“All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them”. (Isaiah 40:6-8).
I’m wondering if you noticed a new grey hair when you were getting ready for church this morning?
I’m wondering if you noticed one more tiny wrinkle to add to the total?
If you’re under 30, I’m wondering if you noticed those first little lines at the corners of your eyes?
It’s a sad fact that no matter how many potions we use regularly, no matter how often we do our beauty routines, our bodies continue to age at precisely the rate the Lord has ordained for them. We are born with a steady progress towards death.
The French have a lovely word for “without” – “sans” – you may remember it from French lessons at school. Shakespeare uses it to great effect in his play “As You Like It”.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling in the nurse’s arms:
Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning-face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
(There is the lover, the soldier, the judge)…
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
These bodies of ours are IMPERMANENT, TERMINAL, TRANSITORY, TEMPORARY.
So why worry about a few wrinkles?
But it is not just our weak bodies that are terminal; the mighty material things of nature are too.
“The Sun is expanding all the time. It may now be up to 30% brighter than when it formed 4.5 billion years ago, and in 1.1 billion years’ time it will have grown by a further 10%. Some 3.5 billion years from now, the Sun will be 40% hotter that it is today. The oceans will boil away and life on Earth will be extinguished. At some time thereafter the sun will balloon out into a burning red giant, 170 times its present diameter, and engulf the orbit of Mercury. In the process, its core will contract and it will lose about half its mass, and the planets’ orbits will change. The Earth will drift outwards to about the orbit of Mars, but the heat from the expanding Sun will be so great that our planet’s surface will be heated to 1873 degrees C – the temperature at which rocks melt. Finally the Sun will collapse to a white dwarf and wink out, and the Earth will drift for ever as a lifeless cinder in the darkness of space”. (Reader’s Digest Assoc. Ltd. “Natural Disasters”).
Our creative endeavours are impermanent also. Our buildings may last a thousand years, but eventually they too share the same fate.
“Some of his disciples were remarking about how the temple was adorned with beautiful stones and with gifts dedicated to God. But Jesus said ‘As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down’.” (Luke 21:6)
This is an APOCALYPTIC expression. The word means a revelation of what has been hidden (the Greek root mean to “uncover”). We are moving towards the period in our Church’s year which we call ADVENT. Next Sunday we have “Christ the King”, and then for the following three Sundays we think of the Second Coming of Jesus in glory. This is a penitent season, moving towards the joy of Christmas.
So in today’s gospel Jesus speaks of the future; of the devastation to come before the end of the material world as we know it. “Not one stone will be left on another”.
AND IT HAPPENED JUST AS HE SAID. In AD 70 Titus, a Roman general, with 80,000 men, began a siege of Jerusalem. It was a difficult city to take, set on a hill, and defended to the death. Jesus had told his followers to flee to the mountains when that day came, but instead they crammed into the city. The result was famine and terror, and there were even reports of cannibalism. At the end the Holy Place was burnt down; and Titus ordered the whole city and the Temple to be razed to the ground. Josephus, the historian, who was actually there, tells us that 97,000 were taken captive and enslaved and that 1,100,000 died.
SO, that part of these prophecies of Jesus in the gospel actually happened. What about the rest?
The Bible commentator, Fitzmeyer writes, “There are almost as many interpretations of this passage as there are heads that think about it”.
And Ellis says, “The discourse presents us with problems. BUT Jesus DID announce a coming end of the world, and he DID reckon with a considerable and indefinite interval before the end”.
Jesus himself said, “No-one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father”. Mark 13:32.
“Well, it hasn’t happened yet”, we might well say. “All these disasters have happened at some time or other, but WE’RE STILL HERE!”
People were saying things just like that even in Peter’s time. He writes in his 2nd Epistle, “Scoffers will say “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise. He is patient, not wanting anyone to perish. A thousand years in his sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night”.
All the disasters Jesus talks of in this discourse in Luke’s gospel could come together at this moment, or this afternoon. Or in a million years’ time. The fact is all that these things have happened at one time or another, sometimes two or three of them simultaneously. What is the list?
- False Messiahs,
- Wars and Rumours of Wars,
- Natural Catastrophes,
- Pestilences,
- Signs from the Heavens,
- Persecutions.
A few that spring to mind over our thousands of years of mankind’s history:
POMPEI: Mt Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, nine years after the sacking of Jerusalem. Hot ash and pumice rained down on the towns below. Of the population of around 20,000, fewer than a quarter are thought to have survived.
THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR: between France and England. This war actually occupied a period of more than 100 years. From about 1337 to 1453. Children were born, grew up and died without ever knowing anything other than a state of war.
THE BLACK DEATH was around the same period. 1338 to 1350 and again in 1625. 75 million people died in that period. In some countries 90% of the population was wiped out in the space of two or three years. Whole villages were wiped out.
And coming closer to home and our own 20th and 21st centuries – WE HAVE IT ALL!
FALSE MESSIAHS: Jim Jones persuaded hundreds of his followers to a mass suicide. Paul has something to say to Timothy about false Messiahs in Timothy 4:3. “The time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear”.
WARS AND RUMOURS OF WARS: World War I, World War II, the Cold War, Nuclear arms race, Cuban Crisis, Berlin Wall, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Africa – the list goes on and on. And of course there is terrorism!
MILLIONS of people have been imprisoned, tortured, beaten, starved and killed because of their colour, beliefs, race, religion, or simply because they were different.
Then there are the:
NATURAL CATASTROPHES: Earthquakes, cyclones (it is 30 years this year since Cyclone Tracey devastated Darwin). Fire, flood, tsunamis. The list goes on and one.
PESTILENCES: Aids, the Grim Reaper – remember the scare campaign on television?
SIGNS FROM THE HEAVENS: June 1908 the Tunguska meteorite in Siberia, fortunately in a remote area. But it annihilated all life in an area 50km across. It may have weighed 10 million tons and have been 100 metres across! And of course we have the depletion of the ozone layer and global warming.
MILLIONS of people have become sick, been injured, made homeless, starved to death, been killed by natural disasters.
All these things have been happening for thousands of years, and when we think of them we realise just how fragile life is. It is TEMPORARY, TRANSITORY, TERMINAL. Everything material ends. There is an ending even to the beautiful music, Vivaldi’s Gloria, which we sang or to which we listened last night. There is an ending to all the beauty we have ever seen in the natural world, all the art that has ever been made, and all the achievements of scientists. All are material; all will end.
We learn to live with this knowledge and still enjoy what we have. But reminders of the fragility of life are everywhere around us. Remember the “ALERT BUT NOT ALARMED” campaign we had on television when it was obvious that terrorism was becoming the new danger to society? Is it possible to be “alert but not alarmed”? To me “alert” means “fight or flight” – the adrenaline starts pumping around the veins, the heart rate increases, hands tremble. We have instant knowledge of what is happening anywhere in the world, so have a constant nagging consciousness of tragedies and aggression. This leads to a constant low level anxiety and worry. I think it was David Thoreau who spoke of people leading lives of “quiet desperation”.
We may respond to this devastation, destruction and death by wringing our hands “woe, woe, woe”, and becoming completely pessimistic about our lives and the future of society.
There was a Catholic priest, John O’Brien, who was a keen observer of life in rural Australia.
“We’ll all be rooned”, said Hanrahan
In accent most forlorn
Outside the church ere Mass began
One frosty Sunday morn.
The congregation stood about,
Coat-collars to the ears,
And talked of stock and crops and drought
As it had done for years.
“It’s dry, all right”, said young O’Neil,
With which astute remark
He squatted down upon his heel
And chewed a piece of bark.
And so around the chorus ran
“It’s keepin’ dry, no doubt”.
“We’ll all be rooned”, said Hanrahan
“Before the year is out”.
“The crops are done; ye’ll have your work
To save one bag of grain;
From here way out to Back-o’-Bourke
They’re singin’ out for rain.
“If rain don’t come this month”, said Dan,
And cleared his throat to speak –
“We’ll all be rooned”, said Hanrahan,
“If rain don’t come this week”.
A heavy silence seemed to steal
On all at this remark;
And each man squatted on his heel,
And chewed a piece of bark.
“We want an inch of rain, we do”,
O’Neil observed at last;
But Croke maintained we wanted two
To put the danger past.
“If we don’t get three inches, man,
Or four to break this drought,
We’ll all be rooned”, said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out”.
In God’s good time down came the rain;
And all the afternoon
On iron roof and window-pane
It drummed a homely tune.
And every creek a banker ran,
And dams filled overtop;
“We’ll all be rooned”, said Hanrahan,
“If this rain doesn’t stop”.
And stop it did, in God’s good time:
And spring came in to fold
A mantle o’er the hills sublime
Of green and pink and gold.
And round the church in clothes genteel
Discoursed the men of mark,
And each man squatted on his heel
And chewed his piece of bark.
“There’ll be bush-fires for sure, me man,
There will, without a doubt;
We’ll all be rooned”, said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out”.
DO WE HAVE TO LIVE LIKE THAT?
Jesus told us of the lilies of the fields, “how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these”. (Matthew 6:28).
We don’t have to live constantly worrying and anxious about the future. The Holy Spirit leads us into truth and guides us through all these things. He comforts us and sustains through the danger. We don’t have to live in anxious tension, constantly alert AND alarmed! In the Old Testament reading this morning Isaiah talks of God saying, “Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind”. Isaiah 65:17. We can look ahead, past the upheavals and catastrophes to come, to our eternal home.
Paul says, in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18: “We are being renewed day be day. Our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal”.
All material things are temporary, transitory, terminal. What is unseen is eternal. So what remains?
THESE THREE REMAIN – Faith, Hope and Love. But the greatest of these is LOVE.
Jesus’ love for us; our love for Him; our love for each other.
These are the permanent things, all else is temporary.
One day in a small English town a tailor named George Viccars received a shipment of cloth from London. When he unpacked the box, the cloth was damp, so he hung it up before the fireplace to dry. A week later George was dead. A few days after that one of his landlady’s young sons died, and then the man who lived in the house next door. It wasn’t long before 20 people per week were dying in the town. The year was 1665, the disease was bubonic plague, and the town was called Eyam.
The rector of Eyam’s Church of St Lawrence called the people together for a meeting, and proposed an imaginary line surrounding Eyam that the villagers would not cross as long as the plague was present. In effect they suggested voluntarily quarantining themselves rather than trying to escape to places where there was no plague. There was a saying at the time “the best means against the plague is a pair of new boots used till they break’. But the people knew how quickly the plague would spread if they went to other towns.
As Jesus had offered his life as a sacrifice for people he didn’t know in places he’d never even heard of, so they made a similar sacrifice. By the time the plague was over in November of 1666, 260 of the 300 people of the village had died – the highest percentage of the population anywhere in England.
THIS WAS LOVE, THIS WAS SACRIFICIAL LOVE.
Faith, hope, love abide. But the greatest of these is love.
Even the tribulations and catastrophes to come. Even the beauty of this world; ALL ARE TERMINAL … and yet … “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?” Romans 8:35
NOTHING CAN SEPARATE US FROM CHRIST –
NOT EVEN THE DEVASTATION AND CATASTROPHE AND TURMOIL OF THE END OF THIS WORLD AS WE KNOW IT.
His love will hold us: “I am with you always, to the very end of the age”. (Matthew 28:20).
First preached at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill.
