Something is Wrong
[Matthew 24 in Dialogue with New Monasticism by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove]
As we are experimenting with our new expression of New Meadows United Methodist Church, it’s a new day, a new identity, a more inclusive identity of our greater community. So the week I wrote this, I recently started reading this book, New Monasticism by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. I’d met Jonathan when I was doing my theology work at Duke. He really tries to put to practice what it looks like to live a lifestyle that’s modeled after what Christ modeled for us, living our faith, not just understanding it once a week for an hour and then going back to our normal lives.
In his case, he lives in an intentional community with people of different races, different economic statuses (stati?) and they shared their resources with one another. They really tried to live into what the church looked like in the book of Acts. So, I decided to start reading this as I’m trying to learn from different people and learn how to best guide, not just my own life, but the life of this faith community in a direction towards such a lifestyle. This book, this first chapter, really kind of hit me. I was figuring out what I was going to speak about this week and this kind of hit me.
So in the last few weeks, actually last few months, a couple different times we’ve worked on a Lectio Divina, a practice of reading scripture where you read it multiple times and you don’t just go into the text about what the actual text means, but you really dive personally into it. How is it speaking to you? How is God knocking on your door through the text? It’s a different style of preaching when I go from this and it appears to me that in this first chapter, this must have been how Jonathan was reading Matthew chapter 24. This is when the disciples come to Jesus and they ask him how do we know when the end is near? How do we know when this time is changing?
Why I’m interested in this right now, I mean, take a look around! We’ve got some of Idaho burning up right now as well as a very significant part of Oregon and California that are on fire. I used to live in Oregon, so that one hits home a little bit more. Places that I paddled are burning to the ground. The towns are gone. The burger place I used to hang out at after getting off of the river, gone. And, you know, it struck me. I’m not the only one. I imagine, many of you are feeling like, what is going on?! We’ve got a global pandemic. We’ve got legitimate protests and riots going on for over a hundred days. The social structure is boiling over to where people can’t even control their anger, because it’s just been going on for so long. Sure there are opportunists and those opportunists need to be addressed, but there’s a massive injustice that has been going on for too long. We’ve got one of the most divisive figures in modern history leading our country. It’s safe to say, there’s a lot going on that would make people think like these disciples, what is going on!? What is going on in the world, are we near the end?
As Hartgrove said, “Bob Dylan captured it pretty well when he said you don’t need a meteorologist to tell which way to wind blows.” We can tell something is wrong. Now I’m specifically using The Message version of this Matthew text because I think it really gets to it in this text. Jesus’s response to these disciples may ask how do we know if the end is near, if and when the temple is going to be destroyed, and when everything is going to change. Let’s look at the text:
So, let’s get back to Hartgrove. Here, the way he looks at it, those signs Jesus spoke of make it plain enough to see “that the storm was brewing on the political scene, that there was corruption in the economic sphere, that the temple was filled with hypocrites, and that God’s people had strayed from their calling. Life can’t go on like this for very long. Jesus said the end is near. Whoever can read these signs of the time ought to know that there is wrath that is to come.” Now, as Hartgrove points out, the sign the word the end is near sounds a little extreme, and this was 2,000 years ago! So, take a look at this storm brewing on the political scene, corruption in the economic sphere, the Temple, God’s people, hypocrites, and straying from their calling. Does this sound familiar? Does this not sound like our world today?
The comfort we can take is that this, these crazy times, are nothing new. The black plague happened centuries ago. There have been famines in between then and now. There have been major natural disasters. We had “the war that was to end all wars” and yet since then, we’ve had multiple wars. No one knows when the end is, and it’s important and we don’t read too much into this, but as Hartgrove points out, what we do need to read into, is that something is wrong and we can tell that if we keep living in this wrong way, that we will destroy ourselves. That is the biggest, most important part of this message. Death will follow if we live like this, whether it’s the end of the entire planet, I mean everything is burning down, hurricanes are getting stronger and more frequent, as are other natural disasters. Climate change is real, and this is an end that could happen because of what we have done. That is sin! However, throughout the gospel of Mark, leading into the Mark version of this very passage, Jesus says “repent, for the time is at hand.” Repent means to turn. To change. Change what we’re doing. Are we going to live in this old way of death? Or, are we going to live in a new way? When he says the time is at hand, the end is near, the Greek word for “time” that is used in the gospel of Mark is Kairos. Now, in Greek, there are two words for time: there is Kairos and Chronos. If “the time is at hand” was chronos, that would mean that the end of the world is about here. “I’ve got a message! don’t wait till it’s too late!” But, that’s not what he says. He says Kairos. This means it is the opportune moment. He’s saying, “I’m knocking at your door. I’m giving you an opportunity, right here right now, to make a change.” That’s what this is about. What opportunity are we going to take? Are we going to live in the old way, where there’s still going to be more wars?
The United States has been at war for most of its existence. After the war that was going to end all wars, World War I, we’ve had World War II, we’ve had the Korean War, which is still actually going on, by the way. We have the Vietnam war, multiple wars in Central America, Africa, and the Middle East. September 11th hit, actually I originally recorded this on September 11th. 19 years ago, what took place, we need to remember. Never forget! Not just never forget the people who died needlessly in the towers, but never forget the people that heroically lost their lives as they were saving those people, but also never forget that our country rushed to war! Twice! This is not the kind of repentance that Hartgrove speaks of, that Jesus speaks of. Are we following into that same way that has been destroying humanity and destroying the planet around us? Where are we going to turn? Which way are we going to go? When we continue to look at signs, we’ve got a racial crisis at our doorstep. Something I never thought about, but Hartgrove pointed out that most of the people in the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina were black. He pointed out one of his colleagues made the statement of “wow, I had no idea New Orleans was such a black city.” Well, it’s not, it’s a racially diverse city, but you only saw the black people because they were the less affluent people, which meant that as the white people left the town of New Orleans, they left their black brothers and sisters behind. Would I have thought about that? I would have thought, get me and my family out of here! Would I have thought about people I don’t even know that are too poor to leave and evacuate? That was convicting to me!
What else do we need to think about? If you look at abortion, as Hartgrove says, “Catholics and evangelicals are right to insist that millions of children who’ve been aborted in America are a sign that something is deeply broken and wrong about our way of life.” Now I’m not going to get to the political argument of which way is the right way to do it. I have my own opinions on that. I honestly think both major sides of this argument are trying to see that number come down. We know something is wrong, but what is the right way to do it? We can agree to disagree on that as long as we are not being unjust about it. Regardless, it is a sign that something is wrong, whether it’s the often misused argument that people are doing it out of convenience, or the fact that some people are just so desperate they don’t believe that they can actually feed and take care of a child.
It’s a sign something is wrong when both conservative and liberal critics of the church are right that something is wrong with the church in America. We are failing at following Christ’s values, both the values of individual holiness, but also the values of caring for the poor and the justice that is often not found for our brothers and sisters of color, or folks of different sexualities, people that are treated as “other” because they don’t fit cleanly into the American box.
Something is wrong.
So where’s the hope? Here we’ve addressed that something is wrong in this country. We’ve addressed that something is wrong in the state of our church, in the world. Where do we go from here? Repent, the time is at hand! We have the opportunity. Every day. To make changes. To make a simple change as individuals. Or, to make changes anymore systemic and at a larger level. The call is now, but it’s always now. The call is always now, to repent, to change, to stop treating the world as just a collection of commodities for our use, that will no longer be available to future generations if we keep it up. The opportunity is now to start seeing people different from us as our equals, and that means fighting for justice at the political level and that also means that at the individual level to start (or continue) standing up when you see someone being wronged. That is hard. I hate conflict but there are times I need to stand up and sometimes I fall short, don’t do it, and I stay silent. I need to repent of that. There is hope. There’s hope that this is the time for the church to shine, to be the church. There’s always a chance for the church to be what it’s supposed to be, the body of Christ, Christ the Redeemer, Christ the one who is God. The very word of God. There is hope, and we have work to do.
