Red Cups, Falling Stones

Mark 13:1-8

You know that Christianity is under attack, right?

If you didn’t know it before this week, you found out about it when Starbucks released their “holiday season” cups - you know, the red ones without pictures of reindeer and snowflakes
and trees and other, um, holy symbols?

I spent three days this week at a conference on vitality in the Episcopal Church, at a retreat center in New Mexico without radio or TV or a lot of time to check the internet, so I had no idea what was going on with the Illinois budget or the never-ending presidential campaign,

but I did hear about The Cups.

So I figure that you, too, must have seen something about this latest evidence that public religion is falling apart, and that the proud symbols of celebration no longer stand in public view.

Perhaps you laughed, like I did.

Perhaps you recognized the anxiety, even if you didn’t share it:

“Do you see these great buildings?” Jesus says to the disciple admiring the strength and beauty of the Temple, admiring the visible symbol of Jerusalem’s status as the home of God on earth.

“See these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be demolished.”

And by the time Mark’s story of Jesus got into wide circulation, everyone who happened to visit Jerusalem could see just how true that destruction was. The Temple the disciple so admired in the early 30s was destroyed by fire in the 70s when Roman forces destroyed Jerusalem to put down a Zealot rebellion. 

It’s a fearful thing when your spiritual base is attacked or destroyed.

It’s painful and chaotic, it induces panic, and it’s easy - very, very easy - to be led astray as you wonder who you can trust anymore, even God.

It’s like that in Paris, this weekend,

though those attacks - like the one on the Temple thousands of years ago - are more political and cultural than spiritual.

It’s happening in Beirut, too, and across the world right now.

But hearing and seeing it in our news, fearing for friends and places we love, makes the horror and chaos real and visceral to us, as we pray for those in the midst of it, and look to our leaders for answers, and planning - for prevention and ways to just make it stop.

That’s not far from how Jesus’ disciples must have felt when he told them that the Temple — the house of God, the necessary, active, constant spiritual center of their faith, their history as God’s people — was about to be destroyed. 

They press him for more information, for a clearer prediction of timeline and warning signs, for a way to prepare for the loss of their spiritual home. And Jesus won’t give them a date, or a warning system.

All Jesus gives them is more chaos:
wars and rumors of wars, international conflict, natural disaster, famine, 

false prophets in abundance,

and that’s only the beginning.

Christianity has been under attack, it turns out, since before Christianity even existed.

I laugh about the Starbucks cups, and the “war on Christmas,” and the other ways that some pastors and politicians and folks on the internet get offended or threatened by the world we live in. But there are a lot of real forms of chaos and disruption around us, and there’s also a new report out from the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study that shows - yet again - that the structures of religion in the US are coming apart, a little at a time, but steadily.

A majority of Americans believe in God, but fewer of us identify with a particular religion, fewer still are going to church regularly. 

The stones are slipping a bit, the structure of the church as a spiritual home, as a public symbol and necessary base for our faith, is coming apart, and people are predicting the end of organized religion.

And if you ask Jesus - or most contemporary religious experts - to tell you when will this be, how to prepare, you’re just going to get more chaos.

There is no time, there is no certainty, there is no actual way to prepare.

And the process of losing our spiritual home, the visible assurance of God’s presence and approval, is going to be full of conflict and chaos and false prophets.

That stinks.

This news also made it to the surface of that conference I was at.  The Pew study was quoted, and we talked about the challenges of knowing whether our church and our religious practice matter, if we’re making a difference, when Sunday attendance is lower (not just in a survey, but in our own actual congregations) and no one outside the church seems to care what the church thinks or does.

Can we still matter, can our faith be vital, and strong, and transformative,

if the structures are falling apart?

Well, yes, of course.

At the conference, we told stories about transformation and spirit-filled lives:

stories from Calvary, from congregations around the country,

stories where the light and power of God shine through, and clearly matter.

There are stories like that coming out of Paris, 

and even out of Starbucks, too.

But the stories don't keep the Temple standing, or the budget balanced, or change the real and clear trends in the culture around us.

So we still have to wrestle with the challenge that upset the disciples: the prediction that someday, the structures of our faith will crumble, and we’ll lose that home base that makes it normal and respectable to practice our religion.

And it’s painful, even if we already know that the fall of the Temple can't destroy our faith.

Jesus doesn’t pull any punches about that when he tells his disciples about the chaos that they're headed toward.

He tells them that global conflict and disaster are “only the beginning of the birth pangs.”

It’s the end of the world as we know it, sure enough, but this end is only the beginning — the beginning of the painful, irresistible convulsion that brings new life.

Resurrection needs death - something the anxious disciples have yet to learn, and something that takes learning over and over again for them, and for us.

When the disciples ask him for the when and the how, the things you’d need to know to either prevent the calamity or prepare for it, the first and primary thing Jesus tells them is “Do not be led astray.”

Don’t let what happens to the Temple, to the church, to the spiritual base that we want to trust, — or even to the world around us — don’t let any of that fool us into believing that this is the end.

Because in fact, it’s the beginning of the messy, painful, life-giving process of birth; the process which ejects us from the trustworthy, safe, and familiar place that has nurtured our becoming and growth, into a life of both potential and risk beyond imagination.

I suspect the church as you and I know it, the cultural prevalence of Christian holidays, Sunday worship, church buildings and congregations, will still be around for my lifetime, and most of yours.

But I think that we will also see it crumbling, and have to turn to Jesus with our questions about when and how and what will we do.

And we’ll get the same answer the disciples got about the Temple: that chaos and change and shock are just the beginning, the beginning of the painful, messy, transformative and life-giving process of birth, and we’d better not let any of that fool us into thinking that this is the end

of the world, or of faith, or of God’s presence with us.

I suspect that the church as you and I know it will come apart,

some day or some how,

and that new life beyond our imagination will be born from the mess and the change.

Next year, Starbucks cups will be different again.

Throughout the year Calvary and other churches will have new numbers to worry about and new stories to inspire us,

wars and attacks and rumors of wars will fill our newscasts,

and Jesus will warn us about all of this again, and again.

And we’ll need the reminder.

We will always need Jesus’ call to stay faithful, and expectant, and full of good news,

because this is just the beginning.