Sunday, November 15, 2015 | 9:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m.

God’s Last Word

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 16
Mark 13:1–8

The antidote to uncertainty, it turns out, isn’t certainty, but courage; and the best response to insecurity is the confidence that comes from knowing that God esteems you worthy of dignity, honor, and love.

David Lose

Even before all of the horrific events unfolded in Beirut and in Paris this weekend, a good friend of mine was moaning about this passage. “I need to preach a pastoral sermon this Sunday,” she said, “not one about the end of the world!” I understood her frustration then, and after Friday evening, I understood her frustration at a whole new level. Frankly I, like my friend, have never liked much of what Jesus has to say in the entire thirteenth chapter of Mark’s Gospel—this little apocalypse, as it is called.

To be honest, I have always preferred to skim quickly through all of these Gospel words, dwelling longer only when I had to do so. But after that conversation and after Beirut and Paris this weekend (shorthand I am purposefully using due to any little ears that might be present), I decided to figure out why I don’t like it.

Maybe the dislike comes because I grew up in Waco, Texas, in the shadow of Dallas Theological Seminary, where dispensationalism rules the day. Now, dispensationalism might be a new term for some of us here at Fourth Church. Those who are dispensationalists claim they know exactly how the world is going to end. They know because of the descriptions of time periods, what they call dispensations, that they see in the scriptures via a method of literal interpretation. With this literal method of scriptural study, they’ve determined very specific conclusions about the end times, conclusions with which I, and our Reformed theological Presbyterian tradition, have fundamental disagreements. Truthfully, I will not be surprised if those who hold this particular perspective mark this past weekend as just one more sign that the end is on the way, so Christians need to be ready for battle. I promise you that is being preached in some Texas pulpits, for sure. So maybe where I grew up has made me overly reactive to end-of-the-world claims.

Or perhaps Jesus’ words make me uncomfortable because I, like you, look around our world and see wars and rumors of wars, nations rising up against nations, earthquakes and famines. Our contemporary condition causes me to wonder if Jesus’ words in this chapter were meant to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. What if Jesus was simply describing what we all know—what it is like to live in a world where chaos still rears its head, people still choose to harm, and all is not yet well? Could it be that this text is not about the end times at all, but about this in-between time in which we continue to live?

Regardless, in the face of a troubling text in a troubling world, our task is to look for gospel, good news, God’s promises. Today, to help us discover God’s gospel in this description of chaos, I bring in another conversation partner for us—Lucy Rose. Allow me to introduce her.

The Reverend Dr. Lucy Rose was a pastor and a seminary professor. I first got to know Lucy as my teacher when she taught the “Introduction to Preaching” class at Columbia Seminary. But as that semester unfolded, I got to know Lucy in a different way, a deeper way. I got to know her as a living testimony to the gospel, someone who was able to hold on to good news in the midst of chaos. And for Lucy, that chaos was cancer.

Lucy had been living with cancer for around three years before Greg and I arrived at seminary. During that summer we arrived, she and her family discovered the disease had moved to her bones. Her prognosis was not good, yet she was determined to teach through her treatment—and then to teach through her time in hospice. And she did. So I ended up being a part of Lucy’s last preaching class.

In addition to teaching, another thing Lucy did during her last year of life was to keep a journal. That journal was later edited by her father and published. I read it cover to cover as soon as I got my hands on it. And I have reread it again and again in the fifteen years since its publication. I turned to it once more yesterday afternoon. Its pages contain some of the most faithful and honest testimony to the gospel I have encountered, and she also helps the reader glimpse what trust looks like when living in the middle of chaos.

As many of you who have or have had cancer know, chaos is often the order of the day. Now, cancer’s chaos isn’t the same kind of chaos Jesus describes in Mark: it isn’t loud and public like what unfolded in Beirut and in Paris. Rather, cancer’s chaos is the chaos caused by sleepless nights or too-sleepy days. It is the chaos caused by not being able to just be “normal,” or not feeling vibrant like you used to feel. It is the chaos caused by no longer being able to deny one’s mortality. So even though it is not the same kind of worldly chaos that might be fresh in our minds this morning, it is chaos nonetheless.

Whenever my teacher Lucy found herself in that place of chaos, she prayed. She chose to pray, she wrote, because of an intentional faith decision on her part to trust that, despite appearances to the contrary, she and this world remained in God’s embrace. Even in those moments when she did not know it, feel it, see it, or even believe it, Lucy still tried to hold on to the promise that she and this world resided in God’s love.

For Lucy, a daily spiritual discipline slowly emerged out of this regular grounding in trust. Every single day during her last year of life, Lucy visualized giving all that she had, all that she was, back to God. Here is one aspect of what that meant for her:

I [have] spent a lot of time in silence and crying . . . and in that quietness and through those tears I discovered three things about my life—three wishes: I wanted to see my little girl, who is four years old, grow up; I wanted to move into old age with my husband; and I wanted to finish that dissertation. . . . And I found myself giving each one of those wishes to God. . . . God, if something happens to me, can I trust you to raise my little girl? . . . Can I trust you to raise her to be a child of yours, to give wisdom to my husband and to those who love her? And . . . can I trust you to give [my husband] the love he needs and will you open a future for him without me? Can I?

And each time Lucy wrote, I would say, “Yes. I can trust you, God, because I have trusted you throughout my life.” Then she would visualize her daughter and her husband shining with the light of their baptisms as she handed them over and let them go. Lucy reflected that after these times of honest prayer, a profound sense of peace always bloomed within her. Now, Lucy also made sure we, her students, knew she still had moments, days, weeks, when anger filled the prayers on her lips, when doubt crept into her dreams, when grief felt absolutely overwhelming. She still experienced times when she sensed God’s absence more than God’s presence.

Yet, even in the middle of all that, she tried her best to remember that her family belonged to God; that this world belongs to God; and that she, then, could keep releasing it all into God’s care until it felt normal to do so. That spiritual discipline of trust and release formed the foundation of how she tried to live faithfully in the midst of the chaos.

But that is not all Lucy practiced as she moved into her death. Having been immersed in the stories of scripture her entire life, she had the tools to biblically reimagine the pain of her chaos. As a matter of fact, Lucy began to compare it to the pain she had felt in childbirth. When she had labored to bring her baby girl into the world, she wrote, she knew that joy and life were on the other side of that pain. So she wondered if she could say the same for her new pain. As she reflected on that, her mind turned to Jesus.

As Jesus walked into Jerusalem (which is what he is doing in our passage from Mark); as he marched towards his own death; as he hung on the cross, he, too, Lucy reflected, trusted that joy and life were on the other side and that there was more to his reality than the painful chaos he was experiencing. And Jesus also knew that through the labor of his death, he was birthing salvation, wholeness, into the world. “And so,” Lucy concluded, “maybe my pain can be the birth pangs of new life” (Lucy Atkinson Rose, Songs in the Night: A Witness to God’s Love in Life and in Death). Lucy’s act of reimagining her pain of living amidst chaos as birth pangs takes us right back to Jesus’ strange words about what is always happening in this world even in—maybe especially in—a constant sense of chaos.

In the middle of telling his disciples that not one of the temple’s stones would remain standing; that false teachers would come and try to claim they were “I Am”; that all kinds of political and natural destruction would break out; and that no one, not even him, would know God’s timetable for bringing creation to completion—in the middle of all that, Jesus chooses to insert the image of birth pangs. “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs,” he says.

It is not the image I would have chosen. It is certainly not the image I would dare use at this moment for those whose hearts are broken in Beirut or in Paris. Rather, I would have used exile images, images of brokenness or barrenness. Those images seem to fit more logically with chaos. As a matter of fact, the King James Version translates the Greek of verse 8 as “this is the beginning of the sorrows.” But that is not an accurate translation. So while the KJV might make more sense to us, it is not what Mark claims Jesus said.

Rather, with his imagery, Jesus invites us to do what Lucy did. Whenever we find ourselves in the middle of chaos, Jesus invites us to remember the claim announced in our baptism that all of who we are—this world, this cosmos—belongs to God, the only one in whom we trust, for when we are able to be centered in that truth, we are then freed to practice the vision of seeing new life continually being birthed into this world, even in the midst of chaos and destruction. We do such a thing not as some kind of practice of escapism or as a way to get out of our responsibility to work for goodness and peace in the middle of chaos or as some limp “pie in the sky” denial of reality.

Rather, we reimagine what we see or feel because we, like Lucy, choose to trust God’s promises more than we trust chaos’s destruction. As people who have been baptized or who are preparing for baptism, we choose to trust that, despite appearances to the contrary, despite the violence that continues to break out, we, this world, this cosmos, still remain in God’s embrace, still reside in God’s love. That dimension of our reality has not changed.

I believe it is this practice of trust and release, this kind of biblical reimagining that Jesus suggests for us when he intentionally uses the powerful image of the birth pangs. By using that image, Jesus promises all of God’s creation that the end is not the end. God is continuing to birth newness even in the midst of extreme chaos. So we, as his disciples, are to put on our hard hats for hope and keep moving through it, trusting that God is only and always good, just as Jesus said. And to let that trust give us courage.

Another way to say this is that Jesus invites us to use Easter vision in what looks to be a Good Friday world, letting that Easter vision continually shape us, not giving in to fear or terror. Frankly, when you read some of what is going on in Paris now, in the aftermath, you start to see it: A pianist hauls a piano in front of one of the sites of violence and starts playing music. All kinds of people in Paris open their homes to those who are stranded. Muslims around the world rallied yesterday against extremism. My cousin and his family who live in Beirut recommit themselves to being an active part of that community and to their work with Syrian refugees. These are just a few examples of what Easter vision looks like, what biblical reimagining can help us do, what it means to ground oneself in trust that God’s promises of new life and new creation are what the end times look like, not war or violence or hate.

Calvin Butts, longtime pastor of New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, was once asked by an interviewer why he and his congregation continued to stay in Harlem and engage with that community in social justice work. “Yeah, sure, you’re doing great stuff,” the interviewer began, “but it’s hard to see what difference it’s making; so what enables you folk to keep going? What enables you to keep hoping?

The experienced preacher responded, “Here’s what. We’ve read the Bible, and we know how it ends. It ends with God! And that means that everything we do in God’s name is charged with hope. Even in the midst of birth pangs” (an illustration used by Ted Wardlaw, quoted by Meg Peery McLaughlin, The Well 2009).

I would add “Even in the midst of chaos.” Especially in the midst of chaos. Trust and release. Biblically reimagine. We know in whom our story ends. Amen.