Proper 28B sermon

The 24th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 28B
November 15, 2009
I was expecting my first child, and I was two days overdue. We were staying at my parents’ house as we all awaited the birth of their first grandchild, and I was like a “watched pot.” I awoke from an afternoon nap, and I began having contractions. We waited a while, and then David and I drove to Jackson to the hospital. After I was admitted and hooked up to the monitor, the attending nurse kindly told me that I was not in full labor and should go home until things progressed a little farther. I was frustrated and more than a little uncomfortable, but we went back home and I went to sleep, and when I woke up in the morning, in full labor….I thought I was going to die! I felt like I was being ripped apart, and I honestly did not know if I would survive it.
In our gospel lesson for today, Jesus and his followers have entered into Jerusalem and the disciples marvel at the grandeur of the temple. Jesus then begins to tell them what the end times will be like: the temple will be destroyed, false messiahs will come and lead people astray, there will be wars and rumors of war, nation against nation and kingdom against kingdom, earthquakes, famines, but this is not the end….The end is still to come. “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” (And then, in a part we don’t read today, he goes on to predict how the disciples themselves will be persecuted and put to death.)
As I listen to Jesus’s words, I wonder what it must have been like for his followers to hear him say all of this. Things were already bad for the people of their time. They were the lowest of the low, barely scraping by an existence, and now they are being told that things are going to get worse before they get better. I wonder what it was like for the original hearers of Mark’s gospel; scholars think that Mark, the oldest of the gospels, was written right around the time of the war in Jerusalem (in 66-70), right around the time that the Romans destroyed the temple for the second time. What must it have been like for them to hear these predictions coming from the mouth of Jesus while they were living it and experiencing it in their reality? What must it have been like for them to hear him say, “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” Where is the good news in this?
In childbirth, even though I had moments when I thought I would not survive, I was able to preservere because I had a goal I was working toward—the birth of my child. I was working toward a new creation. Y’all know something about that here, you who have worked to give birth to a new St. Peter’s by-the-Sea and a new Mississippi Gulf Coast after what must have seemed like the end of the world as you knew it. In following Jesus, in living the Christian life, we are called to be co-creators with God. Now, what does that mean?
One of my favorite writers, the late Madeleine L’Engle, explains the concept of being co-creators with God in this way: “God created and it was joy: time, space, matter. There is, and we are part of that is-ness, part of that becoming. That is our calling: co-creation. Every single one of us, without exception, is called to co-create with God. No one is too unimportant to have a share in the making or unmaking of the final showing-forth. Everything that we do either draws the Kingdom of love closer, or pushes it further off.” (Madeleine L’Engle, And It was Good; Reflections on Beginnings. Harold Shaw: Wheaton, 1983, p.19)
We are invited to join with God, and through our actions, our choices, to help God draw the Kingdom of love closer. That is a weighty and worthy charge, and it is also quite a gift, that God would allow us that part in building God’s kingdom of love. So how do we accomplish this?
How can we be co-creators with God ? There are as many different ways to do this as there are people here, but I can give you a good place to start in three simple parts.
1. Show up for worship. We gather together to remember who we are as God’s people and to reaffirm God’s work of love and redemption and transformation that is recorded in our sacred stories and lived out in individual and corporate life. The writer of Hebrews writes “and let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching”—suggesting that worshipping together is one of the ways that we are able to hold fast to our hope when times grow difficult.
2. Turn in a pledge card. Last week, I devoted my whole sermon to the story of a poor woman who gave me her gold butterfly necklace when I complimented her on it and the lesson that I learned from that powerful experience: that every person is created by God with the need to give. It connects us with God and with all of God’s creation when we are able to offer pieces of ourselves and things that we hold to be dear and of value.
3. Find at least one new way (beyond the first two) of being involved in life at St. Peter’s by-the-Sea. The work that we do as the church is our best attempt at being co-creators with God, at showing forth God’s love to a needy and hungry world. And every person who worships with us needs to be engaged in this co-creative work. We do it because we are grateful for all that God has given us, because we believe that we have a unique way of telling the story of God’s redemption and love and salvation, and because God has invited us to join God in this beautiful and life-giving work.

“This is but the beginning of the birth pangs,” Jesus tells them. Now you can look at that two ways. You can see Jesus telling them, that the suffering has only just begun—more doom and gloom. But I choose to look at it as Jesus telling them that all this suffering is a natural part of the birthing of a new existence and a new way of being, that yeah, it sure huts right now, but in the end, with a whoosh of fluids, a cry of loss or triumph, a great release, and there is a new life. All of the wars and the poverty, all of the diseases and the cancers, all of the terror and injustice, all of the cares and concerns that weigh us down in our daily life, all of these things are but the beginning of the birth pangs. As Christians, we live our lives in hope that even though we face hardships and persecution and suffering, we continue to be a part of a process of new life, new birth, in which God will use us co-creators. Being co-creators means that how we live our lives in the midst of suffering and hardship matters because as we are able to continue to love, and to worship, to honor and to give thanks, we do our part in helping to bring God’s creation toward its fulfillment, toward the end for which it was created. We live our lives in hope because we hold onto Jesus’s promise that once we endure the pangs of labor, we will actually hold in our arms that new life and the promise that our life has meaning.
Won’t you join us as we make the choice to work with God to help the kingdom of God’s love draw closer?