Preacher: Dana Cassell

Scripture: Luke 21:5-19

This month, I have the privilege of working with a congregation here in Roanoke as they try to discern what’s next for their church. Like so many other congregations, they are getting smaller in number, even if not in resources or spiritual well-being. They have a really beautiful, big building that their grandparents and great grandparents built a hundred years ago and then, when the great depression threatened the congregation’s finances, mortgaged their own family homes in order to save the church. It’s not an easy decision to do something new and different, especially when the tried and true habits come with so many threads of nostalgia, sacrifice and commitment.

This congregation I’m working with now in Roanoke isn’t the only one facing big transitions. You all have heard me preach and write about my home church selling their building and dissolving their congregational status – the latter happened officially at this weekend’s Virlina District Conference. You’ve heard me talk about how those First Church people mostly feel, alongside grief and sadness, freedom and relief.

The Manassas Congregation is weighing whether or not to entertain a real estate offer on their property and move, build and worship elsewhere. I preached at a gigantic Baptist church in Charlotte last month that fired its pastor last year and is wandering through a liminal time of wilderness right now, trying to figure out where to go and what to focus on, next.

In the Church of the Brethren, entire Districts are struggling to find leadership. The denomination is facing significant budget issues. In the larger American church, mainline traditions are wrestling with a major decline in religiosity. Several institutions are navigating massive problems with clergy abuse. Covid changed some of our worship practices permanently. The political climate makes it hard to know what someone even means when they claim to be a Christian or to follow Jesus.

We are in a time of great upheaval, y’all. And if you’re feeling it in your own life, in the life of your family or your church or your neighborhood, you should know that you are not alone. It’s everywhere. All around us. It is the water we’re swimming in.

As I’ve fumbled to find handholds and resources in these unsettling days, I have most often found comfort in the fact that living through times of great upheaval is nothing new. It might feel unprecedented and scary to some of us, particularly those of us who have lived lives of privilege during a particularly stable era of human history, but human history is chock full of great upheavals.

Jesus had the very specific experience of living during one of those times and being *aware* of the implications of all the unsettling. He knew that his life, death and resurrection were going to change things radically. He knew what lay ahead, and he tried – over and over – to prepare his friends and followers for it. 

In the gospels, Jesus is forever trying to equip the ones he loves for navigating the coming upheaval. He tries to tell them over and over that he is going to die – be murdered by the state. He tries to tell them over and over that the idea of a “messiah” that they have in their heads is not exactly how things are going to go down. 

But even the first followers of Jesus were human, filled with human tendencies and foibles, clinging to their delusions until the last possible moment. They thought Jesus would show up and conquer every enemy through force or, barring that, since he DID preach all the time about turning the other cheek and not living by the sword, maybe he would conquer every enemy at least through a battle of wits or snark or simple logical prowess. This rabbi was going to SAVE them, they just knew it. And that salvific act was going to be AMAZING.

But Jesus has been teaching and preaching and preparing everyone for something very, very different: a wounded healer, a crucified god, victory through refusal to live on the world’s terms. He’s come to proclaim and inaugurate an UPSIDE DOWN KINGDOM, where everybody’s assumptions about how things work, how things change and who’s in charge of it all get shaken up and reversed.

In this morning’s passage, Jesus is nearing the end of his journey toward Jerusalem. His betrayal, arrest, imprisonment and murder are imminent. And he knows that not only is all that in store for him but that his friends are also going to be in some very hot water, in real and present danger, in the crosshairs of furious tyrants and frenzied, threatened power structures. So he tries to explain, tries to warn them, tries to equip them with spiritual and emotional tools to weather the great upheaval about to shock them into awareness.

Some, we hear, were talking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, and Jesus said: “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”

Unlike our church buildings today, the temple was THE temple. There was only one – for everyone. Jesus prophesying its destruction wasn’t just the equivalent of a single congregation selling their building or one church having their sanctuary ceiling collapse: it would have meant the destruction of the center of all religious ritual, the nexus of Jewish practice, the time-honored ways of worshipping and gathering and humans connecting with God.

Not one stone will be left upon another – Jesus is talking about a radical change, a great upheaval.

About 15 years ago, the theologian Phyllis Tickle wrote a book called “The Great Emergence.” I had just finished seminary when the book came out, and I remember it making a big splash in the larger world of church people. The main idea of The Great Emergence is that if we study the history of the church, we see a pattern: every 500 years or so, the church experiences massive change. Tickle describes it as the Church cleaning out its attic and having a giant rummage sale.

1. Jesus walked on earth around the time that we now call 30 A.D.
2. Around 500 years later, Gregory the Great became pope and energized the church’s commitment to ecclesial and monastic life. If you’ve ever heard of “Gregorian chant” – that’s because of this guy.
3. Around 500 years after that came the Great Schism, when the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches split from one another over big disagreements about both theology and practice.
4. And 500 after THAT was the Great Reformation, when Martin Luther and all the other reformers instigated what we now know as the Protestant church.
5. Which brings us to…now. Tickle calls THIS transformation that WE are experiencing “The Great Emergence.” People are still debating what this change will look like, but I don’t think many Christians would disagree that we are, in fact, in a time of great transition. Like those first followers of Jesus, way back in 30 AD, the ground is shifting under our feet, in real time.

So, it might be helpful for us to pay a little closer attention to how Jesus prepared those first followers of his to weather the original massive change and great upheaval.

Here’s what he says: in addition to this huge change, nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes and in various places famines and plagues, and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. Things are going to get ROUGH.

And even BEFORE all that, Jesus tells his friends, “they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name.” This upheaval is not going to be just about other people. It’s not going to be something you can stick your head in the sand and avoid. If you’re known as my people, he tells his friends, you’re going to be right in the middle of it all.

I honestly don’t know how Jesus’ friends and disciples mustered even the amount of courage and gumption that they did after his crucifixion. We have stories about them locking themselves up in a hidden room, about denying any association with him, about refusing to believe the testimony about his resurrection and failing to recognize Jesus himself on the road. But if I had been one of those people who loved Jesus to the end? And if I had heard him teaching these things and predicting these things and trying to tell me that things weren’t just going to be bad but that they were going to get even worse AND that I was going to be right in the middle of all of it? 

I’m not sure I would have stuck around at all. I suspect I would have fled the country, posthaste.

But those folks also KNEW Jesus, and they trusted him. They heard him make all these predictions and give all these warnings, but they also heard him say, over and over and over and over, to take heart. To practice endurance. To hold fast to the vision of a new heaven and a new earth. To practice hope.

Writer and organizer Mariame Kaba says that hope is a discipline. Not an ephemeral “feeling,” but a way of life. An active striving. Hope is not some flimsy internal, individual motivator – it is borne of working alongside others who all see the vision of what might be and are all committed to working together to do as much as possible to bring it about.

I think that’s what the disciples heard Jesus telling them over and over: stick together, remember what I taught you, hold fast to God’s promises, keep the vision I cast ever before you, and press on, working to feed the hungry, heal the sick, gather in the lost and welcome the outcast.

In fact, here’s what he says at the end of this passage: “You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.” 

I have not lived through many trials that required great endurance. I have mostly lived a very privileged, comfortable life. I’m not sure how my reserves of endurance are, these days. But in the little bits of persecution-adjacent experience I have, I can say with certainty that it was community that saved me, the sure and certain knowledge that whatever was happening around me or to me, I was not alone.

I think that’s how we’ll weather this current great upheaval, too, whether the decisions we’re asked to make have to do with letting go of our buildings or our traditions or our comfort or our safety. I think our best chance for making it through the unknown and to the other side is to stick together and find a way forward that is wide enough to accommodate not just ME but US.

And you know how I know that’s what Jesus meant, too? Every single “you” pronoun in this passage is PLURAL. “Y’all will be hated by all because of my name,” Jesus says. “But not a hair of any of your heads will perish. By y’all’s endurance, y’all will gain y’all’s souls.”

It doesn’t sound great in English, but it works infinitely better in practice.

As we navigate this great upheaval, let’s make a commitment to quit trying to do it on our own, to submit ourselves to Jesus’ assumption that we are not solitary individuals but already gathered and woven into a collective y’all.