Erosion, Earthquakes & Apocalyptic Grace

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 25th Sunday After Pentecost by the Rev. Holly Huff, Deacon.

Holy Scripture is a living Word and in this library of ancient texts we call the Bible God is always contemporary, always speaking to us here and now—and today’s Gospel seems to me to take place especially close to home. The red rock landscapes of southern Utah have a grip on my imagination, and going into those deserts, hiking or backpacking or just driving through one of the parks, I find always forces a confrontation with time, scale, and impermanence. The monumental red slabs of sandstone in Zion National Park, for instance, are striking as they jut into the sky. They seem so fixed, permanent, and immovable. Hundreds of feet in the air, rock climbers the size of waterbugs, made visible only by their brightly colored helmets, stride slowly up the wall, resisting gravity. Against the rock, the precarity of these climbers, their smallness, their courage-slash-foolhardiness is obvious. “What are mortals, O Lord that you should be mindful of them?” Yet, all around, the landscape testifies that the apparently-immovable rock slabs are also passing through. These hundreds of feet of red sandstone are also transient. Despite their imposing profile, they are just as impermanent as we are. After all, the Virgin River cut the empty space of the canyon out of those same layers of imposing rock, and the red sand at the river’s banks tells us it has not stopped its daily work whittling it away, and the wind squealing between the canyon walls spins up grains of red dust.

‘Do you see these great buildings? These great rock walls, these canyons and arches and hoodoos?’ “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” All will be thrown down, even what appears permanent and unalterable. 

Today’s Gospel reading is an apocalyptic text, that is, literally, a text that reveals something to us, or uncovers something. An apocalypse is an uncovering, a revelation of what’s already true. Over the next few weeks, as we reach the end of the church year and make the turn into the season of Advent—an end that is like a beginning and a beginning that is like an end, for those of you who were in Godly Play this morning—and so we can look forward to apocalypses all over the place in our upcoming lectionary texts.

The word apocalypse may conjure up mushroom clouds and images ripped from Mad Max: dystopian speculative fantasy, the end of the world, every bad zombie movie. This is all very dramatic. Biblical apocalypse is dramatic, but it’s grounded in the reality of our present. It tears the curtain away to reveal what is already true. As Jesus says, “The end is yet to come; this is but the beginning of the birthpangs.” Apocalypse is not the realm of future or fantasy: it is about the revelation of the true nature of the present, including the disclosure of God’s judgment on the world’s extortionate systems of power and the birth of a living hope for the present fulfillment of God’s just kingdom, where the last are first and the meek inherit the earth. As a genre apocalypse shows us that what we take as given, what we see as set in monumental stone, is passing away, not as solid as we suppose. All will be thrown down, even these stones will become sand. And because we trust in a God who is faithful, who is covenanted love, this is not a cause for alarm but profoundly hopeful. “Thy kingdom come,” apocalyptic texts move us to pray.

Apocalypse as a scriptural form is also meant to help us open to the apocalyptic moments of disclosure in our own lives. Collectively, we are living through some big ones right now, uncomfortable revelations about the way our society systematically denies human dignity according to race and sex and class and on and on, disclosures about the harm our patterns of consumption have inflicted on the planet. How do we respond to these collective revelations faithfully from an assurance that God’s kingdom will come? 

And of course God is always ready to pull the veil off from our more personal delusions if we will only open ourselves to the destabilizing insight. Through this past year and a half as a parish I think we are experiencing a revelation, a disclosure, about where the real temple is, the real cathedral. What large stones we have here, what a beautiful building! It truly is. Now, I promised Father Tyler I wasn’t going to preach a sermon about the church falling down. But bear with me here… I said this Gospel seems close to home and when I hear Jesus’s talk of earthquakes it seems very close, right here within the rock walls of this sandstone church. The earthquake we weathered in March 2020, just a week into the initial Covid shut down—a time when it felt like the world was ending—that earthquake threw down some plaster but left our cathedral standing without too much damage, thankfully. Still, between the earthquake and more than a year of remote worship, there is an apocalyptic disclosure here if we’re open to it, and what is being revealed is already true: that there is a sanctuary made without hands that can’t be closed down or fall down but is in fact with you wherever you go, with no separation. The holy place, the sanctuary of God’s presence, is within you. “My heart teaches me, night after night.” And it is among you, where two or three or gathered—even on Zoom. Like the tabernacle made of tents in the Exodus years, this sanctuary goes wherever you go, because it is part of your created nature as God’s beloved child: there is nowhere you can wander outside of God’s presence. Jesus talks about being led astray and this is certainly a danger, not because we can actually go where the creator of the universe can’t find us, but because we are so very often led astray in the sense of being distracted from this moment, this present in which God is always present, and from which we so often wander off.  Apocalypse is supposed to keep us in the present: “When will this be? When will all this take place?” isn’t really the right question—and Jesus warns the disciples against anyone who tries to answer it neatly in his name. We’re not solving a Da Vinci code riddle here or trying to slot the end times into my Google Calendar. This is taking place now! Today is the Day of the Lord. Stop and feel the earthquake, that gentle constant rumbling. Stones are being thrown down and rolled away every day. Lazarus, come out! And like Lazarus emerging from the tomb, the uncovering of apocalypse is supposed to help us see differently so we can be differently. Jesus has “opened for us a new and living way” through the curtain of his flesh, and there is no separation. 

So what does the new and living way look like? To describe it from the externals is perhaps funny given that we’re talking about the law being written on our hearts. But it’s not that external things fade out when the spiritual life flourishes. Just the opposite. Entering the new and living way through Jesus’ flesh sets us on a new way of living: where all the external things, the stones that were thrown down in the apocalyptic unveiling, take on new meaning, now within their proper orbit. Knowing that you are welcomed into the sanctuary made without hands wherever you may be relative to this cathedral doesn’t devalue this space but actually allows us to appreciate it better and care for it from a place of confidence, gratitude, and assurance more than if we turn to the building desperately grasping for access to God that was long ago granted, once and for all.

Grounded in an assurance of God’s love for us, desiring to return that love, we can love created things better. And we need them. God is in them. Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood, and all creation is given to be a sacramental sign, God’s tangible grace offered to us through absolutely everything. The new and living way is marked by music and car horns coming in through the windows from the street, the path is blazed by coworkers who make us crazy, leaves tracked in on carpets and infants just learning to roll over. Where is the new and living way when I’m sitting around an overstuffed turkey next to family members with whom I wildly disagree? How does the workplace change when you approach it as a waypoint on the path of life, where there is fullness of joy? Can a cubicle be a holy space? We can ask these questions and play them out in any arena of our lives—because indeed the temple, the gate of heaven, is everywhere. 

And what about the new and living way with your wallet? Since it’s that time of year and all. The church asks for your money not just because we have a beautiful and enormous sandstone building to care for, and certainly not as an exchange for services rendered or sins forgiven or God forbid a club membership. Pledging to the church is a spiritual practice, one piece of living a life of generosity. It’s not transactional, not a purchase of God’s favor like the temple priests made again and again, there’s no vending machine God here—no, approaching what we own and have earned from the new and living way actually starts with the acknowledgement of the once and for all free gift: everything we think we “own” was first given to us, and what we do or do not “earn” in money or in merit is actually irrelevant to God’s estimation of who we are, which is the only opinion that really counts on that subject. In the new and living way, having passed through the curtain that is Jesus’s flesh, having received a new birth, it is now Christ who lives in us, and we are freed, freed to give ourselves away, and to give from everything that we have, including our financial resources, out of a grateful assurance and confidence in God whose promise is faithful.

Through scripture and through infinite daily unveilings, God’s apocalyptic grace comes to us as a merciful earthquake, shaking down our illusions, freeing us up for generosity and vitality and love. The fundamental illusion that has to fall is the thought that we are separate from God. I am one stone here, and God is another, perhaps bigger, stone over there. This is what is being revealed: we are not separate from God, the world is not separate from God. “Lord, not you, it is I who am absent” (Denise Levertov). The dividing wall, no matter how stable, how stonelike, or immovable the separation may appear, can’t endure God’s loving, constant, gentle, shaking. It’s an earthquake but if an earthquake were a parent gently shaking you awake on what turns out to be Christmas morning. Jesus stands at the door and knocks. Tap, tap, tap. The wind whistles; the river does its work. “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”