Photo Credit: Judy Beth Morris, used with permission via Unsplash
As most of you know, I just got back last week from some travel to Prague and then on to Berlin. On the way from one to the other, we stopped over in Dresden, Germany, and spent the night. It’s a lovely city:
This is the promenade along the river, and the central square in the evening. That’s Martin Luther there, if you’re wondering.
This is the Frauenkirche – the central church in Dresden.
To be honest, I didn’t know much about Dresden before this trip. What I did know was that Dresden had been decimated by bombing during World War II. This Frauenkirche has been rebuilt only relatively recently, since the Berlin Wall came down. It has been rebuilt to original design, repurposing as much of the original material as possible. I think it was completed in 2004.
These are sketches of what it looked like just after the war. It remained in rubble for a long time, throughout what we call the Cold War.
In a move toward reconciliation after the war, the city of Dresden, Germany has developed a relationship with the city of Coventry in England, whose cathedral was also bombed out. This is a sketch of what their cathedral looked like just after the war.
And as you move through the region where we traveled, encounter the stories of this rubble, and remember this moment in history – you also stand in the reality of the even bigger devastation that was the Holocaust – the 6 million Jewish people murdered. This is the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue that was destroyed in Berlin.[1]
And of course, just this week, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese peace organization led by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who have made their life’s work the plea: “please eliminate nuclear weapons in our lifetime.”[2]
In the basement of the Frauenkirche, they have an exhibit of photos from Ukraine – of churches in Ukraine that have been bombed by the Russian military – bringing the reality of all this rubble into the present day.
And of course, in this week where we have observed the one-year anniversary of October 7, as we have grieved again the terrorist attack on families waking up in Kibbutzim on that day, and young people celebrating at an open-air music festival, and as we continue to pray for the release and well-being of hostages taken that day – we also continue to reel at the US-backed Netanyau offensive on Gaza – that has broken so many norms of international law – exacting collective punishment on the people of Gaza, seeking to drive an ethnic group off the land, cutting a people off from basic human needs – food, water, housing, medical care.
I want to be clear: I am making no claim of moral equivalence across these devastations. Each arises out of its own particular and complicated global and local context.
What I do want to notice and name is the recurrent rubble that we make of the world. Out of that rubble – over the centuries – arises the plaintive cry – as the old hymn says – to “end our warring madness.”
This morning’s Scripture, brings us to the rubble that the people find as they return from exile.[3] It invites us to listen from the perspective of a people moving through the rubble of their world – seeking to make meaning in an seemingly incomprehensible world – seeking to make a life.
This morning’s Scripture arises out of a particular moment in the life of the people of Judah. The stories we find in the Hebrew Scriptures are of a tiny nation in a world dominated by big empires. Around 597 BCE, the Babylonian Empire sweeps in, takes a significant segment of the people into captivity (the ruling elites, the folks who could lead a rebellion).[4]And after a few years, the Babylonians tear down the Temple, burn Jerusalem to the ground, and take even more of the people to exile.
After about 60 years, the Persian Empire conquers the Babylonian Empire, and the Persian King issues an edict that lets the exiles return. We imagined that moment on Juneteenth, with the words of Psalm 126: “When God restored our fortunes, we were like those who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy.”
In this morning’s Scripture, we meet the first wave of folks who return. They return to find their world – the world their families were taken from – still lying in rubble. What follows takes time. Imagine the trauma. The people settle in villages. There are those who remained on the land – in the scriptures sometimes called “the poor of the land” and all these others staggering home to resettle.
And in the 7th month of the First Year, the people gather as one, and they begin to rebuild – first to build an altar – on the foundations of the old temple – amid the rubble – a place where they can worship God. They build, and they begin to worship – they resume the rhythm of what we might call morning and evening prayer.
And in the Second Year, they lay a new foundation for the new Temple, stone by stone. And they celebrate. What a moment. That’s what we get a glimpse of here. They bring out the trumpets and cymbals, the priests in their full regalia; they praise God and give thanks; and they sing: “God is good. God’s steadfast love endures forever.” We’ve looked at that Psalm before, too. It’s probably a call and response – over and over – “God is good. God is good. God’s steadfast love endures forever.”
And we come to this amazing moment. As this celebration goes on – all the people cry out in one big shout. And then some of them start to weep. You see, some of those there in that crowd had seen the old temple, before it was destroyed – they are old – they know the before-days – they were there when the armies descended, and the walls crumbled in. They remember, and the pain is still so very raw. They begin to wail, even as others begin to shout for joy – the full range of what it is to be human – crying and shouting out. Such a cacophony of humanity that “no one could distinguish the sound of the shouts of joy from the sound of weeping, for the people made so much noise.” So much so that it was heard far away. So far away... that we are listening today.
Notice a couple things with me. Notice that the pain is still real. The devastation is still all around them, and in their midst are those who remember the pain. The pain is alive and real.
Notice that the whole community is together here, breathing almost as one being, even as they cry out in each person’s particular voice – in anguish, in celebration, in... both. One people, one shout, one breath.
Notice the slow and steady work. There is no quick fix here. This is stone-by-stone work – the heavy lift of mending and repair and healing.
Notice the pulse that moves them forward – God is good. God is good. God’s steadfast love endures forever. They sing it over and over – to each other – and to God. The world they knew has fallen in on them, they’ve been taken into captivity, eventually allowed to stumble back home – they have endured so much – the world they knew is gone, a new world not yet here. Yet what has not changed – they sing – is God’s steadfast love, steady and sure.
Notice the fullness of emotion – the human capacity to hold to overflowing so much of life – all those emotions at the same time – the very real and raw pain, even as joy wells up with the hope of a new day dawning, albeit ever so slowly.
Notice how all this carries them forward as they rebuild from the rubble of their world, leaning into, once again, this steadfast love of God.
This is a catalyzing moment, chock full of the breadth of what it is to be human. Over the course of the Scriptures, through the Hebrew Scriptures, and really on into the New Testament, again and again, a tenacious people make meaning out of the recurring rubble of their world. Standing in the reality of that rubble, the people lament even as they glimpse a path toward healing, weeping, and shouting, and singing, “God is good. God is good. God’s steadfast love endures forever.”
We started this morning with glimpses of recent rubble. Our most recent glimpse may be the rubble left from back-to-back outsized hurricanes that have clobbered the Southeast. We see folks in Asheville, with homes washed away – systems for delivering drinking water destroyed, donkeys carrying water in on ruined roadways. And days later Florida. This isn’t rubble caused by bombs -- but we know these massive hurricanes flow out of a different kind of violence – the damage we have done to the Earth – as the oceans warm and churn up even stronger storms.
In this congregation we speak plainly about climate unravelling. The carbon we’ve spewed into the atmosphere and our collective unwillingness to change have set us on a course where the world around us is unravelling. We know the scientific impacts, and we are bracing for the societal impacts. We know that some of the unraveling is irreversible, even as we hope to find ways to create softer landings.
Royce is leading us in a conversation grounded in Brian McLaren’s book – Life Beyond Doom.[5] The book invites us to take seriously the recurring rubble of our world, even as we seek ways of living faithfully and meaningfully in new realities. One of the things I appreciate most about the book (and the conversation) is the invitation to imagine multiple possibilities and pathways to what McLaren calls softer landings.[6]
He invites us to imagine not only the worst possibilities, but also to imagine multiple ways that we might wake up and change, and find ways to live meaningfully.
In the portion of the book we read for last week, he suggests that this will involve building our capacity – we must, as he says, become “capable of meeting deteriorating conditions with increased capacities.”[7] Those capacities include: (1) becoming tough-minded, resisting the lies and disinformation spewing forth in the world; (2) developing moral courage, not only to speak truth, but live out kindness and compassion, in a world prone to meanness and apathy; (3) building our skills of interdependence, understanding that the only way forward is – and always has been – together; (4) accepting that constant change is here to stay; and (5) discovering new depths of the human spirit – the capacity to lament – and to affirm, in hope, that God is good, God is good, God’s steadfast love endures forever.[8]
One writer said of those folks in this morning’s Scripture: “They could not erase their lived experience, the deep wounding, and yet, their wounding did not eliminate their agency to create a new world.”[9]
Developing capacities to live faithfully in ever-emerging new realities:
We do that when we engage the spiritual practice of filling and filling again a community fridge. We develop our instinct and our capacity for sharing. Giving what we have, receiving what we need.
We do that when we put hammer to nail and start to re-create an unused space in this church to be a guest room for refugees. We develop our instinct and capacity for providing shelter and safe haven, as we know more and more people will be displaced in the years to come.
We do that when we gather here in this place, week after week, and say true things, and lament, and sing, and share, and affirm together: “God is good. God is good. God’s steadfast love endures forever,” and then seek to live that out to heal a hurting world.
On the night that President Obama was elected, I was in a preaching class over in Berkeley. The class was taught by Rev. Dr. J. Alfred Smith, Sr., Pastor Emeritus of Allen Temple Baptist Church – a significant man, minister, and mentor, in so many ways. Dr. Smith has encouraged untold numbers of Black, and women, and Queer preachers – helping us to claim and live into our calling, when the powers would prefer our silence. So it’s not surprising that the students in the class were predominantly Black preachers, with a good representation of us queer folk too.
On that historic election night, our 7pm class began as usual – we were all on pins and needles, knowing that vote results were coming in – but we also knew, because Dr. Smith told us again and again, that we were there to do serious work– to learn better how to proclaim God’s liberating power and love in Jesus Christ. And so class went on, as usual.
The class was over at the American Baptist Seminary, right there on People’s Park, and about an hour or so into the class – we heard through the open windows the sounds of cheering – shouts of joy – as Berkeley and the University began to celebrate. We knew what had just happened.
Dr. Smith said, “Class, we know that this is a significant moment, and we should pause, and give thanks.” And we bowed our heads – and as the cheering continued outside, in that class some began to weep quietly. Dr. Smith gave thanks for the ground-breaking election of President-Elect Barack Obama – the first African-American president in the history of our nation. And when he finished praying, and after a loud Amen. Dr. Smith said, “Class, and now, we must resume our work.” And we got back to it.
We don’t know what is going to happen this election day. We may be filled with shouts of joy – it may feel like our world is crumbling in on us – we may cry out in consternation for several months of uncertainty and struggle. But listening to those who have gone before, who have cried out and sung out of the rubble of their world, we can claim this truth with them: God is good. God is good. God’s steadfast love endures forever. God has accompanied God’s people from the beginning, until now,
never relenting
in bringing those who are oppressed out into freedom;
in seeking out those in exile, and bringing them back home;
in inviting us into the worthy work of justice, freedom, and peace.
In every circumstance, God is faithful, and God never relents.
The recurring rubble of our world – and the pain – are real.
So too is our hope.
© 2024 Scott Clark
[1] Fasanenstrasse synagogue in Berlin : Destroyed, April 16, 1941, Leo Baeck Institute, F 21316. Used with generous permission of the Leo Baeck Institute, see https://www.lbi.org/griffinger/record/227599
[2] See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/11/world/asia/nobel-peace-prize-nihon-hidanyuo-atomic-bomb.html#:~:text=On%20Friday%2C%20Nihon%20Hidankyo%2C%20a,the%20world%20of%20nuclear%20weapons.
[3] For general background on this text and the book of Ezra, see Ralph W. Klein, “The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah,” New Interpreters’ Bible Commentary, vol.iii (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1999); Gregory L. Cuéllar, Commentary on Working Preacher at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/rebuilding-the-temple-2/commentary-on-ezra-11-4-31-4-10-13-3 ; Michael J. Chan, Commentary on Working Preacher at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/rebuilding-the-temple/commentary-on-ezra-11-4-31-4-10-13
[4] See Klein, pp.666-68 for a summary of the timeline.
[5] Brian McLaren, Life After Doom – Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart (New York, NY: St Martin’s Publishing, 2024).
[6] See id. pp.175-76.
[7] See id. pp.201-06.
[8] Id.
[9] See Cuéllar, supra.
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