November 26, 2000
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
I have never been to the Holy Lands before, like some who were fortunate to do so last year. But I read that when you arrive at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, one of the sights of great amazement is the gigantic stones.
Herod was an extraordinary builder. He rebuilt the temple and expanded the stone platform surrounding it to the size of 24 football fields! Seven courses of his stones are still exposed at the wailing wall. A great staircase has been uncovered along the south. It is not hard to imagine pilgrims scaling the steps at Passover.
There are spectacular gates and arches. The workmanship of the masonry is distinctive: smoothly cut edging with a flat boss in the center. In one of the tunnels you can see a single stone that is 45 feet long and weighs 570 tons.
The temple itself was gleaning white, with extensive gold overlay. Herod used so much gold in decorating the exterior of the buildings that the sight almost blinded spectators when the sun shone on it.
This stunning complex had only been finished for a couple of years when Jesus and the disciples arrived that year for the Passover. No wonder the disciples were awestruck:
“Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large building!”
They were dumbfounded by the grandeur of Herod’s architecture.
So Jesus, typically unimpressed, climbed up onto the Mount of Olives with its commanding view of the temple grounds, the size of 24 football fields, utters a haunting warning, “All of this will end.”
Jesus saw through the façade of large stones and golden arches. The temple pretended to be the house of God, the intersection of human life with God’s grace, a venue for sacrifice, teaching, praying, and shaping lives and communities. But the splendor of the place could not dispel the shadow of corruption, the failure to embody the life of God in the world. When Jesus saw this, he wept over the sight.
And to the shock of his dazzled disciples, Jesus threatened to dismantle all those weighty, seemingly permanent stones.
“Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”
And as we know, it was exactly these kinds of threats that Jesus made to undo what Herod had done that led Jesus to be killed.
Windows to the World
The problem is not just that the temple failed to live up to its promises. It seems that as the architecture became more splendid, the possibility of genuine worship and the fulfillment of the mission of God’s people became more unlikely.
In the Middle Ages, St. Dominic made a pilgrimage to Rome. Pope Innocent III took him on a personal tour of the gold gilded basilica of St. John. Remembering the reply of Peter and John to the lame man in Acts 3:6, the pope boasted, “No longer need we say ‘Silver and gold have I none.’” But the humble Dominic answered back, “Yes, and at the same time the church can no longer say, “Rise up and walk.”
When we are preoccupied with how grand and splendid our building is, we can lose sight of the mission and fulfillment of God’s will. Church stuff, building programs, maintaining and balancing the many interest groups in our church and in our region are all merely means to the end. When our attention is focused on these superficial matters, we might lose sight of the main point.
In a sense, Jesus’ dire prediction was off the mark. Hundreds of the stones are still there, two millennia later, still piled on top of one another.
But Jesus was speaking metaphorically about his death, about a truer way of connecting with God. Jesus was saying that in the future, no splendid temple is necessary to intersect with God. All the gold and the gigantic stones created by human efforts will not get us any closer to God then the simple manger where cows and animals are kept.
What Jesus did for us didn’t happen inside that impressive temple of large stones. Jesus surrendered his life outside those impregnable walls. His wounded hands and pierced side became our windows into the heart of God. The Temple Mount in Jerusalem, all the temples and churches in the world, including our own retrofitted church facility, were rendered obsolete by Christ whose crucified body is forever the windows into the heart of God. This doesn’t mean that I don’t like our building. It only means that our building is a mean to an end—where we have genuine worship to God and fulfillment of his mission.
During the retrofit, the construction workers and we who were on the retrofit committee noticed how thick our walls are—three feet. We have impregnable walls that can keep us from going outside where God’s mission takes place. Jesus surrendered his life outside the walls of the temple. But that was not the end of him. Jesus was raised from the dead, from a seemingly impenetrable stone tomb. No gigantic stone was going to keep Jesus contained inside a tomb. He wanted out. And so do we. Outside these three feet thick walls is where our future is.
The End is Still to Come
When we do go outside, we don’t necessarily like what we see.
Outside on the Mount of Olives, the disciples also wondered what the future might be like. After Jesus made his prediction regarding the temple, the disciples asked him,
“Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?”
Jesus’ response recorded in Mark 13 offers some of the most difficult passages for us to understand today. Many of its ideas are foreign to us. In an era of space exploration, it is hard for us to take seriously the prediction that the stars will fall from heaven (v.25). The mysterious figure identified as the “desolating sacrilege” has little meaning to us (v.14). The notion of a divine timetable culminating in the return of Christ in glory is not easy for us to take seriously after two millennia of waiting.
So what do all of this mean–the end times—the beginning of the birthpangs? As you and I know, there have been many predictions of when this end of time will happen. Many books have been written on it. Some people predicted Christ’s return last year when the calendar changed to 2000. Jesus and Paul explained that the end will come “like a thief in the night,” when we are least expected.
I can remember when I first started my ministry here in 1975. There was a prediction that the end times were coming. There was a lot of fear and worry that Christ would return during the month of August. But no one knew the exact day.
A minister tells a story about his experience during that 1975 summer.
One day in early September, I proclaimed to my roommates, “Well, I guess Jesus didn’t come back.” “How would you know?” was the reply. “We’re still here.” “Yeah, but we’re the ones who got left.” So we decided on a test. We chose the person we thought most likely to go—if people, in fact, were going up into heavens with Christ. Glo Vandewater seemed like a logical choice: very sweet, devout, holy. And we hadn’t seen her in a couple of weeks. We drove out to her house. Her car was in the driveway. We heard the radio on inside the house as we rang the doorbell. No answer. We knocked. No answer. Silently, we turned to get back in the car. Just as I lay my hand on the door handle, Glo’s voice pierced the silence: “Hey guys!” She’d been in the backyard.
This minister mused, “I hate to admit it, but between the unanswered doorbell and her calling out to us, I was kind of wondering: ‘Could it be?’” Then I asked myself, “Why didn’t anybody come to check to see if I was still around? What am I doing with my life?”
What are you doing with your life? As Christians, Jesus is not teaching us to sit around and wait for the end times. We shouldn’t be wasting our time wondering who might be the Glo Vandewaters who have been taken up to heaven.
Most people, even Christians, see a few politicians, some business executives, a handful of military leaders, and maybe even some rogue leaders as major players who will alter the course of human history. That’s the reason why the whole country and most of the world have been waiting to see who the next president of the United States will be. We think that these world leaders will make a world of a difference!
The main point of Mark 13 is that God is the Lord of history. History is not meaningless. Our planet is not randomly spinning out in an obscure corner of the Milky Way. Yes, there is much that is evil, senseless evil. But we should expect that in a world out of synch with God. Instead we can be confident and hopeful that God has not cast us adrift in all the chaos, but is slowly but surely bringing us and the rest of creation back to his good end.
Every generation feels a need to interpret the meaning of end times for themselves, it seems. And maybe some of you here have that interest right now because of its mystery and the fears that it generates. And you might think that with careful discernment that you might discover how God is going to act in the end of history.
The end of time will come. It will come in God’s time, not ours. What we do know is that when it happens, Jesus will overturn the powers that exist.
Hope in the Future
So we can take this passage and turn inward with our faith. We can be like some of the groups in the past that advocated for escapism of an otherworldly faith. We can say to ourselves that the world is full of evil outside and we just want to wait for Christ’s return. We can stay inside these three feet walls and remain above the chaos of life outside.
When Jesus surrendered himself outside the Temple Mount and his wounded hands and pierced side became the windows into the heart of God, we just can’t stay inside these impregnable walls.
We are outside these walls even when we see decadence of our culture.
We are outside these walls even in our inability to achieve peace.
We are outside these walls even in the ongoing blight of starvation and disease.
We are outside these walls even in the hollowness of our entertainment and technology.
Surely these are signs of the bankruptcy of our human life lived out in our independence from God. But when we see God is the Lord of all history and that our final investment is not of this world and its standards, then we are able to have courage and hope to go outside these walls. The Son of Man will eventually come with great power and glory and from the four winds, he will gather his people from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.
Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Palm Sunday sermon in the National Cathedral in Washington just days before his assassination said,
“We shall overcome because the arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. We shall overcome because no lie can live forever. We shall overcome because truth crushed to earth will rise again. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair the stone of hope.”
The stone of hope is Jesus. When Jesus was standing on the Mount of Olives, he was not just facing the spectacular Temple that Herod built. He was also facing the final hours before his own death. Instead of the gigantic stones found in the Temple, it was the stone of Calvary that Jesus stood on to restart the meaning of history. Instead of the subterranean rock that served as a tomb to contain him, Jesus breaks out of the sepulchre and says, “I must go outside!”
We Must Go Outside!
One of the features of our newly retrofitted church that I like a lot is the quartz tiles we have in the vestibule. Yes, it nice-looking. Yes, we can wash it down to get it real clean. But what I like about it the most is that it leads you to go outside. The quartz tiles extend out of our vestibule, through the front doors and lay exposed outside the three feet thick walls.
It symbolizes for me our commitment to go outside into the world. Notice that it doesn’t go out very far. It doesn’t go out to become part of the sidewalk. At least, not yet. It reminds us that our faith still has a lot of room to grow. But the important point is that as a community of disciples, we can’t be contained. As we grow in the Christian faith and we trust in God’s will, our lives will serve as new quartz tiles going way beyond this temple building to teach the world the Good News of Jesus Christ! We must go outside!
Today marks the end of the church year and we begin next Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent a new year. For now we,
“know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end…For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (1Cor. 13:9,12,13)
Let us not worry about the future of end times. In God’s time we will know. For now, let us be Christ’s disciples who are not awestruck by the spectacular stones that may distract us from our mission.
Let us not be distracted by the gigantic stones of racism; the protruding stones of gossiping; the rough stones of indifference; the slippery stones of dishonesty; the cold stone of sexism; the hard stone of intolerance and judgment; the sharp stone of hate.
Let us go outside because Jesus went outside. Let us go outside because Jesus’ wounded hands and his pierced side became windows into the heart of God. We must go outside and take a glimpse of our future—for God is out there too!
Let us pray.
Gracious and Forgiving God, we seek your power in our lives to not be afraid to go outside of these safe and protective walls to save the world in the name of Jesus Christ. Reassure us that our future is in your hands and may your will be done in your time. Amen.