Be the Stones--Pentecost + 23, Nov. 17, 2019

Year C, Proper 28, Pentecost + 23, Nov. 17, 2019

Luke 21:5-19

               ⁵When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, ⁶“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.” ⁷They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?”

          ⁸And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them. ⁹“When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.”

          ¹⁰Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; ¹¹there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. ¹²“But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. ¹³This will give you an opportunity to testify. ¹⁴So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; ¹⁵for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. ¹⁶You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. ¹⁷You will be hated by all because of my name. ¹⁸But not a hair of your head will perish. ¹⁹By your endurance you will gain your souls.

          In the old west, buildings were put up fast, since the people doing the building didn’t always know if the town would make it, and since there weren’t a lot of hardware stores on the frontier.  [Slide 2] In order to make the town look more inviting to cowpokes and homesteaders, owners would add façades—a larger front wall, often made of slightly better materials and painted nicely.

          [Slide 3] If you look carefully at this Bank, you will see that the building itself is little more than a shack.  But the front wall is nice.

          [Slide 4] I also found it interesting that the hotel seems to be owned by Mary, the mother of Jesus.

          Architects have kept the idea of the façade in their designs, using it in a variety of ways, with the advent of newer, more varied building materials. 

          [Slide 5] This is the Red Building at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.

          [Slide 6]  And this is the Bloomberg Pavilion at the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.

          [Slide 7]  I think this is my favorite, as it turns other buildings into cubist art.  This is the Basque Health Department Headquarters in Bilbao, Spain.

          [Slide 8]  Amazingly, this one is also in Bilbao.  This is the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao…and I don’t know about you, but now I want to go to Bilbao.

         

          Facades used to be there to distract from the plainness of the building behind them.  Now they are sometimes ways to draw the attention toward something equally wonderful, like an art museum.  They are certainly always a “first look”—a way to get your attention.

          Before King David proposed—and King Solomon built—a temple for the Lord in Jerusalem, the dwelling place of God was sometimes a rather plain affair. 

          [Slide 9]  Both Abram and, later, Jacob, stayed at a place which came to be known as Bethel, or Beit El (the house of God).  The two patriarchs were said to have built an altar there—basically a bunch of rocks.

          [Slide 10]  Moses and the Israelites built a tabernacle to house the ark of the covenant and other signs of God’s presence.  Parts of it were made of gold and bronze, so it wasn’t like an Old West Bank or anything.  But it was built like a tent, so it could be packed up and moved with the people. 

          [Slide 11]  So it didn’t hold a candle to the temple of Solomon, [Slide 12]  or the second temple, rebuilt after Solomon’s temple was destroyed by Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar.

          It was this very Temple which Jesus and a crowd of disciples were standing before when those followers became fascinated by the beautiful stones and other adornments on the temple façade.  They were in Jerusalem for the Passover, Jesus having entered rather dramatically a few days earlier on the back of a colt.  Jesus had been teaching every day in the temple, knowing that his days on earth were coming to a close. 

          People had been coming to the temple to hear Jesus preach, but as they did so, they passed by all of the improvements which the King Herod (boo! Hiss!) had been making.  And they did exactly what Herod hoped they would do:  they Ooohed and Aaahed over the beauty on the outside of the temple. 

          And Jesus said to them something that we hear pretty often these days:  “It’s all coming down.”

          [Slide 13] One of my the professors, Dwight Zscheile, recently wrote an article which is getting a lot of buzz.  The title of the article is “Will the ELCA be gone in thirty years?”  The article refers to membership trends in our denomination which suggest that if we continue doing what we’re doing, there will be fewer than 16,000 ELCA Lutherans in worship on a Sunday in the year 2041.

          Pretty sobering, eh?  As Jesus stood before the temple, in the telling of Luke, who already knows the future, since he is writing fifty years in the future, Jesus tells those gathered pupils what Luke already knows:  this temple will be gone in less than forty years.  All those pretty stones are coming down.

          So if your faith is in the façade, be prepared for the whole thing to come tumbling down.  Wise words, then and now. 

          If your faith is in the façade—the idea of Christianity, the practice of regular worship—and not in the living Christ in our midst and your reflection of that incarnation, it’s all going to come tumbling down. 

          “The days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”

          The days will come when this denomination as it exists now will be thrown down, if all we see are pretty worship and lutefisk dinners.  Important things, those…well, the worship, at least. 

          But our faith cannot rest upon a façade of Christianity.

          Jesus, knowing that his days are surely numbered, realizes that their days will be numbered as well, unless they can get beyond admiring the pretty thing they’ve built.

          “Don’t see the stones,” he tells them.  “Be the stones.”

          A façade of Christianity is not enough.  A façade of faith is not enough.  There are those in our midst which will use the name of Christ to advance a narrative which has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ.  “Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’”

          You have to be stones.  You have to be rock solid in what you know of God, of justice, of truth.  Because they will call it all into question.  And if you are not rock solid, if you are not a stone, you will be cast down like this temple will be.

          There are many facades out there, people of God.  Pretty buildings, pretty words, pretty promises.

          But we shall follow Jesus.  Because we are the anti-trend.  We are preparing to make an accounting of our faith.  Not our worship.  Not our building.

          Our faith.  In Jesus Christ.

            

          We’re asking the questions that matter.  And we’re wrestling with the answers.  Because we want to be stones. 

          We’re not perfect.  We’re a lot like that first stone, Petros, the rock upon whom Jesus planned to build his church. 

          We doubt, we hide, we aren’t quite sure what to say.  But we keep working at it, asking the hard questions.  And the church will indeed be built upon us.  And it will be strong, and beautiful…from the inside out.