The clocks turned back one hour marking the end of daylight savings time.  In Florida this may be the only sign we can see of fall and the changing of the seasons.  Up north neighbors have donned sweaters and armed with rakes, wade into the falling leaves from sweet gums and maples and sassafras. Soon they will be bare, their colored glory a memory, and winter’s icy blast will whistle through bare limbs, scratching and tapping on frosty windowpanes to startle us in the night.  The Donner Pass has already shut down to semi-trucks from snow and hazardous wind.

 

Our palms are evergreen and our skies forever summer; only the grass takes a pause between haircuts, but we know the times of warm and cold, of long and short cycle ever onward and are for the marking of days and weeks and months and years.  We know how to read the signs of the seasons.  We have been reading them for a long time.

 

It is another thing to read the changes from epoch to epoch of history, from the age of Grace through the ages of Discovery, Industry, Information and Disillusionment to the End of All Ages.  The Apostles wanted to know when it would end and how would they know, and we want to know from Jesus:

 

Teacher, when will this happen?
And what sign will there be when all these things are

about to happen?

(Luke 21:7)

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The splendor and grandeur of Solomon’s Temple on the Mount must have seemed so much more permanent than the trees that change with the season.  Yet Jesus warns that it will all pass away.  What will this grand destruction mean?  Jesus’ answer is surprising.  The wars, the destructions, the persecutions, all will take place.  Many kinds of spectacular events associated with the end of the world will happen.  But the end is not associated with those things.  They are almost like the colors of the falling leaves.  They will happen and will continue to happen as they have for over 2,000 years.  But these signs are not to be read as the time when history will change from one era to another.  That change is also happening, but not with the cosmic and cataclysmic events expected.

 

When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for such things must happen first, but it will not immediately be the end.

(Luke 21:9)

 

Jesus never answers the question, when will this be?  He talks around it.  He talks of signs, but not of the end.  He talks of persecutions like the tribulations of Christians today in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon, in most of the Holy Land, and certainly in Communist China, Korea and for the non-Orthodox, Russia.  Don’t you sense a certain stridency, and edge of warning and impatience towards the Christian believer in America and Europe as well?  It’s my belief that we are approaching exhaustion as a Church and Temple in America.  I do not make distinctions among the Denominations of Christianity—Catholic, Protestant, Non-Denominational, Jewish, Muslim, Bahia.  They are declining from within as did the great civilizations of the world before them.  But they will rise, as surely as Jesus spoke of Lazarus to his anxious sister:

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“Your brother will rise again,” Jesus told her.

Martha replied, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will live, even though he dies. And everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:23-26)

 

Let us leave this question for you to consider and answer.

 

Jesus speaks of divisions in the family.  What is the family for us today?  It’s a serious question when you have a debate about the meaning of marriage and parenting.  We see divisions between the generations, between the genders and one group feeding off the other for the sake of material gain or social advantage.  Maximum consumption:  We are eating the future of our children and grandchildren.   How can you baptize them, catechize them, educate them in the best Catholic Schools and understand how they have lost interest in the Faith?  And somewhere along the way, in giving them every advantage you yourself never had (and never seemed to miss or feel deprived of), they lost interest in you, too.

 

Jesus talks of endurance, but never states endurance to what end, only to the end:

 

But the one who endures to the end will be saved. (Matthew 24:13)

 

Daily life itself should be something more than to endure or survive.  Marriages are not trials by fire and child rearing should not be the mortification of the flesh or self-flagellation.  Talking to your wife, your husband your children, listening to your parents, your teachers or the preacher should not be like the last mile of a marathon.

 

Endure what, Jesus?  But He gives us the slip again, just like that crowd who one minute wanted to crown Him and the next, kill Him by throwing Him off the hill at Nazareth:

 

And they rose up and drove Him out of the town and brought Him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw Him down the cliff.  But passing through their midst,

He went away.

(Luke 4:29-30)

 

His time had not yet come.  It was close at hand, like the Kingdom of God, palpable, discernable, and visible but slightly out of focus, as St. Paul sees it:

 

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

(1 Corinthians. 13:12)

 

And He will be with us until the end of time.  He is here now and is telling us that He will be with us and will not abandon us, that His resurrection and ascension are not His departure or absence, but rather the means of establishing the new age among us now.  Wars and violence and family crises and cosmic events (how much they seem the same sometimes) are indeed terrible.  All humanity suffers.  God too, suffers with us in Christ.  He always suffers; he wears the nail and spear marks for eternity.

 

This tumult assumes terrible power in the face of such honesty.  But is does not have ultimate power.  It did not control Jesus, and it does not control those like us who are named His adopted brothers and sisters through Baptism.  Though it may kill us, yet is does not harm us.  God’s love is stronger than death.

 

We are not fooled by the endless cycles of violence in our world.  We take them for what they are, the death throes of our own individual sins writ on a grand collective scale—the sins of the world.  We struggle against them even as we know we are in part responsible for the suffering they cause.  But through the eyes of faith, we catch a glimpse of God’s action hidden apart from them, and hope for the reign of God to come as promised and maybe, already begun, but not yet fully present.  We hope in Jesus.  AMEN.

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