, panic rises up amidst the populace, and people want to know: Is this the end? Has it all been lost? To which an apocalypse replies, no! There is an end, a good one, and this isn’t it. God is still at work among you. God is still with you. God is still for you. You may not discern Him, yet He works out your salvation even now.

An apocalypse takes current events, contemporary events, and interprets them in mystic ways. It seeks to see affairs on earth through the eyes of heaven. As such, it often employs wild and frightening images, arcane symbolism, to show us where God is amidst a crisis. The most famous example of this is the Book of Revelation. The Romans have destroyed Jerusalem. Where was God when the holy city fell? Where is He now while martyrs die?

Revelation speaks of spiritual judgment upon Rome, of Christ conquering the Empire which crucified Him, through the sword of the Word of His mouth. It describes mundane acts of worship, the Sunday liturgy we know, as nothing less than the cosmic inbreaking of the Risen Christ, of heaven descending to earth upon this altar. And it tells of eschatology, the teleological end of the world, when God in Christ is wedded to His Bride—who is the Church, who is the world redeemed—so that mourning and crying and weeping are no more, death and hell have been destroyed, and Christ hands the Kingdom over to His Father, that God at the last shall be All in All. Alleluia!

What a vision! What a confession! What a powerhouse of faith, told in poetry, told in liturgy, told in sacred drama! That’s an apocalypse. But we misunderstand it when we read it as a sort of future history, a roadmap divining specifics for centuries of politics and war. Revelation isn’t about nuclear annihilation. It’s not about 9/11 or the Cold War. St John isn’t Nostradamus. It’s about revealing Christ triumphant in the Eucharist, about conquering His enemies through love, and about having faith even in the face of certain death, for the grave could never hold our Lord and cannot keep us down.

Our Gospel reading this morning, our final reading from this year with Mark, is an apocalypse. Scholars call it “the little apocalypse.” Jesus says the day shall come when not one stone is left upon another in the Temple. And this frightens His disciples. They’ve never seen anything like the Temple Mount, with its massive edifices and brobdingnagian stones. What power on earth could overthrow such a gargantuan structure? That’s terrifying. “When will this occur?” they beg Him. “What shall be the sign?”

And Jesus tells them: There will be wars and rumors of wars. There will be false messiahs leading many astray. There will be earthquakes and famines and nation will rise against nation. You will be arrested, tried, and beaten, all on account of My Name. Do not be afraid! This is not the end. These are but the beginnings of the birth-pangs. A new world is being born, for the Gospel must be proclaimed to every nation. And for all that you may yet endure, know that the end is your salvation.

Imagine the Apostles remembering this at His Crucifixion. Imagine that later generation of the Church, reading this Gospel, while their leaders die and the holy city burns. And Jesus says: This is not the end. This could never be the end! I am with you. I love you. I have conquered death for you. You shall endure. You, at the last, will be saved.

Such is the hope that has sustained us as Christians for centuries, through every war, every plague, every persecution, through every time the world, as we have known it, crashes down. God in Christ is with you. God in Christ adores you. God in Christ will raise you from your grave! Next to that, what does it matter if an Empire rises or falls? Christ is with us to the end. Christ is our end. We shall endure. We shall be saved. And we shall rise like stars forever.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.






Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA
X: https://twitter.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran
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Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/
Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026