A colleague tells a wonderful story about building a sandcastle with her son at the beach. It was his birthday. The beach one of his favorite places. They took a picnic. Blankets. Towels. Lawn chairs. Books. Then spread out. Ate. Read. Swam the surf. Walked. And built a sandcastle. One of those massive, creative sandcastles with layers and levels and tunnels and turrets and shells and seaweed. After they finished, the boy’s mother said it was time to leave. “No,” her son wailed. “We can’t. What about our creation? We can’t just leave it here. We have to stay and protect it. We’ve worked so hard on it. The waves will come and wash it away.” The little boy was heart-sick. The sandcastle was a memento of the day. But his mother gently reminded him it wasn’t really the sandcastle it was the fun they had together building it, being together at the beach. That, she said, is what we are taking home and taking with us wherever we go.

Wise motherly advice. Much like the advice, in fact, Jesus gives his disciples as they stand slack-jawed and opened mouthed before Herod’s Temple – a massive, sprawling, first century, real life, sandcastle occupying the equivalent of 24 football fields.  But Jesus gives them some advice. He tells them one day it will be washed away. All of it. Not one stone will be left standing on another, he says. It is one of the charges the authorities use to put him to death. Nor does Jesus say he will bring the Temple to ruin. God will do that and just like the vast sea washing away that sandcastle God will do it in God’s time. No one, not even Jesus, knows when that will be.

It may seem odd this Thanksgiving Sunday when we celebrate the productivity of our farms and minds and the flourishing of our economy to be proclaiming the temporary nature of this world and the church. You’d think this Sunday we’d be celebrating the power and longevity and importance of the church – represented for us today by these new members and abundant pledges.

But here comes Jesus with his theological smelling salts. Just as he gave those disciples – light-headed from the architectural magnificence of Herod’s Temple – a whiff of reality so today Jesus brings us to our senses. Reminds us on a day we might be tempted to focus solely on our own efforts and achievements as a congregation that there is a deeper purpose, a larger arc to God’s reality, a new day yet to come. Today when we dedicate our lives and resources to the church Mark’s story helps us to step back and consider what the enterprise of faith is ultimately about. What it is we wait and work and hope for.

I suspect from time to time we get too attached to this institution, its buildings, programs, rituals, ways of doing things. When such attachments characterize a congregation then that church starts a process of slow erosion like a sandcastle facing the rising tide.
I remember the self-appointed custodian in one church I served. He came by early every morning, late every night to inspect the church. Turn the lights off and the thermostat down. Lock the doors. Document the messes made or dirt left by the community and church groups that used the building every day of the week. “We have too many groups in here,” he complained to me one day. “The youth groups are hard on this place, the support groups don’t pick up after themselves, the teachers in the Nursery School put up signs and posters everywhere.” He loved that church dearly. As much as anyone. Maybe more. But his affection for the building would have smothered the church. He was protecting it for the wrong reasons. So that it wouldn’t look used or worn. Might just last forever.

When Jesus talks about the coming end time, his is not a smothering love – preserving the church from wear and tear. In Mark 13 Jesus’ love is tough. The end time, he said, will be tumultuous, painful, confusing. Not unlike giving birth. That’s why pragmatists and activists and believers in progress avoid this story. Many over the centuries have dismissed the church’s talk of the end of the world as misguided thinking. But a very important paradox is embedded here. Rather than causing us to deny or ignore the present Jesus’ words about the end time free us to fully participate in the here and now. Only when we are not ultimately invested in this world, when we know that this life is not our final destination, only then are we liberated to work and live fully with courage and hope. Parenting, for example, is the art of learning to let go of your child in the present so that you can raise that child for the future. Such balance of present and future is the key to being the church. Take it one step further, “maybe the best thing that could happen to the church would be for some great tidal wave of history to wash it all away – church buildings tumbling, church money all lost, church bulletins blowing through the air like dead leaves, the differences between pastors and congregations all lost too. Then all we would have left would be each other and Christ, which was all there was in the first place.”

That is the message of the end time and Christian hope. Woody Allen said, “I have seen the future and it is very much like the present, only longer.” Christian hope is different. Christian hope, says Peter Gomes, is not grounded in the ultimate conquest of one philosophical or even theological system over another. Christian hope is grounded in the reality that the Jesus who came once in weakness and in meekness will come again in great glory, in judgement, justice and power to redeem the world. To save it from itself. We are invited to adopt a confident hope in God’s future. Not our future. But God’s future. In the bright light of Monday morning that may be easier said than done. We live in a world that sees little of God in the present let alone the future. Powerful politicians, business executives, military brokers, maybe even a few terrorists are seen as shapers of our today and tomorrow. Not God. We measure our ups and downs by the stock market. Live our days with slogans like Nike’s “life is for winners” and find our security in healthcare and military technology. Much of our world is out of sync with God. But Jesus’ lesson today and the book of Hebrews reminds us that that truth, the Kingdom – yet to come – is also buried deep within us, like a treasure in a field. Hebrews says it this way: “I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds.” The Kingdom – God’s future already here but not yet completely arrived. If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness and goodness and beauty – that place of peace and justice at the end of time – is as close as our breathing. Crying out to be born within each of us. The thing we are starving to death for. The place where our best dreams and truest prayers come from. The Kingdom here and now within us and yet to come enables us to face the forces of darkness knowing no matter how the battle goes today, final victory will come tomorrow.

It was the Kingdom within him, God’s future justice, that enabled Martin Luther King, two weeks before his assassination, to proclaim at the National Cathedral, “we shall overcome because the arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. We shall overcome because Carlyle is right – no lie can live forever. We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right – truth crushed to earth will rise again. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”

“The Kingdom of God is at hand” is the way Jesus put it to his disciples and the way he told you and me to tell it to others. Life even at its most monotonous and backbreaking and heart-numbing has the Kingdom in all of its future glory buried within each moment, like a treasure in a field.  Here is the good news: if we take Jesus’ words to heart that an end time, a time of wholeness and healing and justice is coming, if we take those words to heart we do not have to regard the church as a sandcastle threatened by the winds of change and tides of history. But we can see the church together and our lives individually perhaps as an eternal flame –
a candle that will not burn out – that illumines God’s pathway to the fulfillment of humanity’s purpose.

There is a true story. Maybe you have heard it. In colonial times a famous eclipse of the sun gripped New England with panic. Some people began immediately saying it was a sign of the end of the world. In one legislative body several lawmakers fearfully moved to adjourn the assembly. But then one legislator rose from his place and said, “Mr. Speaker, if it is not the end of the world and we adjourn, we shall appear to be fools. If it is the end of the world, I should choose to be found doing my duty. I move you, sir, that candles be brought.” Receiving new members, dedicating resources, that is our duty today. The church is the candle that burns brightly between the present time and the end of time. At times a torch like Dr. King. At times a gentle flicker. If the end will be sooner rather than later all the more reason for us to bolster our ministries and let the light of God burn brightly in us and through us to this city and our world.

When Jesus’ words came true and the Temple was destroyed by the Roman army in 72 AD the people of God, like that little boy on the beach, learned to let it go. They learned to find their hope not in the bricks and mortar and festivals and rituals of the Temple, but in the Kingdom of God promised in Jesus’ coming again at the end of time. And they found their hope too living within them when they reached out to one another to serve him.

This Thursday we will sit down at our Thanksgiving tables amid the lovely transient things for which we are grateful – yet which will pass away. But Jesus’ invitation to you this morning is this: hold most fast that eternal hope – sometimes a torch, sometimes a flicker – which will not pass away. Hold it fast – the core reality of creation, the inextinguishable light of justice and of life – next to the bosom of your faith, on the horizon of your tomorrow.

Amen.