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Focus

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Luke 21:5-19; Malachi 4:1-2a; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

The temple in Jerusalem—Herod’s temple—had been under construction for more than 40 years when Jesus sat down in its outer courtyard to speak with his disciples.  Herod had begun constructing the temple in 20 BCE, and it was already regarded as one of the wonders of the world even though it wouldn’t be completed until 63 CE, some thirty years after this teaching moment Jesus has with his disciples.

In order to be able to build the massive temple he envisioned, Herod first had to rebuild Mount Moriah, the low mountain on which the temple stood.  To do this, he encased the mountain with walls more than 33 meters (108 feet) high, then filled in the space with earth until it encompassed an area of more than 144,000 square meters.    

The temple in Jerusalem was a visual wonder.  A description in the Talmud says that  the interior walls of the temple were faced with blue, yellow, and white marble.   Gold spikes lined the parapet wall on the roof.  Josephus wrote that the entire eastern fascia was covered with gold.  “The rays of the early morning sun, striking the Temple façade created a blinding reflection,” he wrote.  “The rest was white, so that this towering edifice looked like a snow-clad mountain from afar.” 

It must have sounded like madness for Jesus to say that it was all coming down—that not one stone would be left upon another.  But by the time Luke wrote his gospel, sometime around the year 85, everything Jesus predicted in today’s gospel reading had already happened.  

In 70 CE, during the first Jewish-Roman war, the Roman general Titus destroyed the temple and much of the rest of Jerusalem along with it.  

Six years before that, the emperor Nero had carried out the first official persecutions against Christians, using them as a scapegoat for the burning of Rome in 64 CE.

As for wars and rumors of wars, just between the time when Jesus spoke these words and the time Luke wrote them down, Rome fought the Roman-Parthian War, the Boudica Uprising in Britain, the first Jewish-Roman War, the Spartacus war, the Lepidus versus Sulla Roman Civil War, the Sertorian War and the first of three wars with the Kingdom of Dacia.  

Wars and rumors of wars.  Earthquakes.  The eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum.  Portentous signs in the heavens.  Famines.  Plagues. Persecutions.  All these things happened between the time Jesus spoke those prophetic words and the time Luke wrote them down in his account of the life and teaching of Jesus.   

But the world did not end.

Dositheos the Samaritan, Theudas the Rebel, Simon bar Kokhba and other would-be liberators of Israel gathered followers, led rebellions and claimed to be the Messiah.  They were not.  And now history barely remembers them.

It’s easy to get distracted by apocalyptic thinking and doomsday scenarios.  That’s why books like The Late, Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series have always sold so well.  But Jesus made it pretty clear that we’re not supposed to spend a lot of time thinking about that.  “About that day and hour no one knows,” he said, “—not the angels in heaven nor even the Son, but only the Father.”  (Matthew 24:36)

These lectionary texts that we have for today from Malachi, Second Thessalonians and Luke invite us to focus.  You could say they invite us to focus on what we’re focusing on—on what’s getting our attention.

The gospel lesson for today comes right after the passage where Jesus comments on the poor widow who put her two pennies—all she had–into the temple treasury.  The disciples were busy gazing at the grandeur of the temple and didn’t even see her until Jesus pointed her out to them.  They were focused on the impressive architecture.  Jesus, on the other hand, was focused on the people.  

Are we seeing what Jesus sees…or are we distracted?

It’s understandable that the disciples were captivated by the splendor and beauty of the temple as they sat there with Jesus, but they lost focus on why they had come to Jerusalem in the first place.  Reading the gospel accounts, you have to wonder if they ever really understood why they were there to begin with, although Jesus certainly tried to tell them often enough.  And now, there they were, a day or two away from his crucifixion and they kept getting distracted—first by the beauty of the temple then by speculations about apocalypse.  “When will this be?  Teacher, what will be the secret signs that all this is about to happen?”

To be fair, I know I would have had the same questions.  I suspect you might, too.  Wouldn’t you want to be ready for it?  Even with our long historical perspective that tells us that wars and plagues and famines and earthquakes and false messiahs have been pretty much stock set pieces in the long drama of life on earth—even though all these things have  always been happening—and are happening right now—we would want to know when the grand finale is coming to our neighborhood.   We would want to know when the final curtain for everyone everywhere is coming down.

Because the lectionary cycle repeats, we get this same group of texts every three years.  But even with that repeating cycle, I believe that these texts continue to speak to us in a unique way every time they come up.  They always seem timely—sometimes so much so that it’s uncanny. 

Six years ago we were reading these texts on the first Sunday after the presidential election when Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote but Donald Trump carried the Electoral College.  That was a pretty tense time.  A lot of people were wondering what would happen next.  I thought it was noteworthy that Hillary Clinton even quoted a line from our 2nd Thessalonians in her concession speech: “Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.”  

Three years ago these texts came up while we were wading through the first impeachment hearings.  Again, it was a tense time and people wondered if the country’s anxiety might explode into something more than oppositional rhetoric. 

Today we hear these texts right after the most anxious and divisive midterm elections in a long, long time—an election fraught with partisan vitriol and acts of violence.  While the votes are still being counted, many are wondering if our polarized political division in this country can ever be healed.  A lot of people are focused on that.

It’s hard sometimes not to let our focus, our vision, be hijacked by the currents of anger and isolation that have been flooding our lives with such violence. There was another school shooting this week, this time in Seattle.  As of November 11, Veterans Day, there had been 589 mass shootings in the US since the beginning of the year.  A total of 38,431 people have been killed by gun violence so far this year.  That certainly deserves our attention.   

We are still dealing with a pandemic that physically isolated us from each other.  We are still dealing with the fallout from the January 6 assault on the Capitol.

On this Veterans Day weekend it would be irresponsible not to mention the epidemic of veterans committing suicide.  

We have an ongoing addiction crisis.  Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. remain at record levels. According to provisional data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 109,000 people died from drug overdose in the 12-month period ending last March.

Homelessness.  The high cost of housing.  The cost of education.  Racism.  Inflation. Climate change that threatens our very existence… These things all need our attention.

Spouse. Family.  Work.  Church.  School.  Neighbors.  Community Groups.  Meetings. These things are all worthy of our attention.

Netflix.  Apple +.  Disney +.  Prime Video.  HBO.  Showtime.  Cable News.  Sports.  Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. These things are all very good at distracting us when the world just seems to be too much.

So where do you focus?

It’s tempting, very tempting, to just shrug it all off, give up and wait for Jesus to come back and fix everything.  Some Christians have built whole theologies around that.  The writer of 2nd Thessalonians was dealing with that very problem when he said to keep away from “those living in idleness.”  Apparently some people were so convinced that Jesus was coming back at any moment that they just stopped working and were mooching off the rest of the community.  They had lost focus on what Christ had called them to be and to do.

Focus.

Focus on what is helping.  Focus on what is good.  Focus on what is improving.  Focus on what you can be thankful for.  Focus on what is changing.  Focus on what needs to be changed.  But don’t be anxious.  Don’t let it all overwhelm you.  Do what you can where you can when you can.  

Then take a breath.

Take a breath.  And take a long look back.  

Everything changes.  There are only three things that are eternal:  God, Life, and Love.  And life and love are eternal because they come from God. 

The crazy politics, the anger and fear and hate, the anxiety and tension, the stupidity and racism, all the antagonism, all the misunderstandings… will someday all fade into history.

The beautiful temples, the faces that we cherish and hands we hold, our favorite music and art will someday all be lost to the world’s memory.

But God, Life and Love will live on.  And because we are made in God’s image and filled with God’s spirit and life and loved by God, so will we.

So let’s stay focused.  Let’s keep moving forward.  Let’s focus on the vision, as Jesus did, that the reign of God, the kin-dom of God is in reach.  Let’s keep working to make that a reality on earth as it is in heaven.  Let us not grow weary in doing what is right.

Yes, a dystopian, destructive, apocalyptic unraveling of our world is always a possibility, but there’s no point worrying about it.  Instead, let’s keep working to build the alternative.  

Martin Luther was once said, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces I would still plant my apple tree.”

So let’s do that.  Let’s keep planting our apple trees.  Let’s live in hope.

“The very least you can do in your life,” wrote Barbara Kingsolver, “is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I’m living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides.”[1]

Let’s live inside our hope.  Let’s focus on making the world a healthier, safer, more loving place for those who come after us.  Let’s seek first God’s kin-dom and God’s righteousness.  In a world of bad news, let’s not just proclaim the Good News, let’s begood news.

And even if it looks like the walls of the temple are coming down, it doesn’t have to bring us down with it.  “Do not be weary in doing what is right.  By your endurance you will gain your souls.”  

May we continue to live inside our hope.  And may God embrace us with mercy so that we may live through what is temporary without losing what is eternal.

In Jesus’ name.

[1] Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver

Distractions

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Matthew 21:23-32

    Several days ago I was reading on Facebook a very thought-provoking and insightful post from my dear friend and former bishop.  Somewhere in his message he used the phrase, “dear siblings in Christ.”  We’ve been seeing that wording a lot lately in our denomination as we try to use language that’s more expansive and less gender binary. I get it and I support the idea.  Truly, I do.

But I have a problem.  It’s a personal problem and really kind of silly, but it’s still a problem.  For me.  I don’t like the word siblings.  It has a perfectly fine heritage as English words go, Old Germanic to Saxon to Old English to us, and the meaning couldn’t be clearer.  But I just don’t like the sound of it.   It starts with a snaky sibilant, slides into an apologetic little short vowel, butts up against a half-hearted plosive-lingual combo and drowns itself in a swallowed glottal ending.  You would think a word that intends to speak such rich and varied relationships would, itself, be a bit more robust.

Anyway, I broke away from reading my friend’s Facebook post to compose a post of my own: “FWIW and apropos of nothing:
I really dislike the word sibling. The ending “ling” is diminutive for one thing, and I don’t want to diminish those I am embracing as kin, nor do I want to be diminished. I understand the desire to use something more gender expansive than ‘brothers and sisters,’ but siblings sounds squishy to my ear. So… better word? Or is it just me?”

Forty-seven responses later, many of them having to do with the suffix ‘ling’, my friends and cousins and I had arrived at no consensus regarding the word “siblings,” except that we can’t really think of any other single work that does the job, so we’ll all continue using it.  My cousins, the five sisters who grew up in a family of ten siblings, actually like the word siblings and use it frequently.  Cousin Carla (she’s a retired English teacher) and I had quite the discussion on the etymology of the word…which is the kind of thing that passes for sport in our extended family.

And here’s a curious thing at the end of all this:  I completely lost track of what my dear friend and former bishop was writing about in his piece that used the phrase that had sent me down the siblings rabbit hole.  Can’t remember for the life of me and can’t find his post.  

I remember I had been moved by what I had read up to that point.  I remember thinking that I wanted to sit with his words and the feeling he was expressing.  But I let myself get distracted by the triviality of a single word because it sounds odd to my hearing and its suffix triggers my overly picky sense of meaning.  

I guess I’m hearing impaired in more ways than I realized.

It’s amazing how easily we get distracted from the things that really deserve our attention.

Two days after Jesus had overturned the tables of the moneychangers and driven the vendors and animals out of the temple courts, and followed that by healing people in the temple grounds, Jesus returned to the temple to begin teaching and healing again, knowing that he had precious little time left for this work.  Immediately he was confronted by the Pharisees and Sadducees, the sect in charge of the temple and pretty much everything else in Jerusalem. 

“By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” they asked him.  I don’t think that’s the first question I would have asked.  I think I would have wanted to know why Jesus had made such a ruckus with the vendors and the livestock and the currency exchange.  What’s your thinking there, Jesus?  Then again, if I was wearing their robes and turbans, maybe that’s exactly the question I would have asked: By what authority?  What gives you the authority to come in here and turn our world upside down?  Who gives you that authority?

Their question betrays what they’re trying to protect: their authority.  

Jesus is too smart to accept their kerfuffle invitation, so he says, “Let me ask you a question.  If you tell me the answer, then I’ll tell you by what authority I do what I do.  Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it a strictly human thing?”

And just like that, he had them backed into a corner.  For one thing, that’s exactly the kind of question that would keep Pharisees and Sadducees arguing forever simply because of their different views about heaven and how God works in the world.  But they had an even more practical problem.  “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he’ll say, ‘Well thhen why didn’t you believe him?’  But if we say, ‘It’s a human thing,’ we’ll have to deal with the crowd.  They all think John was a prophet.”  So they answered Jesus, “We don’t know.” So Jesus said to them, “Well then I won’t tell you by what authority I am doing what I do.”

But he doesn’t stop there.  While he has their attention he tells them a cryptic little parable.  I say cryptic because it seems pretty simple and clear on the face of it, but really, there’s a lot more depth than meets the eye.  It’s like a Zen koan.  You need to sit with it awhile.  

“What do you think?,” said Jesus. “A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’  He answered, ‘I don’t feel like it’; but later he changed his mind and went.  The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘Sure, okay’; but he didn’t go.  Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.”

For us to more fully appreciate how the people listening to Jesus were hearing this, it probably helps to understand that the minute they heard the word “vineyard” their ears perked up.  “Vineyard” was the image the prophets and rabbis used to talk about Israel. 

So now they’re listening.  We’re listening.  More carefully.  This is a story about us.  One son says he’ll go work in the vineyard but he doesn’t go.  He sounds obedient but he really isn’t.  The other son says he won’t but then he does.  He sounds disobedient, but in the end he does what he was asked.  Where do we fit in this story?  Where do I fit in this story? 

“Which of the two,” asked Jesus, “did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.  For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.”

Jesus is trying to get these religious leaders, these good, faithful people, to understand that they’ve missed the point of their religion and their faith. 

But they can’t hear him.  They’re distracted by the question of authority.

The Pharisees are deeply vested in their identity as authorities on the law.  Their piety is admirable but burdensome when they try to make others live by their standards.  The Sadducees are deeply vested in their authority as priests  and managers.  They are immersed in all things political and all the power that comes with the temple.  

Jesus is a threat to them.  Would they still have authority in the kin-dom Jesus is proclaiming?  Would they still have status and stature?  Where would they fit in the hierarchy of such a kin-dom?  Would there even be a hierarchy?

For the Pharisees it was their authority as the teachers and religious practitioners that was at stake.  Who would interpret the law?  

These authorities in the temple are so focused on the question of authority that Jesus has to shock them to really be heard.

“Tax collectors and prostitutes,” he says, “the people you despise most, are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.”  

Do take note:  he says they will be going into the kingdom of God.  Just not at the front of the line.

So much of what they needed to know about God’s vision for the kin-dom was already there for them in their scriptures, in the words of the Torah and prophets.  So much of what Jesus was teaching and sharing was already in their hands, but they had missed it or forgotten it. Instead of working in the vineyard to realize God’s plan for spreading the wealth and prosperity of the land and administering justice and caring for the poor as it was all laid out in Torah and the prophets, they got distracted by other details.  They got lost in the rabbit hole of protecting their positions in life-as-usual and they missed what John and Jesus had been announcing—that the time had come to live life-as-extraordinary, life as envisioned.  They got lost in words and missed the Word.

I can’t help but think that today, in our country, we find ourselves in a similar situation.  We have in our hands all the wisdom we need to make our nation much more healthy and whole and to heal the divides among our people.  We have the soaring language of the Declaration of Independence to tell us we’re all created equal and endowed with the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  We have our Constitution calling us to form a more perfect union, laying out for us a government of checks and balances and guaranteeing specific rights to us as citizens.  We pledge allegiance to a nation with liberty and justice for all.

But we’ve been distracted by protecting our particular interests.  All has not included all.  Party politics has knocked the checks and balances out of check and out of balance.  And when we try to make a more perfect union, some people oppose the effort, believing that things were more perfect in a more segregated and separated past.

In 1962, James Meredith made civil rights history as the first Black student ever to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Immediately the town of Oxford, home of the university, was torn by riots as white people took to the streets in violent protest.  But Meredith didn’t let it intimidate him. Four years later, hoping to inspire Black citizens in the South to vote, James Meredith set out to walk 220 miles from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi carrying nothing but a walking stick and a Bible. He wanted  to show that a Black man could walk freely through the South.  “I was at war against fear,” he explained.

On the second day of his walk,  James Meredith was ambushed by Aubrey James Norville, a Memphis hardware clerk, who shot him four times and left him to die in the middle of the road. Incredibly, Meredith survived.

And then an astonishing thing happened. While Meredith was recuperating in the hospital, dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people began to gather to continue his walk from Memphis to Jackson. On June 26, 1966 a recovered James Meredith entered Mississippi’s state capitol accompanied by 12,000 marchers including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael.

It would have been easy for Meredith to surrender in his war against fear.    But he didn’t let a sniper distract him from walking into Jackson with 12,000 friends.

The events in today’s gospel text took place during what we call Holy Week.  The authorities in the temple didn’t like the way Jesus exercised his authority.  They didn’t like it he wasn’t cowed by their authority.  They didn’t like it that they couldn’t distract him from his mission. They didn’t like it that Jesus was distracting the people from life-as-usual and giving them a vision of life-as-extraordinary.  So they crucified him.  

But crucifying him didn’t stop him and it hasn’t stopped his vision of the kin-dom of God.  And today the living Christ is still calling us to walk with him and behind him to make that kin-dom of peace and justice and equity, that kin-dom of liberty and justice for all a reality, and to spread the news that in God’s eyes we are all…siblings.  

In Jesus’ name.