THE DAYS WILL COME – Luke 21.5 - 19

Sermon by the Revd Roxana Teleman

The highlight of an Italian holiday, nearly 25 years ago, was my first visit of St Francis’ basilica in Assisi. For those born, like me, on the wrong side of the iron curtain, in Eastern Europe, such a visit, unthinkable for more than 40 years, had been made possible by the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989.

Altogether a memorable visit: not only for the overwhelming beauty of Giotto’s frescos, depicting the life of St Francis, that I had so long wished to see with my own eyes, but also a very intense spiritual experience.

If someone had told me, in those moments, that the days will come when the basilica will be shaken, that its stones will fall down, I would have shrieked in horror. It is what actually happened in 1997, when earthquakes caused the vault to collapse. The basilica looked so massive and solid, so permanent – yet it was fragile and perhaps with only a short lifespan for the scale of human history.

Many of us can remember other sanctuaries damaged or destroyed in the last years, be it by hatred, war, natural catastrophes, and even development projects: Buddhist temples in Nepal, ancient religious sites in Iraq, churches in Philippines, Haiti and New Zealand, mosques blown to pieces in Syria, temples in Myanmar …

Living in France, I cannot but mention one of the finest examples of French Gothic architecture, the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris. Its roof caught fire 7 months ago. I’m sure that, for many people, the images of the raging blaze were rather apocalyptic. My daughter, in Paris at that time, told me of the despair of many people in the street. Even if France constantly reaffirms the secularism as being one of its fundamental national values, Notre-Dame has become a symbol not only of the city of Paris, but of the country itself, closely associated with its history: here Napoleon has been crowned (as Henry VI of England has been in his time, as king of France), here the liberation of Paris in 1944 has been celebrated. Here the French road system has its centre 

For all its beauty and spiritual meaningfulness, or perhaps because of that, Notre-Dame had also attracted much hatred. It has been desecrated and plundered in the French Revolution, the statues of the Biblical kings on its façade, mistaken for French kings, have been beheaded. And in the last years, one feared that the days will come when the cathedral will be targeted by bomb attacks.

Like Notre-Dame, other sanctuaries were and still are constitutive of a shared identity, whether national, political, cultural, religious. Such was the case of the Jerusalem Temple: rebuilt, significantly expanded and lavishly adorned at Herod the Great’s initiative; completed in AD 63, nearly 70 years after Herod’s death, only to be methodically destroyed by the Romans, 7 years later, during the siege of Jerusalem. The destruction of the Temple would leave a scar on the national and religious identity of Israel, because it represented before, during, and after Jesus’ time the dwelling place of God’s sheltering protection for Israel.

No wonder Jesus’ disciples wanted to know when the Temple stones will plummet

and what the sign will be? When will those days come? What will be the end of the old order of things?

We all want to know how to read the signs of our time, of our age that is replete with terror and fear, when rage seem to have been loosen. What starts as a winter of discontent seems to grow into decades. Political upheavals, societies that at times seem ablaze, natural disasters, climate change - are these signs of the end?

No matter how unsettling, how deeply worrying our times may be for us, there is nothing new about what we are going through.  No place and no age are immune to the consequences of human arrogance and frailty, of misguided and misguiding leadership. It is part and parcel of our fallen nature.

Not only the building blocks of our societies are falling down – but also those of our private lives. Let us just remember those who lose their jobs, become homeless, whose family ties are broken, those who are caught in a spiral of addiction, those who are on a traumatic journey as refugees.

For all our western confidence in science, technology and democracy, for all our prosperity and intellectual sophistication, we cannot hope the feeling that things are falling apart.

We live in a constant state of anxiety, we cast about for a timetable: how much time left before war reaches Europe, before the global oil crisis, before all the glaciers melt? Do we still have time to find a remedy? We half-close our eyes, we half-cover our ears to protect ourselves from the feared answer.

But we are people of faith, are we not?  And as people of faith we seek to learn the signs which would prove that God’s kingdom is at hand. And we do this while incessantly praying: may your Kingdom come, may your will be done.

This is a difficult ‘space’ for us to inhabit, but Jesus Christ enters it to be with us and asks: “Why don’t you know how to interpret the present time?”

The time we are eager to interpret is Chronos, the measurable time, with a linear unstoppable flow, which encapsulates our earthly lives, the events thereof are so evident in every age: violence, injustice, poverty, natural disaster… We do not easily understand that Christ urges us, as he urged his disciples, to recognise not Chronos, that clips our wings, wears us out, devours us, but Kairos, the time that nourishes us, regenerates us, the time of our visitation from God, when He acts in our lives and in the world, the time when grace, pardon, peace and abundant life are freely offered. ‘Behold, I am doing a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?’ (Isaiah 43:19)

Kairos, God’s irruption in human time, comes not with tumult, but in the quiet of the night, with the birth of a child in Bethlehem, and, from there on, leads towards the Cross, and through death to life. God, in Jesus Christ, journeys with us and for us, to destroy death and its power.

He does not lead us to an end that means the final point or the final hour for the human race, but to the end that is the ‘telos’, the accomplishment, the divine goal for humankind, the communion with God.

Those who had prophesied that the days will come when human history will reach its end, its telos, its accomplishment, either through class struggle and the triumph of communism, like Marx, or through the triumph of capitalism, like Fukuyama, have been proven wrong, have remained trapped by Chronos.

 Living in the here and now, how can we reconcile a realistic assessment of the world around us with our faith? Hope should be our answer, the hope we put in God’s hands, not in a Temple or an edifice of stones or ideas, designed and built by human minds and hands, as solid and long-lasting this may appear. Some of those will disappear, some of those should disappear, as the Berlin Wall did, to let God’s kingdom break in.

 In the present disorder and distress, we have a task that may seem so foolish to the world around us: to trust God’s holiness, and to testify to it – a subversive task.

No, the end, the telos, is not yet, the days are still to come. Let us dare look beyond the apocalyptic horizons of our modern world, to look with hope to the new creation of all things in the kingdom of God, where the Sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings.

Let us dare look around us: the blocks of the Berlin wall have been scattered all over the world – and I see them as signs of hope for a better world. That better world is beyond our reach – but not beyond the reach of God, who comes to visit us and to re-make us as part of his new creation.

And let us dare listen and respond to that whispering voice the poet Rainer Maria Rilke heard: 

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear: […]

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me. […]

Give me your hand.”  (The Book of Hours, 1905)