Planting trees in the apocalypse

Mark 13:1-8, 24-37

What a fun scripture on portents of the end of the world for week two of social distance worshiping. It’s the end of the world, they say.

Yet, Jesus says a couple interesting things here—maybe you missed it. He says, “Nobody knows when that day or hour will come, not the angels in heaven and not the Son. Only the Father knows.” That last part really gets me. Jesus is saying that even he does not know when the end will come. That knowledge is beyond the living Christ.

So, who are these dudes who think they know better? Who are these con men who pretend to have it all figured out? And who are we to suggest we can figure out signs of the end of the universe? Our perspective is so limited. The idea that our little brains can figure out what it all means is just so laughably naïve. Even Jesus didn’t know when the end would be.

But then Jesus says something else that’s fascinating. He says, “I assure you that this generation won’t pass away until all these things happen.” So, if you’re confused by that, you’re not alone. Jesus is talking about several different kinds of apocalypses at the same time. “Apocalypse” is this great Greek word that means “revealing” or “revelation,” a kind of great awakening to the way things truly are. These days, this word is generally used as a substitute for the end of the world, but that’s not how it’s typically used in the Bible. When Jesus talks about the end of things, he is most often talking about a seismic change in the way the universe works. When Jesus was born, it was an apocalypse. When Jesus dies, it is an apocalypse. Easter morning is the great apocalypse. So, when Jesus says that this generation will not pass away until all these things happen, it’s not a mistake that world did not end. In fact, by the time of Gospel of Mark was written, most of that generation had already passed away. Mark knew what he was writing here. Like most of the Gospel of Mark, “the end of things” is a reference to the cross and to the empty tomb.

That is the end of all things, and also the beginning.

As we navigate these strange days, living through a pandemic the likes of which none of us have experienced before, it becomes awfully tempting to start looking for signs that this is it: The end of the world. There’s a whole cottage industry of end times predictors who have always been wrong, by the way, and they always will be wrong, as Jesus points out. But putting all that aside, even if you did know that the world was about to end, what good would it do you? Why aren’t you living right now like it is the most important time regardless of anything that’s coming?

Legend has it that Martin Luther was once asked, “What would you do if you knew the world was ending tomorrow?” And he replied, “I would plant a tree.” It’s a brilliant answer. Live now. Do good work that will outlast you now. Show the world how valuable life is to you right now. You are guaranteed right now and that’s it.

Feeling Anxious--Giving Generously

Mark 12:28-44

I want to talk a bit today about two things on my mind: anxiety and giving. I know that might seem like a strange combo, and I think we can all understand the importance of talking about anxiety. After all, everybody’s got that deer in the headlights look right now, except it’s a super slow motion thing, more like the moose, who are actually attracted by headlights. So not only do they not know what to do, they actually run in circles toward the problem. We are the moose right now, embodying anxiety.

But what that has to do with giving might seem particularly unclear. You might well be thinking, “I know the church needs to pay the bills, but, really, is that what you’re talking about today?”

Not exactly. It’s really a story about the poor widow from the Gospel of Mark, but I’m going to get there by first talking about feeling anxious.

If you’d rather skip ahead past the anxiety part, you can actually do that today. For once you can change the channel or go talk a quick shower and come back. That’s the advantage of watching me in your pajamas and/or drinking a mimosa.

You’d think it’s awkward to crack jokes and not get laughs, but that’s actually the one part of this that is pretty much the same as a typical Sunday morning.

Laughing is actually the first thing we need to do together. Whatever I can do to lighten the mood, because right now we are cooped up, isolated, and anxious, and it’s largely not about contracting COVID-19. It’s more the abrupt disruption to our sense of what is normal and our physical distancing from one another. On top of the normal stress of change we are forced into the exact opposite reaction we would typically have in the face of adversity. We’re told to stay apart.

If you are feeling anxious today, first off, that just means that you are normal. Name that: I am feeling anxious, and it’s completely normal.

Next, you need to name the specifics of what you are anxious about. If you want to do this at home, go ahead, jot down some notes… or just let your mind wander. When we begin to list things we are anxious about, we should realize first of all that what is weighing heavily on me may be different from you. For me, I’m anxious not about myself or my family getting sick; I’m far more anxious about many of you. I’m anxious for our doctors and nurses, for our nursing home, and for my parents. But it’s not just about people getting sick either. I’m anxious about our business. I’m anxious about finances. I’m anxious about other peoples’ finances. I’m anxious about how long this will last for a variety of reasons (I’m guessing we’re all in the same boat on that one). I’m anxious about all the families cooped up together, the kids in unsafe situations; I’m anxious about drug and alcohol abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse. I’m anxious about funerals and our inability to grieve well. I’m anxious about the loss of income for people who have seen themselves as self-made their whole lives; I’m anxious about what that will do to people; and I’m anxious that you won’t reach out for help and will instead internalize everything. I’m anxious for people who are trying to be strong, because our strength relies on our bonds with one another. You are not an island; you are deeply connected with other human beings and we need to figure out how to keep it that way.

An empty church, a sign of love

Galatians 6:1-10

Today I want to reflect on what it means to be a community in light of COVID-19, both as a community that holds to the words of scripture that remind us time and again that we need not be afraid and as a community that holds one another in love, a community that does not minimize the fears of others, and, ultimately, a community dedicated to the care of the most vulnerable.

            Firstly, I confess that I don’t know what on earth I’m doing. They don’t cover this in seminary. I suspect you are finding yourself in a similar boat, dazed by how quickly things are changing and unsure whether that’s prudent or how you should be feeling about that. The first step of all might be giving ourselves permission to stop and grieve, because we have lost things already and other things hang tenuously in the balance—trips and concerts, sports, weddings, even work and school and basically everybody’s social life. I’m sort of an action person, as some of you are, but you are not obligated to do things right now; you can grieve your losses, even if nobody you know ever gets sick.

Next, some perspective is helpful. The history of the world is full of challenging moments, many more-so than this one. The world God created and called “good” still grumbles under the weight of this brokenness we call sin. In other places in the world, Christians and non-Christians alike deal with these realities on a day-to-day basis, and it is our privilege to live in a place and time where this is odd and extraordinary.

We are so unaccustomed to this type of adversity that all we can think to do is go out and raid stores for toilet paper. It’s a sign that something is wrong with us that our first instinct is to hoard. So, I have some news that is at first going to sound bad: Life is not only about you—health is not about you, salvation—even—is not about you. Christ lived and died for the community of faith, and that we make that only about our personal and individual salvation is a symptom of a disease far more devastating than any pandemic. Our selfishness will lead to the pain and suffering of others, and that is true all the time, but far more obvious now.

            Let me be completely plain as it regards the novel coronavirus, and as a millennial myself, I am sick of healthy young people proclaiming that since there is little risk to them, everybody else is overreacting. Life is not about you. As Christians, we should be willing to make great sacrifices for the sake of others, no matter their vulnerability. Instead, too often we won’t even make small sacrifices unless there is evidence that our direct contribution is doing something, like we need to get credit for doing good. It’s selfishness, pure and simple. We should not live in fear, but we should put the needs of others before our own. Too often we are better at saying, “Thoughts and prayers!” than we are at committing to making ourselves uncomfortable for the sake of somebody else who has no choice.

I get it. None of us know what should be done, but one of life’s secrets is that none of us ever know what should be done. We do the best that we can with limited information. The test of whether a thing is right or wrong is not based on whether you are acting with an understanding of all the science or anything like that, or else we would be paralyzed. A choice is right if we make it for the sake of others and it is wrong if we make it our of selfishness. So many of the old fairy tales fail to tell us that good and bad are rarely obvious, but if we are making a choice with somebody else in mind—somebody who will not benefit us personally—then that choice can’t be wrong. It’s less often a choice between right and wrong and more often the choice between what is right and what is easy. 

From religious practice to discipleship

Mark 10:32-52

I can empathize with Zebedee.

Zebedee? you’re no doubt wondering. I don’t remember hearing about any Zebedee?

Oh, he was there. Mark 10, verse 35: “James and John, Zebedee’s sons, came to Jesus and said, ‘Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.’”

Zebedee is mentioned several times in the Bible like this, either as the father of James and John or as the husband of Salome, and he does actually make an appearance in Mark 1:19-20 when he is out fishing with his sons as Jesus calls them to leave him behind. So, we know he’s a fisherman but that’s pretty much it. Still, I strongly relate to Zebedee and I’ll tell you why: Because his grown-up children come to Jesus, the Son of God, the Savior of the world, the Big Kahuna, and they say, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”

I’m not sure there’s any moment in scripture where I completely get Jesus more than when these grown-up children come up, pulling his arm and saying, “Hey, Son of God… Hey, son of God! Hey! Hey! Look at us! Give us what we want!”

So, I feel for Zebedee, because if his grown-up sons are like this for Jesus, seriously what were they like back at home?

One of the metaphors most common to our relation with God is that of “Father.” It’s not the only metaphor we have of course, and in some ways it can be a troublesome one for some people. If you had a poor father in your life or if you lost your father, imagining God as Father can be either very positive as you yearn for the figure you were missing or it can be unhelpful and even traumatic. So, realizing that God as Father doesn’t work for everybody, it can nonetheless be a useful metaphor for some of us in moments like these. God as divine parent can help us to remember how childish we can be—not childlike, childish.

So I don’t know Zebedee, but I feel for him. James and John are childish in this story. “Allow us to sit at your right-hand and your left!” they ask.

In return they get a kindergarten response from Jesus. If you listen closely to the scripture you can hear the long sigh that Jesus let out here. It’s like that moment where the children’s sermon has gone out of control and the kids are pretty sure the pastor is Jesus and that he is going to give out candy like the Easter bunny, except—need I remind you—James and John are not children. Their stupidity is a little harder to excuse.

“Can you drink the cup I drink or receive the baptism I receive?” Jesus asks them.

“We can,” they answer.

This is where it gets fun, because the disciples still obviously don’t get who Jesus is, even though he’s spent every single chapter in the Gospel of Mark spelling it out for them. They think he is asking them if they can literally drink from his cup and receive the kind of baptism for the forgiveness of sins that Jesus received from John the Baptist. Well, that’s easy! Is that all there is to sitting at the right-hand of God?

They are asking a question about religious practice, but the answer Jesus gives is about discipleship. The difference between religious practice and discipleship is the difference between the meaningfulness of ritual and the testimony of self-sacrifice. We need both, but the great irony is that the disciples fail particularly hard at the latter: They don’t know what it means to be a disciple.

Cheap Grace vs Free Grace

Mark 10:17-31

I preach on this story so often when it is not the reading of the day that I hardly know what to do with it when it is. So, I figured that I would use the opportunity today to talk about why I find this story so applicable to so many situations.

            First of all, it’s about wealth, which is a subject everybody can relate to. The scene sets us up for the kind of hierarchical stratification in which we live most of our lives, judging who is wealthier, who is poorer, and trying to tease out what is a comfortable level of wealth for us to have and live our lives. Everybody does this; everybody has an idea of what is ‘good enough’ for them to feel like they are getting by, and everybody has an ideal of what is ‘wealthy.’

            This is when Jesus drops the bomb, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

            With the rug pulled out from underneath us, there is an obvious next question, “So what does it mean to be rich?”

            And I think this is one of the most important questions implied anywhere in scripture. It’s a question that will betray our motivations up-front, because anybody can argue that they aren’t really rich, not compared to so-and-so, or such and such. After all, if you make $100,000 a year, sure you are in the top tenth of one percent in the world in terms of income, but still you would have to put that much away for 10,000 years to become a billionaire. Since billionaires exist, how wealthy are you, really, in comparison?

            At first blush, Jesus leaves the door open. Perhaps to earn our place in the kingdom of God we just need to be really good lawyers, arguing that wealth is relative and how can I get snubbed in the kingdom of God when that pro athlete, who has only been blessed with being big, is so much wealthier than me? Or how I can be rich—really—when that other person got all their money from inheritance?

            It’s real easy to not be rich if we compare ourselves with others, but comparison is exactly the problem. The standard Jesus sets for us is not the rich and not the poor; he is not saying that you are wealthy because you have more than the people who use the food shelf, and he’s not saying you aren’t rich because you don’t have as much as a billionaire. The Jesus sets is whether you have given it all away. Verse 21: “Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’”