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The Rev. Dr. Dennis E. Morey, Pastor
Scripture: Mark 13:1-8
Changing Perspectives
Sitting on a minibus with our four young children, Margaret and I were on our way to see the Passion Play in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, with six other people. Our children were quiet as the grownups in the bus talked.
One couple had been visiting their son and his family and they were on their way home and stopped to see the play. There was a group of three women traveling together. Two were sisters, and another woman was a nurse. Conversation on the way to the play was pretty general and we soon arrived.
On the way back to the hotel, the conversation turned to the play. Several people gave their perspective and I listened. Some commented on the behavior of the horses in the play and the camel, what the Baptist kids were doing down front, the difficulty they had in finding the bus, as well as the fine weather we had that evening—all interesting perspectives.
Someone asked me, “So what did you think?”
I replied, “It looked pretty much like the Gospel of Luke to me.”
The nurse turned to me and asked, “So this is not new to you?” She recognized that I had a different perspective. “What do you do that you would know it was from the Gospel of Luke?”
I told her that I was a pastor of a Presbyterian church in Iowa, and the passengers grew silent. “O good,” she replied. “I have a question. Do animals go to heaven? You see, I had this cat …”
Because I had a different perspective, I looked at the play differently than the others. There was one question after another, and it was a long ride back to the hotel.
Jesus had a different perspective than anyone on earth. Jesus had been a scholar of the scriptures and could see how the seasons and times fit together. He often tried to help his listeners connect the dots, but they refused to believe him. They insisted they saw reality and Jesus was delusional.
Today’s scripture is from the last few days before Jesus would die.
Earlier that week Jesus rode into Jerusalem, and the people hailed him as the descendent of David who would take the throne of Israel, but from a different perspective Jesus insisted on riding a donkey, the symbol of peace.
Jesus saw the Temple not as a magnificent building and an opportunity to merchandize Passover, but as his Father’s house, and he drove the moneychangers and the merchants out.
It was the place of continual worship of the true and living God. The system of sacrifice declared to the world its sin, and the never-ending grace of God.
From a human perspective, the Temple in Jerusalem was magnificent. King Herod had been given Judea to rule. He married a Jewish woman and tried to endear himself to the Jewish people by taking on the project of building a new Temple.
Herod engaged in many such projects that involved building retaining walls and bringing in hundreds of thousands of tons of fill to elevate his buildings high above the landscape.
Building was such a big deal during this time that the whole economy grew because of the jobs it created. Not only were builders needed, but shop owners and all the support personnel, priests, teachers and doctors, soldiers and everyone needed to make such a project possible. By the time of Jesus’ ministry the project, not quite finished, had already gone on nearly forty years.
Josephus the historian says that some of those stones were 40 feet long and 12 feet high and 18 feet wide. Bridges spanned ditches and valleys, gaining access to the sacred structure, all supported with stone arches and enormous foundation stones.
No mortar was needed to glue the stones together. Their weight was so great and the joints so precisely fit that they were as strong as if they had been formed together since the beginning of time.
The bridge leading to Solomon’s Porch was 345 feet long and 50 feet wide and rose up 225 feet from the valley below.
There was so much gold plating on the face of the Temple that when the sun rose in the morning its reflection blinded those who looked directly at its splendor.
The building and its supporting structure were so white that from a distance it appeared to be a snow-covered mountain. From a human perspective it looked like the most secure structure possible. It would no doubt be there in that spot forever.
It was that perspective of the building the disciples were talking about when Jesus said, “I am telling you this, the day is coming soon when not one stone will be left upon another.”
It nearly happened in 40 A.D. when Caligula was the Roman emperor. He insisted he was a god. He had heard about the Temple and that the Holy of Holies was empty. The Jews believed nothing human could describe the Lord God. Caligula decided he would go to Jerusalem and set up his own statue in the Holy Place. He died in 41 before he could do it.
Then in 70 A.D. Jerusalem fell to the Roman Emperor Titus. Everyone ran into Jerusalem for safety and he sealed off all the entrances and exits. Those who ran to the hills, as Jesus had advised, survived. From the city, 97,000 were taken prisoners and 1,100,000 died by slow starvation.
The city was sealed off. The food supply was completely depleted and people died so fast some died trying to bury others until there was no one to bury the dead. Josephus, the historian, tells of people chewing leather straps and old shoes when there was nothing left to eat. Then the cries of sorrow and pain stopped. Silence prevailed because no one had the strength to cry.
From God’s perspective, what had happened? Why did that society fall? What went wrong?
Why didn’t anyone listen to Jesus’ perspective? Today we don’t have Jesus telling us our society will fall. We have the final book of the Bible, Revelation, that tells us about the end of time, but our society and in many respects our religion has pretty much either ceased studying it or has marked it too complicated. Those who study it often stop, saying, “It is just too depressing. I don’t want to know what happens in the end.”
This weekend Hollywood has released a new movie about the end of the world. We are hearing about the Mayan calendar that some are saying predicts the doomsday end of time as the 21st of December 2012.
There is a movie about it, so that must mean it is true, right? We know Hollywood would never make a movie about something that was not true, don’t we? The truth is that the Mayan calendar was made by humans observing the alignments of planets and their repetition. It is not God’s perspective. I hope none of us buy into this latest Hollywood lie.
Jesus said there was no human who would ever be able to predict the end. The human can only make calculations from a human perspective. No one knows the way God sees things. Only God knows. If we buy into this whole idea, there is going to be a new hysteria and a new doomsday deception.
If we want to avoid the end of the world as we know it, we must stop doing what we know destroyed other civilizations.
We do know what caused the end of Jerusalem. It was simply poor choices of the people. They believed a lie.
They listened to leaders who wanted to protect the status quo. They closed their eyes to all the warning signs around them. They denied their responsibility and their place in God’s plan to call the people of the world to a relationship with God.
They preferred to believe that buildings and economies and human knowledge made them secure. They became their own gods. They said they obeyed the Lord God, but they obeyed their own appetites.
Their first priority was themselves. They had God’s word, but they chose to live above it. They had there in black and white what was right and what was wrong, and they allowed it all to fade into gray.
They thought their circumstances and personal judgment were more important than following what they knew was God’s way.
They used their religion to support their personal perspective, saying that they were better and smarter than others and they believed themselves protected by God’s promise to their ancestor, Abraham.
We need to ask ourselves if we are looking at life from our own perspective, what we hope will happen, what we have been told will happen, instead of how God sees it.
This video is a lesson about perspective. The first perspective is how a teenager sees her school. Listen closely to two very different perspectives of the same situation.
I wanted to show that today because it illustrates how far off we can be when we look at life and the situations in which we live.
What is going on in your life? Do you have worries? Do you have decisions to make? Do you have relationship problems? Now we can certainly pray and tell God how we see what is happening, and that is always good. God’s invitation for us to tell God what we think is going on in our lives is always open.
But we must also be wise enough to be quiet in our prayers and listen. God has a perspective, too. Finding God’s perspective and allowing it to guide us not only gives us courage to face the challenges, but also brings us the peace we crave. Looking at our situation from God’s perspective, trusting God to work out what is supposed to be, brings us great peace.
Amen.
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Mark 13:1-8 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 birthpangs.” (From the
New Revised Standard Version of the
Bible) |
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