Today is the Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost. Next week is the final Sunday of the church year. Advent begins on December 1.

Today’s readings last appeared in the lectionary in November 2021.

Three years ago, I preached “The Rock That Births You” on these texts in a church in Houston, Texas. That sermon changed the way I understand the Gospel of Mark. I’m sharing it today with you — both as an audio of the original sermon and an edited transcript — because it seems even more relevant now than when it was originally preached.

This isn’t an easy story — it is especially hard to avoid the antisemitic pitfalls of Christian preaching about the destruction of the Temple. But I think it is one of the most important stories in Mark, a short section of verses that help make sense of the entire gospel. And I love the pairing of the Mark story with Hannah’s song from 1 Samuel.

Perhaps the emphasis isn’t the end of the Temple but the new birth of the Kingdom of God to which it points — and the difficulty and suffering of that birth.

In the middle of the sermon, I blurted out an interpretation of Mark’s gospel that I’ve never heard before — tackling the issue of why Mark (unlike Luke and Matthew) doesn’t have a birth narrative. If you listen carefully, you might hear the moment when I realized something I’d never considered before.

I literally rewrote the end of this sermon while standing in the pulpit. Some of the “roughness” emerges from its extemporaneous nature!

I’ve never read Mark in quite the same way since that day.

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1 Samuel 2:1-10

Hannah prayed and said,

“My heart exults in the Lord;my strength is exalted in my God.

My mouth derides my enemies,because I rejoice in my victory.

“There is no Holy One like the Lord,no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God.

Talk no more so very proudly,let not arrogance come from your mouth;

for the Lord is a God of knowledge,and by him actions are weighed.

The bows of the mighty are broken,but the feeble gird on strength.

Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread,but those who were hungry are fat with spoil.

The barren has borne seven,but she who has many children is forlorn.

The Lord kills and brings to life;he brings down to Sheol and raises up.

The Lord makes poor and makes rich;he brings low, he also exalts.

He raises up the poor from the dust;he lifts the needy from the ash heap,

to make them sit with princesand inherit a seat of honor.

For the pillars of the earth are the Lord's,and on them he has set the world.

“He will guard the feet of his faithful ones,but the wicked shall be cut off in darkness; for not by might does one prevail.

The Lord! His adversaries shall be shattered;the Most High will thunder in heaven.

The Lord will judge the ends of the earth;he will give strength to his king, and exalt the power of his anointed.”

Mark 13:1-8

As Jesus came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!”

Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?”

Then Jesus began to say to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”

Fifty weeks ago, on the first Sunday of Advent, we began reading Mark as the gospel passage in the lectionary. On that day, the text was Mark chapter 13, starting with these words from verse 24:

Jesus said, “In those days, after that suffering,

the sun will be darkened,and the moon will not give its light,

and the stars will be falling from heaven,and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory…

But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in heavens will be shaken, and then they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory.

Today, we end the lectionary’s Mark cycle. Next week is Christ the King Sunday, with a reading from John, and then begins Advent.

This is the last Sunday in the Gospel of Mark.

How does this Mark cycle end today?

And Jesus came out of the temple and one of the disciples said to him, “Look, teacher, what large stones and large buildings.” And Jesus said, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left upon another. All will be thrown down.”

And then there's talk of wars and earthquakes and famines. You might call this the “burn it all down” chapter.

We haven't gone very far in the gospel of Mark at all. We’re in the exact same chapter! We end the year as we began.

What has this gospel been saying to us over the course of the last year?

It's interesting, of course, because the Gospel of Mark does not begin in chapter 13, nor does it end there. We’re in the middle of the book at both beginning and end!

The Gospel of Mark itself begins rather abruptly. In the first chapter, there's no story of the Nativity. There's only John the Baptist, and then there is Jesus appearing on the scene. And Jesus says, the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.

That's the point of the Gospel of Mark: the kingdom of God has come near. That's the thesis statement, as it were, that everything wraps around this expectation of the time being fulfilled and that the kingdom of God has arrived. It has “come near.”

If I would have heard Jesus say that all those centuries ago, I would have thought, “Really? Really? The time is fulfilled, what does that mean?”

It sounds very mysterious and wonderful. And yet. If the kingdom of God is about to break loose on the earth, it doesn't feel that way. It feels like I'm still living in this regular place where we're oppressed by the Roman empire and our religion is put upon by people who don't understand us and there's no freedom here. We're poor. We're sick. We're lost. God seems to have abandoned us. Caesar is on the throne.

What do you mean that the time is fulfilled? That the kingdom of God has come near? How do we get from this reality of our hard, difficult lives of suffering to the age to come? Is it that easy, Jesus? Are you just going to stand here and announce it?

The’s the question behind the Gospel of Mark – Where is the promised Kingdom?  

* * * * * *

Over the last year, Mark answered that question. In all of the stories he tells in the pages of his book, Mark revealed that the mystery of this hinge in time, the fulfillment, the leap between the age we know and the age that is to come – it is the story of God's suffering son.

Mark is about suffering in this world. I call it the gloomy gospel. Because if nothing else, in its pages, we have gone in the last year from one hard story to another. Stories full of frightening things and loss, of demons and disease. Stories of people not understanding who Jesus is or purposely misunderstanding him. People who want to kill him and those who do.

Jesus, the suffering one, is the Jesus that we meet in the Gospel of Mark.

And so today, as we come to the end of the cycle of the year in which we are reintroduced to this suffering son. The story centers around a very interesting part of Jewish life. It centers around the temple.

Jesus came out of the temple. Clearly, he and his friends have been worshiping there, doing their appropriate duties as good Jews. Jesus came out of the temple and one of his disciples said to him, “Look teacher, what large stones and what large buildings.”

The temple. The temple was a beautiful place in ancient Israel. It is believed to be the house where God dwelt, the place where the Shekinah actually lived. The temple represents God's presence in and among the people of Israel. God's house in Jerusalem. It is a place that is the built representation of that very kingdom that Jesus has just said is coming, has arrived, is very near to us now.

It embodies the hopes and the dreams of that kingdom. The temple represented to the Jews God's permanence, God's promise, God's stability among them. And it was so important. The temple was so important to them because they were people who were held as a client state to Rome. It was a place of community, identity, and gathering.

They were an oppressed people. They are at the bottom of the social structure. They are poor. Their goods and their wealth have been stripped of them and taken to Rome. They have nothing, essentially, except for those promises, that presence, all of it in that built space of the temple. That God still dwells with them. The temple is so much to a Jew. It is unthinkable that anything would happen to it.

The disciples say, “Look what large stones and what large buildings!” They fully expect Jesus to say, “Yes, isn't it amazing?”

And they probably think he's going to say something like, “The kingdom of God is like this Temple.”

But instead, Jesus says, “Do you see these great buildings?”

And that's the moment they're all hanging there expecting Jesus to say something amazing and remarkable about the presence of God. Jesus said instead, “Not one stone will be left here upon another and all will be thrown down.”

Of all the suffering that Mark has taken us through in this entire book, this is the absolute worst. What the disciples are thinking now is: That cannot be. That cannot be. The temple cannot collapse. The temple cannot be thrown down. Because that means that God will have completely deserted Israel. God would abandon us?

It is hard to imagine their shock.

That's the opposite of the kingdom that Jesus was promising.

It was the unthinkable.

And yet, that's exactly what happened. The unthinkable.

* * * * * *

There are two historical layers to this story in the Gospel of Mark.

Mark, of course, is relating something that happened between Jesus and his followers sometime around the year 33. But Mark does not write this book until around the year 70.

An entire generation has come and gone since the time that Jesus walked out of those temple precincts and said those words – or words much like them – to the people who were his students.

Then, some forty years earlier, Mark said that Jesus warned them: It's not going to be here much longer. It's all going to be cast down.

Later, in A.D. 70, Mark’s report would seem like a sort of an insight or a prophetic glance or an impossible, unthinkable thing had become reality.

Because that was the year, A.D. 70, when the Romans had enough. They took an army into Jerusalem, and they crushed the Jews. They knocked that temple off of its foundations, took all of its holy artifacts and they stole them, and they marched them in a parade back across the Mediterranean Sea and into the streets of Rome, the pagan imperial city.

The temple was indeed destroyed. The unthinkable actually happened.

Indeed, if you think Mark is gloomy, if I think Mark is gloomy, it's because this entire gospel might have been written in the middle of a war. The war started in A.D. 66 when the Jews finally had had enough of the Romans, and they revolted against them.

At first, it seemed like the Jews might have won, mostly because there were a whole bunch of political events back in Rome that kept the Roman army occupied in other parts of the empire. But once Rome woke up and they realized what was going on out in Jerusalem, there's no way that they were going to let rebellion stand. They were Rome: We're going to go get them; we’re going to subdue them.

They sent their great army to Jerusalem, and they did their worst to the Jews.

They did their worst to Jerusalem. And when the Roman army did its worst, it was horrible. Thousands and thousands of innocent Jews were slaughtered in the streets of Jerusalem. Thousands were captured and sold into slavery. And thousands were taken from their homes and exiled into other parts of the Roman Empire.

And when they were sent into exile, many of them became sport for Roman arenas. That the Jews were thrown in with lions and they became just another spectacle to be eaten at the pleasure of the Romans. The Jews at this time were being made martyrs as much as those who believed in Jesus were being made martyrs. We Christians were in the same boat with the Jews.

This is not a text about Jesus saying, “See this temple? Well, it's all going to go down and you're just going to worship in some church after this.” This is not a text about the replacement of Judaism with some new religion or some casual thought about a temple just happening to fall so you can build some new building on its site.

No, this text comes from the heart of despair when the Jews and the Christians who were Jews and the new Christians themselves, when all these groups of people were under the heel of Roman oppression, under the will of Rome. At any second, in a moment, everything that they believed in, everything they trusted, everything they thought was stable and permanent, and everything that expressed the presence of God in their midst, could all be destroyed by Rome.

Everything could be taken. Everything could be burned down. Everything they treasured destroyed.

The unthinkable happened.

Mark was remembering something that Jesus most likely said, something that sounded very prophetic in hindsight. But that very thing had become the reality of the first people who read this book. It must have shattered them. And now when I read it, when I hold that moment in my own heart and I think of the pain, I know that they can relate to where we are.

* * * * * *

What have the last 20 years been other than a shattering? The temples and towers that we had built to the permanence of things like capitalism and democracy. All will be thrown down. Our banks fail. Our houses sold on the  block at the will of mortgage companies. Jobs lost. And now a pandemic. Three quarters of a million people dead. We never thought that was going to happen to us. We had beat those things. A global pandemic, that was for our ancestors. We have medicine, we're smarter than that.

And now?

We are swimming in a sea of deception. People can’t tell truth from lies. The United States has just re-elected an authoritarian, whose own former advisors call a fascist, to be president. I walk around downtown Washington, look at the White House and Capitol, and I wonder: Will one stone here will be left upon another? Shall everything be thrown down?

Jesus’ words have never seemed more penetrating, more heartbreaking, more ominous.

— 2024 addendum to “The Rock that Births You”

It will never occur here. It's unthinkable.

Institutions we thought would last forever. Denominations we never imagined would shatter. Fears of losing beautiful and treasured buildings. Stone upon stone, representing the permanence of God, all will be thrown down.

Jesus, first century Jews, those who read Mark's gospel when it was new, ink still wet on scroll – what has Mark been saying to us all year? I think that what Mark has been saying is actually here, in these last words of the Mark cycle. Because all will be thrown down is not the final word.

Instead, the scene shifts, and Jesus and his friends are no longer walking out of the temple, but they're standing on a rocky hillside, across from the temple, looking at those shimmering stones, those huge rocks that are that building that is the house of God. And Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, tell us when this will be.”

How? What? When?

They need to know.

How will this be? When will it be? What will be the sign that these things are about to happen? What they are probably asking is: can we have a sign so we can run away? That we can be safe; so that we can protect ourselves from this.

Because if this is going to happen, we do not want to be here when this occurs.

But Jesus says that this terrible thing will happen. People will be led astray. There will be false leaders. There will be wars and rumors of wars. And then in the midst of all of these warnings, in the midst of their fear, Jesus says, “do not be alarmed.”

What the heck? Do not be alarmed?

I'm terrified. Reading this passage is like spending all day on Twitter!

This must take place, Jesus said, for the end to come. For nation will rise up against nation, kingdom against kingdom, there will be earthquakes, there will be famines. But this is the beginning of the birth pains.

And there it is.

Mark's gospel has no nativity narrative because the entire gospel is a nativity narrative.

The gospel is not just concerned about whether Jesus was descended from Jewish kings or that Mary gives a terrific prophecy of the rich being cast down.

No, Mark's nativity gospel is the birth of the kingdom of God. And how we will pass through this stage to the next stage.

How we are going to move through the birth canal from this time of suffering to the Kingdom? That time when God's presence will shine through the whole of the earth like a light that never goes out. When the glory of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. When the new Jerusalem, where there will be no more tears, will come and there we dwell forever. Where God will make God's habitation in human hearts.

This is the birth narrative that Mark cares about. This is the advent that Mark cares about.

And you know what Mark tells us? Birth is hard.

Birth is hard.

The passage through the birth canal – this move from one age to another, from the end of things, from the death of the old into the beginning of the new – will be marked by and attended with suffering.

But that is the thing. Birth is hard.

Hannah knew that in the Old Testament. Birth is hard.

She was loved. She had everything, but she didn't have the one thing. That baby, that son that her husband dreamed of. She was brokenhearted. As a woman, she was essentially cast down because she couldn't give the one gift she most wanted to give. It said she was full of the greatest anxiety and despair. Birth is hard. And then Samuel is born.

Her song?

My heart exults in the Lord;my strength is exalted in my God.

My mouth derides my enemies,because I rejoice in my victory.

“There is no Holy One like the Lord,no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God.

Endings and beginnings. Rocks and birth. They go together.

* * * * * *

Several years ago, I was at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. I was standing in the Zen garden, which looks up at the shining cliffs, the beautiful red mesas at Ghost Ranch. And I was holding in my hand a rock from the Zen garden. I was praying, and I felt very grounded. I felt the sense of permanence of the rocks, of the cliffs. When you opened your eyes, you saw the shining cliffs – they're 165 million years old.

I was feeling all of that, the presence of God, the rock, the stability, when all of a sudden the earth underneath my feet began to move. And there was a sound like no sound that I have ever heard in my entire life. I thought that there had been an explosion in Los Alamos where one of the bombs had gone off accidentally at the nuclear labs.

I dropped the rock that was in my hand, and I looked up to the sky. There was no mushroom cloud. (Whew!) But there were clouds.

What had happened was a facing of the shining cliffs had fallen off and these huge boulders were tumbling down the side of the mesa, hitting the ground as if being thrown by the gods in heaven and everything was moving and as those rocks hit the ground dust, dirt, soil, it all exploded.

And so there were clouds, clouds of dust arising from the earth, not a cloud of destruction in the sky. And I held my hands against my face and I went, oh my gosh, it's not about death, that earthly, that shaking that I felt, but instead it's about creation. Because that's how creation happens. The dust of creation – dust from which all things came.

Creation happens when one thing transforms into something else. Those rocks are going to become soil. Those rocks are going to be carried away by wind and water. And they will become fertile soil that sometime in the future someone will plant food in and feed their village.

Life, birth, a new earth comes from that which is thrown down, cast off, and crashes when we least expect it.

C.S. Lewis referred to God once as “the one who shatters.” The birthing God is a shattering God. Anyone who has ever given birth knows this. I've only done it once, but I remember lying in that hospital room with the beautiful baby. That's the part we love to talk about. But my body was shattered. It would never be the same body that I had before birth.

That's the work of God. The one that shatters in order for birth to happen.

And C.S. Lewis went on to say this: “Could we not say that this shattering is one of the most important marks of God's presence among us?” It’s no coincidence that C.S. Lewis wrote during World War II.

And that's what Mark has been saying to us all year: a new world is being born.

And it may feel to you like everything that is stable, everything that is permanent, everything that once housed the presence of God, that it's all being destroyed. That's the birth. The shattering of this age happens so that a new one will be born.

In Deuteronomy 32:18, Moses refers to God as the rock who bore you. The rock who bore you. And then he went on to say to the people of Israel: you forgot the rock who gave you birth.

Mark has spent a year reminding us. A terrible year. A truly terrible year that we have been through together. On top of a terrible decade, following a terrible decade, the unexpected things that have happened that we never thought would happen, and the things we thought were unthinkable. And everything unthinkable that is yet to come.

Mark is saying to us, Do not be unmindful of the rock who bore you. Do not forget the God who gave you birth.

It's a beautiful, hope-filled, surprisingly comforting mystery for a suffering people. None of this is in vain. We are the generation of mothers and midwives, those who know the pain of the birth canal, and our job is to remember that God attends all of this and endings give way to new life.

As we enter into Advent, this Advent in particular, that is well worth holding in our hearts.

This is the beginning of the birth pangs…

ADVENT IS COMING!

The Advent theme this year is: Advent, the Season of Justice and Joy?

For the ENTIRE Cottage community:

Sunday Musings will focus on justice and joy for the four Sundays leading up to Christmas.

For PAID SUBSCRIBERS at the Cottage, TWO special Advent activities:

🕯️First: Advent begins with THREE special online gatherings during the first week of December. Think of it as “deconstructed” Advent retreat over three afternoons.

JOHN PHILIP NEWELL, JEMAR TISBY, and NOEL PAUL STOOKEY are coming to the Cottage online to kick off Advent! (Honestly, I’m SO excited!)

The three sessions will be recorded live (dates and times TBA soon). If you can’t attend the live online event, you can watch the three recordings later on your own schedule — and make your own DYI Advent retreat at home.

🕯️Second: You’ll receive a daily Advent calendar this year. Each day, you can open a “window” on justice and joy with mini-reflections from a host of surprising writers, preachers, and artists. I hope it will speak to your soul and strengthen you for the journey ahead.

📣If you subscribed last December for Advent and plan to continue your subscription, you might want to check your account information to update your credit card or email address to make sure delivery of The Cottage isn’t interrupted. You can do that HERE.

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INSPIRATION

This is no time for a child to be born,With the earth betrayed by war & hateAnd a comet slashing the sky to warnThat time runs out & the sun burns late.That was no time for a child to be born,In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;Honor & truth were trampled to scorn—Yet here did the Savior make His home.When is the time for love to be born?The inn is full on the planet earth,And by a comet the sky is torn—Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.— Madeleine L’Engle, The Risk of Birth

I lived in the first century of world wars.Most mornings I would be more or less insane,The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.I would call my friends on other devices;They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.Slowly I would get to pen and paper,Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,To construct peace, to make love, to reconcileWaking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any meansTo reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,To let go the means, to wake.I lived in the first century of these wars.— Muriel Rukeyser, “Poem”

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