Year C, Proper 28--"All That is Solid Melts into Air."

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Year C, Proper 28

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

I remember when I was in high-school we had a career counseling day. I must have been in tenth or eleventh grade and had taken an aptitude test that had definitively determined that the best career path for me, by far, was to be a tank driver in the Canadian military. Somewhat perplexed (I had after all just been protesting the first Gulf War) I did a little digging and found out that of all the positions in the military, tank drivers had the shortest life-expectancy. The bubble test had determined that the best course for my life was to be blown up as quickly as possible on the battlefield.

But there was one redeeming thing from that career counseling day. Someone asked the CEO speaker for the best advice they had for people entering the workforce. He didn’t hesitate and replied, “You job is going away.” He went on to explain that on average people change careers five, six, seven times over the course of their working lives and that the old model of signing on with Ma Bell out of university and retiring a sixty-five was no longer a reality. That kind of security was no longer a feature of the contemporary market.

This wasn’t really an easy thing for teenager to hear. He was pointing to the fact of radical change, that as Marx says, “everything solid melts into air.” All the old securities that previous generations had been brought up to rely on were no longer there. I felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under me. I was brought up short, and came to myself, in an experience of profound groundlessness. The stones in my Temple of how things should be started to loosen, tumble down even.

Now if we’re not teenagers blinded by a sense of their own invincibility and immortality the recognition that things change—that relationships end, that bodies get sick, that institutions fail, that jobs go away—is not news to us. It’s all over scripture after all. A quick romp through the psalms shows us our lives figured as dew, as grass, as breath, a sigh. Brief. Transitory. Going away. This isn’t doom and gloom talk, or apocalyptic hyperbole—it’s just the way things are.

In Jewish culture, the Temple wasn’t just a building. It was the source of the Jewish peoples’ entire identity. It told them who they were. It gave them a tangible, graspable, concrete locale that reminded them of their story as a people and as individuals. That’s why after the Temple was destroyed the first time, Jeremiah had to go to such powerfully prophetic lengths to remind the people that while the Temple was destroyed, God was not. Jeremiah had to remind them again and again that the liveliness, the effervescence, the love of God remained unchanged, despite the temple being in ruins and the people living in a foreign land under a hostile, invading power.  

Now, Jesus is telling the disciples who are pretty enamored of the beautiful stones of the Temple that it too will fall, “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.” Not just the Temple and those beautiful stones, but, “…all these things that you see.” There no small amount of humor in that brief exchange. We can imagine the disciples just casually commenting on the nice view of the temple, making a little small talk, perhaps as a way to get Jesus to talk of something other than his impending death, the fact that the temple of his body is about to fall down. But Jesus will have none of it. He is unrelenting in pointing out that seeking safety, security, permanence, and control among the passing things of this world is an impossibility. Talk about a wet blanket!

Or is it? You see, Jesus is always trying to wake us up, to show us where true stability is to be found. He knows the human condition so well; he’s well-acquainted with all the ways we try to shore up our identity against the fact of fleetingness. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Are we just supposed to say to ourselves, “Oh, that’s too bad that Jesus doesn’t have pillow,” or this a profound wisdom saying of Jesus pointing to a deeper reality in the life of discipleship? What if “all that you see… will be thrown down,” and the teaching about foxes and birds of the air are actually meant to thrust us deeper into relationship with God, the ground of our being, so that the security, the peace, the joy not determined by the chances and changes of this life might manifest itself in us? What if Jesus is using this casual setting of a sight-seeing excursion to wake the disciples, and us, up to where and in whom the security for we frantically grasp is actually in abandoning ourselves to life in Him?

That’s the radical thing about the Gospel. Over and over, the disciples—like human beings across cultures and throughout time—seek for security in outward things. And don’t get me wrong, relative security is necessary thing. We need what Winnicott calls a “good enough mother,” in order to flourish. We need enough predictability in food and shelter to thrive. We need friendships, relationships, affirmation, and love in order to become the people we are made to be. But, if our sense of who we are is restricted to, or entirely dependent on those outward conditions, we’re setting ourselves up for suffering. Why? Because they are inherently fleeting, unstable, changing—"going away” as the CEO at the high-school career counseling fair announced. The collapse of the various temples of our lives, the ways we sought security and ultimate happiness in passing things, is actually a great gift to us. The collapse of our temples is ultimately for our healing, for disabusing us of our illusions and our attachment to things temporal that we might learn to rest, to dwell, to dance from the ground of the eternal. Seen from the right perspective, the collapse of our Temples can show us where we’re stuck, and nudge us into that most fundamental of spiritual dispositions—littleness, surrender, abandonment. Fallen temples are about new life, new creation, greater and greater freedom. Our God is a God of life, not death—a good thing to remember in midst of any collapse.

The Good News of the Gospel, is that we (by which I mean everyone everywhere) now have access to a living, conscious, unmediated experience of God. The covenant made with Abraham is now extended to all of humanity, and the temple is no longer a physical location, but a spiritual reality in depths of the heart, in the ground of our being, that we can encounter and live from no matter who we are, where we are, and no matter our circumstances. The Temple falls down because it has been interiorized as the ground of being. The Temple falls down because it’s now located in the heart. Remember those pivotal lines from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, “The love of God has been poured into your hearts through the Holy Spirit.” God lives in us, God has indeed come near, God has tabernacled with us—and it’s in stopping the outward search—“Hey Jesus look at that pretty Temple over there!—that we realize the profound and life-changing fact that the Kingdom of God is within. The new heaven and the new earth, the Jerusalem that God is creating as a joy, has already been gifted to us.

That’s why Jesus tells the disciples in the face of wars and insurrections, of nation rising against nation, earthquakes, fires, plagues and portents in heaven, not to prepare their defense in advance. Jesus will be with them and by the Holy Spirit tell them what to say and do. It’s a teaching about God never letting us go, never abandoning us, about God being with us no matter what—even when by all accounts things look pretty grim.

“Empty-handed we go to Lord,” is a favorite phrase of Ruth Burrows, one of the most profound writers on the Christian life I know. That’s really what Jesus is calling us to. Nothing in our hands. Nowhere to lay our heads except on Jesus’ shoulder, wrapped in the everlasting arms of his firm embrace. For He is the one temple that won’t fall down.