 | The New England Church PulpitNew England Congregational Church UCC |
Using a New Language | Luke 21: 5-19 | November 25, 2001 |
Many of us have learned a second language--or at least tried to. I, because of the requirements of the various schools I have attended, have approached four languages other than English. I say “approached” because I did not really learn the others and I barely can function in the language into which I was born. But I know the value of a second language to enable and enhance understanding. We sometimes turn to another language to say that for which our native tongue doesn’t have the right words. We have seen since Sept 11 how language can fail us. A friend of mine wrote a column for a nearby paper in which she noted how reporters struggled to find the words, the metaphors to put the magnitude of the 911 event and the degree of moral outrage into words. “We watched,” she wrote, “as professional communicators and designated experts struggled to find fresh words or continued to use the more serviceable ones such as ‘resilient’ and ‘incalculable.’” (Dr. Joan Arteberry Zavits The Republican Sept. 20, 2001) We all know what it was like to grope for the word or expression that would be adequate and none were.
Today’s gospel lesson sounds like a different language. It is part of what we call apocalyptic texts. They are like a second language. They are thick with vivid imagery. Poetic metaphors are enlisted in order to talk about the future. The word apocalyptic comes from a Greek word that means to reveal. It is like taking off the covers of a statue in one sudden swoop for all to see. But the language is strong, image filled not reduced to simple explanations and literal descriptions. When we talk about tomorrow we want something similar to the weather forecast with prosaic, simple, direct percentages and probabilities. But that is not the kind of language found in this text.
Apocalyptic language was popular in Jesus’ time. It was a language of those on the bottom of things--the conquered, the poor, the persecuted. Mixed together with Eschatological language which speaks of end times and last days, this becomes someday language. Someday those who are in power will get what’s coming to them. God will see to that. Someday we’ll be saved. Someday we’ll be all right. Someday God will set things right.
Today’s text comes at the end of Jesus’ ministry. Someone has remarked on the beauty of the temple in Jerusalem--and magnificently beautiful it was with huge blocks of green and white marble, the eastern front and part of the side walls covered with gold plate flashing in the sun. But Jesus says that someday the temple will be gone. The holiest building you know, he says, will tumble down around you. Where you stand in awe today will someday be in ruins. Well, his hearers know he has shifted into this second someday language and they ask Jesus to tell them some more specifics: Tell us the date! Tell us the signs! Tell us when to get ready!
Jesus just gives them this language filled with traumatic termination. The temple, seat of national pride and the faith of Israel, is to be destroyed. Furthermore, the followers of Jesus will be persecuted terribly. Now those who are looking to Jesus for the signs of the times must have been disappointed and upset. What he was telling them certainly did not smack of God laying into the evil ones. In fact, it appears that the ones God is supposed to love are going to suffer even more.
What is this?
With this bleak picture of the future Jesus tells them, “This will give you an opportunity to testify.” When an old world is being dislodged, dismantled, torn asunder, then you will have the opportunity to give account for the faith that is within you.
What we see and hear and read as chaos and destruction, Jesus reads as opportunity, the right time to tell the whole world about God.
This connects with another kind of language: Jesus language, the realm of God language. Remember when Jesus says ”you have heard it said that you should love your friends and hate your enemies. I say Love your enemy.” Remember when he said “Go the second mile. Do good to them that persecute you. Forgive 70 times 7.” It is hard to see when we ought to use the language of the realm of God. It is hard to see the place of this second language that Jesus came to teach us because we are so used to looking at the world with eyes that expect to see opportunities to succeed, gain power, take care of me and mine. So we might miss signs of the coming of the realm of God.
When you are looking for something in particular, your brain has a way of filtering everything else out. Psychologists have devised a game that proves how hard it is for us to notice something when we are expecting something else. It goes like this: They sit you down at a table in front of an ordinary deck of cards and they flash six of them at you, asking you to identify them as fast as you can--nine of diamonds, three of hearts, jack of clubs---oops! What was that one? Then they repeat the exercise, slowing it down a little so you can get the ones you missed the first time.
The third time is so slow that you think you must be an idiot because there is one card you simply cannot identify. You think you know what it is, but you are not sure, and it is not until the cards are all laid face up on the table in front of you that you can see what the problem is. The mystery card is a six of spades, only it is red, not black. The deck has been fixed. Someone has changed the rules, rules that prevented you from seeing what was there. You could not see a red spade because spades are supposed to be black.
Sometimes the realm of God comes in ways we did not expect. Sometimes the language is different. Sometime the signs are missed because we were looking for the wrong thing.
Frederick Buechner writes that “there is no part of the New Testament faith more alien to our age than [the] doctrine of a second coming, this dream of holiness returning in majesty to a world where for centuries holiness has shone no brighter that in the lines of a certain kind of suffering on faces like yours and mine. Partly (he continues) I suppose it is alien because of the grotesque, Hebraic images it is clothed in. Partly too, I suppose, it is alien to us because we have come to associate it so closely with the lunatic fringe--the millennial sects climbing to the tops of hills in their white robes to wait for the end of the world that never comes. . . . “I suspect” he continues, “ that what our age finds most alien in these prophecies of a final judgement and redemption of the world is their passionate hopefulness.” (The Hungering Dark)
There is a Hebrew word for hope whose root means to twist, to twine, and it is a word that seems to fit this kind of hoping well. We twine together the possibility that a good thing will happen and that some bad thing will not happen. There are a hundred little strands of hope that we twist together to make a cable of hope strong enough to pull us through life.
So this language of the realm of God is full of expressions of love, forgiveness and hope.
Great sorrow and pain may befall us, according to today’s scripture, but “not a hair of your head will perish.” That is realm of God language. That is the claim that despite all that happens, we are always, even to the end of the world, in the loving hands of God.
Sometimes people who claim to be part of the realm of God act that way and astonishing things happen.
On the night of October 8, 1989, in the climate of uprising that was growing in eastern Europe, more that 70,000 citizens mobilized in the streets of Leipzig. Before the march, the St. Nicholas pastor admonished the demonstrators to be nonviolent: “Put down you rocks.” Meanwhile, the security officials waited for instructions from Moscow and Berlin on using force to subdue the demonstrators. The order never came, and the police gave up. A month after the Berlin Wall fell, the security chief who wanted to subdue the rebellion is shown in the film staring out at the crowd in front of his headquarters. “We planned everything,” he says. “We were prepared for everything, except for candles and prayers.”
Jesus told his disciples that their distressing time was a time “to bear witness.” What is the witness that we are to bear in our sometimes distressing time? What is our word for the future?
It is the same word that Jesus gave his disciples. God is love. This world is God’s. We are preserved and given hope, not by our attempts to secure the world, but by the sustaining preserving love of God. That is our word for the future. It is a word based upon faith in God.
Amen
Joe Dunham
| Copyright © 2001 by Joe Dunham. All rights reserved. |