UCC Church of Charlotte

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Not By Might
I Samuel 2:1-10
Mark 13:1-8

Grace and Peace to you this morning.  Grace and Peace.
    
In the United Church of Christ, when the denomination decided we
needed to be known to more than just our church members, they came up
with the Still Speaking Campaign.  We wanted to say something about
us, to let folks know who we are.  And to say something about us, we
chose to say something about how we see God.
    
God is Still Speaking.
    
Some of you know the Gracie Allen quote that goes along with this –
Never put a period where God has placed a comma.
    
For God isn’t done with us yet.  God is still speaking.  It harkens
back to the pilgrims, our early forebears.  When they left Plymouth,
England, John Robinson said, “The Lord hath yet more light to break
forth from his holy Word.”
    
God is still speaking.
    
But for us to hear God still speaking in our lives, it helps to know
what God has said in the past.  We are relative latecomers to the
conversation.  We have some catching up to do.  For God speaks in
mysterious ways.  God’s word comes to us as strange and threatening
and new, at least if we are paying attention.  But this newness and
strangeness and threat is nothing new to God’s word.  That is what has
always happened.
    
So when Jesus and his followers are in Jerusalem, they do what every
good tourist does: they gawk at the architecture.  The Temple, rebuilt
and massively expanded by Herod the Great.  The places known in story
and psalm from the time of King David.

      Wow, did you see that gate?
      We don’t have anything like that back in Galilee!

And Jesus warns them not to get too attached to these massive
structures of stone.  There will come a day when the city lies in
ruins, when the Temple is destroyed, when the people are scattered.
He warns them of terrible disasters, of horrible things taking place
in the city of Jerusalem, God’s holy city, and there will be wars, and
there will be famines, the natural outcome of war.  And there will be
earthquakes.  And men will come and say “I am the Messiah, follow me
and you will live,” because that is what happens in times of trouble.

And he wasn’t far off.  There are a few stones still on top of one
another at the western wall of the Temple mound.  The insurgents in
Israel got to be too big a hassle for Rome, and in 70 AD, the Romans
sacked Jerusalem.  (There will be wars and rumors of war.)  Later that
same decade, a mountain overlooking a city decided to erupt, and
Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.  (There will be
earthquakes in various places.)

What is important about these things is not that Jesus predicted them,
but what he says to do about them.

Do not be alarmed.
Do not go following those who claim in their anxiety to be the Messiah.
These are the birth pangs of what God is bringing about.

In other words, yes, the world is going to shake, and yes you will
have reasons to worry.  But hold to your faith, don’t panic, don’t
freak out, just know that God is still working out what is coming to
be in our midst.
    
The Bible is full of stories of dysfunctional people, and it is full
of stories of people of faith who put their trust in God even when the
world seems in peril, even when the foundations shake.  And if we read
it carefully, we will find out that they are the same people.  This is
our entry into the stories.  We dysfunctional people who put our faith
in God and try to hold on to it when the foundations shake and times
of trouble come.
    
What kind of faith do we hold onto in times of trouble?  Perhaps we
remember the promises of God in the words of Hannah that we just
heard.
    
In the traditions of Moses and Miriam singing God’s praises after they
crossed between the parted waters of the sea, this morning we read of
a mother’s song of praise to God for the son born to her.  Hannah
sings a song of praise that echoes the words of prophets, words that
echo later in the song of Mary.  And Hannah offers us glimpses of both
the power of the Lord, and the falsehood of the ways of power of the
world.
    
Hannah sings, as Moses did, of the breaking of the bows of the mighty,
that the powers of war and death will hold no sway.  She sings of
those who have profited off of the work of others now living hand to
mouth, while those who had nothing are now invited to a banquet.  She
sings of it being in the power of the Lord to kill and to give life,
to bring down to Sheol and to raise up from death.
    
God is the one in charge, not the earth with its volcanoes nor Rome
with its armies.  Not by might will men prevail.
    
We ought to know this by now.  There are many things we can will to
happen, but not the important things.  We can make ourselves to sit at
the table, but we can’t will ourselves to be hungry.  We can sit
together, but we can’t will togetherness.  We can make ourselves go to
bed, but we can’t will sleep.
    
There are limits to our powers even in our own bodies.
    
We can wish the best for our spouses, our family, our friends, but we
cannot will them to change.  As Ed Friedman used to say, nobody wins a
battle of wills.
    
So where our will comes to its limit, we find ourselves needing to
rely on something more, on someone greater.

And when we discover the limits of how much we can secure our future
for ourselves, we find we need to trust in the one who has the power
of life and death.
    
And when we run out of excuses and we finally get past our resistances
and our denial and start trying to live as though we were created in
the image of God, and that our neighbor is as well, we find we need to
ask forgiveness from the one who has been telling us this the whole
time.
    
For all our pretenses to power and control, for all the ways that we
marvel at the technologies of the day, for all the ways we try to bend
the universe to our will, we would do well to remember the song of
Hannah:

He raises up the poor from the dust;
he lifts the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes
and inherit a seat of honor.
For the pillars of the earth are the LORD'S,
and on them he has set the world.
    
Thanks be to God.
Amen.