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I have to congratulate you for choosing a very intelligent rector. He was smart enough to leave the country and get someone else to preach on today’s Gospel. It is a hard piece of scripture to listen to and an even harder one to preach about. Where’s the Good News in this Gospel? Mark 13 is called the Little Apocalypse. It is the prediction and description of End Time and is based not only on a future possibility but on an experience of the Jews referred to in Daniel, which was another hard piece to listen to. Apocalyptic thinking, or end-time thinking, seems to occur more during times of persecution and hardship. Daniel is referring to the decision of Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century before Christ to erect a statue of Zeus in the temple and require people to sacrifice on the temple altar to this pagan god. This would have indeed been an abomination of desolation. Times were not
much better for In our time we
have seen things happen that we could not imagine. The devastation of the Throughout history various sects or messianic leaders have thought they were living in the end time, and they prepared for it. The turn of the first millennium was one such time, and for some the turn of the second into the third caused a great deal of anxiety. Remember Y2K? But Jesus is very clear that false messiahs and false prophets will think they see signs and omens or will produce them, and we are to pay them no mind. The world will be completed in God’s own time, and we do not need to be anxious about it. Easy to say, harder to do, I know. W.H. Auden coined the phrase “The Age of Anxiety” in the middle of the last century, and if anything, we as a culture are more anxious now. We live in the Age of Even Greater Anxiety. And books about the End time are selling at a fast pace. That fact and the world situation prompted my seminary to hold a symposium entitled “Envisioning the End Times: The Politics of Christian Apocalypse.” What is suggested here is that fear and anxiety is something that is part of the human situation and always has been and that people can and do manipulate it for their own ends. As Christians we need to find a different way to look at things, a way that offers what the Gospel of Christ offers and that is hope and courage. A little laughter never hurts for us to gain our perspective. You know, don’t you that Noah, that man who lived at a definite end time, was the first true man of faith. Not only because he built the ark according to God’s plan but because he got on a wooden boat and braved the flood with two termites aboard. If you can laugh, you can deal with many things from a different perspective. As Christians we see the End Time as a Birth Time. All time is in God’s hand and we know that death leads to resurrection, even when it is hard to truly hope for this or believe it. History is going somewhere with God and Jesus has promised that the Christian community will be given resources to deal with whatever comes. Our part is to live with awareness and endurance and courage. The epistle to the Hebrews talks about the struggles that the community of faith has been through, and how they had lived with compassion and confidence that they had something better than possessions. Those of us concerned about what is happening in the Episcopal Church right now might feel that the struggles of the world have entered the church. And indeed they have. We have struggles everywhere. That is the nature of life, and it is through engaging in our particular struggles that we are given an opportunity to gain greater awareness, endurance and courage. Courage, after all, comes from a situation of fear. If you were not afraid, you would not need courage. Hebrews entices us to not shrink back and be lost but to live with faith and be saved. I would like to suggest one small thing that you can do when you are feeling anxious or fearful. I learned this technique when I was going through cancer treatment. When my mind would run ahead with “what-ifs” and “how-will-I-evers” I learned to stop my mind and simply be in the present moment. I would pay attention to my breath, slow it down, think about my body as the temple of the Holy Spirit, and know that God was present with me, no matter what. Eckhart Tolle has written a book entitled The Power of Now. There is a lot of power in staying in the present. I learned that all I had was this moment of time, but it was also all anyone else had. Our lives are composed of moments, of nows, and tomorrow never comes. I also learned that we let ourselves be crucified again and again between two thieves, just like Jesus. The one thief is regret about the past and the other thief is fear or anxiety about the future. We cannot change the past, and it is only in living faithfully in the present moment that we can shape the future. We don’t have to do it all alone, thank God. We are part of a community of faith. Christ has promised to give us what we need to live faithfully together. As I meet with you and get to know you better I hear over and over how important you are to one another as a family, as a community. You give each other such strength and encouragement to live your lives faithfully. A Christian life is a life filled with love, joy, gratitude and service. Courage, humor, faith and endurance help us live this kind of life. We do not need to be stuck in our fear or our anxiety. With the support of the community of faith, we can embrace whatever comes knowing that God is with us and is for us. This morning we will baptize a new little person of faith—Ellie Anne Rockwell. And we will promise that we will help her grow into a life of faith and love. She will need us; her family will need us, and we need them as part of our Christian community. In baptism we give her the Holy Spirit within her, which is enough to sustain her through all the days of her life. I would like to end with a poem by the 14th c. Persian poet Rumi. It’s a kind of antidote to anxiety.
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