May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight oh God, our strength and our redeemer.
 
     I imagine them there in the temple- Jesus and a great crowd that has come to listen to him. Jesus has been teaching here since his impressive arrival in Jerusalem, just about a week previously. The temple is the center, the very heart of Israel’s life – even more, the heart of its worship. It is an imposing structure, although still under construction. This temple, the third temple, was started by Herod, in 20 before the Common Era. As Luke tells us, it has beautiful stones. More than one commentator, describing the temple, quoted the words of the first century writer Josephus; he said: “Now the outward face of the temple 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, it reflected back a very fiery splendor and made those who forced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away, just as they would have done at the sun’s own rays.”
 
     An impressive building, indeed, but even more, the place where the presence of the holy was felt and experienced and believed to dwell. All this wonder and beauty was offered for God’s glory, and yes, as is so often the case in such situations, certainly for the glory of the builder, the benefactor. The temple was also the setting of conflict between Jesus and the religious authorities of his day. When he came first to the temple, he took a whip to those who were selling things in it; he drove them out, saying, “It is written: my house shall be a house of prayer for all people, but you have made it a den of thieves.”
 
     He has been teaching there every day since, and Luke tells us that from that time on the leaders kept looking for a way to kill him, but they could not find one because all the people were spellbound by what they heard. It is in this place, in this moment then, with the listeners marveling at the grandeur of the temple, even as they are spellbound by Jesus’ words, that Jesus prophesies destruction and devastation. “The days will come,” he says, “when not one stone will be left on another, and all will be thrown down.”
 
     Just for a moment, feel into that astonishing word, and even more, feel into the loss that it implies. Jesus is talking about the violent destruction of a peoples’ very center, what they have counted on spiritually, communally. He is talking about the loss of the locus of meaning, the destruction of the space of the divine presence, the place where they, where we, have given our best and where worship is possible.
 
     Perhaps you have had some experience like this. I think myself of our experience here at Holy Apostles of the devastating fire – can it really be 17 years ago? That feeling of standing out on 9th Avenue, seeing the smoke and the ruin, and wondering what would become of us as a people. The answer came, of course, over time, but we had to go through the devastation.
 
     We in New York also have the experience, more secular but perhaps even greater in its symbolic power, of the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Surely all the questions of what will become of us, of what it means, of how we are to live on the other side of it, are echoed in this passage. We may have had less dramatic and public experiences that nevertheless have this quality of the loss of center. I think for myself of going home to the place where I grew up and finding the woods in which I wandered every day of my childhood were simply no longer there.
 
     I think of experiences of life falling apart, center not holding, the end of the world as we have known it. The end of a relationship perhaps, or the end of a job, or the coming of a sudden catastrophic-feeling diagnosis. One example of this that has been the most poignant for me happened to my downstairs neighbor just about ten years ago, when her husband and son were killed by a bus crossing the street. Surely in that instant life was shattered. It would never be again what she had known.
 
     Jesus prophesies the destruction of the temple as the harbinger of yet a larger destruction, and then the consummation of all things – the very end of the world, and the dawn of a new age. His own ministry has been the sign of this new realm of God breaking in, and his death and resurrection are the pivot point on which it all turns. And of course the immediate response of his hearers is “When?” and “How shall this happen?” The first Christians, like many Christians after them, were preoccupied with the notion of the end of time. They expected it to come quickly, in their lifetime, and that expectation was not fulfilled. Their expectations were part of a larger worldview, part of a literary genre that was common in Jesus’ day, an apocalyptic worldview. The worldview is that crisis and destruction are being brought by God’s majestic intervention from outside of history, making everything new, vindicating the faithful and righting wrongs, and it speaks specifically to a suffering and persecuted church.
 
     By Luke’s time, however, by the time that Luke is telling this story to his community, the temple has already been destroyed. So, there’s a kind of a backwards and forwards in the way I believe we’re meant to hear this passage. The delay in the end of all things is already being experienced by Luke’s community. There’s already a sense that we have to understand the end and the consummation and the action of God in a somewhat different way. There is still a real crisis: life, as those early Christians knew it, had been shattered and remade and it would be shattered again many times, as it has been for so much of human history. The instability, the wars, the insurrections, the floods and earthquakes and famines and plagues that Jesus speaks about have come and are coming.
 
     But this sense of many different perspectives on time helps me as I look at our times, our times with so much violence and so much war – our time of terrible threats to human life and to the earth itself. It helps me to wonder, to pray, and to see these crises not as an end coming from the outside of history, but as a challenge to my imagination and faith, to my sense of responsibility as a human being and a person of faith, to my discernment about how I am called – we are called – to participate in the birth pangs of the new thing that God is doing.
 
     The actual meaning of the word “apocalypse” is uncovering, or revealing. It is to see what has been hidden or what has been denied. That new revelation may explode suddenly or it may emerge gradually in the midst of profound disorientation. The neighbor that I spoke of, who lost her son and husband, said to me, “I had no idea that I was signing up for an advanced course in mystery.”
 
     What do we see in these moments of crisis? Surely we see, if we are open, something about ourselves, about our need to change – perhaps about guilt and responsibility, perhaps about our longing for God. If we are faithful, hopefully also we see the love that undergirds us and the interconnection that we have with all things. But even more, the revelation, the apocalypse, is to say that God is present – not in the old expected way, not limited by our prior experience of God, but present in truth and power and mystery, in hiddenness and in sudden flaring forth doing something that we can only begin, dimly, to imagine.
 
     It is this uncovering that is beginning to happen throughout the rest of the passage, as Jesus’ words about what is coming for his hearers, and especially for his followers, move from social devastation to personal participation. “Don’t pay attention,” he says, “to those who come with easy answers and explanations. Don’t go following after them.” And then he says, “Don’t be terrified!”
 
     Clearly there are plenty of reasons, in such a moment, to be terrified. And it’s comforting to me, if strange, that Jesus doesn’t just say, “Don’t be afraid,” in the way that happens often throughout scripture. Terror can be an expected response to the confrontation with the powers that be, to persecution, to betrayal by loved ones, to imminent loss, and yes, possible death.
 
     But still Jesus says, “Don’t be terrified. Find your courage.” Courage. Strength of heart. The first virtue, as Bill Coffin said, that makes all others possible. “In this apocalypse, this crisis, this catastrophe,” Jesus says, “you will have the opportunity to testify, to bear witness.” That word-witness- yes, is martyr. “Some of you will be killed, and all of you will be hated because of my name, but not a hair of your head will perish.” Some of you will be killed! But not a hair on your head will perish.
 
     These are hard and sobering and difficult words, and yet we have to hear them. We have to ask, “What is the opportunity that Jesus speaks of in moments of crisis?” He says it is to gain your soul, to grow, to become your soul, to gain a sense of what is truly essential, to find that undergirding love – that trusting connection to Jesus – that vast and open heart. It is to find that opportunity to participate in what God is doing in ways that we cannot yet predict and cannot control.
 
     So several questions are raised for me by this passage, by these difficult and bracing and sobering words. How do we grow in courage? How do we live in difficult times?

     Surely it is a process. I think, of all the Biblical characters who show us this, perhaps Peter is the most powerful in his absolute failure and cowardice at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion - his repentance, his working through, his forgiveness and his going on to be a powerful witness to the resurrection.
 
     We talked a lot on this year’s retreat about how we grow in courage. I shared with those who were there that one of my own mantras comes from Eleanor Roosevelt, who said, “Every day do something that scares you.” It’s like there’s a working of the muscle, of taking risks, of stepping up. I know that when I am afraid, I have to lean into the community. I have to find my time in nature, which for me, helps me connect with something larger than myself.
 
     In thinking about how to grow in courage, I first began to write about different prayer practices, breathing and meditation, that help me.  But honestly, the most important thing is to remember to pray at all, in whatever way you pray. It may include screaming and weeping and stretching your heart. Surely it involves starting to move, taking the first right step. That is, in fact, where I connect with that other strange word of Jesus in this passage, who says, “Don’t rehearse what you are to say. I myself will give you words and wisdom.”
 
     I think it’s true that we don’t discover how we can serve, how we can live, how we can be brave, by waiting and thinking about it. We find it in the moving, in the action, in the doing, in the commitment.

     And then the other question is: what is the witness that I am, that we are called to make? Each of us will have our own answer to this question in the context of the catastrophes and challenges of our time and of our personal lives, and in the context of our faith – our baptism, our commitment to a God of wild and radical love who we are called to serve before the idols that claim us, that call us, that seduce us…the idols of security and money and status and power.
 
     I know that our witness often looks like compassion, like hospitality. I know that it includes standing up for the dignity of every human being, particularly those who are outcast and marginal, that it looks like claiming and committing to the integrity of creation. I know that our witness involves the costly work of forgiveness and reconciliation, the discovery that my enemy is part of me, one whom I must learn how to love. That witness may be made in an open hearted “Yes” or an equally open hearted “No”, with clarity, setting boundaries. It involves vulnerability; it insists that community is more important than things and it depends in gratitude and trust on the wild and radical love of God, the one who is present in surprising and mysterious ways.
 
     Whatever it is, Jesus tells us that we will have the opportunity in this crucible of destruction and courage to gain our souls. So in the end, I invite you to muse on and live these questions:

     What is it in your life and in our world that is ending?

     What frightens you? How can you hear the words of Jesus: “Don’t be terrified?”

     What is being revealed? Where is God doing a new and startling thing? What are the glimmers or bursts of revelation?
 
     We are coming towards the season of Advent with its message, stay awake and watch. What do you need to live in apocalyptic times?

     What will help you grow your soul and keep your courage?

     And finally, what is calling out now for your witness? What is the testimony that is yours to make?
 
     Amen.