Well—the nights are getting longer for sure, and, while this has been a mild weekend, more and more often when I head out for my early morning run I see that the windshields of the cars parked along the street are frosted over. The last green leaves of summer have turned and mostly found their way in this neighborhood anyway into a zillion home depot yard bags--or have been swept, illegally, into huge mounds in the street. It’s not even Thanksgiving yet, but the advertising flyers in the newspaper are already announcing discounted holiday ornaments. And of course Bing Crosby and Frosty the Snowman are once again playing along in the background in just about every store and supermarket.
In the Church calendar we still have some way to go, and an important and meaningful journey, from where we are now to the midnight streets of Bethlehem and the Manger Bed that is his first earthly throne—but here in what we used to call the last weeks of Trinitytide, now the season of ordinary time “after Pentecost,” it is in any case beginning to feel a lot like Advent.
The collect last Sunday, Proper 26 in the way the Prayer Book numbers them, we might have noticed addressed God “whose blessed Son was manifested to destroy the works of the devil,” and looked to the day when he shall “appear again with power and great glory.” Certainly images right at the heart of Advent. And I would mention that the collect for this morning was from 1549 until the revision of the American Prayer Book in 1979 the Collect for the Second Advent Sunday: the anticipation of the Incarnate Word connected then to the continuing and living presence with us of God’s Word Written in Holy Scripture.
The Old Testament readings over the past few weeks as well from Ruth would evoke for us as well the background memories of the Christmas story—the great grandmother of David, and so along this branch of the family tree of David’s Greater Son. Hannah this morning, mother of Samuel, also a part of the David story, since it is Samuel who blesses David with oil and sets him apart as the “anointed one,” which is the meaning of Messiah. And the Song of Hannah, at the beginning of Chapter 2 of First Samuel, what Mary must have had in mind when she sang her first Magnificat after her meeting with the Angel Gabriel, which is why I made the special request for the Stanford in C in place of the psalm.
Hannah’s song in First Samuel 2 begins, “My heart exults in the LORD; my strength is exalted in the LORD.” And then continues, “The LORD makes poor and makes rich; he brings low, he also exalts. He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes . . . . The LORD will judge the ends of the earth; he will give strength to his king, and exalt the power of his anointed.”
So again, the last weeks of Trinity, the “ordinary time” after Pentecost, but with all the wonder of the story we are about to share again in so many ways beginning to unfold up ahead. It won’t be long now.
All that said, and before us this morning the 13th chapter of St. Mark. This story as well working its way to the end. It’s already Holy Week, and the authorities are getting more and more anxious about Jesus, tension is in the air, and you won’t need to be the Amazing Kreskin with a crystal ball to see that Old Rugged Cross already being lifted up just outside the city wall.
And Jesus here. The disciples, some of them in the great city I’m sure for the first time in their lives, looking around at the magnificent, dazzling Temple.
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A Model of the Herodian Temple
The place both of deepest piety and also now much controversy in the life of First Century Judaism. The God who met Abraham in the the city streets of metropolitan Ur of the Chaldees, up in modern day Iraq, and who wrestled with Jacob at the Jabbock on the Arabian peninsula and who called Moses from the Burning Bush in the Sinai desert and who led his people as a pillar of cloud by day and of flame by night over the Tent of Presence, now with his sacred place on Mount Zion.
Built at the heart of the Royal City in ancient days by King Solomon to be the eternal earthly home forever for the LORD God of Israel, but soon corrupted with the images of the gods of the noble women of other nations whom Solomon had brought in through his many diplomatic marriages. Corrupted over generations, and then restored by King Josiah, but then pillaged and destroyed when the Babylonians finally overran the city.
Rebuilt by Governor Nehemiah and the Priest Ezra when the Exiles returned from Babylon, but then stripped and desanctified again under the reign of Alexander the Great and his successors. Restored by the Maccabees, in a miraculous way that is the origin of the holiday of Hanukka. And then expanded as a kind of Temple-complex, with all kinds of administrative and governmental and educational and social adjuncts, just a few decades before this moment in the gospel, under Herod the Great, in his massive campaign of public works and urban renewal. And Herod of course himself a figure of heated controversy among the observant Jews of the day. A client of the occupying Romans, a king not of David’s line, was he even really Jewish?-- who had far more identification with the Hellenistic culture of the Roman Meditteranean than with the heritage of Israel.
Click here for an overview of Herod's Temple.
The Temple from the beginning.
And an interesting related story in this morning's New York Times.
In Jewish literature of the era, the notion that what God’s Messiah will do when he comes first of all is replace this corrupted earthly Temple with a cleansed, and purified, and perfect Temple, to be truly the point of contact, the bridge between God’s Heavenly Kingdom and his renewed Creation.
And Jesus then this morning, in Mark 13. Yes, it’s an impressive building. Beautiful architecture, wonderful furnishings of wood and brass and gold. The place of the finest music and liturgy, the dazzling priests in their flowing robes.
But don’t let these outward appearances lead you astray. This of course the same message that we have heard recently in the parables of the Wealthy Benefactor and the Widow’s Mite . . . in the comments about the religious leaders who dress the part and say the right words, but whose lives and whose hearts are unconverted. In Matthew 23 he calls them “whitewashed sepulchers.” Beautiful on the outside, but corruption and death on the inside.
And here then: “There will not be one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down.” Some have talked about this as a kind of future prediction or prophesy of the destruction that will happen in the Roman military action in Jerusalem in the year A.D. 70. But that’s not what Jesus is talking about here. People put this building up, and then knock it down, and then build it again. And so it will be until God acts, once and for all. So it will be until this age passes away, and the new age is born.
The great vision of St. John the Divine in the 21st Chapter of the Revelation: “And I saw the Holy City, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them.’”
Which is of course what is happening now. Right now.
Which is what Jesus is saying to his disciples. Life goes on: wars and rumors of wars, earthquake and famine, seasons of prosperity and seasons of deprivation. All around us.
But we are like people standing over the point of the Continental Divide, one foot in each watershed. In the past, and yet even now striding into the future. At the Table this morning, in this great mystery: to be refreshed by the Banquet of the New Age of God’s Kingdom, the Bread of Heaven and Cup of Salvation; to know his Body as the Perfect Temple, and to be incorporated ourselves into his Body, to become ourselves the stones and building blocks of God’s Perfect Home.
Which is all Advent, all Christmas, all Good Friday, all Easter, all together. The old year is indeed coming to an end. The nights are longer. The early morning chill. And the New Year, the new year is just ahead. So near we can reach out and touch it, embrace it, begin to live in it. St. Paul, First Corinthians 3: 16: "Do you not know that you are God's temple?"
Bruce Robison
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