A few years ago, I was playing blocks with a three-year-old friend. We built a tower – as you do – big and tall and kind of random, because we just put whatever blocks came to hand on top of others.
And just as we were about to run out of blocks, my friend gleefully knocked the whole thing over. She laughed, and after a moment, I remembered to laugh, too.
This is what toddlers do, after all. It is (google tells me) an important developmental and learning tool.
I wasn’t invested in that block tower at all, but its destruction made me unexpectedly anxious. (Watching something fall apart just… always gets me.)
Still, my friend and I built more towers and piles, and knocked them down, over and over that afternoon. And though I was having fun, even though I knew it didn’t matter at all, I never quite got used to the little shock every time those blocks scattered over the floor, not one left upon another. Always felt a little anxious.
Even when I knocked them over myself.
So the idea of the collapse and utter destruction of 37 acres of large, heavy buildings is doing queasy things to my stomach, as we listen to Jesus and his first disciples talk about the Temple in Jerusalem today.
And even if you enjoy knocking down block towers with all your heart, imagining that scene might make you a little anxious too.
It’s supposed to.
That Temple Jesus’ disciples are admiring was built as an assurance of the solidity and permanence of God’s presence. It was to be a unifying sign, a building of confidence and certainty.
So its destruction by war, revolt-suppression, and fire a few decades after Jesus passed through its gates was a massive blow to the people of God. You and I might feel something similar seeing our homes in rubble, or if we watched the White House and Capitol torn down. Might have felt something similar in the fall of 2001, when we’d watched towers fall.
As if the ground itself were no longer stable under our feet.
When things fall down, we sense our own vulnerability and fragility. We feel more exposed, and raw. We feel less safe. More aware of our limits.
More aware of the need for God.
For love and power greater than any destruction.
In our lives and in the world around us.
Often without realizing it, we may count on the things around us as silent assurance that we’re safe, connected, “normal.” And the sudden disappearance – or the extravagant destruction – of things and symbols can startle us into actively looking for what we really most need: for miracles, for love, for transformation – in other words, for the effects of God’s presence in the world.
This story Mark is telling today is not really about the destruction of the Temple. It’s about the revealing of God. About what it will be like when God’s presence comes fully and completely into the world, replacing everything we used to count on with the power and will and glory of God.
It’s a scary story, because in that revelation, all the things we are used to come apart – fall down like a tower of blocks. Even good things, even things that used to reveal the presence of God – the Temple, the church – will come undone so that the fuller presence of God is felt, and seen, and known by all of us.
That happens on a smaller scale already, sometimes.
This pandemic we’re still in knocked down all kinds of big, solid building blocks of our lives. Knocked down so many of the ways we’re used to meeting God, too.
And I’ve talked to many people who found that when the customs of worship and gathering came apart, they saw God at work in new ways, or their prayer actually strengthened, because it wasn’t ordinary; because we needed it more.
That’s not the way it worked for all of us, but for some.
Others of us know people who’ve been through devastating cancer treatment (treatment that’s destructive of good things in our bodies and identity as well as the cancer itself) and find themselves feeling love and hope and trust – even health! – more strongly in the middle of everything falling apart.
Not everyone, but some.
Destruction around us can leave us lost, or sour, or fundamentally unchanged.
Or it can set us free; open us wide to love and glory.
And you and I have an advantage, when everything around us – or inside us – falls apart.
We heard that this morning, in the excerpt from the letter (or probably the sermon) to the Hebrews.
We have confidence, that preacher says, to approach the devastating, awe-inspiring presence of God in everything, as those who are already once for all saved. Hearts clean and true and full of the assurance of God’s faithfulness.
That assurance is where Jesus is trying to lead his disciples, as he goes on beyond what we heard today. In the midst of everything dangerous, destructive, failing, God’s presence will be with them, guiding them, anchored in what Jesus has already done and taught them.
There’s a hymn we sang a few weeks ago that I think expresses what Jesus is trying to teach his disciples to hold on to, when that Temple in Jerusalem comes down, and devastation is all around them.
All my hope on God is founded;
he doth still my trust renew,
me through change and chance he guideth,
only good and only true.
Jesus is warning his disciples – and us – that destruction can go on and on, and we’ll need God’s faithfulness. So that when everything falls apart we may still be scared (we’d be crazy not to be), but we won’t be paralyzed. We’ll be able to trust and stay present, even when we’re anxious and shaken.
When we meet times and places of destruction as those already saved – those who cannot lose God’s faithfulness – we’re not protected from pain by indifference or detachment. We’re open to compassion and generosity – able to offer it to others, and receive it ourselves.
When we root ourselves in God’s faithfulness, we can stand in the midst of destruction – of institutions we count on, or our own daily plans – confident that there are miracles coming forth. We don’t expect to come through unscathed. Instead, we find ourselves making sacrifices with confidence. We can grieve our losses honestly and wholly – because there will be losses – and let those losses open us to new love and hope.
We need this – the world needs this from us – in all these painful places where we get stuck in anxious fear.
When we look at a picture of devastation and destruction over the next decades and century, as seas rise and weather and even earth change around and beneath us, like they’ve been doing in Glasgow these last two weeks.
And in order to do anything together to heal the world and ourselves, we need that confidence and hope and compassion and sacrifice and generosity and creativity – and perhaps a few miracles – that trusting in God’s faithfulness can give you and me.
If we know we don’t need to keep things as they are – that there are miracles, love, and transformation on the other side of loss – we can even knock some towers down ourselves.
I never stopped getting a little anxious when toddler friends knock things down. It’s a visceral reaction to things falling apart that I just live with. But right along with that involuntary anxiety, on that afternoon several years ago, I kept feeling a little wave of love, a sense of faithfulness.
My three-year-old friend trusted me to keep playing, to stay friends, no matter what we built or destroyed. And I trusted her the same way.
It’s a tiny, faint echo of the faithfulness of God that will not lose us – and actually draws us closer – when things fall apart. Draws us into love, and glory, and transformation no temple could contain.
In the words of that same hymn of faithfulness:
Mortal pride and earthly glory,
sword and crown betray our trust;
though with care and toil we build them,
tower and temple fall to dust.
But God’s power, hour by hour,
is my temple and my tower.
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