Luke 21: 5-18, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15
May I speak in the name of the father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
As we come to the end of the liturgical year, our readings become more apocalyptic, and today’s Gospel, is often called the ‘Little Apocalypse’.
Now common understanding, and what we have consumed from modern culture, the term ‘apocalypse’ is used to refer to the end of the world or some imagined future in which world structures have been destroyed, however, the word ‘Apokalypsis’ in Greek also means something which will be revealed.
The revelation of future events, that we hear in the last book of the New Testament, The Revelation would fall into this category. But there is nothing in the definition of the word which implies that all that is revealed must be about the future. It can as easily refer to a revelation regarding the present or even the past. In any event, apocalyptic language and imagery, dramatic as it may seem - means to assure the faithful that they should keep their trust in God even when facing the most challenging of circumstances – not to scare us to kingdom come.
Moreover, what is considered to be apocalyptic is usually visionary. A human figure, usually is taken to a heavenly realm and there receives a vision about the past, present, or future.
If we read these books seriously, however, they do not claim to be the revelation of certain ideas or principles rather, something that we need to understand, these stories reveal the invisible spiritual world to us. Encounters with this spiritual realm were regular and accepted in the ancient world and these happened at specific places; religion was therefore not an intellectual exercise but a practical one consisting of concrete actions in the here and now, in the material world.
And today as we are encouraged to pray for the victims and survivors of abuse of those in the church, as we reflect on our readings today, we’ll explore why safeguarding is not just an obligation but a response to these apocalypses, these unveiling of the spiritual realm, the universe as it is truly - is in all of its fullness.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus, just moments ago, witnesses a faithful woman, both widowed and impoverished, throwing everything she had, her mite, into the Temple treasury and now his four closest disciples begin to reflect upon where they are - the Temple, the place where God touched the earth. And as is suitable - the building that honours the God who alone is God, it would have been overwhelmingly big and beautiful.
As religious tourists tend to do, they begin to admire the impressive architecture…. Jesus interrupts the conversation as his usual unnerving self - with talk of destruction, ecological disaster, wars, and persecution. “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down he says – for all will pass away.
Of course, in the first instance, there is nothing wrong with being impressed. Temples and cathedrals like this one are built to point to God’s glory and to draw us to praise and worship, pointing us to what is so much greater than we are.
But Jesus’s revelation, his unveiling here is to draw attention to the fallibility of all these things, not least religious things, for the Temple, a symbol of religious authority and human achievement, was not immune to collapse.
For the disciples, Jesus’s unveiling was very real. the destruction of the temple a few decades later from their perspective, was disastrous. And yet Jesus is quite clear: even such a shocking event does not shake or undermine the purposes of God.
Now St. Paul, who wrote our second lesson is understood as a great scholar of the Old Testament, the one who could connect and articulate to his fellow Jews all that happened in the Old Testament to God becoming man in Jesus - but that is not how he thinks of himself. He bases his call to spread the gospel on his visions with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus.
And this was not an isolated incident. Twice more Paul directly interacts with Christ who appears to him and describes at least one more visionary experience.
He is adamant that the gospel which he preaches, involving past, present, and future events in the life of Christ to which he was not an eyewitness, was communicated to him by Christ himself, not by humans. For St. Paul, the gospel is a revelation of invisible spiritual reality grounded in his direct experience of the spiritual realm.
And it is in this frame which he speaks to those Christians in the major port city of Thessalonica in modern day Greece in our second reading. He ultimately calls on these Christians, to not get tired of doing what is right. Never stop lifting up those around you if you can. It would seem that Paul wanted to impress on his congregation the importance of their deeds, that how they act shows the fulfilment of their calling.
Now we might be living in a different moment from St Paul but many of the lessons are ones we need to hold on to. Discipleship hasn’t changed much in the last 2000 years. Following Jesus still means testifying to our trust in God during circumstances that test our confidence and our hope.
Over the past few years, the Church of England has been called to account for its Safeguarding failures. As a wider church and as cathedral community, we are on a journey: there is always more work to be done and more lessons to learn and there is a constant need for us to lament and repent of our failings.
For we cannot live out the great commandment to love God and love neighbour if those who would harm their neighbour find a secure hiding-place in our common life. Terrible things have happened in our churches, as in all our best-loved institutions; we share a responsibility for ensuring that they cannot happen again.
And this, surely, by God’s grace, is the pastoral task of the church.
Safeguarding is about managing and reducing risk, and making our cathedral as safe as we can, and making it a place where people can come and talk about deeply personal stories where they can begin their journey of healing, our art installation that opens this week, Pillars of Hope in the Galilee Chapel from tomorrow offers us an opportunity to build up our own resources of compassion and confidence in responding well to those who come to us and share their story of abuse, and it is our hope and prayer that we will
also give some confidence to those who may be sitting here now who need this cathedral to be a place of sanctuary.
And our duty to safeguarding then, isn’t a bureaucratic burden or a distraction from our mission — it’s a vital expression and response of what has been revealed to us – with the understanding that God will be with us always, even to the end of the world.
Amen.