Wars and Rumors of Wars

Friends and Readers:

It’s a great joy to share the news that I am now a contributing blogger for Patheos.  The differences in format you will be seeing over the next weeks are part of moving onto the Patheos platform.  I will still be linked on Textweek. If you are a subscriber, you will still get notices of new posts. Your comments about all this, as well as each post, are very welcome. As always, thanks for reading! Nancy
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  What large stones and what large buildings! The country fellows from Galilee who were Jesus’ disciples are awed, on this first trip to Jerusalem. Jesus pushes back against that awe:All of these building will fall, he tells them, and he speaks about wars and rumors of wars, calling it all thebeginning of the birthpangs.

Well, who isn’t awed by buildings? The icons of cities are their buildings:  the Eiffel tower is Paris; Big Ben is London; the Capital Building is D.C. ; the Brandenburg Gate is Berlin. I pick travel destinations, in part, for the buildings I want to see.

So where’s the good news in Jesus saying they will all fall?  I can believe Paris, London, D.C., Berlin, will go on after I die. But I don’t want to believe in an age in which all I find awesome – and familiar – in this world will be gone.

Wars and rumors of wars have abounded in my lifetime. Cuba, Vietnam, the Cold War, Iraq twice, Iran, Afghanistan: I’ve lived through these, rumors and wars. Now it’s Syria: a war and a traffic of rumors, a flood of refugees and destruction, undeniable images of treasured buildings lying in rubble.  Echoes of the destruction of Jerusalem in 71 C.E., when all those buildings the disciples admired became rubble.

It has been conventional wisdom to understand Jesus’ predictive words about terrible times as pointing to the end of the world.  And the end of history. Both of which would immediately re-open as a strange new world.

My former professor, Stephen Jay Gould, had coffee mugs in his office with the words No Vestige of a Beginning, No Prospect of an End written on them –   a motto and a manifesto against Christian insistence on end times, and on Eden as a literal history of creation.

But what if Jesus meant something else?

What if Jesus meant us to understand that empires and eras, temples and traditions, all rise and fall, and idols come and go?  That the familiar, the treasured, and the dear, do end, but without shattering the nature of creation or the reign of God? What if Jesus meant us to understand that God is beyond all that – and the fullness of time is both within these times and beyond their ticking time-ends? What if Jesus meant us to understand that the mammoth and magnificent achievements of empires cannot begin to represent what is really eternal? What if Jesus is pointing to the power of beginning again as the real story of God, whose creation is not fixed and lasting but endlessly evolving?

America is a creation of immigrants who arrived here when the life they had known was shattered, by war, by despotism, by shifting political winds, by rising tides of hatred. They arrived, survivors of an old world now in rubble who will build a new world, using their scars to limn possibility that does not lead to the old death.  From every part of this world they have come, brining remembered food, songs, prayers, customs, comforts, worries. Shift the details, and the survivors of more horrors than I can name arrive to become new people in a new world.

Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines.  We’ve seen all this come to pass. And we’ve seen how, through it, the world has been reborn.

It takes incredible courage – even more than courage, it takes faith – to begin life again. Ask the wounded vets whose shattered bodies endure unceasing pain. Ask middle-aged Americans who lost good jobs nine years ago in the recession, and haven’t earned a decent living since. Ask all the families who have someone in prison now. Ask the children in the foster-care system. Ask people struggling with addiction. Ask all those who lost homes in the west coast fires this year, or in the Texas floods.

The language of end times gets a particular workout in the presidential hunting season. Candidates predict the rise and fall of the nation, and proclaim themselves the ones who can produce the rise and prevent the fall. We are challenged, as Jesus said we would be, to discern good shepherds and dismiss the rest, without giving in to cynicism or despair.

Environmental disasters, the current end-time story that grips us all, threaten to alter something far more essential than a landmark building: the earth around us.  And even environmental disasters need us to have the courage not to give in to cynicism or despair.

As most of the world’s nations gather this month in Paris to address climate change, Jesus’ words – this is but the beginning of the birthpangs – urge us to invest our awe in hope – not in the old stone structures of the past.  In these old structures, beloved as they are, we heard rumors of wars. From them, wars came about. Our deep iconography of them cannot help us, though in them we have written the history of vast mistakes.  But there are new possibilities for the future:  wonderful life, which is never made of stone, but is born of the power of life itself to dream dreams and see visions of God’s world. Jesus’ eye never wavered from this vision: not the end, but the fullness of time.

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Illustrations
1. A man prays at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Image from Wikipedia, Western Wall page.
2. Tour Eiffel.  Image from Wikimedia Commons.
3. Big Ben in Elizabeth Tower, Parliament Square. Image from Wikipedia Big Ben page.
4.  The Capitol Building at Dusk. 2013.  Image from Wikipedia, The Capitol Building page.
5. Athletes compete at Wounded Warrior Trials. US Marines Corps veterans, Camp Pendleton.  Image from Wikipedia page for Wounded Warrior Trials.