Year C
 Daniel 12:1-3
 Psalm 16
 Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25
 Mark 13:1-8

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

“Grandmother, what big eyes you have!”
“The better to see you with, my dear.”
“And Grandmother, what big teeth you have!”
“All the better to eat you up with.”
And the wolf ate Little Red Riding Hood…

We just heard the very beginning of Mark’s Ch. 13…  at the end of Ch. 12 vv. 38-40…  while teaching…  Jesus admonishes…  Beware of the scribes…  who like to walk around in long robes…  and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces…  and to have the best seats in the synagogues…  and the places of honor at banquets…  they devour widows’ houses…  like wolves devouring the innocent…

And then…  as Jesus sat down opposite the Treasury…  he watched many rich people putting in large sums of money…  but then a poor widow came…  and put in two small copper coins…  and he said to his disciples…  this poor widow has put in more than all the others…  for all of them have contributed out of their abundance…  but she…  has put in everything she had to live on…

And when he came out of the Temple…  an anonymous disciple…  unnamed perhaps because he was intended to represent all of us…  gushed over the grandeur and the immensity and the stability of these large buildings…  and Jesus said…  they have no permanence…  not one stone will be left on another…  and it reminds me of what Jesus said in Matthew 24:35…  heaven and earth will pass away…  but my words will not pass away…

Katherine Grieb…  who teaches New Testament at Virginia Theological Seminary wrote about the difference between what seems changeless…  and what’s not…  the Jerusalem Temple… newly reconstructed by Herod the Great at significant expense… was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world… the project began about 20 years before Jesus was born… and according to the Jewish historian Josephus…  although the inner sanctuary was completed in only about 18 months… the Temple took many more years to complete… 

It occupied a platform of more than 900 by 1500 feet… twice as large as the Roman Forum with its many temples… four times as large as the Athenian Acropolis with its Parthenon… about as long as five football fields… and about as wide as four…

The huge retaining walls that supported the Temple were composed of great white stones as long as 40 feet… some of which still stand as part of the Western Wall… the front of the Temple itself was a huge square… 150 feet on each side… much of it decorated with silver and gold… and the complex was so high… that it could be seen by pilgrims miles away…  as they journeyed to Jerusalem to worship there…

Professor Grieb ends…  whoever it was who made that initial comment to Jesus would also have been impressed by what the Temple represented… the symbol of God’s presence with Israel… and God’s actual dwelling place at the center of the known world… but he would also have been impressed by the Temple itself… by its massive sense of stability… and by it’s stones which seemed changeless and immovable… both of these things were so weighty… so foundational… both literally and figuratively… that no one could ever imagine them going anywhere…

And we don’t know just how much time passed…  but later on…  when Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives…  opposite the Temple…  Peter… James…  John…  and Andrew asked him…  when is this going to happen… and for what sign should we look… 

Today is the second week of our seven-week Advent…  last week and today…  we focus on eschatology…  the word itself comes from the Greek and means last discourse…  and refers to that part of theology concerned with death…  judgment…  and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind…

So Advent is about waiting for this last discourse…  not just for the incarnation… but for the completion and perfection of God’s kingdom…  Advent is about waiting for that moment which makes sense of all of our moments…  it is fundamentally about transition… and all of us have gone through one kind of transition or another…  that creates an in-between time for us…  Fr. John Shea wrote that these in-between times are like being a trapeze artist who’s let go of one bar…  but hasn’t yet taken hold of the other one…  you’re not where you were… and you’re not yet where you’re going to be… he calls it mid-air living…  the identity you had is gone…  and the identity you will have has not arrived…  it’s one way that we are always being made new… but really… when you think about it…  our entire lives are mid-air living… we talk… we act… we plan as though most things in our lives are changeless and immovable…  but the truth is that our lives are in an almost constant state of flux…

It used to be… that people were used to waiting… waiting to finding answers… or communicating with someone… could take weeks… or months… ships used to bring letters from Europe to America… the Pony Express delivered messages before we had the telegraph… or you might have to plan a trip to the city library to do some research on something… now we have Google…  and instantaneous texting and email and video calls… 

But with the advent of this technology… and a consumer driven society that promotes instant gratification… we don’t want to wait… and we’ve forgotten how to just sit with something… an issue…  a dilemma…  a decision…  and reflect on what it might mean… and consider the consequences for ourselves and for others…  we’ve lost the intrinsic value of gratification delay… we want fast answers so we can put things behind us and move on to the next event in our lives… and then there are some things that seem to throw a wrench in the works… like a medical diagnosis or some other kind of loss… and the waiting can feel like things are falling apart around us… stone by stone… 

Jesus was sitting in both literal… and figurative opposition to the Temple…  his values were in opposition to those of the Temple…  he knew it would crumble because it didn’t serve all people…  and the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE… because when domination systems don’t reflect God’s love… no matter how stable or grounded they seem…  when the things we’ve thought of as foundational oppress people…  they cannot stand in opposition to God’s law… and I am certain that the more we live into serving God…  we will not only serve ourselves…  but we will seamlessly serve ourselves and our families and our communities…

We live Advent lives… waiting for new life to come… but this new life comes with birth pangs… not because God desires it… but because we’re the ones who have to dismantle…  sometimes stone by stone… the systems which are in opposition to God’s law…  either those which we have created or those which we simply support…  systems we think are inviolable… and when the Temple is gone… we live in an in-between time… not quite who we were… not yet who we will become… and during this time… it can be difficult to know what the best mid-course corrections are…  and when we realize that we live mid-air lives… and no longer have the certainty of what we were holding on to… it is possible to become more sensitive to all those around us who live mid-air lives too… and maybe instead of grabbing for the bar we think we want… the bar that serves only us… we can grab hold of the bar of God’s justice that is placed in front of us…  now that would be a Cirque de Soleil act worth seeing…