Collective Hope
Texts: 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13, Luke 21:5-19
One of the things that stands out to me about this gospel is its honesty. There is a frank reality that is hard to deny. There have been wars, epidemics, earthquakes, famines, and plagues. Nations have fought, there have been dreadful things that have happened. The disciples were persecuted. They went before kings and governors. Some were told to deny Christ by their friends and family.
And the temple? Some stones are indeed standing, a singular portion of the western wall, with its giant blocks of stone tightly packed together. Standing at the Western Wall,you can get a taste and feel for how enormous and grand it all was. But the rest of it is gone. That was the last temple. Its destruction in the year 70 cemented the creation of two distinct religions, a synagogue based Judaism and Christianity. Before the destruction of the temple the two had been pulling apart, but Jewish Christians still worshiped in the temple, still did Jewish things. Afterwards, Christians met in their own places of worship and Jews did the same. They became two sibling religions, both learning how to worship without a temple. The temple was a cultural cornerstone of identity, losing it changed the religious landscape of their day. Who could have imagined life without the temple?
But then it was gone. People were shaken. But the world did not end when the temple was destroyed. There have been so many times that have felt like the end of the world since then. Yet hours and days still pass. Time marches on.
World War 2 was something my grandparents experienced, but not myself. Still, I’ve gone to Holocaust Museums, I’ve seen the images and videos of people talking about the mass death. There’s old advertisements for strollers with a lid to protect against gas attacks that chill me. It must have felt like the end of the world. For too many who died, it was the end of their worlds.
One of the key moments of my youth were the attacks on September 11th. I was in seventh grade when it happened, and all day long the TVs at school were glued to the news. The second plane hit the towers over and over again, cementing that moment my young brain. I had never thought about the World Trade Center before, they were just buildings in a city I have never been to. I had no idea who Al Qaeda was or why they cared about a center of commerce. I just saw planes hitting buildings, after school I went with my parents to fill up the car with gas, and I had the sense that the country as it had existed before that moment was gone. Perhaps it was. It felt like the end of the world. For those who died both in the attacks and the wars that followed, it was the end of their worlds.
Yet now, I meet with college students who either weren’t born or were babies on that day. After I get over feeling old, just like I’ve made some of you feel as I’ve mentioned my age, I see how the effects of the attacks have shaped those who come after. Even if they weren’t born, it affects them. Just like World War 2 affects me. Just like the destruction of the temple shaped the religious landscape forever and affects all of us today. I won’t even touch on how the pandemic or other fresh events play into this. We will be feeling the effects for a long while. All these things shape us. Collective trauma is powerful. But yet, time marches on.
Yet, even in the midst of deep grief, we have lives that need attention. We have things that need to be done. It isn’t the end of the world, even if the world has changed so fast it feels almost unrecognizable. Where do we go when everything has changed and yet the sun still rises and falls, the bills still come, babies are learning to walk, everything still happens? It’s not the end of the World, but it’s the end of some worlds. People are gone. Everything looks different. We wrestle with evil and needless destruction. It’s the end times, yet time doesn’t end.
Some might be tempted to just stop and stare at the sky, waiting for Jesus to show up. That’s what Paul was writing about in our reading from Second Thessalonians. In both First and Second Thessalonians, Paul is writing to a group of people who are deep in grief. They have been waiting for Jesus to come again as promised, but their loved ones have died. They asked Paul, “When exactly will Jesus come again? And are our loved ones who have died gone forever?” Paul assures them that no one knows the hour or the time when Jesus will come again, but when he does, all who have died will rise again in eternal glory. None of them will be lost. But Paul’s poetic imagery in First Thessalonians about paying attention, lest they miss Jesus coming, creates a bit of an issue. People have stopped working and are on high alert. Jesus will come at any time, so they are by God going to be ready for it. Paul tells them to get back to work. They still have to take care of their responsibilities.
That's probably one of the hardest things about grief. While grief calls us to slow down and requires more rest, life still marches on. We can take some time to mark the moment, but we can’t just stop moving altogether. Probably one of the hardest parts of processing acute grief is the fact that the world indeed isn’t over and life continues. It feels like the end, but it’s not the end of our lives. There are still things we have to do. It's hard. Struggling with the weight of daily living in the midst of tragedy is real and weighty. It requires support. It requires community. I want to pause here and say that if you are struggling right now, there are people who can help. We all need a support system, people who can help with the mundane tasks of life and help us process what happened. There’s nothing wrong with using the tools of psychology and psychiatry as part of that system. Grief is powerful.
Some, in the midst of great cataclysmic change, may try to find a prophet or guru, someone who appears to have all the answers, who seems to have figured it all out. Jesus says, “Beware of those people!” If they seem to have all the secret knowledge, if they tell you that theirs is the only truth, that everyone else is mistaken or invalid, run away. There is no secret cure. There is never only one solution. There are only people working together believing that better is possible. It’s a collective effort. Jesus didn’t save the world from wars and plagues. Individually, we can’t do it either. Collectively, we have a much better chance.
Probably one of the hardest parts of this gospel reading is that Jesus doesn’t promise to fix it all. Jesus just lets those who are following him know what is coming. Dark days are ahead. I know I’m not the only one wondering, “Why?” Why didn’t Jesus fix the world? Why is it that things are still messed up in the world two thousand years after Jesus’ death? When do we find peace and harmony? When will war be no more?
I’ve recently watched the first season of the show “God’s Favorite Idiot” on Netflix. In the show, there’s a big fight going on between heaven and hell and God is worried that heaven might actually lose. Not enough people are hearing God’s message. An ordinary man, Clark, gets tasked with sharing God’s message: that God is real and that all religions have it mostly right, God’s about love. In one episode, Satan attacks Clark’s father and he ends up in the hospital. Clark asks an angel, “Why didn’t God protect my dad?” There's a pause, a moment to take in the sorrow. Then the angel shares that the right forms didn’t get filled out in heaven. It comes down to paperwork.
Later, Clark tries praying for a particular archangel to help his dad. The archangel is in the middle of a battle with a demon and is severely injured, leaving Clark’s request unanswered. Clark never learns this information and feels like he’s being ignored. The message becomes clear: Even if you’re doing everything you can for God, there are times when God seemingly isn't all that helpful. God can’t protect us against everything that comes our way. You can decide for yourselves if that is true. That is simply a message in a show.
But Jesus indeed never promised that we would have carefree, happy lives if we followed him. In fact, he promised his disciples the opposite. They would suffer greatly because they were Jesus’ messengers. Jesus himself was hung on a cross. The world itself would still have wars, famines, epidemics, all these things that we still experience today. What then was the point of it all?
Jesus is not the one who made everything magically better. But he did give us something. He gave us an eternal hope, that we have the power to bring God’s reign to earth, that one day life on earth can be like that in heaven. This hope is not a pollyannaish way of viewing the world, it’s not just rose colored glasses. It’s a fierce belief in a better way. It’s the powerful welling up of the Holy Spirit inside each of us. It’s a call for each of us to live in a way that helps make the world into God’s dream. There is a cost to all of it. God’s ways do not always win friends. But within Jesus’ life and ministry, we see the possibilities. Once the possibilities are seen, they can be actualized. Not by individuals alone, but by communities who come together in love, who listen and vision together.
For thousands of years, people were enslaved. For over four hundred years, the system of chattel slavery, of perpetual enslavement based on their ethnicity and skin color, existed. The whole system was like the temple in our Gospel reading today. Especially in the United States, it was hard to imagine it falling down or breaking apart. It was older than the country and codified into the constitution. It helped build the country up into an economic powerhouse. But people held the vision of freedom. They worked towards that dream. Black people especially held it before the country as a great wound hurting the values and ideals the country was purported to be founded upon. Many who did this never saw the end to enslavement. They died before the Civil War. But they had a powerful impact. They inspired others to continue their work. Eventually the weight of the work broke into war. The end result was the emancipation declaration and the constitutional amendments ending the chattel slavery system and making black people full citizens. But the collective trauma of this system still weighs on our country today. We’re not at the point where it’s all history, it still impacts our present day reality. The vision of freedom is still before us, it is not fully actualized even today.
But just as collective trauma stays around for generations and shapes communities, collective hopes, visions of a better future, also stick and stay. They work on us long after those who lift them up are gone. God calls us into generational work, building us up and holding out the belief in a world where all God’s children have what they need. If we build communities that believe in the dignity of every human being, if we hold that out and reach towards that goal, the generations after us can be stronger. We, as individuals, only have a piece of the puzzle. We need to come together in order to see the full picture. It’s hard work though. Jesus doesn’t promise an easy time. Jesus simply promises that in the end, we will gain our souls. In the end, we will find fulfillment and purpose. We will find the Holy Spirit enlightening on us, the strength of God behind our work.
In a country that is becoming increasingly siloed, where charlatans peddle easy answers and politicians promise they are the only answer to the fractures we feel, we need something else. We need the vision of God. We need the power to stand up for human dignity, to share the truth of God’s love, to say there’s a better way than what others are trying to sell. Our collective traumas shape us. Our collective hope in God’s world can free us. There is a better way. In the midst of wars, of pandemics, of suffering, we can help each other in love, we can believe in the dignity of all, we can dream of the day when suffering is no more. We’re not likely to see it in our lifetime, but we hold it before us, believing that it is still coming. Jesus will appear again one day. Maybe to us, maybe to the fiftieth generation after us. Until then, we are the Body of Christ in the world today and we’ve got work to do. So let us move forward, let us care for one another, let us embody love, even in the midst of deep griefs and collective traumas. Amen.
