Pentecost XXV                         The Rev'd Dr. Titus Presler, Subdean

Luke 21.5-19                            General Theological Seminary

November 18, 2007                   Solemn Mass

                                                    

It is a joy to be with you here today,

  and I am grateful for the invitation of your rector David Cobb.

I bring you greetings from the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church,

  where our mission is to educate and form leaders for the church in a changing world.

It is good to know that our theologue Robert Hendrickson

  is carrying out an internship with you,

  for the tradition of this parish is a grand one.

I first experienced it in 1979 during the rectorship of David Bolton

  when I came for the ordination of my dear friend Tad Meyer to the priesthood,

    because he was serving as curate here.

As I contemplated Tad prostrate on the pavement at that event – something I had not seen before! – I realized that this parish is a particular repository and custodian of catholic spirituality and practice within the church.

I commend you for that and rejoice in your continuing faithfulness.

 

From the Gospel of Luke today we hear this familiar and not especially reassuring story:

“When some were speaking about the Temple ,

  how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, Jesus 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 in Jerusalem was a wonder of its time,

rebuilt by Herod the great to a new magnificence.

According to the Jewish historian Josephus, Herod's Temple contained white stones that were 37 feet long, 12 feet high and 18 feet wide —

  I believe that's a good deal bigger than a semi-trailer truck, only there were no such trucks in those days to use for transporting such stupendous stones,

  and we can only imagine the anguish of human labor it took to erect the temple.

Herod gave a golden vine for one of the Temple's decorations, and the grape clusters on the vine were as tall as a person.

This was the center of Jewish religious observance, and it was marvelous.

 

My wife Jane and I visited the World Trade Center with our four children in the winter of 1991 or so —

   it was a classic family school vacation trip as we bundled into the Plymouth Voyager minivan we had at the time and drove off to Washington and New York.

The Trade Center seemed a wonder of our time, even though by then, of course, the towers were no longer the tallest buildings in the world.

110 stories each, 1,350 feet tall, 103 elevators each, 12 million square feet of rentable space altogether, construction designed to bend with the high winds of southern Manhattan

  — all of this seemed a marvel, and I rejoiced in the statistics.

Like the Temple of Jerusalem, the World Trade Center had its history of adversity,

  especially with the bomb blast set off in its basement in 1993.

Like the Temple, though, it was restored, people marveled at its endurance,

  and it became a landmark for the rejuvenated New York City of the late 20th century.

Yet the bombers of 1993 were prophets of its ultimate destruction,

  and their sympathizers ensured that their unfinished task was brought to terrible completion.

 

What are we to make of Jesus' discourse today –

  his words about wars and insurrections,

  nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom,

  dreadful portents and signs from heaven?

9/11 hangs over this first decade of the 21 st century in an altogether remarkable way:

  the catalyst for intractable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,

  the beginning of the unraveling of Pakistan,

  a symbol of the greatest animosity between Muslims and Christians since the Crusades.

Beyond these conflicts are the portents of environmental catastrophe that United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon yesterday called “the defining challenge of our time” –

  this in the wake of the final report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

How do such events relate to Jesus' prophecy?

Of course, Jesus' specific prophecy about the Temple was fulfilled in the year 70 A.D., when the Romans destroyed the Temple under the leadership of the general and later emperor named, unfortunately, Titus;

  the Western Wall, often known as the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem today, is all that remains of the Temple complex.

Yes, today's events fulfill Jesus' prophecy,

  but they fulfill the prophecy just like many other times of calamity since Jesus have fulfilled that prophecy.

In warning his disciples Jesus was advising them that times of adversity will arise in every age,

  and that in those times of adversity, they were to remain faithful,

  “for by your endurance,” says Jesus, “you will gain your souls.”

 

We can take Jesus' words as a platform for speculating about the end-time.

Or we can them, as I believe we should, as a catalyst for envisioning what the Christian community should be up to for the sake of the world in such a time as ours.

“By your endurance,” says Jesus, “you will gain your souls.”

Endurance that will redeem our souls cannot be a matter simply of waiting it out, or climbing into lifeboats, or saying “I told you so!”

It must be rather a visionary venture in building new life.

 

The November 11, 2001, New York Times Magazine was entitled Beginnings: An issue about the Next New York .

One article detailed a conversation among two architects, an urban planner, a structural engineer and a landscape designer on what, if anything, should be built on Ground Zero, the site of the former World Trade Center –

  and six years later it continues to be more insightful about rebuilding than much of what we have heard since in the wrangling about Ground Zero

  and the building of what is now to be known as the Freedom Tower.

Listen to some snippets of their conversation:

Marylin Taylor, an urban planner, said, “One of the things we have a chance to do here is to have an extroverted place rather than in introverted place.

  “We no longer need to create this superblock with its own world. The World Trade Center, when it was built, replaced 15 city blocks.”

Interesting! — she was concerned about the stewardship of community ,

  that the rebuilding be more supportive of community life than the old center was.

Architect Terence Riley, the moderator, said, “One of the more immediate responses after the attack, and it may have first come from former Mayor Ed Koch, was ‘Rebuild the towers.' We probably all have our opinions about the merit of the idea, but let's first think about what it represents.”

Architect Tod Williams, replied, “It's: ‘Let's make life the way it was. Let's show the world that they can't take us down.' There were also a lot of young people that said the same thing.”

Marylin Taylor, the urban planner, jumped in: “My 18-year-old daughter said the same thing. She said: ‘You don't recognize, Mom, you've been critical of these buildings from an architectural point of view. You don't realize what a symbol of New York they were to everybody my age.' People want their symbol back.”

Another interesting comment! — That's the stewardship of memory and the stewardship of symbols that create and support the memory of a community.

Moderator Riley brought up another idea: “Let's take another quick response that all of us have heard, that the towers should not be rebuilt at all and that the entire site should be a memorial. . . . Their idea is that the site is where thousands of people lost their lives and in many cases their physical remains are still there. So why not do something that treats it almost as a burial ground, a place of great solemnity?”

That's also a stewardship of memory , only now it's the memory not of the towers but of the lives lost in their destruction and the trauma of the city and nation.

Leslie Robertson, who had been the structural engineer for the twin towers responded,

  “But it should not be a park. This is not what great cities do in a time like this. What about the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco? They didn't make a great open space, they rolled up their sleeves and rebuilt the city. Or the Chicago fire?”

That's a different stewardship, the stewardship of economic and structural momentum in the life of city and nation,

  a sense that there's energy and productivity that must be preserved and harnessed for new achievement.

Architect William Pedersen argued that whatever new buildings go up must be energy-efficient in a way that the Trade Center towers were not:

  “The tall building,” he said, “is a perfect structure to deal with wind turbines and wind generation. Photovoltaic cells are ideally situated on tall buildings because they have a tremendous amount of surface area.”

There's stewardship of the resources of the earth,

  and stewardship of the financial resources needed to harness them.

 

The point? Our thinking about the life and work of the church needs to be just as creative and inspired as that conversation about Ground Zero was!

What, for instance, is the contribution of congregations in a time when a Harvard sociologist publishes two books on the decline of community in contemporary life: ­

  I'm thinking of Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community , and Better Together: Restoring the American Community ?

Congregations are remarkable entities in that they bring together a multi-generational and often multi-cultural group of people on a weekly basis for live interaction that has social, instructional, musical, liturgical and inspirational dimensions.

The capacity of congregations to build community in an atomistic age is unique.

 

What is the contribution of congregations in a time when organized religion labors under the 20 th century's haze of suspicion about it,

   but people's longing for spiritual ground and spiritual practice continues to intensify?

Offerings here at Christ Church well illustrate what that contribution can be:

  I'm told that Sunday evening Compline draws up to 200 young people every week,

  and I see that the Monday Evening Mysticism Group welcomes all to such treats as reading Evagrius, a third-century Egyptian monk –

  all this in addition to lifting up the promise of new life in Jesus Christ through all the resources of Christian tradition that you can marshal every Sunday morning an on weekdays as well.

 

What is the church's role in the intensifying religious polarization of our time?

Well, this morning at the Sunday Forum you had me sharing from encounters with moderate Muslims in the Arab world.

In an especially creative initiative, St. Stephen's Church in Richmond, Virginia, has established an entire Center for Reconciliation and Mission, devoted chiefly to the encounter with Islam.

St. Ethelburga's in London, England, was a tiny medieval chapel until it was mostly destroyed in 1993 by an IRA truck bomb intended for nearby banks,

  but now, rebuilt as the St. Ethelburga's Center for Reconciliation and Peace,

  it brings together people across racial, religious and national boundaries.

 

What is the church's role in the widening disparity between rich and poor both in the USA and globally, with ramifications for education, health and economic security?

In its global mission the church has always reached out to offer education, health care and economic tools,

  and today it continues to do so, often in innovative ways:

  churches are often the chief catalyst for microfinance cooperatives,

  some missioners work specifically on introducing and sustaining renewable energy sources like solar panels in rural villages,

  and in Africa as well as here churches are major players in AIDS ministry.

 

I could go on, but those are just some of the kinds of questions we need to be asking about the work of the church in the challenges of our time.

  

Our time, like Jesus' time and countless times in between, is a time of many calamities.

“By your endurance,” says Jesus, “you will gain your souls.”

In the face of today's challenges and impending catastrophes we are not helpless individuals with no resources on which to draw.

No, we are the Body of Christ, and individually members of it.

As members of the church, which is the Body of Christ, we are integral parts of a transcendent reality in the world

  that exists for the transfiguration, the transformation, the salvation of the world.

 

May that reality form and energize our lives in our congregations and dioceses.

May that reality form and energize us in theological education.

May that reality form and energize our discipleship to Jesus Christ,

  the incarnate, crucified and risen one who longs for companions in this work of transfiguration.