“Glimpses of Another World”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. David McMaster
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Text: Luke 21:5-1-; 25-28
As I drove into church this morning, I heard that today is a notable day for Toronto sports fans. Today, for the first time in three years, a Toronto team is playing in the playoffs. The Argos play Hamilton in Hamilton … but I do not want to talk about the Argos, I want to talk about the Leafs and one Leaf in particular, Ron Ellis.
Ron Ellis is one of the most renowned hockey players that the Maple Leafs have ever had. I heard Ron Ellis speak at a breakfast meeting a few years ago. He is, perhaps, not the world's best speaker, a quiet man, but he had something powerful to say. He told stories about how as a child and youth, all that he wanted to do was to play in the National Hockey League. He played and worked at his skills until he reached that goal. When he had made it, he said, “it wasn't enough so I raised the bar, I wanted to win the Stanley Cup.” Ron Ellis was a member of the last Leaf team to win the cup in 1967. “It was absolutely marvellous,” he said. “We were on top of the world for the summer of '67. But then came September. I went out to the Leaf training camp, a champion, only to find out that the Leaf brass had brought in five new, young wingers all trying to take my job. Life-note number one,” he said.
In '72, he played in the big series against the Soviets that has now taken on almost mythical status. The Canadian game was on the line when one of Ellis's Toronto team-mates, Paul Henderson, netted the goal that allowed Canada to claim victory. That group of NHLers was ecstatic. They returned home, champions of the world. They were welcomed and lauded as heroes by everyone. “But,” said Ellis, “when Henderson and I returned to The Maple Leafs' training camp, it was already well underway. What had been accomplished was set aside, we came to camp late, felt like outsiders. It didn't matter that we were champions, we had to fight to gain our spots on the Leaf team. Life-point number two,” he said. Even though he had been successful, even though he was a champion, success turned quickly into history. “You are only as good as your last game,” he said. “Nothing lasts forever in the game of hockey.” It was then, he continued, “I began to sense the emptiness of it all. I had sought after honour and glory and trophies, only to find that after an initial joy, nothing lasts, and there was still a void, life was still empty, nothing lasts forever. ”
That thought may have been in the background of the events told in Lk.21:5f. Jesus and his disciples have finally reached Jerusalem. The disciples must have been impressed by the great temple in Jerusalem. In the places they had grown up small, mud houses would have been the norm but here, in the capital, there were some immense structures. The glory of the temple was the stuff of legend. For the Jewish people, it was the house of God. King Herod had extended it during his reign so that it now towered over the Jerusalem landscape. It was built with stones that were several feet thick, stones whose weight was measured in tons rather than pounds or kilograms. The disciples must have been mesmerized by the immensity of the temple. It seemed inimitable, impervious, unassailable when Jesus comes along and says, “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 (Lk.21:6).” And sure enough, within a generation, the Romans sacked the city, tore stone from stone. Nothing, not even the temple, lasts forever.
I, personally, gave up on things lasting forever when the Soviet Empire fell in December, 1991. I may not have liked it much, but the Soviet Empire was part of the reality that many of us grew up with; there was the East Block and the West and incredibly, the powerful East just disappeared. The Soviet Union, East Germany (Oct. 1990), Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, as nations, are now all history. The Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, the Cold War have all faded into the rubbish heap of time. Like the 1967 Stanley Cup champion, Maple Leafs, how they have fallen. But the Jerusalem Temple? The Holy of Holies? Even that? Nothing, it seems, lasts forever. Every human structure, all human efforts, all things of the earth, destined to fade.
It begs the question: Is there anything that one can hold on to? Is there anything lasting? Anything eternal? Or is all just vanity of vanities and hopeless?
Jesus, after delivering his sombre words about the future of the great temple and the end of the world, says something quite startling. When all this stuff happens, when everything in the world seems to be falling down and falling apart, “Look up! Your redemption is drawing near.” “Look up,” says Jesus, “for God is about to break in to transform things. What we see, what we experience on earth is not all that there is. There is a reality beyond this world just waiting to make itself known. There is a story beyond our earthly story, a much bigger story, a grander story, one that will circumvent all the failures and the change and disintegration that we grow accustomed to in this life. It is the story of God, the story of creation, a story of human failure, but then also of hope for the future and eternal things.
That, my friends, is a story that is not always easy to hear or comprehend. We have our reality based primarily on five senses. Through them, it is not easy to see another reality and, in fact, through them we scarcely can even see all that there is in the world we live in. So often in life we do not fully appreciate all that is around us. Søren Kiergegaard told a parable about a man who was travelling. He was riding inside a lit carriage. The carriage was driven by a peasant who sat outside, up front in the cold and dark. Inside, the man passed his time with his thoughts and snoozing and sleeping. From his vantage point, he was totally unaware of the spectacle that could be enjoyed outside. It was the clearest of clear nights and the stars and planets appeared like never before. The peasant driver was quietly mesmerized by the beauty of creation as he drove the carriage down the road. The traveller in the lit carriage saw nothing.
We do not always see what is around us. We create worlds like the inside of a lit carriage at night and miss much of what goes on around us. Tolstoy once said that we tend to limit life and then mistake what limits life for life itself. But there's so much more and one wonders what we would see if we stepped outside where our eyes were truly open.
Jesus, and the biblical writers, keep pointing us to a reality that will one day break into our world with the coming of the Son of Man. They say that we can catch glimpses of it already. It is as if, says St. Paul, we “peer through a glass darkly (1 Cor.13:12).” We see now in part what will be made clear.
Is that true? Can we see in part this other reality?
There is in Celtic spirituality the concept of the “thin place.” The thin place is one of those places in which a person can almost reach out and touch God or more readily experience God. I think that I found one of those places when I travelled down the east coast of Ireland, south of Dublin into Wicklow and the place called Glendalough. The ruins of an ancient monastery are in Glendalough. It is the place where the renowned St. Kevin was said to dwell. Hills sweep down into a valley and to the lough and I remember staring out at the stillness of the water in this beautiful scene. As I wandered around the ancient buildings and chapels, there was this feeling, an inexplicable feeling in the quiet and stillness, a feeling like I was in the presence of something far greater, something beyond what I could see.
It was perhaps similar to what Linda experienced many years ago. Linda and I had become friends at a Youth Camp that we both counselled at and one weekend, Linda came up from her home in Niagara Falls to stay at my mother's house. The Saturday was one of those lazy, hazy, crazily glorious summer days. I had a couple of hours work to do in the morning and Linda caught up with some reading. When I had finished, I went to find Linda. I looked all over the house and looked again. She was gone. I had lost Linda! Eventually, as I gazed out the back door, I saw a figure off in the distance, across the fields. I started out and found Linda sitting on a block, staring, evidently in another space. As I approached I said, “Whatcha doing?” Linda was and is a Christian and she paused and said, “I came out here to pray. I'm not sure if you'll understand this but something took over (and Linda wasn't weird, she wasn't charismatic or anything), something took over out here in the beauty of God's creation. It's as if something much greater happened; as if I was in the very presence of God.” Linda glowed as she told me this. Did Linda find a “thin place?” Had she caught a glimpse of the bigger story?
Think too of the so-called near-death experiences that we hear about from time to time? Are these untrue? Are they all untrue? A couple of years ago, another friend of mine called me up. We hadn't talked in some months and she started to tell me an almost unbelievable story of what she had been through. She had gone for a routine surgery when something happened. Apparently, the surgery had gone well but while she was still under anaesthetic, the hospital orderlies tried to move her from the operating table to a gurney to take her to recovery. Someone had forgotten to apply a brake to the gurney and as they attempted to move my friend, the gurney moved and they dropped her onto the hard tile floor. The injuries she sustained were life threatening and she told me of how the hospital staff had called her family in and prepared them for the worst. She said that she was unable to speak to them but she could hear her family mulling around her, crying, and wondering how such a thing had happened when all that she had been in for had been routine surgery. Then, to my surprise, this very educated woman, she is a medical doctor herself as well has holding a Ph.D. in Psychology, started telling me about a journey she experienced toward a great light and a feeling of utter peace and joy that she experienced. She said, “David, it was wonderful, I can't explain it, and I don't know why I was sent back.”
Hers is not the only one of these stories that I have heard. In fact, another physician has shared with me about how he had one of these in his late teens and now has absolutely no fear of death; he knows that there is something more. What do we do with stories of that nature? Particularly when they come to us from individuals with critical minds and individuals we trust? Are these just mere stories? Are they delusions? Or are they glimpses of something else, a bigger story, another reality?
I sometimes wonder about Martin Luther King Jr. In the days of Civil Rights marches. You remember the night before his death, when he said,
I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind … I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
Are Martin Luther King's words just words? Are they all metaphor or did he see something? Did he see a bigger picture, a greater reality in which God was going to break in and bring about redemption. Did he look up and see what God was doing?
What about some of those inexplicable transformations in human behaviour? What do they tell us? Do they give us glimpses of something beyond? There's the story of Joanna Flanders-Thomas, for instance, who worked against apartheid and then turned her attention to the most violent prison in South Africa, Pollsmoor prison in which Nelson Mandela spent eight years of his confinement. Joanna started visiting the prisoners daily, bringing them a simple gospel message of forgiveness and reconciliation. She organized a tiny ministry entitled The Centre for Hope and Transformation. The year before her visits began, the prison recorded 279 acts of violence between inmates; the next year there were two, and the following year eight. The results attracted the attention of the BBC which did a two hour documentary on her work. One writer said to Joanna Flanders-Thomas, “I don't get it. These guys had been hardened criminals, violent, monsters, rapists, murderers. And from what I can see you were simply holding Bible Studies, playing trust games, having prayer meetings. What really happened to transform Pollsmoor Prison?” Joanna looked up and said to him, almost without thinking, “Well, of course, God was already present in the prison. I just had to make him visible.” ... ... “I just made him visible.” ... did the prisoners look up and catch a glimpse of something beyond their own stories, something transformative, something beyond all that they knew? Does the account give us all a glimpse of something greater and the power of the gospel of Christ?
In Luke 21 as Jesus speaks of the fall of the temple and the end of the world, it is as if he says, nothing around us lasts...
There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. Men will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken.
“But this is not all that there is,” says Jesus, “there is more ...
At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near (Lk.21:25-28).
Jesus is saying that what we have glimpses of now will one day break into our reality
Ron Ellis, as he told his story of victories and championships and successes that were always short lived, said that it all began to get to him. Joy always faded and left him feeling empty and void. He said that it drove him into depression, almost to despair. “Until,” he said, “he looked up.”
Many of us tend to have very limited lives. We live as though in Kierkegaard's lit carriage. We see little. We experience joys and too many other things that fade and are short lived. We desperately want something greater, something lasting, something firm to hold on to for ourselves and to pass on to our children. Look up…your redemption is drawing near.