November 18, 2007    Luke 21:5-19

    We do indeed live a thorny world.  The paper tells me that the poor are lagging in hurricane aid from Mississippi, that a cylcone has crippled Bangladesh, that militants are gaining strength in Pakistan, that more civilians have been killed by Hamas policemen, that there is an oil spill in California, that global warming is threatening our planet, that our economy seems to be just a bit shaky.  

    Last week I was looking at a sermon on this same scripture reading from Luke written by a colleague of mine thirteen years ago, and I was struck by how current it sounded.  “People are concerned,” the preacher said.  “ . . . For a long time there has been the feeling that things are coming unglued and are falling apart . . . From the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in Israel and terrorist activities, to conflict over the racial balance in the schools, people are concerned.  People are troubled and concerned about the T.V. their children watch.  They are troubled by some of the food they eat . . .”  And so on.  You get the drift.  We not only live in a thorny world today, but it seems that has been a condition of humankind since time immemorial.

A millenium ago monastic orders retreated to the wilderness convinced there was a better world than the one we have made.  A thousand years ago the 12th century Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, “The world is full of thorns.”  I suspect that if he had been able to pick up a newspaper and read it, he would have seen headlines similar to those we read today, only cast with different names, different places, different weapons.   He might have read: “Mob burns heretics at Liège” or “Henry V imprisons the Pope” or “Eleanor of Aquitaine divorces Louis VII and marries Henry II” or “Plague spreads throughout the country.”  As Bernard says, “The world is full of thorns.”

    Stepping back yet another millenium  we find Luke faced with the problem of proclaiming the good news of Christ in a thorny world - a world full of destruction and ruin.   In June of the year 66 C.E., dissident groups in Palestine formed a Jewish coalition and rose up in rebellion against Roman rule.  The rebellion began with defiance of imperial Rome in the cessation of temple sacrifices to the emperor.   By November, the passion in support of the rebellion had grown so enormously that  Cestus Gallus, the Roman legate of Syria, marched headlong into Jerusalem determined to smother the rebellion.  To his wonder and surprise, his troops were repelled by the dissidents, and they had no other choice but to retreat in humiliation.  Judea rejoiced in its newfound freedom and promptly set up a provisional revolutionary government in Jerusalem.  Rome did not, however, sit idly by, and two years later Vespasian, the greatest general of the time who would later become emperor, marched his troops down through Galilee, easily recapturing northern Palestine, leaving a trail of plundered villages and crucifying any captured insurrectionists.   Rome, caught in the turmoil of civil war, called Vespasian home, postponing his siege on Jerusalem, but within the year the general Titus sacked Jerusalem and burned the Temple to the ground.  That this is a thorny world we live in was as real to the Jewish population of Palestine in 80 A.D. and to Luke as he sat down to write his gospel as it was to Bernard of Clairvaux, to my colleague thirteen  years ago, or to us today.

    In the fourth century Augustine wrote his great treatise The City of God .   In this monumental book Augustine presents the idea that from the beginning of creation there have been two cities.  One was earthly, driven by a “lust for domination” characterized by division, by barriers between cultures, and by people who quarrel, fight, and wage war with each other.   What triumphs and victories of this earthly city there are, they are elusive, transient, and short-lived.   This is the world that Bernard might say is full of thorns.   Then there is the heavenly city where “those put in authority and those subject to them serve one another in love.”  This is our true home, a place of peace and light - that is, peace in its most comprehensive and profound sense . . . what the Bible calls shalom. 

    Surely the people Luke is addressing in his gospel account are experiencing full force that earthly city, the world of thorns.  How is he to tell the story of Christ in the face of such demoralizing defeat?   He decides to present the dilemma by using a style that is known as apocalyptic literature.  This is a type of “resistance” literature that evolved during the political upheaval of late biblical and intertestamental times, and apocalypse simply means “to lay bare” or “to throw open.  By using an apocalyptic style of writing Luke hopes to “lay bare” the true nature of these historical events - more specifically  to interpret the events of the Roman-Jewish war and the destruction of the Temple in light of the coming of Christ - that is, to glimpse the heavenly city among the ruins of this earthly world of thorns.  This seems to me to be the challenge we all have - those of us who live today, those who lived a decade ago, those who lived a thousand years ago, those who lived 2000 years ago.  It was even the struggle of those who returned from exile in Babylon 2500 years ago, only to find Jerusalem in a shambles and their Temple a mere shadow of its former self.  Isaiah broadcasts a wonderful vision of a new heaven and a new earth, but where do we glimpse that amid all the thorns of this life on earth?

    Having posed this question, I would like to read for you some excerpts from a book I have been reading recently.  Some of you know that I have become quite enamored with a cycle of books written by Jon Katz.  A writer by trade, Katz moved from his suburban home in NJ about five years ago  to what he has called Bedlam Farm in upstate New York.   His recent books are reflections upon his life on this farm where he lives with his border collies and Labrador retrievers, some sheep, two cows, chickens, three donkeys, some goats, and a cat named Mother.  While his reflections present graphic accounts of life on the farm and relationship with his various animals, there is a significant spiritual thread which runs through his story which makes it especially compelling.  In his book Dog Days there is a chapter called “Heavenly City,” and it is from this chapter that I would like to read.  Here is what he says.

    “Easter morning, 2006: One of the farm’s traditions . . . is taking the sheep down to the meadow across from West Hebron’s big brick Presbyterian church as services conclude on Easter Sunday . . .
    “But before we set off, I read a bit of Augustine’s City of God to my dogs . . . I’m not a religious man, but I respect religious holidays, even envy them in some ways.  And I’m conscious of the role faith plays in my life.  The late Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton was right, I think, when he said that a meaningful life is not possible without it . . .
    “[Now] when I look at the chicken manure, collapsing barns, and rusting fences of Bedlam Farm, I don’t want to push comparisons with a Heavenly City too far.  Yet is has been a place of peace and light for me, for all its flaws, decay, and continuing jolts of reality . . .
    “[For example], our first winter, as I struggled to navigate the cold and the ice, to feed and water animals, and deliver lambs on sub-zero nights, I wasn’t sure I would make it.  At the cost of a disintegrating spine, some frostbitten fingers, and many hard-won lessons about the true nature of farms, animals, and the seasons, I had survived . . .
    “Easter was a crisp, mostly sunny, and very beautiful day this spring [of 2006].  The songbirds had arrived in force.  A strong southwesterly wind whistled noisily through newly budding trees.  The donkeys and sheep were leaving hay in the feeder to munch on sprouting grass - the true sign of spring.
    “Yet the day was not proving as serene as I’d hoped.  The Labs had found some dead thing the evening before . . . and whatever it was had taken a toll on their digestive systems . . . Lulu [the cow] was limping, so I got out the hoofpick, knelt down next to her, and pulled a shard of rock out of her hoof.  Thus distracted, I didn’t notice the new ram, Rupert, scuttle up behind me and butt me . . . lightning bolts [shooting] up and down my vulnerable spine.
    “The water hose had sprung a leak and needed to be patched.
    “[And] I felt a bit melancholic . . . as I sometimes do on holidays, when my friends around town are with their families and I am away from my own . . .
    “Easter, and sunshine were very welcome.  The month before, mud season had descended on the farm.  The spring thaw had begun, but often it lasted only until dusk, when temperatures still plunged below freezing and stretches of black ice coated the roads.  The constant melting and thawing, along with the runoff from snowy hills, had turned the place into a bog.
    “There was nothing heavenly about mud season.  Only farms - and maybe zoos - know that rich brew of mud, manure, hay, wet fur, and fleece . . .
    “Trying to assemble a sort-of-heavenly city in West Hebron is not a casual thing . . . If the farm renews me, it also sometimes wears me out with its constant cycle of health and sickness, disruption and repair, life and death.
    “People tell me all the time that I’m living out their fantasies, but when I take stock of my blistered and stiffened hands, my painful back and sore legs, and all the chores and tasks I can never catch up with, I wonder if they would really want to trade places.  No place is perfect, no life without conflict, travail, or immunity to the tolls of late middle age.
    “Much of the time, nonetheless, I feel almost superstitious about having a place I cherish so much, and distinctly unworthy.  What have I done to deserve such a haven?
    “Every day is a decision, and I choose to be here, until the day comes when, as Augustine believed, I will leave my animal body and live in peace and without want . . .
    “ . . . we waited for the churchgoers to emerge . . . the organ music swelled and people began streaming out of the church toward their cars.  Soon, a gaggle of kids was standing at the edge of the parking lot, looking across a creek too wide to cross with sheep in the early spring.
    “‘Hey, Rose!’ they yelled [to my border collie] . . . I . . . got to my feet, a wordless signal for Rose to get to work, marching the sheep up and down the meadow . . .
    “Augustine probably had a different place in mind, perhaps a place a bit less pungent, with fewer curious, energetic, and slobbering dogs.  But as the sheep grazed under Rose’s watchful care . . .and I turned to look back at my patched-together homestead shimmering in the sunlight, I thought it qualified.”

    It is a thorny world we live in, and Luke as he writes his gospel is fully aware of what the citizens of Palestine have been through.   “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom,” Jesus says.  “You will know persecution and betrayal and hatred.  But . . . I will give you words and wisdom and  not a hair of your head will perish.  By your endurance you will gain your souls.”  Through all your trials and tribulations, I will be with you, Jesus says.  The “thorns of this world,” he promises, are sown in the soil of hope.

    Another writer has put it yet another way, saying that the kingdom of God may be found in all the mud and muck of the world, but it is real nonetheless and everyone’s life is sacred journey.  Where do you glimpse the heavenly city?  Where do you glimpse the kingdom of God?  Where do you know the presence of Christ?   There is, after all,  more out there than what the headlines would leave us to believe.  Do we glimpse Christ in the sincere concern of a friend, in the embrace of a child, in the new life of spring?  Do we find it in mystery and beauty of nature and its progeny?  Do we find it when love triumphs over evil, when kindness is given and received, when generosity fills our hearts?   When I sat at a BREAD meeting Thursday night, I thought I glimpsed God’s kingdom in a gathering of white and black, young and old, Christian and Jew, conservative and liberal, rich and poor, educated and not so well educated, but all with a passion for justice.   Do you remember that famous picture on 9/11 when two people jumped hand in hand from the Twin Towers?  What this image of two people going to their death says to me is that even in the darkest moments of horror and despair, two people reached out to each other and opted for something greater, transcending the destruction of this thorny world.   “Nation will rise up against nation, but,” says Jesus, “I will give you words and a wisdom that none can withstand, and not a hair on your head will ultimately perish. ” 

    “Lo, I am with you always - now in this thorny world and forevermore.”