One day back in September, in a small event space in Brooklyn, 19 people gathered and sat in a circle. They included an immigration lawyer, a therapist, a climate protester, an artist and a reporter. They were there for a workshop called “Cultivating Active Hope: Living With Joy Amidst the Climate Crisis” — to the reporter, the title sounded wildly optimistic. “Have you ever known someone who cited the Anthropocene in a dating profile?” she asks in a story she wrote about the experience. “[Someone] who doled out carbon offset gift certificates at the holidays? Who sees new babies and immediately flashes to the approximately 15 tons of carbon emissions the average American emits per year? Who walks around shops thinking about where all the packaging ends up? You do now.”
Her name is Cara Buckley. She knows the planet is in trouble. She does what she can: She donates to environmental and humane causes, eats vegan, composts, takes public transport, carries around bamboo utensils, buys second hand and stocks up on carbon offsets — and yet none of it has been balm. “I [feel] complicit by merely existing,” she writes. “After all, I [belong] to the species that [is] taking most of the other ones down.” A friend suggested that her climate angst was an extension of her melancholic leanings, which struck her as plausible, but not quite right. “We know that the future is looking bad, that the present already is, and that inaction, especially here in America, is making it all worse. But how are we supposed to live in our hearts and souls with such an existential threat?”
What she took away from the workshop was more or less a prescription for learning to live with hope. The facilitators taught her ancient wisdom: to seek out a spiritual path to forge gratitude, compassion and acceptance. She learned that operating out of denial, fear, anger, and blame only burns us out. And she began to see that what is needed is a way to move to a place not of tacit acceptance, but of fierce, roaring compassion.[1]
Fierce, roaring compassion — she clearly wants to infuse the wise teaching with a bright taste of resistance and a strong dose of activist energy — and yet, it was compassion she was taught to practice.
Jesus and the disciples were in Jerusalem during the final days of his ministry, and they spent much of their time there in the temple. Jesus overheard people speaking about the building’s magnificent size, its breathtaking beauty, the splendor of all the gifts dedicated to God, and with great calm, I imagine, he said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” The temple was still under construction then. It was one of Herod’s biggest and most ambitious projects. Begun in the year 19 B.C.E., the temple itself was completed in less than two years, but work on the outer courts and decorations continued until 64 C.E.[2] It was an enormous complex. Scholars estimate that the outer court could hold 400,000 people, and that during pilgrimage festivals it frequently held crowds of that size. And the decorations were magnificent. The first-century historian, Josephus wrote,
The exterior of the building wanted nothing that could astound either mind or eye. For, being covered on all sides with massive plates of gold, the sun was no sooner up than it radiated so fiery a flash that persons straining to look at it were compelled to avert their eyes, as from the solar rays.[3]
It was a glorious space, designed to reflect in its splendor the very glory of God. It was also a space that didn’t reveal at first or second glance how it was being funded. In the same chapter, Luke 21, just before this scene, we read about Jesus seeing rich people putting large gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.”[4] The church has long held up this impoverished woman as an example of generosity and complete trust in God, but she also reminds us that Herod’s grand project came with a price tag: she put in all she had to live on, but it would still be his name associated with the magnificent structure. The Jewish people knew it was a house for the name of God to dwell, but they also knew that Herod had reasons for building it that had little to do with God’s name and a lot more with his own.
“As for these things that you see,” Jesus said, “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” The disciples wanted to know when; they asked him for a forecast, for details of time and circumstance, for knowledge that would put an end to their uncertainty. They weren’t the first, and certainly not the last, to worry about the news of wars, earthquakes, famines and plagues and to look at them as though they were the scheduled stops on an apocalyptic train ride to the endtimes.
Do not go after them who tell you that it all makes sense, Jesus said. You will go through times of blow after blow of heartbreaking and soul-draining news, and inevitably there will be those who tell you that it all makes sense, that each event is a mile marker along the tracks to the great and final day, but don’t trust their calculations. Do not go after them. Follow me. Stay with me. Trust me. Don’t confuse the kingdom of God with beautiful stonework or with neat systems of thought that fit together seamlessly like blocks in the temple wall. The days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down. Where you are standing in awe today will then be a heap of rubble. The thoughts you have of God and the purposes of God and how they are being fulfilled — pretty buildings, all of them, they will collapse. Follow me, he says, and learn to trust the faithfulness of God more than your best ideas. Learn to trust the creative possibilities of God beyond the limits of your own imagination.
Follow me, he says, and he points to the city without tears of which Isaiah sang,
No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in the city or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime. No more shall they build and another inhabit; or plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent—its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.
Isaiah’s bold vision carries echoes of the beginning of our story in God’s garden, of the great promise of life in the blessed conviviality of God’s creation. He sings of the tree and the serpent, but his song is not the all-too-familiar tune of the fall, it is the older and forever new tune of God’s faithfulness: “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth,” says the Lord. It is the song of a city without tears and without temple, the song of creation finally being the home for all creatures and their creator, in righteousness and peace. It is the sound track of Jesus’ life and ministry. Follow me, he says, beware that you are not led astray. Do not be terrified. Do not worry. Trust the path I have cleared in the world and follow me.
As to that deep trust, most days, I notice more than a little hesitation in my step. It’s not that I don’t like the song — it’s quite beautiful and moving — but a world without violence, without terror and fear is just a bit much to wrap my skeptic mind around. Most days, I find it much easier to imagine the whole world heating up and flooding in denial, ignorance, selfishness and fear.
G. S. Galbraith wrote,
Only the young possess the simplicity
To accept a truth transcending rote and rule,
So that, like star-led shepherds, children see
The fact of miracle.
But logic, the sophist, clouds the maturing life,
Caution replaces the fearless face of youth,
Till the sceptic mind prefers a plausible lie
To a fantastic truth.[5]
Plausible lies are things that appear to be real and permanent like thick temple walls. Plausible lies are lies because they continue the illusion that life can be mastered and that we are the masters. And plausible lies are plausible because they push the promises of God out of mind.
Walter Brueggemann suggests that the vision in Isaiah “is outrageous because the new world of God is beyond our capacity and even beyond our imagination. In our fatigue, our self-sufficiency, and our cynicism,” we remain convinced “that such promises could not happen here.”[6] But Jesus points to that promise, tirelessly, and he embodies the fantastic truth of God’s profound solidarity with sinful humanity and with all God’s creatures. That scene in the temple, that teaching about the collapse of our religious constructs was among his final teachings before his arrest. What followed were rejection, betrayal, denial, ridicule, torture and execution. Every lie, every injustice, every self-righteous illusion, every hateful word and angry blow — we let him have it. And he died because he bore it all.
But God, in fierce, roaring compassion, on the first day of the new creation, raised Jesus from the dead. What a fantastic truth. What a path to follow — for me, for you, for Cara. What a love to live.
[1] Cara Buckley, “Apocalypse Got You Down? Maybe This Will Help”, New York Times, November 15, 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/15/sunday-review/depression-climate-change.html
[2] Six years later in a Jewish uprising against the Roman occupation the entire structure was razed by Roman troops, leaving only portions of the outer wall standing.
[3] Josephus, Jewish War 5.222
[4] Luke 21:1-4
[5] G. S. Galbraith, “Fact and Wonder” Christian Science Monitor, Nov 25, 1959, in Peter Gomes, The Good Life: Truths That Last in Times of Need (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2002) p. 116
[6] See Lectionary Homiletics Vol. XV, No. 6, p. 61