TWENTY-SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Daniel 12:1-3

Psalm 16

Hebrews 10:11-25

Mark 13:1-8

Prayer of the Day: Almighty God, your sovereign purpose brings salvation to birth. Give us faith to be steadfast amid the tumults of this world, trusting that your kingdom comes and your will is done through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

“When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” Mark 13:7-8.

It was back in the Fall of 1982, my first year of parish ministry, that a parishioner asked me whether I thought the events foretold by Jesus in today’s gospel were taking place today. Then, as now, there were potential and actual military conflicts on the horizon, natural disasters occurring and talk of the “end times” among popular media preachers. I responded in the affirmative then. Forty years later, my response is the same. People in Gaza, Haiti and South Sudan are caught in the clash of military conflicts and civil strife. Famine threatens the Horn of Africa. The effects of global warming are having injurious effects on the health and safety of millions. In all of those places the church is present and disciples of Jesus are witnessing in word and deed to God’s love for the world and God’s determination to redeem it. What many “end times” preachers refer to as the “great tribulation” is not a prediction of distant future events. The tribulation has always been among us. Black youths who experience police violence, indigenous peoples robbed of their land, their culture and sometimes their children, LGBTQ+ folk and their families facing judicial obliteration of their hard won rights and undocumented families fearing deportation and separation know well the nearness of the great tribulation. Only those of us privileged to have been born white, American/Northern European and reasonably well off perceive it as remote.

I am guessing that most of you reading this article share my dismay at the outcome of last Tuesday’s election. I spent a good deal of Wednesday in a blue funk wondering how a majority of my fellow Americans could imagine that a six time bankrupt could be the best manager for the national economy, how a convicted felon could be trusted to instill law and order, how a sexual predator could be trusted to “protect women.” I felt the urge to draw back the curtains, crawl back into bed and curl up into a fetal position. I’m past that now. If you are still there, I have just four words for you: Snap out of it.

Jesus never promised his disciples a rose garden. He challenged them to take up the cross for the sake of God’s just and gentle reign. He calls us to stand with him among the poor, naked, strangers, imprisoned and sick. That entails facing tribulation head on. Saint Peter would say to us, as he did to the first century believers in Asia Minor, “[b]eloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.” I Peter 4:12. Dealing with set backs, defeats and hostility are occupational hazards of discipleship. So, let’s put on our grown-up pants and, as one of my mentors was fond of saying, “get to gitten.” We are not yet dodging bullets, facing arrest or struggling to care for injured children in a war zone with inadequate supplies-as are many faithful in many parts of the world, who are seeing the great tribulation up close and personal.

That said, it seems that the tribulation has drawn a good bit closer. It remains to be seen how much of Donald Trump’s bellicose rhetoric is hot air and how much will translate into violent and repressive policies. In the meantime, we can hope for the best and be prepared for the worst. How can I possibly hope for the best? Because I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit to melt the hardest of hearts. I believe that there is hidden in every historical transaction a “God factor” that can turn events in surprising and unanticipated directions. Prayer enables us to enter into that divine struggle and open our hearts and minds to the Holy Spirit’s transformative power. I believe that human agency is real and that what we do, fail to do or refrain from doing makes a difference. So, in the words of our second lesson from the Letter to the Hebrews, “[l]et us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.” Hebrews 10:23.  

Equally as well, I believe that disciples of Jesus in these United States need to be prepared for the use of government power to impose the worst acts of oppression, bigotry, racial hate, homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia we have seen in over a century against the most vulnerable among us. To that end, our ELCA bishops need to put teeth into our sanctuary guidelines by urging congregations to move forward with and supporting their pastors in implementing outreach to migrants, networking with sibling congregations, faith communities, advocacy groups and other agencies providing housing, sustenance and legal support for immigrants. There is also an urgent need for training in non-violent resistance, a must for confronting directly a massive deportation effort threatened by the incoming Trump administration. Bishops should be consulting with and referring their congregations to the many organizations and persons skilled and experienced in these techniques-like yesterday. In short, dear bishops, what you wish the Lutheran Church in Germany had done in the 1930s, do now.  

Those of us who pastor congregations need to speak the truth about the Republican Party clearly, unequivocally and without apology. No doubt there will be objections that we are being “political” and “partisan.” But this is not about politics. We can disagree in good faith over what needs to be done to fix our broken immigration system and manage our border. But when it comes to splitting up families, spewing lies about racial minorities and referring to immigrants as “vermin” who “poison the blood” of our nation, there is nothing to discuss. From a Christian perspective, politics are the means by which we love our neighbors-whether white, black or brown, whether gay, straight or nonbinary, whether documented or not. Politicized hate is not legitimate politics. It is simply terrorism and state sponsored violence the likes of which organizations like the KKK, Proud Boys and Aryan Nations routinely advocate and employ. By any metric you can devise, the Republican Party is a hate group every bit as much as the aforementioned. We need to say so to our members. And to those support Donald Trump, we need to say “Look, you are no doubt good people. You are loved by God and a treasured part of our community. But whether through ignorance, indifference or malice, you are participating in a terrible, hurtful and destructive movement with a hateful political organization. For that you should be ashamed. You need to repent of your sin before it devours you.” That our churches and their leaders have too seldom spoken this truth is, I believe, a failure of prophetic nerve.  

More important, however, than anything bishops and pastors can do is for each one of us to speak up, stand up and testify in our own daily lives against hatred and in defense of the most vulnerable among us. That is how change happens. We need to be speaking up at family barbeques, beauty parlors, bowling alleys, mall walking clubs, Bible studies, book clubs and wherever we find ourselves situated. You never know where the opportunity will pop up to push, however incrementally, a seemingly closed mind in a new direction. You never know whether your words will embolden someone else, who thought they were all alone, to speak up as well. You never can tell when children or impressionable young people might be watching, wondering whether the MAGA loudmouth in the room speaks for the whole adult world. You might be the one whose speech opens the ears of a young gay, lesbian or non-binary person, who has heard from the church only words of judgment and condemnation, to hear a good word of love, acceptance and hope from Jesus. So speak, even if your voice is shaking, even when you are struggling to find the right words, even when it seems unlikely that speaking up will make a difference. Trust me-or rather, trust Jesus. It will.    

I do worry that the American church has become so accustomed to being the nation’s chaplain that we cannot imagine our existence apart from that role. I worry that our faith has become so symbiotically bound up with patriotism and American values that we cannot imagine ourselves as a countercultural community. I worry that we sometimes wade so deep into the political fray as to get lost in the weeds and forget that our job is not to reform America, save democracy or elect the candidate we believe capable of performing these tasks. Our loyalty is-or should be-to the reign of God before all else and to the exclusion of every loyalty demanding of us attitudes, actions and commitments contrary to that reign. Nations like ours, as the prophet Isaiah reminds us, are a “drop in the bucket.” Isaiah 40:15. As the grand old hymn reminds us, “crowns and thrones shall parish; kingdoms wax and wane.” Democrats might be fretting over how they need to reformulate, reshape and repackage their message to do better in the next election. For the church of Jesus Christ, the message remains the same and let polls, focus groups and election results be damned.    

There is some good news in Sunday’s otherwise dark gospel lesson. Jesus tells us that the tribulation we are experiencing is not the death throes of all God has made. Rather, it is the birth pangs of new creation. To be clear, I do not believe for one moment that God wills wars, famines or earthquakes. But I do believe that God takes whatever we and the world throw at God and turns it toward God’s own redemptive intent. It has been said that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. If that is true, then that arc is imperceptibly gradual. It appears to me that the way of the universe is a disjointed path along which we crawl forward and get thrown back repeatedly. Progress is ephemeral and likely to evaporate at any point. That God is leading the universe to its end in God is not evident in the ebb and flow of history. It is only glimpsed in Jesus’ resurrection. Faith in the Resurrection is the only way to make sense of a people who persist in putting their trust in God and loving their neighbors, enemies included, in a world so thoroughly hostile to God and infected with hate. Disciples are the people who forgive whether forgiveness is requested or not. They are the people who care for the planet, speak up for its most vulnerable residents and bring healing to its deepest wounds-even when their efforts appear too feeble, too late, ineffective and hopeless. Yes, it’s dark out there with no sign of dawn anytime soon. But God does some of God’s best work in the dark. After all, nothing is darker than a tomb.

Here is a poem by Arthur Hugh Clough calling for faithful and persistent struggle for the good, not unlike Jesus’ call for endurance in the midst of tribulation.

Say not the Struggle nought Availeth

Source: This poem is in the public domain. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) was an English poet, an educationalist and an assistant to Florence Nightingale. He was the brother of suffragist Anne Clough and father of Blanche Athena Clough, who both became principals of Newnham College, Cambridge.  Clough was born in Liverpool, England, but his family moved to the United States in 1822. Clough’s early childhood was spent mainly in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1837 he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. Thereafter, he won a fellowship with a tutorship at Oriel College, but resigned in 1848 because he was unwilling to teach the doctrines of the Church of England as required. He traveled to Europe where he witnessed the revolutionary movements of the time which, in turn, inspired several of his poems. In 1852 he traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he lectured for several months. He returned to London in 1853 where he worked as an unpaid secretarial assistant to Florence Nightengale, his wife’s cousin. In 1860, his health began to fail, but despite this turn of events, he took an extended tour of travel throughout Europe during which he wrote several of his longest poems. He died in Florence in 1861, having contracted malaria in Switzerland. You can read more about Arthur Hugh Clough and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.