If I Had a Hammer...

This sermon was heard at the First Presbyterian Church in Berryville, Arkansas on Sunday November 15, 2009, the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time.

1 Samuel 1:4-20
1 Samuel 2:1-10
Hebrews 10:11-14; 19-25
Mark 13:1-8

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen

I read the news today. What an amazingly depraved world we live in. In a little less than a year, our Mayor was cited twice and served jail time twice for driving while impaired and possession of marijuana. A noted local attorney was arrested on so many drug related charges that her bond was set at $50,000.00; and the only reason it wasn’t $100,000.00 was because she agreed to immediately enter a drug rehabilitation program. Chris Helmlinger was found in a shallow grave because someone wanted to steal his identity. All they wanted his identity, his name and his numbers, so they took his life.

It was less than ten days ago that Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan killed thirteen people at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, the largest mass murder ever on a domestic military base.[1] This happened just eleven days shy of the anniversary of another notorious mass murder, this too in Killeen.

Eighteen years ago tomorrow, George Jo Hennard drove his pickup through the front window of the Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen. Then after shooting and killing twenty-three and wounding twenty others he turned his weapon on himself. This was the deadliest shooting spree in America, until the Virginia Tech shootings not eighteen months ago.

Last night CNN showed a special on the survivors of the Jonestown massacre. Nearly a thousand died and barely thirty survived the horrific mass murder/suicide which introduced into the American conscience the expression “drink the Kool-Aid.”

As for me, I don’t think the question “what kind of sick, twisted world is this?” should ever be asked. It always seems to me that just as soon as it’s asked, the answer rears its ugly head getting more and more grotesque.

In my opinion, and your mileage may vary, I don’t think the world is really any worse than it was in biblical times. Some of the things we read about in scripture’s historical books are just as sick and twisted as anything I have just described. The one thing that makes us really different is that we are bigger, stronger, and faster than our biblical counterparts. We’ve become the “Six-Million-Dollar-Man” of sin. Add to this the ready access to information which has increased exponentially since Guttenberg invented the printing press, and we may not be worse. But if it seems that way to you, I won’t press the point.

Jesus told his disciples that the temple will fall, not one stone will be left upon another, all will be thrown down. Later, when asked in private, Jesus warned the brothers, James and John, Peter and Andrew, that they will hear of wars and rumors of wars. They were warned that nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. They were warned of earthquakes and famine.

The signs are there, the signs are alive and well. A Google search with the terms “end times” returns over 262,000,000 hits in under one-eighth of a second. Yes, Jesus warns that end times are coming and there are a whole lot of people who are trying to guess when that will be.

Many use Christian prophecy to say that the end is just around the corner. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins created a cottage industry doing this with the “Left Behind” books, movies, and other products based on one interpretation of Christian end times.

Recently there has been even more attention paid to the Mayan calendar which ends with the winter solstice of 2012. Between the History Channel, the Learning Channel, the Discovery Channel, and a major movie depicting human struggle against natural disasters of terrifying proportion; the attention paid to what happens when it happens in this prophetic scenario is very fashionable, and very profitable.

So Jesus teaches that there are end times, and they will be ushered in tragically. The disciples were warned that this was just the beginning; this agony was simply the pangs of a mother preparing to give birth. This is the Braxton Hicks of prophecy fulfillment. This is the false labor, just the pangs. This isn’t even the real thing. This agony is just how creation prepares itself for the coming birth of the new age. But there is something very interesting about this prophecy, very interesting indeed.

Remember if you will from our reading, Jesus predicts the destruction of the temple. The devastation of this temple would be so great that not one stone would be left upon another. We’re not talking about cinder blocks here either; we’re talking about great vast dressed stones. To destroy the temple would take a tremendous effort. The destruction of the temple would take considerable time and effort.

Not only would it take great physical effort to tear down the temple, it would take great political, military, and general human power to tear it down. The Romans had a very “live and let live” attitude toward other cultures and religious faiths in the empire; as long as there was civil rest and as long as the tribute was paid. When those bridges got crossed, whether by political upheaval or taxes not making their way across the Mediterranean, the army moved. It moved swiftly, or as swiftly as it could given the information and travel technologies of the day; and it moved brutally. Again, these folks didn’t invent crucifixion, but they took it to a place no one could have imagined.

So for this prophecy to come about, there would be years of minor insurrections. There would be little pockets of resistance. There would be some warnings before the whip came down, and when the whip came, it would take a little longer to get there than it would take for a B-1 bomber to leave Fort Leonard Wood and get to the Middle East, and it came with a vengeance.
Ultimately, the utter destruction of the temple and the nation of Israel, this destruction prophesied by Jesus in our reading today, came to fruition in 70 AD in a series of horrible and dramatic battles ending with the siege at Masada.

Now, what makes this prophecy interesting is that according to biblical scholars the book of Mark, the first of the recorded gospels, was written sometime between 65 and 75 AD. What I’m saying is that this prophecy was written as the events of the day were unfolding toward the destruction of the temple. They might even have been written after they unfolded. I guess the point I’m making here is that it’s pretty easy to write accurate prophecy while they are unfolding. It’s even easier to do afterward.

It’s easy to prophesy something that has all ready happened, and I say to you today that these events continue to happen. Prophesy, and this prophesy in particular is being fulfilled everyday. The local examples I listed earlier point toward this prophesy. The items from twenty to thirty years ago point to this prophesy. We can count natural disasters; earthquakes, tsunami, hurricanes, tornadoes and the like. We can include the terror of the World Trade Center and the rest of the 9/11 attacks. When we do this, we can imagine that this is how some peoples live everyday in the shadow of their enemies.

This knowledge about the history of this reading can give us a feeling like the whole thing is anticlimactic. What’s prophecy if the events have all ready happened? What good is a warning of events that have all ready come to pass? What’s so important about Jesus sharing knowledge that was all ready known? The answer is this: What is important is not the prophecy, what is important is first how Jesus responded to the prophecy and then how we respond to Jesus.

In verses four and five, the brothers ask the Lord, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished.” Again, the disciples are not so unlike us and we are not so unlike them. When offered the news of prophecy, they wanted to be able to identify when the signs would be fulfilled.

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the “now, but not yet” view of our holy lives. How we live in the light of the kingdom of God, but because of the very nature of sin, the kingdom is not come, at least not yet. This “now, but not yet” is another way to express the fulfillment of this end times prophecy. Surely, by any estimation of this prophecy, based on the signs Jesus shared with his disciples, we live in end times. But this fact, this knowledge cannot lead us to say that tomorrow will not come, not yet.

As true as it is to say these prophecies were coming true in the day of the Lord, it is as true today. The signs are all around, so how did Jesus answer their question about the signs of the times? Then Jesus began to say to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray.”

Did you notice what Jesus did there? He doesn’t answer their question. They want to know when, he offers something else; he gives them something even more useful than the signs of the end times. He warns them not to be led astray. And in this “now, but not yet” of end times, there are opportunities aplenty to be led astray.

Jesus doesn’t seem to care if we know the day when there will be no more tomorrows. If that mattered most, surely he would have shared that with his disciples. There are more important fish to fry. So instead, Jesus shares something more important, the dire warning that in a world that is so ripe with sin that it can’t seem to get worse, until it does, we must beware that we are not mislead.

You see, Jesus is the sign. Many will come to lead us astray, they will say, “I am he,” and they are not “He.” The glory of how this is written in the ancient Greek texts is that there is a better way to translate this phrase, this “I am he.” The simpler translation would read, “Many will come in my name and say “I AM.” The way Jesus said this little phrase; he invoked the Greek version of the holiest of Hebrew words, the name of God.

In a world where the kingdom of God is here and now, but not here and not yet; in a world where by the signs of sin the end is here and now, but not here and not yet, we are not called to interpret the signs. We are called to live in the light. We are called to move from the alienation of this world to the divine community ruled by Christ. We are called to move from the dark to the light. We are called to move from slavery to freedom. We are called to move from fear to liberty and assurance of eternal life. For Christians, it is Jesus and his message of salvation by grace through faith which is the sign of all times.

Pete Seeger and Lee Hays wrote the song “If I Had a Hammer.”[2] It ends with this refrain:

Well, I’ve got a hammer,
And I’ve got a bell,
And I’ve got a song to sing,
All over this land.
It’s the hammer of justice,
It’s the bell of freedom,
It’s the song about love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.

Thanks be to God for the hammer and the bell and the song which we are to hammer and ring and sing. It is when we hammer, ring, and sing the songs of God’s love and freedom and salvation by grace through faith that the word and the kingdom reach further into this world, this world which is so sin sick. When we do this, the tide of these unholy signs is stemmed that no one will be led astray.

[1] CNN.com, Fort Hood suspect charged with murder, http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/12/fort.hood.investigation/index.html, retrieved November 14, 2009.
[2] Seeger, Pete and Hays, Lee, “If I Had a Hammer.” Warner Bros. Records, 1962.