St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Owings Mills MD
November 17, 2024
Year B, Proper 28: The 26th Sunday after Pentecost
1 Samuel 1:4-20
1 Samuel 2:1-10
Hebrews 10:11-14; 19-25
Mark 13:1-8
This is Not the End
This year, the change of seasons has been delayed.
The summer warmth lingered far longer than it should have while the ongoing drought gave us the most beautiful and long-lasting foliage that I can remember.
But the cold, and even some welcome rain, arrived last week.
The days grow short.
We’ve entered a chillier and more shadowy season.
Meanwhile, here in church, we can feel the seasonal change as we approach the end of the year.
In just two weeks, a new church year will begin on the First Sunday of Advent.
Of course, Advent usually gets pretty much gobbled up by the commercial Christmas of the world. And that’s too bad because there are two important themes to Advent – two sides of the Advent coin.
One is preparing for the birth of Jesus.
And the other is preparing for the Last Day, getting ready for the day of judgment - getting ready for the end.
There have been two times in my life when I’ve thought that maybe this is the end.
The first was twenty-three years ago on what started as a beautiful September morning with an impossibly blue sky.
I was teaching history at my high school alma mater, St. Peter’s Prep, in Jersey City, just a few blocks from the Hudson River waterfront.
My classroom was up on the top floor, with big windows looking to the East, giving me and my students a pretty good view of the New York skyline.
Sue was working in the corporate offices of Barnes & Noble, near Union Square, a couple of miles north of Manhattan’s southern tip.
It was the second day of classes.
So, the school year was still new enough to be shiny and hopeful, the students’ notebooks almost entirely blank, ready for all sorts of possibilities.
Well, most of you are old enough to remember how that day which began with such beauty ended with such horror.
After the fall of the second tower, which I could see and even hear in my classroom, as I turned to face my students sitting before me, wide-eyed, looking for me to somehow make sense of this, I remember thinking that whoever did this wanted to terrify us before they finished us off.
I remember thinking that maybe this was the end.
And there were many endings that day, so much death, destruction, and fear.
But it was not the end.
It took all day for her to find a way back across the river, but Sue eventually made her way back to Jersey City.
That night, Sue and I walked the few blocks from our house to our church to pray with Dave our rector and a few of our fellow parishioners.
I don’t remember much of that night. I don’t recall a word of Dave’s homily, but looking around at the beautiful church, looking at Sue beside me, and my sisters and brothers around me, I remember thinking that, no, this is not the end – that somehow, we would go forward – together.
When school resumed a couple of days later, even as the ruins of the World Trade Center smoldered a little more than a mile away, we started something new.
Each morning, many of us gathered in the school’s foyer to pray for peace – students, faculty, and administrators, all of us together, pouring out our hearts to God.
This was not the end.
The second time when I thought that maybe this was the end was just a few years ago.
As you know, from time to time, different diseases pop up, usually in faraway places. And aside from feeling compassion for the people suffering and admiration for the people trying to help, epidemics or pandemics never really touched my life until, of course, the arrival of Covid-19.
And, at first, even that didn’t seem like such a big deal.
Back at our church in Jersey City, just like here, we made some modifications to the service – no exchange of peace, no drinking from the cup – and then we abruptly stopped meeting in person for what most of us thought and expected would be a few weeks until we “stopped the spread.”
Well, you all definitely remember what happened during those long months of separation.
There was a tremendous loss of life and livelihood, especially up in the New York City area where we lived, which was an epicenter of the pandemic.
During those hard and frightening days, we all learned whose work is truly essential.
For me, there were two moments during the worst of the pandemic, before the vaccines, back when there seemed to be only tunnel and no light, two moments when I thought that maybe we’d never get this under control, that maybe this was the end.
The first was one day when I drove past our main hospital, the Jersey City Medical Center, and there was a long line of out-of-state ambulances parked there, all different unfamiliar colors and names, all idling, waiting for the next call to help someone gasping for breath.
The other moment was the saddest, strangest funeral I’ve ever been part of.
A prominent, much-loved parishioner of our church died but we weren’t allowed to hold a funeral service.
What I could do is go to the funeral home by myself, where, I knelt before the man’s open casket and said the service, just the two of us, in that still and silent room.
After that saddest, strangest funeral, I spoke with the funeral director.
Now, I should say that, in my experience, funeral directors are some of the most upbeat people around. I’m not sure why that is – maybe they know better than most the preciousness of life, the value of time.
I knew this particular funeral director pretty well, but that day I hardly recognized him. We were masked, of course, but through his eyes and voice and body language, I knew that he was drained and exhausted. I saw profound sadness and even fear in his eyes.
And I remember thinking that maybe this was the end.
And there were many endings during those days, so much death, destruction, and fear.
But it was not the end.
In just a few days after we were told we couldn’t meet in person, Sue figured out how to live-stream our service on our church Facebook page.
On that first Sunday and for months of Sundays to follow it was just the two of us in church. Sue was our camera person, acolyte, lector, and intercessor while I presided and preached.
Of course, I would never ever want to go back to those days, but they weren’t without their blessings. After the service, I used to especially love scrolling through the comments posted by parishioners and other viewers, all those “amens” and “alleluias” and greetings of love and friendship.
And, very early in the pandemic, we started offering conference call prayer services, three times a day, morning, noon, and evening. And it was a joy to hear all those much-loved voices as they called in day after day and as we prayed for deliverance, prayed for each other, and even managed to laugh.
And, amazingly enough, the morning edition of “Church By Phone” continues to this day.
This was not the end.
I’ve shared parts of these stories with you before, but I wanted to return to them again because, for me, they come closest to what the Jewish people experienced in the year 70 when the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem.
As we heard in today’s gospel lesson, while speaking to his awestruck disciples about forty years earlier, Jesus had predicted that this would happen, that the mighty Temple would be destroyed – not one stone left upon another.
It’s hard for us to grasp what a catastrophe this was for the Jewish people.
The Temple was the center of religious life, the place where, in a sense, God was believed to dwell.
It’s where the sacrifices took place, the sacrifices that kept Israel in covenant with God.
How could God have allowed the holiest place on earth to be destroyed?
And what happens next?
No doubt, many thought that this was the end.
But two new spiritual sprouts grew from the ashes of the Temple.
The priests were no longer needed, but the rabbis, the teachers, took the lead.
And a new Judaism was born, a tradition strong enough to withstand catastrophes even worse than the destruction of the Temple.
And the other sprout was Christianity itself, the faith that has brought us here today, two millennia later, the faith that reassures us that God loves us enough to die for us.
This was not the end.
As we heard in today’s gospel lesson, Jesus is quite frank that times will be hard.
For some of us, at least, it probably sounded like he was talking about today.
But no matter the season, even in the midst of the cold, even when the shadows are deepest, God is at work, planting seeds of new life.
So, we face our hard times, together, trusting that even when the end does come, God will not let go of us, no matter what.
Amen.
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