Readings for 23rd Sunday after Pentecost, November 17, 2019

• Malachi 4:1-2a and Psalm 98  
• 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13  
• Luke 21:5-19

"Temple of Human Hands," Pastor Fred Kinsey
The Lukan journey of Jesus has reached its destination point!  Way back in chapter 9, is where Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem,” and he would not be turned away, rushed, or distracted.  He will soon face his ultimate temptation in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mt of Olives.  But first, Jesus is teaching in the Temple daily, and probably staying overnight at Mary and Martha’s house in Bethany, all the while knowing that Jerusalem is infamous for killing its prophets. 
 
In Jerusalem, Jesus will spend most of his time at the Temple, the center and symbol of Israel, the location of the presence of God, on earth.  In the Gospel of Luke, we see how central the Temple is to the lives of Jesus and his followers.  It began the moment Jesus was born and his parents took him to the Temple to fulfill the law that every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord, and they offered the prescribed sacrificial pigeons.  And most notably, it was on that day that Anna and Simeon, “led by the spirit,” identified Jesus, just one week old, as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel; thanking God for the coming redemption of Jerusalem.” 
 
Then, at the precocious age of 12, when the extended family from Galilee took Jesus on his next journey to Jerusalem for the Passover celebration, he slipped away from them all, not to go play with the other kids, but to sit at the feet of the Rabbi’s in the Temple, and discuss learnedly about Torah.  And they were “amazed at his understanding and his answers!”  Though his parents were angry that they had to look for him for three days, and probably grounded him till Yom Kippur! 
 
So the Temple was important in the life of Jesus and his followers, just as it was for every Jew.  He loved that it was the presence of God and seat of religion and politics, and when Jesus first arrived after “setting his face to go to Jerusalem,” he made a public demonstration in the Temple.  As soon as he entered the temple he began to drive out those who were selling things there; and he said, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer;’ but you have made it a den of robbers.”  And then he entered the Temple every day to teach, leading up to the night in which he would be betrayed, at the height of the Passover festival. 
 
Somewhere during these days after their arrival in Jerusalem, they heard people “speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God.”  But Jesus told his Disciples and followers, “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.” 
 
The Temple was indeed a glorious building in the time of Jesus!  It had been rebuilt by Herod the Great just 50 years before to show off how proud he was to have captured Jerusalem, and not be outdone by any other temple in the empire.  Its gold façade shone like the sun, and the magnificent stones of the temple mount made every visitor marvel at its magnificence! 
 
Jesus died and rose again around the year 30, and the second Temple would be set afire and destroyed by the Romans (in their war against the Jewish insurrectionists) in the year 70, the time at which Mark was writing his gospel, followed by Luke and Matthew in the 80’s, and John in the 90’s.  So as Luke was writing, he would have already known that the Temple stones were thrown down, as Jesus predicts here in chapter 21.  
 
Saint Paul too, never saw the destruction of the Temple.   All his Letters we have in the New Testament were written earlier, after Jesus’ death, in late 40’s thru the early 60’s when Paul was martyred in Rome, but before the Temple’s doom in 70. 
 
Even before its destruction for some 200 years, this was a period of great unrest, and widespread oppression, resulting in a massive underclass.  Poverty – brought on by high taxes, a debt economy, and subsistence living wages, were conditions that gave rise to apocalyptic hopes and dreams – for a time when the tables would be turned and the justice of God would break through, usually not without a time of conflict or war, and perhaps natural disasters too.
 
Jesus quotes these common place apocalyptic themes in his prediction of the end of the Temple and end of this present age.  But amidst all this chaos and carnage, Jesus has a message for his followers.  In the verses after our reading, which are a continuation of his prediction, he tells his followers “when you are surrounded by armies, flee to the mountains, …Those inside the city [of Jerusalem] must leave it, and those in the country (like the Galileans he knew) must not enter it.” 
 
Jesus wanted his followers not to get involved with fighting a losing battle against the mighty Roman Empire.  And in Jerusalem, the Temple, and most of its people, were slaughtered.  Jesus counsels, that like the Exile to Babylon, God was using foreigners, the Romans in this case, to condemn this present age, symbolized in the destruction of the Temple a second time.
 
Jesus wanted his followers to wait for ‘the Son of Man coming with power and glory.’  Then they should ‘stand up and raise their heads,’ he said, ‘because your redemption is drawing near!’  And, ‘Son of Man’, is the way Jesus referred to himself, especially as the coming resurrected one. 
 
Our redemption and our salvation, is in Jesus the resurrected one, who is also the one who rises up as the new nexus, the new location, of worship, after the Jerusalem temple is destroyed.  God wants the followers of the Messiah, who is the new temple, built not with human hands, those who come out of hiding in the hills, who wait in safety to live a new day, who “endure” through the apocalyptic perils – to testify to the truth of Jesus as the foundation stone of a new resurrected and spiritual temple – and to be ready to come into the New Age. 
 
So for all who are followers, the resurrected Jesus is the new location of God, who is worthy of worship and praise. 
 
We don’t believe we need to rebuild the physical Temple to prepare for Christ’s 2nd coming – like the fundamentalists and those arming themselves for Armegeddon, fixin’ for a fight.  Jesus, our resurrected Lord, is our temple, made not with human hands, but who is alive and sits on the right hand of God.  The new age has dawned and the return of Christ will be a new age where heaven and earth are united, and we have no need of human built temples, when spears will be made into plow-shares, for the Lamb will be our temple, and there will be no more death. 
 
As Jesus was just starting his public ministry in the gospel of Luke, he recalled Isaiah’s prophecy, ‘that the spirit of the LORD God is upon me.’  And as he ends it now in Jerusalem, he shows his love for the temple, defending its honor and visiting daily, even as he knows of, and predicts, its destruction.  For Jesus is the cornerstone of a new beginning and a new age.  He is the temple, built not with human hands, but by the hand of God, for our inclusion and our salvation. 
 
The Rabbi’s that Jesus sat with as a boy, would go on to transform Judaism into a portable religion in their diaspora, after the Temple’s destruction, centering their followers around the Book of the Torah, in synagogues and congregations, much like the house-churches and congregations that sprang up from east to the west, as Christianity spread out from Jerusalem.  And ever since, our fates and survival have been tied together. 
 
As the followers of Jesus – the Gentile nations who have been grafted on to the tree of God’s chosen people – we are called to enact that realm of God that the ancestors of Jesus first proclaimed.  Let us testify to the peace and love and power, Jesus has taught us, as together we worship the ‘rock of our salvation,’ the ‘cornerstone’ of our Temple, not made with human hands, who is Christ our LORD.  

Readings for All Saints Sunday, November 3, 2019

• Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18 and Psalm 149  
• Ephesians 1:11-23  
• Luke 6:20-31

"Fog Lifted," Pastor Fred
The misty fog of November can be mysterious and beautiful, or dimming and dangerous.  A thick fog can cover the ups and downs of any terrain, whether it’s the sidewalk or road, hills or valleys.  Fog can obscure car headlights, and traffic lights.  It can come on fast, and dissipate just as quickly.  Tree tops and tall buildings, jut eerily out of ground fog, and can be…, mysterious and beautiful, or dimming and dangerous, or, all of the above. 
 
Once I was fishing on a river in Upper Michigan early in the morning.  A patchy fog obscured the banks of the river, and the field of lily-pads we suddenly found ourselves in.  It was disorienting, and hard to get our bearings!  There was no wind, and the surface of the water was like glass.  Near barren birch trees and oaks, hanging on to their last leaves, no longer looked familiar as we attempted to find our way, paddling through the fog of another dimension.  It felt as if time was frozen, like there was no past or future, only this place, an everlasting present, amidst a deafening silence.  It was as mysteriously beautiful and dimmingly dangerous as I’d ever seen! 
 
Likewise, foggy morning commutes can be dimming and dangerous.  In the fall of 2002, an infamous pile-up involving 50 vehicles occurred in Wisconsin, just north of Milwaukee on I-43, very near Lake Michigan.  Dense fog conditions were reported, resulting in the worst multiple-vehicle collision in Wisconsin history.  Tragically, 10 people were killed, and 36 were injured. 
 
All Saints Day was placed at this time of the year on the church caelendar, some say, to coincide with the foggy days of early November, at least from a northern-hemisphere perspective.  It was believed that, just like the fog, the veil between heaven and earth was very thin, and the saints of this world and the next, were closest to one another, possibly even transitioning from one realm to the other.
 
The Day of the Dead traditions, that come primarily from Christian cultures of Latin America, dramatize this thin veil, in elaborate celebrations, on the eve of All Saints, parading with candle-light, and dressing as the dead-come-back-to-life, not unlike the costumes of Halloween!  In San Francisco, the tradition includes ending at a local cemetery, where they prepare lavish party tables of food and drink, by family grave stones with real food and wine on the tables, a kind of foretaste of the heavenly feast that they share with their loved ones.  Not only does this proclaim and celebrate the resurrection, but it demonstrates the belief in a thin veil between heaven and earth, between the living and the dead.  It’s beautifully mysterious, and more playful than dangerous – a fun and deeply meaningful tradition that overcomes the fearfulness of death. 
 
The theologian Jaroslav Pelikan said, “Tradition is the living-faith of the dead – traditionalism is the dead-faith of the living.”  If that’s true, how do our beloved dead, pass on a living faith tradition, to us, in the present-day church?
 
We see in our gospel reading, that Jesus is a wonderful leveler, lifting the veil between heaven and earth.  In Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, in our gospel reading this morning, the introductory verses have been left out for some reason.  But I think they help set the scene for us.  As Luke reports it: “Jesus came down [from the mountain] with the disciples, and stood on a level place…”  So instead of the more familiar, ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ from Matthew’s gospel, Luke pointedly has Jesus delivering a, ‘Sermon on the Plain,’ from a leveled place! 
 
In Israel, it’s actually pretty hard to find a level place!  Jerusalem and the Temple are on a conspicuous hill, Mt Zion, as it’s often called.  And the region of Galilee is full of rolling green hills.  Perhaps only the Jordan Valley, and the desert in Sinai, can be considered level places.  But following John the Baptist’s proclamation, to make way for Jesus, the Messiah, by, “making his paths straight.  [Where] Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the rough ways made smooth,” Luke teaches us how this is part of the kingdom message, and fits perfectly with the Beatitudes.
 
From this level place, Jesus declares that, the poor and hungry, those who weep, and the reviled and excluded, will be lifted up.  While the rich, the fully satisfied now, those on top, and those who are laughing now at the expense of those on the bottom, will all be brought low.  But it’s different than just a mere reversal of fortunes.  For example, it’s clearly not about revenge, for Jesus hastens to add, “Love your enemies; [and] do good to those who hate you…”  And so, even as Jesus stands on the level plain to deliver his message, he paints a picture of a valley where all stand together with him, on equal footing. 
 
This is counter-cultural to the normal take-away message we are often taught, about climbing our way to the top; unseating the oppressor in order to take their seat, and continue the oppression on those who did it to you.  It reminds me of the secret that Winston Smith discovers, the protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984 novel.  To overthrow Big Brother, the underground manual said, you have to realize that there always has been a rich ruling class, and always will be.  It just goes through a series of coups.  It’s always the middle classes that overthrow the upper ruling class, and the lower class always stay where they are, and, then it starts all over again.  But, says Jesus, it is not like that in the realm of God, which he came to inaugurate.  The kingdom of God is a great leveler, inviting all to live on the plain.  And so, God in Jesus, brings a new way, a third way, for us. 
 
Jesus knows, this is not a message likely to be well received.  Prophets – a class that Jesus identifies with – were usually hated, excluded, and reviled – and sometimes killed!  It might be dimming and foggy, and dangerous even, but Jesus comes to lift the veil between heaven and earth, lift the mysterious and beautiful fog, to level the playing field and melt away the clouds obscuring Jacob’s ladder to heaven, and open up a new way! 
 
Jesus, the first fruits of the resurrection, dressed in heavenly attire, climbs out of the grave to greet us at the great banqueting feast, not just in the cemetery of our Day of the Dead meals, but walks with us every day, wherever we are, to give us hope, and to lift the fog of our grief.  “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh,” says Jesus.
 
"Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."  So, how do our ‘beloved dead’ pass on a living faith tradition to the present-day church?  Today, on this All Saints’ Sunday, we commemorate our loved ones who have gone before us in the faith.  And they challenge us to shed the traditionalism of our serial oppressions, and carry on with the tradition of our baptism.  The saints are people who have been made whole by the grace of God – through baptism into Christ – not by their good works.  So here, on this side of the fog – they challenge us to a living faith that is washed in the forgiveness and love of our baptismal font, that we might have a foretaste of the feast to come at our table – even as we remember their lives lived among us!   
 
Jesus comes to lift the fog in our lives.  And, now we see our tears, and our joys, more clearly for what they are, in all their beauty and mystery, dimming-ness and danger.  The fog, is the culture of oppression and exclusion of the kingdom of this world, that Jesus comes to lift.  The fog is that tempting glow, but ultimately vengeful and dangerous abuse of the privileged, from the mountaintop – the excesses of those who are always laughing and full, and entitled, and those whom society, the Kingdom of this world, asks us to revere, to look up to, and “speak well of,” but who are opposed to the Kingdom of God.
 
Jesus, teaching on the plain – from the leveled mountain-top, the straightened road, once crooked – stands with those who weep now, those who are hungry now, and the poor, and un-veils the foggy paths we walk – or paddle! – in our lives.  Jesus showed us a third way, beyond the spirals of violence and revenge, offering a grace-filled truth more beautiful, more mysterious, though sometimes more dangerous, to get to – the way of radical forgiveness and universal love and respect of each other, which challenges the oppressive structures of this world. 
 
Jesus – on the plain looking at us, his disciples who are gathered around the eschatological banqueting table of the LORD – lifts the fog, and reveals the feast of victory for our God, and it is a mysterious and beautiful sight!  Come! You are invited!  You are blessed, and the feast is prepared!