November 15, 2009
Life’s Unpleasantness - Mark 13:1-8
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadAs you well know by now, my wife and I are expecting our third child in late April of next year. As you also well know, the birthing process is no laughing matter. Of course, that’s easy for me say, but from the time that we find out that we’re pregnant until well after the baby is born, it’s hard. I heard a speaker once who said that death hangs over the whole thing. I hadn’t thought about that, but he’s right. There is absolutely no guarantee that either mother or baby will survive. And why should they? I personally cannot imagine, nor do I wish to learn, what passing a 6-10 pound human being out of my body is like. All I can do is cheerlead from the side and thank God for modern medicine, especially epidurals. And, I also cannot imagine what the poor baby goes through. The birthing process is equally hard on the baby. We have videos of both our girls right after their birth, before they were even weighed. We may have been happy to see them, but they were certainly not happy to see us. In both cases, they were having a really bad day. Modern medicine has made it possible that well over ninety-nine out of one hundred mothers and babies survive. If you think about it, though, that only one in a hundred would survive is a miracle.
The very first thing that we experience when we come into this world then is pain. Think about what that says. When Adam and Eve left Eden in Genesis 3, they entered into pain. From that point on, humanity has lived in pain. Jesus tells us and his disciples here to get accustomed to pain, and not only pain but unrest and war and all around, as Abe Lincoln put it, unpleasantness. “Look, teacher, at what large stones and what large buildings,” one of the disciples exclaimed to Jesus as he looked at the Temple. Jesus told his disciples not get used to those big stones and big buildings because not one of them will be left upon another. All of Jerusalem will be trashed one day, Jesus said. All of life as we know it, the foundation on which our society rests and in which we live, will come crashing down.
Leah and I were in New York and Washington lately. Both cities are impressive. One of the most amazing things that I have ever done is to go on top the Empire State Building at night and look at all that concrete and electricity. It’s absolutely amazing. When Leah and I were in New York, we walked from 72nd Street through the Southwestern half of Central Park all the way down to Greenwich Village and then to Chinatown and then to Little Italy, and it took forever, walking past building after building like the Bank of American Building.
Washington is smaller, but the monuments are huge. I had forgotten just how big, for example, the Lincoln Memorial is. The Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, the Roosevelt Memorial, event the Taft Memorial (you had forgotten about that one) are all impressive. Now imagine if all that concrete in New York and all those monuments in Washington came crumbling down. Do you remember how you felt when the World Trade Center had fallen and the Pentagon was burning and what that did for the psyche of the country? Imagine both entire cities falling down and what that would mean for our country and for representative democracy and for our way of life. That’s what the Temple meant to 1st Century Jews living in Palestine. It was the foundation of their world. And it did indeed crumble forty years after Jesus said this.
Fort Hood experienced a horrible shooting last week that killed twelve soldiers. It was the largest killing ever on any US military base. We’re not accustomed to that kind of unrest in this country, and yet in other parts of the world, such unrest is common. Well get used to it, Jesus said. Nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. Jesus goes even further in verse 12 to say that “brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise up against their parents and have them put to death.” I met a former patrolman yesterday who once worked as an investigator for the Florida Highway Patrol. He told the story of an 18-year-old boy who got drunk, drove his car at a high rate of speed, and hit another car head on. Both people in the other car were killed. They looked at the boy’s license and then looked at the dead woman’s license and discovered that the boy had hit and killed his own mother. That was obviously an accident, but Jesus said it will be intentional. And that’s not even a sign of the end of the world. That’s just life, Jesus said. That’s just the way things are sometimes.
I told myself in the drought of 2007 that I would never complain about rain again. But the thought did occur to me during this week’s monsoon of what would happen if the rain never stopped. Who is going to stop the rain? Can we send a space shuttle way up in the sky to turn off the valve? And, now that I mention it, what are we going to do, now that the rain has stopped, if it doesn’t come back on? We need rain for life, and yet rain can also take life, and yet we can do absolutely nothing about it. I have never known anyone to die either in a flood or a drought. Yet in the rest of the world, that happens all the time. One day, Jesus said, it will happen here. And again, that’s not even a sign of the end. It’s just life.
Leah and I were at the beach this past summer, and the ocean was spectacular on this one particular day. These big cumulous clouds blocked the sun and made parts of the ocean a shade of green, but where the sun came out, it was blue. And with the white caps out in the ocean, it just took my breath away. We had just come from the beach on that particular day and for the first time, my two-year-old was not afraid of the waves. I had spent the whole week assuring her that the waves were our friends, and she finally had come around. But the thought occurred to me that, like the rain, the ocean was frightening. What would happen if I saw on the horizon the ocean rise up a foot or two? What’s to stop that ocean from coming inland? Five years ago on Christmas day, that happened and millions of people died.
Get used to it, Jesus said. We live in a fallen, broken world. There is nothing in this world where that does not apply. God did indeed create it, and God did indeed declare that it was good. But it has gone terribly awry since then. Not one of us can escape that. We wake up every morning and go to bed every night in the midst of brokenness. We are all recipients of and contributors to the world’s deep pain. Therefore, we all have some unpleasantness.
We have convinced ourselves that human innovation and spirit can rise above the fallen world. I do not at all disparage human innovation. When we’re in that hospital in April, I will be really thankful for modern medicine’s gift of epidurals. But science can never fix what is so badly wrong. Human innovation may have given us epidurals and bypass operations, but human innovation also gave us the atom bomb and internet pornography. And, last I checked, not even human innovation has tamed God’s earth.
On one hand, God created this beautiful world and God’s beauty is all around us. If you have any vision at all, you can clearly see that. Go hang out for awhile outside today and just pay attention. Further, God through Jesus Christ has already saved it. If you ever think that you aren’t worth much, or they aren’t worth much, then go stand under a cross and think about the fact that the God who created this whole universe bled and suffered and suffocated on that cross for you and for them. This place is God’s idea, and even though it is badly broken, we have a promise that God has and will save it.
But on the other hand, that salvation is not complete yet. So in the meantime, we have to deal with pain. One of the privileges of being a pastor is hearing your stories, and pain sits squarely in every one of them. Some of you have lost family members this past year. We’re coming up on the holidays and I’ll have to tell you that they’ll be hard on you this year. Some of you have lost your parents. My parents are doing fine. In fact, they are on their way to Arizona with some friends of theirs as I speak. But I will lose them one day, unless they lose me first. And some of you know that pain all to well, the pain of losing a child. I cannot tell you how my heart aches for you. Some of you are in physical pain, and medicine can only go so far. Some of you have lost your jobs, and you’ve got mouths to feed. I cannot imagine the stress you have right now. Some of you don’t understand how your children, whom you absolutely adore, can be so self destructive. That has to be the most helpless feeling in the world.
Fortunately for us, our pain is not the end of the story. Jesus said that even though all these stones would come falling down, that he would build them again in three days. Jesus would rise from the ashes and give us life even in the ashes. I still say that the most powerful and profound thing that we Christians do is to stand at the side of a grave and shout “halleluiah!” Whatever pains we face will not, by definition, define us, because God in Christ already has. But while our pain is not the end of our story, it is certainly part of it. All we can do is to have faith that God is doing something good in it. In the meantime, we have some unpleasantness. There is no question about that. If pain has not hit you yet, then just hang in there because it will. May God give us a firm faith that even in the pain, there is hope, there is Jesus, there is the Resurrection.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
