The Sky is Falling                                                                          Mark 13:1-8                           

I apologize in advance to those who have heard me tell this before and I apologize to those who have not heard me tell it before as well. Once upon a time a little red hen was picking up stones and worms and seeds in a barnyard when something fell on her head. "The heavens are falling down!" she shouted, and she began to run still shouting, "The heavens are falling down!" All the hens that she met and all the roosters and turkeys and ducks laughed at her, smugly, the way you laugh at one who is terrified when you aren't. "What did you say?" they chortled. "The heavens are falling down!" cried the little red hen. Finally a very pompous rooster said to her, "Don't be silly, my dear, it was only a pea that fell on your head." And he laughed and he laughed and everybody else except the little red hen laughed. Then suddenly with an awful roar great chunks of crystallized cloud and huge blocks of icy blue sky began to drop on everybody from above, and everybody was killed, the laughing rooster and the little red hen and everybody else in the barnyard, for the heavens actually were falling down. Moral: It wouldn't surprise me a bit it they did. (James Thurber, Fables for Our Times)

And what about us? Would it surprise us if the sky began to fall? Why are we so sure that it won't or that the ground will hold us when we step upon it? I daresay we haven't really given such things too much thought. Some how we just assume that everything will always be the way it has always been while at the same time we know that nothing of this world stays the same. Nothing at all. We are distracted with just being who we are and doing what we do and we lose sight of the bigger picture, of our relationship to time and space, to sky and earth. We forget that God has called us out of the world to be a people, a people who act with God as participants in the history of the world. It is not a given that what might happen will happen. Fred Craddock has said that apocalyptic literature such as that which is our reading for the day is a glimpse beyond what is going on to what is really going on. The question is do we really want to know?

So what is really going on? Is the sky falling? Is that some kind of metaphor for a dying church or a crumbling culture or the end of civilization as we know it?  

Was it a metaphor like the one Jesus used about the Temple falling down? Jesus has just criticized the Temple and its rulers in no uncertain terms where we enter the story today and the very next words out of anybody's mouth is praise for the beauty of the Temple. That Temple was impressive by the way. No less a personage than Josephus himself, an influential intellectual of the time, describe it this way:

Now the outward face of the Temple in its front wanted nothing that was likely to surprise either men's minds or their eyes: for it was covered all over with plates of gold of great weight, and at the first rising of the sun, reflected back a very fiery splendor, and made those who forced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away, just as they were at a distance, like a mountain covered with snow; for, as to those parts of it that were not gilt, they were exceeding white  . . .Of its stones, some of them were forty-five cubits, five in height, and six in breadth. (as quoted by Ched Myers in Binding the Strongman)

It really was quite a place. I am told that some had come to confuse the place with the religion itself as if its existence represented the existence of a whole people of faith. No wonder they were shocked by the words Jesus used. Was he referring to the Temple or to them? No wonder these words were used against him at his trial. But what did he say? That there would not be one stone left standing of this Temple, the walls are comin' down, the sky is falling?

They must have thought he was crazy but maybe not. At least some of those who heard him say these words would live to see the day when the Temple was, in fact, destroyed. I do not believe there is any magical connection between Jesus words and what happened later. It was inevitable. Buildings do not last forever. The words about the future uttered by Jesus should not have surprised anybody for as Bruggemann put it in his commentary on the text: the events depicted here are not from a crystal ball but everyday life.  

The violence and horror of war; the impending destruction of the Temple; the perilous and shaky existence of the Church under persecution; the enticing voices of false prophets and messiahs all of whom had an easier way - a way that would avoid suffering and sacrifice, a way that would deliver satisfaction, a way that would simply give people what they wanted. Perhaps it is just such a time that Amos was talking about in another time and place when he prophesied that there would be a famine not of bread or of water but a famine of the word - a famine not significant just for the absence of the word but by the presence of the lie or the many lies that rise up to take its place in its absence. To think that the temple is the religion is a lie. To think that life can be faithfully lived without sacrifice and suffering is a lie; to think that love is possible with out giving up something of one's self is a lie; to want it all and expect to have it without giving anything is a lie; to think that the word will make life easy for us instead of more difficult is a lie. All of these things are one version or another of the lie that tempts us to check out of the struggle to be authentic, to be faithful; to take the easy way, the expected way; to just go with the status quo and keep our head down.  

When Jesus addressed those present that day with these ominous words it was in fact a call to faith, to rely at least as much on God to hold us while we hold on, as we rely on the sky not falling on our heads. Then and now we are asked to live in a time when the sky is falling as if it were not falling. It is not simply a brave word to get ready and to survive the blows of the universe as they come but rather it was a visionary word challenging us to find meaning in the suffering, to know that change only happens through suffering, that there is not and cannot be any transformation without it. Indeed let's be clear, where there is authentic life there is suffering. Faith demands it, love embraces it.

But there is more: The word here above all other words is that the falling sky is only the beginning and not the end. The beginning of the birth pangs is how he put it. Is it hard for us to think as if we are at the beginning of something? We have been here so long it feels more like the end but what if the end is really the beginning, the beginning of a birth, of a new creation? Secretly or not so secretly we are expecting the end. Dare we even imagine that we are only at the beginning? Can we bear it? Or can we embrace it?

I think it was Craddock who wrote, Something marvelous that God is doing is yet to arrive, to be born. All that we have known and all that we have not known are not even half of it. There is yet something else that is not yet.

We are always creating a new day.  We are not just who we have been but who we will be. Let the Temple fall, and fill my heart with love to do God's good work in the world.  Let the wars rage and give me a passion for peace and the willingness to make sacrifices to have it. Give me the faith to work always for what I know I can never accomplish but also know I can never fail to accomplish as long as I continue to work for it. Let the sky fall and the earthquakes destroy and give me courage to get up every day in the ruins to serve the broken and the wounded and the lost wandering the world without shelter or hope. Let the old day go and give us a new morning where the light is shining and every tear is dry and every heart is free and unafraid.