Something To Do While The World Falls Apart
Sermon
No Box Seats in the Kingdom
Sermons For The Sundays After Pentecost (Last Third)
A number of years ago, leaders in a church decided to track down the congregation's drop-outs. They combed through the membership list, put together a list of names, and sent out volunteers two-by-two to knock on doors and invite the absent members back to church.
As is often the case, the volunteer visitors discovered that most of the people visited had found other things to do on Sunday morning. One person said, "I would come back to church if it didn't conflict with my tennis time." Another said, "We came to church when our kids were involved. When they outgrew Sunday School, we stopped going." Another said, "I enjoy going to church on the really big days, like Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July. Compared to those days, other services are a little bit dull."
One response was different. Two volunteers named Jack and Esther went to see a man whom nobody knew. He lived on the end of the street, in a big house behind three overgrown pine trees. It took the volunteers a few minutes to find the front door. All the curtains were drawn. It looked like nobody was home. Suddenly the door swung open, and a thin man with a shock of white hair said, "My name's Tarnower. What do you want?" They said, "We're from the church. We stopped by to see you." He invited them in. They explained why they had come.
In a few minutes, he was shaking a bony finger at them. "I'll tell you why I don't go to church anymore. It's because I got in the habit of reading the Sunday Times before I went to the worship service."
Esther leaned forward. "Tell us," she said warmly, "how did the newspaper keep you from coming to church? Did you get caught up in the sports section and lose track of time? Or the comics?"
Mr. Tarnower looked at her with wild eyes. "No," he said, "I read the news. It's an awful world out there. There are a lot of diseases I don't understand. Wars break out. Families fall apart. Children run through the streets with handguns. People die prematurely. Listen, the world is falling apart, and the church can't do a thing about it."
"Well," Jack said, "you ought to come back. We have a nice minister, a fairly good choir, and a Bible study on Wednesday nights. You might enjoy our program."
"No," Mr. Tarnower said, "I don't think so. I get out for groceries, but that's all I want to face. I went to church for a while, but the world got worse. When my wife died, I decided to sit in here, watch everything fall apart, and wait my turn. I don't go to church anymore. The church has nothing to say."
He has a point. We live in a rough and painful world that seems to grow worse each day. As Walter Brueggemann notes,
For all our intellectual sophistication, seemingly assured affluence and confidence in our technology, a deep, unsettled feeling that things are indeed falling apart cuts across the spectrum . . . Our best institutions seem oddly dysfunctional. Churches worry about survival, courts only sometimes yield justice, medical institutions provide sporadic access and care, schools only occasionally educate and all our institutions seem in a deep crisis of purpose as well as finances . . . and the presence and threat of violence is everywhere.1
One day, four of the disciples heard Jesus speak about a world coming unglued. He told them, among other things, that the Jerusalem Temple would be destroyed. Imagine how hard that was to believe! The Temple was the central institution of Israel, the primary religious shrine, the center of commerce and banking, the heart of history and tradition. Jesus said, "The temple shall fall to the ground, stone by stone, piece by piece."
The four disciples were understandably shaken. As Jesus went on to say, his disciples will be subject to every kind of pain and abuse: wars, famines, earthquakes, persecutions, beatings, betrayals, and death. In such a world, what can anybody do?
Jesus gives his disciples something to do. He gives them a commandment, an imperative in the midst of passive language. When the world comes apart, what should every disciple do, first and foremost? Jesus says, "Preach the gospel." That is what he demands of us: "The good news must first be proclaimed to all nations."
What a curious thing to say! When the world is falling apart, shall we stand up and deliver a sermon? Imagine if the news came that a huge asteroid was headed for the earth. There is nothing we could do. Destruction is imminent. Civilized life is about to end. Meanwhile some preacher stands up in a black Genevan gown and says, "Let me give you three points and a poem." That is a silly picture.
What does Jesus mean when he says, "When the world is falling apart, preach the gospel"? Historically speaking, some people in the church have taken that to mean, "Get as many people in the church as you can. Scare them if you must."
Every few years, someone writes yet another religious best-seller about the end of the world. The world never ends, but the books continue to be published. Each claims to be a work of "prophecy," and strings together random Bible verses that try to prove Saddam Hussein is the Great Beast, or some wild idea like that. Each chapter warns the Second Coming of Jesus will take place at any time. "The time is short," these writers say, "so turn to the back of the book, follow the Four Easy Steps, and stop worrying about the world any more. The world outside may blow apart, but at least you've got Jesus in your heart." In many books and churches, this is the point of all preaching: to escape from the world's calamities.
Should troubles come, all some people do is point to the horizon and say, "Look, there he is! Jesus is coming again." As a radio preacher once claimed, "The Bible says that when things in the world get to their absolute worst, Christians won't have to suffer through it. The trumpet will sound, and Jesus will gather all of his believers into the air and rescue them from danger. In fact, if you are a Christian who owns a car, you have a responsibility to put a bumper sticker on your car to warn those left behind that, when the trumpet sounds, your Christian car will be going out of control."2
Jesus warned against people like him. "Beware no one leads you astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still a long way off. Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. But this is only the beginning of the birthpangs."
Old Mr. Tarnower was right. This is a world where things fall apart. The writer of Mark's gospel knows that, perhaps more than all the other writers of the New Testament. This is a world of disease, of headaches and hemorrhages. This is a world that reminds us of our human weakness, with deafness, blindness, paralysis, and death. This is a world of deception and meanness, where people put spins on the truth and do what they can to put themselves in power over others. This is a world of chaos and cruelty, where the innocent suffer and lives are put at risk. Mark knows that.
But Mark knows something else. In the words of a favorite hymn of the church,
And though this world, with devils filled,
Should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed
His truth to triumph through us.
The prince of darkness grim, We tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure, For lo! his doom is sure,
One little word shall fell him . . . 3
. . . and the Word is Jesus Christ. He is stronger than all that can hurt or destroy. That is the Word we must proclaim, the Word we must speak at all costs. The world may be haunted by evil, but it belongs to God. We may be in love with our own destruction, but we have been claimed by the strong Son of God. Even when evil and unbelief swelled up to kill him, God raised up Jesus to keep confronting his enemies, until the day they are put beneath his feet. Yes, this is a world where things fall apart. But God is stronger. God has not given up. God is going to win. That's what we have to say.
No wonder, then, Jesus said this to Simon, Andrew, James, and John. They walked with him ever since he said, "The time is fulfilled; God's kingdom is at hand. Turn and believe the good news" (Mark 1:15). They saw that kingdom advance one step at a time. The tormented person found peace. The eyes of the blind were opened. The ears of the deaf were unstopped. The lame person jumped like a deer. The tongues of the speechless sang for joy.
In other words, preaching the kingdom is always more than speaking a Word. It is kerygma, a proclamation, a Word proclaimed in speech and action. It is doing mission. As one scholar notes, "This preaching is more than the poetic eloquence of gifted public speech. This preaching was the eschatological realization, the making immediate, of the kingdom of God."4
In Jesus Christ, God's reign has broken in. The four disciples wanted to know, "When will the kingdom come?" as if it were a distant, glorious age. But the church cannot ponder the arrival of the coming age as if it were a bus running behind schedule. We are given the task of proclaiming what God has begun in Jesus Christ. The faithful Christian never sits on a mountain to await the Second Coming. No, our job is to take seriously Christ's First Coming. The time of the Second Coming is none of our business, but it is our business to act as if the world has changed because of Jesus Christ. We are called to do what Christ does: to proclaim God's reign in word and deed, to act as if the times have changed, to believe and behave as if God rules over every opposing power.
There is a funeral at the end of one of Frederick Buechner's novels. It may be the only way the story could come to a close. A lot of terrible things happen in the book. Theodore Nicolet, a Protestant minister, loses his wife in a car accident. He is left to raise two small girls with the help of a housekeeper, Irma Reinwasser, who is a Holocaust survivor. One day he goes to track down a wayward church member who left her husband. That piques the interest of the editor of the town newspaper. He doesn't have a lot of news that week. So he takes the opportunity to print a few rumors about Nicolet's pastoral care. None are true, but the damage is done. Nicolet returns home, reunites the woman with her husband, and does what he can to set the record straight. Irma speaks up for him. "He's a good man. Leave him alone."
Irma dies shortly thereafter. A few teenagers are caught up in the public spectacle, and decide to pull a prank on her. Her house catches fire and she dies. So, at the end of the book, the whole town gathers around the grave of Irma Reinwasser. Nicolet read the words from the book of Revelation: "And God shall wipe away all tears, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things have passed away" (Revelation 21:4).
He spoke for a few minutes, then concluded with words of committal and a benediction. The people began to shuffle away in the rain. One turned back. It was Will Poteat, the sleazy newspaper editor who caused the turmoil while Nicolet was out of town. "Good show," he said to the preacher. Then he pointed to the grave and sneered, "This supper of the great God . . . no more death, no more pain. Ask her."
Nicolet stood silent, his two daughters by his side. He didn't know what to say. He didn't know what to do. Suddenly his daughters did an unexpected thing.
They grabbed up some of the flowers that they had brought and started pelting him with them -- orange hawkweed, daisies, clover --- and stooping over like a great, pale bear in his baggy seersucker suit, he kept on lunging at them with his finger. Nicolet threw back his head and laughed as Poteat went lumbering off with the little girls after him. When he got as far as Nicolet's car, he turned around for a moment, and it was only then that they could see that he was more or less laughing himself.5
What do you do when the world falls apart? "Preach the kingdom," says Jesus to all his followers. Even if life should turn deadly, we proclaim the power of God that is stronger than death. And preach and proclaim we shall, until the day when there are no more tears, when death has no more power, when grief is swallowed up in laughter.
____________
1. Walter Brueggemann, "The terrible ungluing," The Christian Century 21 October 1992.
2. I wish this were a fictional story, but a radio announcer in eastern Pennsylvania actually made this claim in the fall of 1994.
3. Presbyterian Hymnal (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), p. 260.
4. Brian Blount, "Preaching the Kingdom: Mark's Apocalyptic Call for Prophetic Engagement," Princeton Theological Seminary Bulletin Supplementary Issue, Number 3 (June 1994), p. 46.
5. Frederick Buechner, The Final Beast (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 276.
As is often the case, the volunteer visitors discovered that most of the people visited had found other things to do on Sunday morning. One person said, "I would come back to church if it didn't conflict with my tennis time." Another said, "We came to church when our kids were involved. When they outgrew Sunday School, we stopped going." Another said, "I enjoy going to church on the really big days, like Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July. Compared to those days, other services are a little bit dull."
One response was different. Two volunteers named Jack and Esther went to see a man whom nobody knew. He lived on the end of the street, in a big house behind three overgrown pine trees. It took the volunteers a few minutes to find the front door. All the curtains were drawn. It looked like nobody was home. Suddenly the door swung open, and a thin man with a shock of white hair said, "My name's Tarnower. What do you want?" They said, "We're from the church. We stopped by to see you." He invited them in. They explained why they had come.
In a few minutes, he was shaking a bony finger at them. "I'll tell you why I don't go to church anymore. It's because I got in the habit of reading the Sunday Times before I went to the worship service."
Esther leaned forward. "Tell us," she said warmly, "how did the newspaper keep you from coming to church? Did you get caught up in the sports section and lose track of time? Or the comics?"
Mr. Tarnower looked at her with wild eyes. "No," he said, "I read the news. It's an awful world out there. There are a lot of diseases I don't understand. Wars break out. Families fall apart. Children run through the streets with handguns. People die prematurely. Listen, the world is falling apart, and the church can't do a thing about it."
"Well," Jack said, "you ought to come back. We have a nice minister, a fairly good choir, and a Bible study on Wednesday nights. You might enjoy our program."
"No," Mr. Tarnower said, "I don't think so. I get out for groceries, but that's all I want to face. I went to church for a while, but the world got worse. When my wife died, I decided to sit in here, watch everything fall apart, and wait my turn. I don't go to church anymore. The church has nothing to say."
He has a point. We live in a rough and painful world that seems to grow worse each day. As Walter Brueggemann notes,
For all our intellectual sophistication, seemingly assured affluence and confidence in our technology, a deep, unsettled feeling that things are indeed falling apart cuts across the spectrum . . . Our best institutions seem oddly dysfunctional. Churches worry about survival, courts only sometimes yield justice, medical institutions provide sporadic access and care, schools only occasionally educate and all our institutions seem in a deep crisis of purpose as well as finances . . . and the presence and threat of violence is everywhere.1
One day, four of the disciples heard Jesus speak about a world coming unglued. He told them, among other things, that the Jerusalem Temple would be destroyed. Imagine how hard that was to believe! The Temple was the central institution of Israel, the primary religious shrine, the center of commerce and banking, the heart of history and tradition. Jesus said, "The temple shall fall to the ground, stone by stone, piece by piece."
The four disciples were understandably shaken. As Jesus went on to say, his disciples will be subject to every kind of pain and abuse: wars, famines, earthquakes, persecutions, beatings, betrayals, and death. In such a world, what can anybody do?
Jesus gives his disciples something to do. He gives them a commandment, an imperative in the midst of passive language. When the world comes apart, what should every disciple do, first and foremost? Jesus says, "Preach the gospel." That is what he demands of us: "The good news must first be proclaimed to all nations."
What a curious thing to say! When the world is falling apart, shall we stand up and deliver a sermon? Imagine if the news came that a huge asteroid was headed for the earth. There is nothing we could do. Destruction is imminent. Civilized life is about to end. Meanwhile some preacher stands up in a black Genevan gown and says, "Let me give you three points and a poem." That is a silly picture.
What does Jesus mean when he says, "When the world is falling apart, preach the gospel"? Historically speaking, some people in the church have taken that to mean, "Get as many people in the church as you can. Scare them if you must."
Every few years, someone writes yet another religious best-seller about the end of the world. The world never ends, but the books continue to be published. Each claims to be a work of "prophecy," and strings together random Bible verses that try to prove Saddam Hussein is the Great Beast, or some wild idea like that. Each chapter warns the Second Coming of Jesus will take place at any time. "The time is short," these writers say, "so turn to the back of the book, follow the Four Easy Steps, and stop worrying about the world any more. The world outside may blow apart, but at least you've got Jesus in your heart." In many books and churches, this is the point of all preaching: to escape from the world's calamities.
Should troubles come, all some people do is point to the horizon and say, "Look, there he is! Jesus is coming again." As a radio preacher once claimed, "The Bible says that when things in the world get to their absolute worst, Christians won't have to suffer through it. The trumpet will sound, and Jesus will gather all of his believers into the air and rescue them from danger. In fact, if you are a Christian who owns a car, you have a responsibility to put a bumper sticker on your car to warn those left behind that, when the trumpet sounds, your Christian car will be going out of control."2
Jesus warned against people like him. "Beware no one leads you astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still a long way off. Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. But this is only the beginning of the birthpangs."
Old Mr. Tarnower was right. This is a world where things fall apart. The writer of Mark's gospel knows that, perhaps more than all the other writers of the New Testament. This is a world of disease, of headaches and hemorrhages. This is a world that reminds us of our human weakness, with deafness, blindness, paralysis, and death. This is a world of deception and meanness, where people put spins on the truth and do what they can to put themselves in power over others. This is a world of chaos and cruelty, where the innocent suffer and lives are put at risk. Mark knows that.
But Mark knows something else. In the words of a favorite hymn of the church,
And though this world, with devils filled,
Should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed
His truth to triumph through us.
The prince of darkness grim, We tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure, For lo! his doom is sure,
One little word shall fell him . . . 3
. . . and the Word is Jesus Christ. He is stronger than all that can hurt or destroy. That is the Word we must proclaim, the Word we must speak at all costs. The world may be haunted by evil, but it belongs to God. We may be in love with our own destruction, but we have been claimed by the strong Son of God. Even when evil and unbelief swelled up to kill him, God raised up Jesus to keep confronting his enemies, until the day they are put beneath his feet. Yes, this is a world where things fall apart. But God is stronger. God has not given up. God is going to win. That's what we have to say.
No wonder, then, Jesus said this to Simon, Andrew, James, and John. They walked with him ever since he said, "The time is fulfilled; God's kingdom is at hand. Turn and believe the good news" (Mark 1:15). They saw that kingdom advance one step at a time. The tormented person found peace. The eyes of the blind were opened. The ears of the deaf were unstopped. The lame person jumped like a deer. The tongues of the speechless sang for joy.
In other words, preaching the kingdom is always more than speaking a Word. It is kerygma, a proclamation, a Word proclaimed in speech and action. It is doing mission. As one scholar notes, "This preaching is more than the poetic eloquence of gifted public speech. This preaching was the eschatological realization, the making immediate, of the kingdom of God."4
In Jesus Christ, God's reign has broken in. The four disciples wanted to know, "When will the kingdom come?" as if it were a distant, glorious age. But the church cannot ponder the arrival of the coming age as if it were a bus running behind schedule. We are given the task of proclaiming what God has begun in Jesus Christ. The faithful Christian never sits on a mountain to await the Second Coming. No, our job is to take seriously Christ's First Coming. The time of the Second Coming is none of our business, but it is our business to act as if the world has changed because of Jesus Christ. We are called to do what Christ does: to proclaim God's reign in word and deed, to act as if the times have changed, to believe and behave as if God rules over every opposing power.
There is a funeral at the end of one of Frederick Buechner's novels. It may be the only way the story could come to a close. A lot of terrible things happen in the book. Theodore Nicolet, a Protestant minister, loses his wife in a car accident. He is left to raise two small girls with the help of a housekeeper, Irma Reinwasser, who is a Holocaust survivor. One day he goes to track down a wayward church member who left her husband. That piques the interest of the editor of the town newspaper. He doesn't have a lot of news that week. So he takes the opportunity to print a few rumors about Nicolet's pastoral care. None are true, but the damage is done. Nicolet returns home, reunites the woman with her husband, and does what he can to set the record straight. Irma speaks up for him. "He's a good man. Leave him alone."
Irma dies shortly thereafter. A few teenagers are caught up in the public spectacle, and decide to pull a prank on her. Her house catches fire and she dies. So, at the end of the book, the whole town gathers around the grave of Irma Reinwasser. Nicolet read the words from the book of Revelation: "And God shall wipe away all tears, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things have passed away" (Revelation 21:4).
He spoke for a few minutes, then concluded with words of committal and a benediction. The people began to shuffle away in the rain. One turned back. It was Will Poteat, the sleazy newspaper editor who caused the turmoil while Nicolet was out of town. "Good show," he said to the preacher. Then he pointed to the grave and sneered, "This supper of the great God . . . no more death, no more pain. Ask her."
Nicolet stood silent, his two daughters by his side. He didn't know what to say. He didn't know what to do. Suddenly his daughters did an unexpected thing.
They grabbed up some of the flowers that they had brought and started pelting him with them -- orange hawkweed, daisies, clover --- and stooping over like a great, pale bear in his baggy seersucker suit, he kept on lunging at them with his finger. Nicolet threw back his head and laughed as Poteat went lumbering off with the little girls after him. When he got as far as Nicolet's car, he turned around for a moment, and it was only then that they could see that he was more or less laughing himself.5
What do you do when the world falls apart? "Preach the kingdom," says Jesus to all his followers. Even if life should turn deadly, we proclaim the power of God that is stronger than death. And preach and proclaim we shall, until the day when there are no more tears, when death has no more power, when grief is swallowed up in laughter.
____________
1. Walter Brueggemann, "The terrible ungluing," The Christian Century 21 October 1992.
2. I wish this were a fictional story, but a radio announcer in eastern Pennsylvania actually made this claim in the fall of 1994.
3. Presbyterian Hymnal (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), p. 260.
4. Brian Blount, "Preaching the Kingdom: Mark's Apocalyptic Call for Prophetic Engagement," Princeton Theological Seminary Bulletin Supplementary Issue, Number 3 (June 1994), p. 46.
5. Frederick Buechner, The Final Beast (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 276.
