Harry T. Cook

11/30/08

Mark 13: 24-37

We can thank the shifting of the church year to the season of Advent for the angst introduced in the reading from Mark about a darkened sun and moon, descending angels, and an apocalypse on the way.

We think we know the genesis of this text: Mark’s immediate reflection on the catastrophe that befell Israel in 70 A.D. as the legions of Rome sacked Jerusalem and took down its temple – an unspeakable happening that both happened and was spoken about. It was the end of an era, to be sure, and the end of the world for a lot of people.

Why does the dear church spring this anxiety attack upon us just as our Thanksgiving dinner is finally digesting and when we are looking forward to the merriment of Christmas? It’s bad enough that it gets dark by 5 o’clock in the afternoon and that the rigors of winter are upon us here in the Northern Hemisphere. Why the sturm und drang of apocalypse? Maybe to keep us on our toes? Or merely to remind us that the bowl of cherries we’re tempted to think is life is itself a misnomer. Life is neither a bowl of cherries nor an apocalypse. It is a combination of both in succeeding waves. Some days, some weeks, some years are pretty good. Some are not so good. Others are just plain awful. Plenty of people thought the world they knew had come to an end on September 11, 2001. Others by now have seen enough of the gyrations of Wall Street to know that some end is near enough. The automobile industry that built this greater Detroit community will never be the same again. Something is going to collapse. We just don’t know what.

If Mother Earth survived the rigors of formation after the Big Bang and the successive ages upon ages of stop-and-start evolution, if she has survived the vicious wars that have been waged upon her weary breast in every latitude and longitude, if she has survived — at least thus far — the beating we human beings have given her rivers, lakes, oceans and atmosphere, if she has survived all that plus the wanton murder of millions of her human children and the shameful neglect of millions more, she will probably survive our current national impoverishments. It’s the world of the individual and of groups of individuals that is frequently and truly threatened as change comes and remolds the contours of our common life.

Just as “for everything there is a season, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up. A time to seek and a time to lose,” so life does not begin at zero, go to 60 and continue on ad infinitum. What goes up eventually comes down.

When it comes down, it feels to some as if their world is ending. And sometimes it is.

A knowledgeable Detroit journalist wrote the other week that neither Detroit nor the industry that made it great will ever be the same again. “It’s all over,” he said with the facts of the matter on his side. Even if a government bail-out comes, it will be too late to put Humpty Dumpty together again the way he was. So here in Michigan at least, it seems like the last days. It must have seemed so, especially to Palestinian Jews and even to those who were tending toward the emerging Jesus Movement at the beginning of the last third of the First Century. The Holy City was in ruins, along with the cultic center wherein the Numinous One was thought to have dwelt between the cherubim. Yet it was not the end of the world or even that world, but a huge shake up of its component parts. A new thing was upon the face of the earth. The idea was to be ready to greet it, even in all the uncertainty that its coming was sure to bring.

Thus did the author of the Gospel of Mark tell his communities that they should “keep awake” because they could not know when the new thing would be obvious enough to perceive. They must also be “ready.” What might that mean to us, here down the line almost 2000 years later? We are witnessing social and economic structures we thought were as sound and as durable as the proverbial Rock of Gibraltar crumble before our eyes, taking down huge swaths of people and their livelihoods. One wants to cry, “Stop!” But there will be no stopping. So what do you do? You bring out the broom and dustpan, the shovel and the wheelbarrow and pick up the pieces and see what of the wreckage might be used to build anew. That’s how the Christian church got started. That’s how rabbinical Judaism succeeded Temple Judaism and became a world-wide phenomenon tied not to a building, a place or a time but to the concept of “Shabbat” and community. Picking up the pieces and re-arranging them is how Franklin Delano Roosevelt led this country out of the Great Depression. Nobody enjoyed it while it lasted, but we got over it. We’ll get over what’s happening now, and be on our way to being a new thing once the clean-up begins.

As Tennyson, in “The Passing of Arthur,” had the king declare from his departing barge, “The old order changeth, yielding place to the new, / And God fulfills himself in many ways, / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.