From the Pulpit: It’s the End of the World As We Know It

When Jesus talked about the Temple being destroyed, was he talking about the building — or the corrupt ideologies that undergird our vaunted institutions?

The Rev. Spencer Brown says Jesus’ doomsday preaching was an attempt to rattle his followers out of their slumber, and it’s just as relevant to us here today in 2024:

No influencer or brand or ideology can ever take the place of the work that Christ has given us to do: the work of a loving God, the work that we are to love God with every fiber of our being, to love our neighbors as ourselves. We know this. We strive to live into this, and yet we rip one another apart.

We claim to love one another with Christian love, when we know that there really is no hate like false Christian love. To love like Jesus is to speak truth to power; to love like Jesus is to break down the walls that divide us.

It’s not enough to simply invite people to sit with us wherever we are. The tables we sit around have lost their sense of purpose. The true host of the banquet feast is no longer at the head. We build tables that are too high for some with chairs that break underneath us, and feasts of spoiled food and ideologies with vitriol and enmity for one another. And yet we still sit. We still sit at these tables and prop up institutions and ideologies that not only harm, but destroy the very humanity of ourselves and all of creation around us.

Why are we trying to sit at tables that Jesus would overturn? Why are we trying to prop up institutions that Jesus would throw down?

Why are we still sitting idly by as our neighbors — beloved children of God just as we are — exclude others from the table and dehumanize with words and actions that seek to destroy the ‘other’ around us? Stand up from the tables that you know Jesus would flip, tear down the walls that separate us.

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In a time of such division, of such hatred and anger and revilement of others based on who they are or who they love, where they come from, how they look, or who they voted for, simply stand up from the table laid with rotting divisions and seek the one who came to the world to love us, to heal us, teach us, and commanded us to do the work.