Malachi 3:19-20a | 2 Thessalonians 3:7-12 | Luke 21:5-19

Grant us, we pray, oh Lord, our God, the constant gladness of being devoted to you, for its full and lasting happiness to serve you with constancy, the author of all that is good. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

TODAY we are celebrating the last Sunday of the church year, the thirty-third Sunday.  Next Sunday we will celebrate the feast of Christ the King that ends the liturgical year, and then we begin with the first Sunday of Advent.  So to help us understand why these particular readings are the end of this liturgical year, I’d like to look at what we started with 12 months ago almost, and it is simply this: it was the story of John the Baptist proclaiming to the world that something new was coming.  “Stay awake.  Stay alert.  The kingdom is now.  The kingdom is here.  Something radically new is coming.”  

If you’ve ever tried to bring to somebody a radical, new vision of the world, as Jesus was seeking to do, you know that very often you reach — you experience the same thing that Jesus experienced, and that is rejection and not just, “No, I’m not interested in what you say,” but what you hear him describing for his disciples, the same thing will happen to him.  They will be hated, and they’ll be rejected.  They’ll be persecuted.  They’ll be killed, even by those that are close to them.  What is that about?  Why so much resistance?  Why is it that, when someone brings to someone’s imagination a new vision of the world that is more peaceful, more beautiful, more loving, why would they reject it?  I think it’s easy, perhaps, if you give it a little thought, that when you’re asking someone to change the principles upon which they’ve lived their life, the principles they live by, made decisions by, and you’re telling them that those are not really true and that their lives are filled with basing what they do on illusions.  And if their ego is weak and their ego is all tied up in how they perform, then you’re almost doing exactly to them what they want to do back to you.  You seem to be persecuting them and destroying them, and so their instinct is to fight back.  

Now, let’s look at this whole issue, because I think it’s fascinating.  What is it about evil that is so opposed to what is good, and how does it work?  I guess the big thing is how does it work.  I know the difference is that evil is always trying to propose to someone something that doesn’t really work, something that doesn’t produce what it promises.  It’s a lie.  It’s a half-truth.  We experience it, over and over again, when we’re told by the world that if you do certain things, have certain things, you’re going to be ecstatically happy, and if you get more of those things, you’ll be even more ecstatically happy.  I think most of us realize that the things that the world offers, fame, power, money, possessions, they really don’t produce the thing that we long for most, which is this core, inner center of peace, a way of feeling connected to the entire human race and creation and somehow knowing that you have value, you’re safe, and you have a gift to give to the world.  That’s the truth.  That’s what we’re here for.  That’s what the goal of the kingdom is, to find that core place of inner peace, and you have a sense that you’re here for a really powerful reason.  And the joy of offering that gift to the world is more satisfaction than any possession or anything you could ever gain through the things that the world offers.  

That’s a radical shift, a radical change, because it’s really about seeing your life as a kind of worker but a worker that so enjoys his work that he can’t imagine not working.  And that’s why I think it’s interesting.  The second reading is kind of fascinating to be placed in this set, because it talks about people who are gathering with the community.  The new Christians are all together, and then they find people that are really not working.  They’re just kind of sitting back and taking and taking and taking.  It’s like, “Hey, this new world, this new kingdom that you’re in is a world where you participate in something extraordinary, and you don’t just sit back and feed off of it in a kind of lazy, sort of taking kind of way.”  So it’s a kingdom that engages you in a work that is so satisfying and brings so much pleasure that it goes almost completely contrary to the way the world works.  And the interesting thing about evil is it has this insidious quality that it really doesn’t expose itself fully for what it is.  It hides.  It hides behind half-truths, and it’s interesting, because what evil tends to do is to infect some part of your personality, some part of the world, some part of things.  And then it really does a job on us, because one of the things that I just described as the goal of the kingdom is to have a sense of your value and your dignity and your worth.  And evil has this way of getting into some part of you, and you kind of begin to feel and know this is a part of you that you’re not proud of.  This is a part that is, let’s say, greedy, selfish, whatever, and then what you do without realizing it is, instead of looking at that as part of you, you see that as all of you.  Then you write yourself off.  You lose confidence in yourself.  We do the same thing to everybody around us.  

It’s so fascinating to me when you see a public figure who does something wrong or you see anything about a clergyman or a teacher or whatever, and I’m not talking about the most serious infractions.  I’m not talking about molestation or some horrible thing.  I’m just saying, when you are perceiving someone as — and all you see is their failure, their weakness, their one big problem, you write them off, and there’s nothing further from the truth, because evil is that kind of insidious thing that distorts our perception.  I hear people saying all the time, “God, the world is so bad.  It’s all evil.  It’s all going in the wrong direction.  We’re all going to go down the tube.”  And why?  Because there are things in the world that are not healthy, not good, and we tend to forget all that is good, all that is wonderful, all that is powerful, all that is loving.  So that’s another way evil gets in the way of keeping us into the — or helping us to stay in this kingdom, place.  

So another thing about evil I think is fascinating, as you see in the first reading, is there is something there about good and evil, and that is that evil will always seemingly self-destruct.  It self-destructs, and there’s the image.  A great fire comes, and it burns up all those who are evil.  The thing that’s fascinating about that image is, when you look at any system, any company, any organization that becomes corrupt and becomes nothing more than an institution that takes and uses and abuses those that come to it for help, you know that that is going to collapse, thank God.  And we’ve seen collapse after collapse after collapse of businesses and organizations that simply have lost their focus, but that same powerful fire image that destroys those, that completely wipes them out is also the fire that’s in the sun, that is the radiance of some kind of wisdom and light that comes into those that are just.  And that gives me great hope, that we have this realization that good is stronger than evil, and evil always somehow destroys itself.  The danger is that it takes so many good people with it.  

Now let’s look at the gospel, because the gospel is fascinating, in the sense that it is a confusing piece, because it seems that it’s talking about the end of the world, and all these famines and earthquakes are going to come before the end.  A couple of things you have to remember is people that lived at the time of Christ felt the Second Coming, the end, was going to come in their life.  Even Paul would advise people, “Don’t buy a house.  Don’t get married.  It’s all going to end in a while.”  So the end of the world was kind of considered to be something imminent, but at the same time, what you’re, I think, hearing in this particular passage, is the end of the corruption that is in the institution that Jesus longed to change.  I have to admit, many times I talk about the Old Testament in a negative way, because I’m really not talking about the fullness and the richness and the beauty of the Old Testament, but I’m really talking about the way that Jesus confronted the corruption that was in the church, in the temple, in the men who ran it who had no real desire, no real focus on being of service.  They used the system to serve them.  That was the classic dilemma, and so when Jesus is talking about, “This is all going to fall down.  This is all going to — there’s not going to be left a stone on a stone,” he’s not against the temple obviously, but he’s against the corruption that is in it.  And he’s underscoring the fact that, when somebody, when some institution decides to go in a direction that is evil, that is about taking instead of giving, about using instead of serving, it’s going to destroy — it’s going to self-destruct, and that’s what Jesus is stressing.  Then he goes on to say, “There are all kinds of things that are going to be coming about the end of the world, but don’t get excited about somebody telling you it’s going to happen.”  Jesus even then was saying, even though the disciples all thought it was going to happen really quick, he said, “Be careful of that.”  That’s a plan, I would even say, that Jesus as a human being had no real knowledge fully of when that was all going to turn out.  I’m not talking about him as God but as a human.  That’s how he presented himself to the world.

So here we have image after image of things that I pray and hope will give us tremendous amounts of hope, meaning — hope is not how I’d like it.  “I hope maybe perhaps it’ll work.”  But hope is that incredible virtue that tells you that everything is working toward the good, everything — everything.  And when your intention is focused on that, when your desire is not to retaliate against those who resist you with the same kind of hatred but to look at them and to do what Jesus did on the cross, and that is to look at them and say, “They really don’t know what they’re doing.”  And the people who did what they did to Jesus, the rejection they had for him and his disciples, they didn’t know what they were doing.  They were panicky.  They were frightened.  They were trying to survive.  That doesn’t excuse what they did, but it doesn’t make them into these terrible, evil people that we think people are.  Evil is something that gets into us.  It isn’t that we are that.  Even you look at the worse image of evil out there.  ISIS is — I know this isn’t an easy thing to hear, but those people are victims as well as the horror that they do to their victims, but they too are caught in some illusion, some half-truth, some misconception that they’re doing something that is good, they’re doing something for God.  That gives you another sense of how evil is so insidious, because it actually convinces people that what they’re doing is for a good reason when it’s literally working against everything that goodness is and that love is and that compassion and empathy are.  

So we’re ending the church year, then, on a note of, I think, hope, even though you might read these readings and say, “Oh, it’s all going to end, and it’s all going to implode, and there’s going to be great, horrible events, and then we’re all going to be burned up.”  If you change that image of being burned up to being purified, if you change the image that evil is stronger than good, which some people really believe, then you can sit back and look at this entire situation with more of a curiosity than a depression.  It’s interesting how it’s all working out.  Isn’t it interesting the issues that we’re having to deal with today?  They’re not issues we dealt in the past, and that has to mean that there’s something major happening in the world.  And it strikes me that there’s more good in the world than ever, and there seems to be more evil in the world than ever.  I don’t know whether that’s really true, but we’re certainly seeing it with clearer eyes.  And I think when you see it and you can feel its phoniness and its emptiness and its self-centeredness, that might do more than anything to keep moving us toward the kingdom, the kingdom of service, the kingdom of love and care for the people that we have around us, that we know we want to be free.

Father, your gift to us is wisdom, the ability to see, the know, to be conscious of what is valuable, what is real, what is life-giving.  As you awaken us to this knowledge, to this awareness, bless us with compassion, empathy for our own faults, our own missteps and those of those around us who are still caught in blindness that we can truly be an agent of peace and love and union in the world.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.