“Give up the Distractions”

by the Reverend Shirley Smith Graham

St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, 

Williamsburg, VA, November 18, 2007

November 18, 2007

 Luke 21:5-19

The gospels speak in short-hand.  Listening to them is like getting the skeleton of the message without any fleshy commentary to guide our thoughts.  So our hearing of today’s gospel from Luke might sound like austere, bad-news Jesus.  The stones of the Temple will be thrown down; there will be wars and insurrection; there will be natural calamities, and you will be persecuted.  There will be cataclysmic and awful distractions, but be faithful nonetheless.  Not a cheery message on this beautiful autumn morning. 

But it we look beyond the short-hand of the gospel, we find the commentary that helps us interpret what Jesus is saying.  For no more than 20 verses after today’s passage, in Chapter 22, we are told that the religious authorities “were looking for a way to put Jesus to death.”  Jesus had the amazing ability to be in a moment of acute pain and give instruction to his disciples that will be useful to them.  Even as Jesus knows that crucifixion is just around the corner, he is able to pull out from his divinity what’s important for his disciples to know.  That, even when bad things happen, ignore the distractions, and keep on being faithful.  Bad things happening doesn’t mean God has abandoned you; it simply means that God is with you through the bad things.

There is this personal anguish for Jesus – the foreknowing that the human voices which now praise him for his wise teaching and healing acts simply precede the voices that will accuse him, condemn him and kill his body.  We have no greater image of tolerance than what Jesus did – to continue to extend his hand to the very same people who would nail those hands to the cross.  Because of his God-love for humanity, Jesus chooses to be bonded in love to those who will hurt him.  His God-knowledge says this is the way it is with humanity.  Such has it always been, that God has sent a message of hope, enabling people to set right their actions, to heal the breaches and be set in right relationship with God.  And such has it always been that many have refused that message of correction and, as a result, have endured the bad consequences of their own misguided actions.  We’ve been hearing these last several weeks the prophesies of Jeremiah and … and …. – showing Israel its crimes and God giving them the opportunity to put it all right, even though they kept on sinning.

What pain we put God through – that we continue to do that which hurts us even when we have been shown that it needs to change.  I don’t believe it’s in God’s nature to like to see people suffering.  Suffering is allowed, but not liked.  So, I believe this scene in the Temple to have been not just frustrating for Jesus but also painful, knowing that the cross was not far afterward.

Despite this bleak scene, I wonder if ancient words of hope were ringing in Jesus’ ears, even as he listened to the trivial talk about the beauty of the Temple.  Like any Jewish child, he would have heard since he was a toddler his mother and father reciting portions of Torah and the prophets.  Most likely, Mary taught her son a selection of Scripture, songs and prayers that would be helpful to him in life’s big moments.  I know the canticle I have taught my son, the one we say each bedtime: “Lord you now have set your servant free, to go in peace as you have promised.”  It is possible that the prayers and songs Mary taught Jesus included the canticle from Isaiah which we read today:

“Surely it is God who saves me.  I will trust in him and not be afraid.  For the Lord is my comfort and my sure defense, and he will be my savior.”

The Lord will be the savior.  God saves –the Temple does not save.  God, who is unseen, will be the one to bring humanity to completion and wholeness.  The deliverer will be God who is unseen, not the Temple which is seen.

Jesus sounds cranky and tired as he turns and says, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”  Despite hundreds of years of warnings, the people are still relying on earthly signs to help them navigate instead of putting their trust in God.  No sooner has Jesus said that the great Temple will be destroyed but that the people are asking him how they can know such a thing will happen, presumably so they can run and avoid it.

But the people have missed the point.  Their attention is captivated by the descriptions of what the end-times will look like instead of being captivated by the One, by God, who will bring all things to fulfillment.  Remember the biblical apocalypse, the time of judgment prophesied as far and wide as Amos and Daniel and Jesus, is a moment of justice, a moment of God bringing healing to the earth and its people.  The goal, even in the Old Testament, is life with God, and the path toward that goal will necessarily involve cataclysm and destruction.  Yet those traumas are simply on the path and are not the end-goal itself.  However, the listeners forget the goal entirely and get hung up on the signs of destruction along the way.

We’re fascinated by destruction, as people, aren’t we?  As much as we think we like to hear good news, we allow ourselves to overfocus on the bad.  Of the four stories on the front page of yesterday’s local newspaper, 3 of the 4 were about things gone wrong – vehicles destroyed, school schedules gone bad, real estate losing value.  Truly it is important to see life as it is and acknowledge the bad.  But I would suggest that we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by the bad, tempted into worry and anxiety.  We have colluded with the anxiety of the age and get obsessed with things gone wrong instead of focusing on God, calls us to act with justice where we can be impactful, where we can make a difference. 

This worry over the wrong things is not a modern phenomenon.  Look at Luke’s text.  Jesus proceeds to note that the people around him are tempted to focus on the wrong things – and doesn’t it sound like the list we might worry about ourselves?

-- wars and insurrections

-- nation rising against nation

-- earthquakes, famines and plagues

-- and persecutions.

In fact, so afraid are we of the things on this list that it is possible we did not hear this passage rightly – perhaps as we listened to this gospel, we got so hooked into the traumas that we missed entirely Jesus saying “do not” focus on these things.

Now, let’s look at the work that Jesus does point the disciples toward doing:

-- Testify: speak the truth that is in you.

-- Give up the anxiety of speaking that truth well

-- Train yourself for endurance.

First, speak the truth that is in you.  What does your faith in God, fundamentally, give you?  Do you feel tied to God’s larger life in some inexplicable way?  Are you gifted to know that life-with-God is better than life-without-God?  Do you know in your heart that Jesus’ strength will see you through all of life’s storms?  What is the truth that you have within you?  Be ready to share it, to give witness to it, to testify when the time comes.

Second, don’t worry.  Do not spend time worrying how you will handle a particular situation, or what you will say.  Trust in the Lord.  God “will give you words and a wisdom” that no one will be able to contradict. 

Finally, practice endurance.  Practice what it would feel like to watch a hurricane coming and batten down your soul’s hatches in preparation for the onslaught.  Or, to switch metaphors, get ready to be a long-distance runner, who will be able to trust in the strength of her legs not just for the first, second or fifth mile, but will be able to rely on those legs in the 23^rd, 25^th and 26^th mile.  Get used to stumbling and running on.  We are merely human; we will stumble; but God offers us the strength of the spirit to get past the stumble and endure to the end.

There will always be distractions – in our personal and corporate life.  There will always be a controversy in the parish, or the larger church or our city that we could get hung up on.  There will always be wars and insurrections, nation rising against nation, earthquakes, famines and plagues, persecutions.  But what Jesus calls us to is calm endurance.  So we learn the skills of endurance.  At signs of distress, we learn how to wrestle our emotions down, how to center our distracted minds, how to steel our fickle wills, so that we can make our actions reflect what Jesus asks us to focus on.

I think that’s why Jesus, as divine as he is, set a good example in his earthly life for us mere mortals.  Jesus loved and was loved.  He spoke, and he listened.  He made a plan for his day, and sometimes the plan got changed by someone else.  He tried to focus on his goal, his message, and sometimes got distracted.  And he taught us how, in the midst of the storm of distractions, to live a faithful life:

-- speak the faith that is within you

-- give up the anxiety of doing it well

-- train yourself for endurance.  Hardships will come, but “by your endurance you will gain your souls.”

We are surrounded by signs of our endurance.  What are these signs?  Our sacred story – Holy Scriptures – and the sacraments  of baptism and Eucharist.  We are people who signify our faith as much as we are likely to speak our faith.  I’ve often heard Episcopalians talk about their discomfort when they are asked, “Are you saved?”  Often, people are uncertain how to respond.  How do you put something as profound as salvation into words?  How could a simple, monosyllabic word like “yes” be the answer to whether you are counted among the saints in light?  How could simple words, which vanish as soon as they are spoken, adequately describe that, for some unmerited reason God has embraced us?  So, unlike

So, unlike some of our more “reformation” brethren, instead of talking about we saved, we are likely to want to act out that salvation, to do things that signify our confidence in God’s saving action.  We listen with open hearts to Bible readings, even when we do not understand them or when they challenge our actions.  We shout out: “Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.”  During Holy Communion, we reach forward our hands to accept the sign that God has poured himself out in love to us.  By taking the bread that signifies we are saved, we affirm that we are healed, and made whole in God’s sight.  Each day, every day, we participate in signs of our endurance.  So let us give up the distractions.  Amen.

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