Prepare

Vagabond

Lections: The Twenty-Third Sunday After Pentecost (Proper 33), AD 2025 C

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.

Miyamoto Musashi is generally held to have been the greatest swordsman in Japanese history. Famously unorthodox, impossible to predict, he fought 62 duels, beginning at age 13, and remained undefeated throughout his entire life. Having reached the pinnacle of his craft, he retired from bloodshed to focus on philosophy. He finished The Book of the Five Rings, a summation of his life’s work, just months before dying of cancer. He met his end with a sword in one hand and a cane in the other.

What made him so unbeatable, what gave him that edge with which his opponents could not compete, was the attainment of what he called No-Mind. He did not think when he fought; he did not plan. But that does not mean that he didn’t prepare. Musashi trained diligently, obsessively. He studied other fighting schools, other techniques. He internalized all of those lessons, all of that preparation, as muscle-memory, as unconscious automatic reflex, such that when it came time to fight, he could empty his mind and flow.

He didn’t outthink his opponents; their thinking slowed them down. In combat, he bypassed thought altogether, which made him incomparably deadly.

This is very much akin to what we in the West would call “virtue ethics.” Virtue ethics is the notion that we should always strive to do right in little ways every day. By making moral choices in mundane matters, we thereby train ourselves to be virtuous when it counts. Think of it like exercise, similar to how a runner gradually builds up his endurance, or a how a weightlifter starts with lighter weights that she might later bear the heavy.

This is what Jesus is getting at when He says that one who is faithful in a very little shall be faithful also in much. Christians are to do what is good and right and true until it becomes a part of us, until it becomes natural, such that we hardly need to think about it. Then we are ready for the challenges of life, within a broken world. We need not make up our minds in advance, for Christ will give us His Wisdom.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus is teaching in the Temple, picking up where we left off last week. Remember the context. These are His last days of life before the Cross. He rode into Jerusalem on a Sunday; Thursday night is Passover; by Friday He’ll be dead. These then are His final public sermons, His last chance to prepare His disciples, and all the crowds assembled in Jerusalem, for what must lie ahead.

Moments before, they had witnessed an elderly widow contributing her last two farthings, all that she had to live on, to the Temple establishment, which clearly bothers Jesus. The House of God ought to be taking care of her, not the other way around. Immediately thereafter, He hears pilgrims marvelling at the sheer size and beauty of the Temple complex, built upon the donations of who-knows-how-many like this widow.

Mind you, these are not simply country bumpkins. The Jerusalem Temple is the largest such structure in the Roman Empire, covering some 36 acres atop an artificially reinforced mountain. Single stone blocks weigh up to 570 tons. Herod the Great—villain of our Christmas story, and puppet-king set upon his bloodsoaked throne by Rome—had expanded and rebuilt the Temple into a wonder of the ancient world. We would surely sit there with our mouths agape.

“Don’t be impressed by all this,” Jesus says. “Not one of these great stones shall be left upon another. All will be thrown down.” This, understand, is the sort of talk that gets a person killed.

“Teacher, when will this be,” they ask Him, “and what sign shall come before it?”

“Beware you not be led astray,” He warns. “Many will come along claiming to be the Christ. When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not panic. Kingdoms will fall, disasters occur, and portents shall be discerned within the heavens. You shall be arrested and hated on account of my name. But I am with you always. I will not let you perish. You shall be my witnesses, and my Spirit will speak through you. Do not craft your defense in advance, for I will give you wisdom that they cannot contradict.”

He then goes on to tell them that when they see armies gathered about Jerusalem—and indeed those armies shall come—they should not imagine that this is some great apocalyptic final battle. It won’t be the end of the world, but it will be the end of an era. “Flee from the violence, from the fiery conflagration,” He says, “and go out to be My witnesses, My martyrs to the world. By your endurance you shall gain your souls.”

And all this came to pass, mind you; sooner than one might think. Less than 40 years after Jesus’ Resurrection—within, that is, a single biblical generation—a Judean rebellion broke out against Rome. Militant Zealots seized Jerusalem, and especially the Temple, as their final fortress. They murdered moderate believers, thinking the Endtimes were at hand. They even burned each other’s food supplies, as though that might force God to intervene. But when the Roman Legions came, when the eagles gathered about the city, the Jewish Christian community of Jerusalem remembered Jesus’ warnings, and fled to the city of Pella. They survived the holocaust to come.

The destruction of Jerusalem, instigated by religious fanatics and carried out by Rome, methodical and merciless as ever, deeply traumatized the Jewish and Christian communities. They thought their world had ended. Many books, including the histories of Josephus, the Revelation of St John, and to a certain extent the Gospel accounts themselves, all seek to make sense of this apocalypse. And so today we have the words of Jesus addressing the situation.

Imagine that you are a Christian at the end of the first century. Peter, Paul, and James, the leaders of the Church, have been killed in quick succession by the state. Fast on the heels of this, Jerusalem, the Holy City, the House of God on Earth, has been razed by pagan powers. What sense are we to make of this? How can we survive this? For the people reading this morning’s story, about no stone left upon another, the Temple is already gone.

So turn we now to the promise of Christ from the pens of our Evangelists: that the Temple is only stone, and such things must pass away; that wars and earthquakes and false messiahs are not the end of the world; that we are to survive, and to endure, and ever to proclaim, in word and in deed, the Good News of our Lord. “Do not worry,” Jesus says. “Do not fear. I am with you. My Spirit is in you. I will speak for you and through you, and not a hair of your head will perish. For lo, I am with you always, unto the end of the age.”

Skeptics might question whether Jesus truly predicted the destruction of the Temple, or whether the authors of our Gospels put these words into His mouth in order to address the crisis of their own day. But “tearing down the Temple” was a key accusation at His trial. And the Christian community has always maintained that the reason why we fled from Jerusalem was because Jesus had warned us that all of this was coming down the pike. “Woe to you in those days. Get out while you can. Let he who has ears to hear, listen.”

Our situation today is not so far removed from back then. Still we hear rumors of wars. Still we face natural disasters, made worse by the hubris of men. Still fanatics hijack religious institutions. And still we live under an empire, the steel fist in a velvet glove. What are we to do? How can we survive? When will Jesus come? And so we turn again to the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ: “Do not fear. I am with you. My Spirit lives within you. My Wisdom speaks through you. Witness to the world; endure to the end; have faith that I am faithful.”

Luther once wrote: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” Brothers and sisters, let us do whatever the good that God has set before us. Let us live in hope, when all the world proclaims despair. And let our joy in Jesus Christ forevermore endure.

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/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA

X: https://twitter.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987

Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/

Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100074108479275

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