The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost-the Rev Melanie Lemburg

 25th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 28B

November 14, 2021

 

        We don’t realize how much we rely on landmarks until they are no longer there.  In two different times in my life, I’ve lived someplace where major landmarks have disappeared in an instant.  Even though I had only lived in New York City for a couple of weeks before September 11, 2001, in my 3 years there, I never got used to the gap in the downtown skyline where the twin towers once stood when I’d go for a run south on the West-side Highway.

        On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the whole landscape was wiped out and irrevocably changed when Hurricane Katrina came ashore.  Parishioners who had lived there their entire lives told me stories about how, after Katrina, they would get lost traveling well-known routes because all the distinguishing landmarks were gone, so they never really felt like they knew where they were at any given time.  When I moved there 4 years after Katrina, they still hadn’t replaced street signs, so anytime I would try to go somewhere off my regular path, I would often get lost.  You should probably know that I often find myself “directionally challenged.”  Just last weekend, a companion and I decided to walk to dinner from St. Mark’s Church in Brunswick where we’d had the opening service of convention.  It actually took us a while to realize that we had gotten lost on the three-block trip to the restaurant, and when we called my husband to come get us, we finally realized that we had walked in the opposite direction of the restaurant—this is with ample street signs and my phone’s gps.

        But even for people who are not directionally-challenged like me, it is easy to get lost when known landmarks are wiped away.

      The community that the writer of Mark is addressing knows something about this.  As one commentator writes, “Mark was likely written during (or just after) the disastrous Jewish revolt against Roman imperial occupation in Palestine (66 – 70 CE). Mark’s world was shattered and shaken to its core. The Roman armies vanquished the rebellion and destroyed the Jewish temple, desecrating what for Jews was nothing less than the sacred heart of the world. The message of Mark’s Gospel is thus a message of hope proclaimed in the midst of catastrophe, grace in the midst of violence and ruin. To really hear it, we have to listen from a position of desolation, chaos, and bewilderment; we have to listen alongside the traumatized soldier, the displaced refugee, the pregnant teenager, the addict and his heartbroken family…. This is where Mark lives. These are the depths from which Mark proclaims God’s good news.”[i]

So, it makes sense that in our portion of Mark for today, we see the disciples begging Jesus for certainty.  We, who have seen many of the landmarks of our world shifting for the last 18 months, can certainly understand that longing for a sure foundation, for known landmarks, when the world around us feels like it is in chaos. 

        The Hebrews reading is a portion of a sermon to a dispirited congregation.  The preacher is addressing a congregation that is suffering from decline; he is addressing a flock who is “tired and discouraged about the way evil seems to persist in the world.  As a result the congregation has begun to question the value of being followers of Christ.  Attendance at worship has begun to falter, zeal for mission has waned, and the kind of congregational life that is rich with love and compassion has begun to dissipate.”[ii] 

It’s interesting to me that both Mark and the Hebrews reading end up in the same place—hope.  In the gospel reading, Jesus doesn’t offer his disciples certainty but he does offer hope, telling them that God will come to the rescue “in spectacular fashion: righting wrongs, routing wrongdoers, and thereby inaugurating a new era of justice and compassion.”[iii] 

In similar fashion, the author of Hebrews urges his congregation saying, “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

What might that look like—that holding fast to hope—what might that look like for us in a world where many of our major landmarks were taken away from us in March 2020 and if they are being built back, many of them look very different from before?

        Last weekend at Diocesan Convention, our bishop Frank Logue shared the gift of a road map for the journey in the form of a question that had been shared with him by a fellow bishop.  That question is “what does faithfulness to Jesus look like in this moment?”  “What does faithfulness to Jesus look like in this moment?”

        It doesn’t necessarily offer the certainty that the disciples and many of us long for.  It does, however, offer us a new landmark when all around us seems in chaos, and it is helpful reminder of both how we might continue to hold fast to hope, and it is also a reminder that “he who has promised is faithful.”  Asking ourselves “what does faithfulness to Jesus look like in this moment?” gives us the road map, for one small step at a time and reminds us that Jesus is walking the path right beside us.  It helps us move forward together until we recognize the landmarks around us or until we find a completely new path and the courage and hope to follow it. 

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