Hope and Community in Troubling Times
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In Matthew 24, we read, “As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”
“Do you see all these buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; everything will be thrown down…”
And then he says,
“And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places; all of this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”
Jesus would have made for a terrible tour guide. “Yes, to your left, you will notice the Eiffel Tower, which will someday collapse into a meaningless heap of metal.” I imagine his disciples felt equally as squashed like he kicked over their sandcastle or something.
And yet, a rather simple acknowledgement of the grandeur of the temple, presents an opportunity for Jesus to ask an important question of the disciples. What will happen to your heart, your spirit, your hope, if this all comes crashing down?
Jesus didn’t let off the throttle. Sentences later, he is laying the groundwork for his debut dystopian novel series. “There are going to be a lot of wars. There are going to be a lot of times when you wonder if you’ll be a casualty of war. There are going to be famines. There are going to be earthquakes in all kinds of places. There are going to be assassinations and assassination attempts. There are going to be pandemics. There are going to be stronger hurricanes and probably no polar bears.”
Flip ahead four chapters in Matthew, and Jesus has boarded his Heaven-bound spacecraft and rocketed the heck out of there. Leaving us with all of those apocalypses to survive.
But I suppose that was his point all along. None of those apocalypses will be the last one. Well, one of them will be, probably, but there are going to be a whole lot of endings ahead. A whole lot of buildings will fall. In fact, by 70 AD, Jesus’ predication had already come true, as Rome left not one stone of the Temple standing on one another.
Photo by Mylène Haudebourg on Unsplash
So, knowing all of this. Knowing that you are going to see and experience tremendous destruction, that you will likely be a citizen of a country at war, that you may see the institution of democracy crumble, knowing all of this, how will you tend to your heart? How will you tend to your soul? How will you continue to find life, light, and hope?
Jesus is speaking to a group of people whose ancestors journeyed, lost and hungry in the desert, with the hope of a promised land. In their imaginations, the Temple would be a symbol of their having made it, of having arrived in that promised land. And Jesus looks to the ancestors of those people and says, “what is going to happen to your soul when it all comes crashing down?”
Jesus is inviting his disciples to get deeply introspective, because he knows that if their faith is dependent on the Temple, that when it inevitably crumbles, as all physical temples do, so too will their faith.
West Hills Friends is full of people who are actively experiencing the crumbling of previously sturdy structures. There are people here who’ve recently been kicked out of their previous churches for loving Queer people, there are people who’ve suddenly found themselves doubting much of what they used to believe, there are people who’ve been deconstructing for decades.
And everyone at West Hills Friends, because it is a collection of human beings, have experienced individual or societal crumblings, some clearly apocalyptic in scale. The word apocalypse means an “unveiling,” and I’m not sure many of us will escape life having not had the curtain pulled back on us, or for us at least a few times. At age 11, the curtain was pulled back on my father’s affair, and my life was never the same after.
And even if folks don’t feel as if they’ve experienced such unveilings in their life, we all are, by the fact we are citizens in a the United States, are experiencing tremendous anxiety, fear, doom, and hopelessness as we barrel even closer to the November election.
I don’t think Jesus is saying to us “hey, I told you it was going to happen, just be happy anyway!” Instead, I think Jesus is reminding us how crucial communities like West Hills Friends will be. He is encouraging an element of Christianity that some have really picked up on…that to follow this other way, to orient oneself towards a loving, compassionate presence in the world, will require profound apocalyptic imagination. It will require us to still cultivate and tend to joy as a sort of ironic defiance to the deadening influences of crumbling empires and the turmoil they create.
Many Christian mystics, including many Quakers, alongside Christians living under oppression and slavery, have a more profound sense of being poor, wayfaring strangers traveling through lands of woe. Of being a citizen of another world. The African American spirituals, sung in fields and in the slave quarters of plantations, were songs about another place, another reality, and just like the Israelites, a promised land beyond the present despair and suffering.
Delegates pray during the Republican National Convention, Tuesday, July 16, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
This week, I wondered what it would have been like for Jesus to be at the Republican National Convention. I wonder, if he had the opportunity, if he’d ask the Christians there, “When it all comes crumbling down, the Christianity you’ve built by stacking the stones of your faith with the stones of the empire, what will happen then?”
And what about us? Will we be able to tend to our personal and collective joy defiantly as things crumble around us? Can we take care of one another, to love one another, and tend to one another’s hearts together?
Octavia Butler, one of the first black women science fiction writers, began writing a series of post-apocalyptic books in the 1980s. The first page of the first book reads as a diary entry dated July 20, 2024. Yesterday’s date. She died before completing the series, but Butler imagined a not-too-distant future where the entire world has been thrown into disarray following the irreversible effects of global climate change, and new political movements, intensified by renewed Christian fundamentalism, organized around the motto, “Make America Great Again.”
Octavia, a black woman imagining her place in the world in the 80s, created a world shockingly similar to our current one. It feels appropriate to conclude this message with a quote from her, as our timeline now comes into synch with her imagined future. She writes, “That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”
Some Queries for your consideration:
How can communities like ours nurture apocalyptic imagination as we navigate these troubling times? How will we still cultivate joy in the apocalypse?
Do you have a sense of being a “citizen” of another place? How does imagining another reality help you survive the present one?