SPEAKER_00: A reading from Isaiah.
SPEAKER_00: For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.
SPEAKER_00: The former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
SPEAKER_00: But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating, for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.
SPEAKER_00: I will rejoice in Jerusalem and delight in my people.
SPEAKER_00: No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.
SPEAKER_00: No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime.
SPEAKER_00: For one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
SPEAKER_00: They shall build houses and inhabit them, they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
SPEAKER_00: They shall not build and another inhabit, they shall not plant and another eat.
SPEAKER_00: For like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall enjoy the work of their hands.
SPEAKER_00: They shall not labor in vain or bear children for calamity, for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord, and their descendants as well.
SPEAKER_00: Before they call, I will answer, while they are yet speaking, I will hear.
SPEAKER_01: For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us.
SPEAKER_01: We were not idle when we were with you.
SPEAKER_01: We did not eat anyone's bread without paying for it.
SPEAKER_01: But with toil and labor we worked night and day so that we might not burden any of you.
SPEAKER_01: This was not because we do not have that right, but in order to give you an example to imitate.
SPEAKER_01: For even when we were with you, we gave you this command.
SPEAKER_01: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.
SPEAKER_01: For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work.
SPEAKER_01: Now, such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.
SPEAKER_01: Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.
SPEAKER_01: The word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_02: All will be thrown down.
SPEAKER_02: They asked him, Teacher, when will this be?
SPEAKER_02: And what will be the sign that this is about to take place?
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus said, Beware that you are not led astray, for many will come in my name and say, I am He, and the time is near.
SPEAKER_02: Do not go after them.
SPEAKER_02: When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified, for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.
SPEAKER_02: Then he said to them, Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.
SPEAKER_02: There will be great earthquakes and in various places famine and plagues, and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.
SPEAKER_02: But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you, they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name.
SPEAKER_02: This will give you an opportunity to testify.
SPEAKER_02: So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance, for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.
SPEAKER_02: You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death.
SPEAKER_02: You will be hated by all because of my name, but not a hair of your head will perish.
SPEAKER_02: By your endurance you will gain your souls.
SPEAKER_02: The Gospel of the Lord.
SPEAKER_02: It was not as tall, it was not as wide, it was not as deep.
SPEAKER_02: That temple, which was meant to be God's literal house, they thought God lived in it.
SPEAKER_02: So God was like a giant but not too tall.
SPEAKER_02: That got torn down in 586, completely demolished to the ground.
SPEAKER_02: And then it was rebuilt a little bit after the year 540, this is BC, smaller than David's son Solomon originally built it.
SPEAKER_02: So the second temple was smaller than the first.
SPEAKER_02: Herod, who named himself the Great, he named himself the Great, changed the scale of that temple.
SPEAKER_02: It used to be about two and a half basketball courts in area.
SPEAKER_02: He changed it to be the size of four football fields.
SPEAKER_02: Herod literally made the temple in Jerusalem the eighth wonder of the ancient world.
SPEAKER_02: What was so wonderful about the size?
SPEAKER_02: Jerusalem is extremely hilly.
SPEAKER_02: And in order to make that temple mount be almost ten times what it was, Herod didn't just build a wall and fill it in.
SPEAKER_02: He built a bridge over a valley.
SPEAKER_02: The temple platform, which is still there today, still there today, some of the stones in it, there's one in particular, it's more than 45 feet long and more than 57 tons in weight.
SPEAKER_02: It's so big that archaeologists aren't sure how they moved it to this day.
SPEAKER_02: If you went with us to Israel two years ago, you saw it.
SPEAKER_02: It's not even rectangular, it's shaped like a race car or something, and it's so big that they built around that.
SPEAKER_02: The followers of Jesus come to the eighth wonder of the world, which is all the more meaningful when they came from a village that's like High Texas, population 17.
SPEAKER_02: Anybody been to High Texas?
SPEAKER_02: There's a nice distillery there.
SPEAKER_02: That's about it.
SPEAKER_02: They went from High Texas population 17 to New York City.
SPEAKER_02: They saw the bird's Khalifa.
SPEAKER_02: And they said, Jesus, look how big this building is.
SPEAKER_02: And he said, typical buzzkill, Jesus said, not one of these stones would be left on another.
SPEAKER_02: Of course he was right.
SPEAKER_02: In the year 70, the Romans invaded Jerusalem, burned the whole temple down.
SPEAKER_02: If you've seen Jewish, um, usually you see Jewish men doing this, praying at the wailing wall of the Western Wall.
SPEAKER_02: That's a retaining wall.
SPEAKER_02: That was not part of the temple.
SPEAKER_02: That was what Herod built up to make the Jerusalem Acropolis.
SPEAKER_02: The city above the city.
SPEAKER_02: That was the Temple Mount.
SPEAKER_02: It's enormous.
SPEAKER_02: The Western Wall is huge.
SPEAKER_02: And it's a retaining wall, not the temple.
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus has this sense that this grand eighth wonder of the world is not going to last.
SPEAKER_02: Now, we could hear this story as many of our Christian brothers and sisters have for the last 2,000 years.
SPEAKER_02: When and how will this happen?
SPEAKER_02: Such that we hold the newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other and look for who is the Antichrist?
SPEAKER_02: Is it the Ayatollah Kumani?
SPEAKER_02: Probably not.
SPEAKER_02: Is it Kim Jong-il?
SPEAKER_02: Probably not.
SPEAKER_02: For 2,000 years we've wondered, eventually somebody will probably be right.
SPEAKER_02: The world will end.
SPEAKER_02: The best selling fiction series ever.
SPEAKER_02: Does anybody know?
SPEAKER_02: It is not Harry Potter.
SPEAKER_02: It is Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
SPEAKER_02: That's because we're so interested in the when and how.
SPEAKER_02: And I want to tell you, I've read the scripture differently today.
SPEAKER_02: If you want that, I can't give it to you.
SPEAKER_02: And nor can anybody.
SPEAKER_02: Like I said, eventually somebody will get it right.
SPEAKER_02: I used to belong to a church in 1988.
SPEAKER_02: There was a really influential book called 88 Reasons the World's Gonna End in 1988.
SPEAKER_02: And we had a prayer meeting and we were there ready for the world to end.
SPEAKER_02: And you know what?
SPEAKER_02: It didn't.
SPEAKER_02: It's a little embarrassing.
SPEAKER_02: There was a sequel to that book called 89 Reasons the World is Going to End in 1989.
SPEAKER_02: And can I tell you a reason 89?
SPEAKER_02: It didn't end in 1988.
SPEAKER_02: That was it.
SPEAKER_02: Eventually somebody's gonna get this right, but I do think that's what Jesus is about today.
SPEAKER_02: I want to tell you, I think Jesus is suggesting, frankly, we tend to focus on these 57-ton stones in our faith life, but those things are gonna fall without the regular ordinary shims and mortaring that it takes to sustain those things.
SPEAKER_02: And I'm gonna tell you that by way of a story.
SPEAKER_02: Once upon a time I had a daughter.
SPEAKER_02: I still have her, but when she was first born, she had this really interesting idiosyncrasy, which was that the best way to put her to sleep was not by swaddling her up or singing to her or bouncing to her, it was to put her in a baby bjorn.
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you know what that is.
SPEAKER_02: It's sort of like a little shoulder harness, and you put the baby in a pouch.
SPEAKER_02: Some people are really successful using the baby bjorn where the baby looks at your chest.
SPEAKER_02: That induced like almost vomiting from my child.
SPEAKER_02: So we had to turn her around.
SPEAKER_02: So when baby was tired, we put her in the bjorn and I walked the dogs or something.
SPEAKER_02: If I stopped moving, she woke right up.
SPEAKER_02: So if I was folding the laundry in the bjorn, I was picking up the towel and sort of dancing around.
SPEAKER_02: You know how this is, right?
SPEAKER_02: Every kid's different.
SPEAKER_02: Well, she would fall asleep.
SPEAKER_02: It looked like her neck had broken.
SPEAKER_02: And there she was on the baby bjorn with her little broken neck drilling out of the side while I walked my dogs for two or three miles.
SPEAKER_02: It was fine when she was six pounds, six ounces.
SPEAKER_02: Two years later, she was north of 30 pounds.
SPEAKER_02: And of course, what happened to my posture was not good.
SPEAKER_02: I found my shoulders really coming forward and my neck like this as well.
SPEAKER_02: So I bought a backpack, a hiking backpack where you can put baby in the backpack, thinking this would correct my posture.
SPEAKER_02: She didn't like it as much, uh, and it did not correct my posture.
SPEAKER_02: It just actually made things hurt a whole lot worse, sadly.
SPEAKER_02: So I was looking for the dramatic fix, and first I did like a life event unique to me.
SPEAKER_02: I went to a chiropractor.
SPEAKER_02: Oh my god, it's so scary.
SPEAKER_02: All those snaps and pops and twisting your neck.
SPEAKER_02: I thought, surely, that's gonna do it.
SPEAKER_02: No, no, no, it did not do it.
SPEAKER_02: I went back to the chiropractor, not for the not for the neck break thing, but you know, they took like a butter knife that was smooth, it wasn't serrated, and they put some like petroleum jelly on my muscles.
SPEAKER_02: This is called grastin, if you've ever heard of it.
SPEAKER_02: And they just put all of their weight on it and rubbed up and down like that.
SPEAKER_02: And I could feel all of these little knots underneath my skin.
SPEAKER_02: Hurt.
SPEAKER_02: I had all kinds of bruises, and I still stood like this all of the time.
SPEAKER_02: So I thought, you know, I am just gonna fix this myself.
SPEAKER_02: I'm just gonna think about my posture all of the time.
SPEAKER_02: You know that thing where you imagine there's a string on your head pulling straight up?
SPEAKER_02: It works great until your cell phone rings.
SPEAKER_02: And then when you look at it, guess what happens?
SPEAKER_02: Works great until you have to like get the keys out of your pocket or you think about breathing.
SPEAKER_02: It works great until you think about anything else, you know, which is pretty much all the time, which I want you to know it means it doesn't work great.
SPEAKER_02: So, my sister-in-law, who's a chiropractor, said, Hey, I've got mixed news for you.
SPEAKER_02: You will not fix your posture by thinking about it.
SPEAKER_02: Because the minute you stop thinking about it, which is all the time, it's just gonna go back down.
SPEAKER_02: The only way you can fix your posture is by doing these exercises.
SPEAKER_02: Now I don't mind exercising.
SPEAKER_02: I don't mind, but I like exercise to be a significant event.
SPEAKER_02: I like it to be something that has like metals attached to it, or like times that I can beat my time, or some external evidence that I can readily verify, like yes, you exercise, like soreness, or something.
SPEAKER_02: That was not what she gave me to do.
SPEAKER_02: What she gave me to do were these little things that I had to do like every single day for 15 minutes or more.
SPEAKER_02: And I didn't feel sore after them.
SPEAKER_02: I didn't feel tired.
SPEAKER_02: I did him for several days, and I just thought, I know this is working.
SPEAKER_02: Silly looking things, mind you.
SPEAKER_02: I'll show you one of them.
SPEAKER_02: I had to put my thumbs up like this and get down on my fists and lean forward and then just pick my arms up like this from one to the other.
SPEAKER_02: Now I did this outside of my home because I was exercising in the morning.
SPEAKER_02: I didn't want to pick my kids up.
SPEAKER_02: And people who are jogging by or walking by are looking at this guy out here raising the stumps.
SPEAKER_02: I had to do sets of like 50 of those, like three sets of 50.
SPEAKER_02: There's no resistance.
SPEAKER_02: Of course, you know, what's funny is that doing those things faithfully, those boring things, took the load off my scapula and pulled my scapula back.
SPEAKER_02: And once my scapula were back, you know, having my neck like this was no longer comfortable.
SPEAKER_02: It it strangely, it becomes more comfortable if you slouch everything.
SPEAKER_02: But when your shoulders are back and your neck is forward, it really hurts.
SPEAKER_02: So my body picked this up on its own and pulled my neck back.
SPEAKER_02: I want to suggest to you that Jesus might just be reminding us that our faith life is not in these mega blocks, it's in these little seemingly insignificant, almost non-measurable physical therapy exercises.
SPEAKER_02: The truth is you cannot fix your posture by thinking about it.
SPEAKER_02: You cannot.
SPEAKER_02: You have to re-engineer your posture through what we call the daily grind.
SPEAKER_02: The daily grind is not about coffee.
SPEAKER_02: At the time of Jesus, women made bread.
SPEAKER_02: 90% of your diet was bread.
SPEAKER_02: 90% good luck being keto at the time of Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: It took women five and a half hours to produce a two-pound loaf of bread.
SPEAKER_02: That was the daily grind.
SPEAKER_02: Now I have to tell you, I do the cooking and shopping in my home.
SPEAKER_02: And uh those sorts of repetitive tasks are not where I like to put my emotional and spiritual energy because the thing is I have to do them again tomorrow.
SPEAKER_02: Cooking is one thing because I'm gonna make something different, but emptying the dishwasher or watching a towel get used one time and then put in the wash, I'm gonna have to fold it again.
SPEAKER_02: Wash it again.
SPEAKER_02: Those are the things that can be so tiring.
SPEAKER_02: Because I like to go from something exciting to something equally or more exciting.
SPEAKER_02: And folding towels is just not really exciting.
SPEAKER_02: You can watch YouTube's different folds for Thanksgiving.
SPEAKER_02: There are turkey folds you can do to your towels.
SPEAKER_02: I don't find that exciting.
SPEAKER_02: It's even more depressing because my turkey does not look like the sample turkey.
SPEAKER_02: I want to suggest to you though, that life is not made up of boulders, life is made up of days.
SPEAKER_02: And you can talk to anybody who does AA or NA or OA.
SPEAKER_02: If you have to think about a life of sobriety, it is crushing.
SPEAKER_02: About a day is all you can do.
SPEAKER_02: A day at a time.
SPEAKER_02: Thinking about how many times I'm going to unload the dishwasher this year, I'm going to tell you it takes me to a really sad place.
SPEAKER_02: Do not think about that.
SPEAKER_02: Think instead about how you can be present, I think, in ordinary moments.
SPEAKER_02: Ordinary moments of faith.
SPEAKER_02: And I want to suggest to you that part of what we do tacitly, implicitly, we our habits already tell us where our value is, and they already program quite frankly where we're going to find ourselves.
SPEAKER_02: So I'm just going to give you one of my examples.
SPEAKER_02: I really like being efficient and productive.
SPEAKER_02: And when I have time, like let's pretend I'm in a line at the supermarket and I can tell it's going to be a while to use the time.
SPEAKER_02: Well, I just pull out my mobile device.
SPEAKER_02: I don't clog up the line.
SPEAKER_02: I'm not slow.
SPEAKER_02: I've got my payment ready.
SPEAKER_02: You know, you've been to the store and people are surprised they have to pay, but it's not me.
SPEAKER_02: I'm ready.
SPEAKER_02: But so that I don't waste my time, I've got my fun.
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes the first thing I do when I get up is just have a look at what's happening in the world.
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes, right before I go to bed, I just have a look.
SPEAKER_02: And of course, what I'm wiring my brain to do is always look for value and excitement and energy somewhere other than where I am.
SPEAKER_02: I don't want to tell you that's wrong.
SPEAKER_02: I just want to tell you we don't normally think that that's what we're doing to ourselves.
SPEAKER_02: And boy, if that's where we put our value, our faith life is going to be really hard.
SPEAKER_02: Because in my faith life, I've got four or five of those blocks.
SPEAKER_02: I don't have a thousand of them.
SPEAKER_02: Four or five of those 57-ton blocks.
SPEAKER_02: One of them was when I got ordained to the priesthood.
SPEAKER_02: When I got ordained to the diaconate, that was one of my blocks.
SPEAKER_02: Interestingly enough.
SPEAKER_02: And most of y'all out there aren't ordained.
SPEAKER_02: So I've got one you don't have.
SPEAKER_02: One! Not a thousand.
SPEAKER_02: The question, I think, is that we often look at these big moments where we just get it.
SPEAKER_02: And instead, maybe what we ought to be looking at is that the mortar that holds those moments up.
SPEAKER_02: The mortar without which those big blocks they turn over.
SPEAKER_02: The way that those blocks are carried treated.
SPEAKER_02: The difference, I think, between extreme faith and being extremely faithful.
SPEAKER_02: Extreme faith is about acts, about encouraging the headlines.
SPEAKER_02: Extreme faith is about the daily grind.
SPEAKER_02: It's about showing up over and over and over again why the people that you care about.
SPEAKER_02: The truth is, and we talked about this with All saints, the She Ros and Heroes in my faith life are not the ones who showed up one time.
SPEAKER_02: I think those people are neat.
SPEAKER_02: The people who showed up over and over and over again, especially when I made it hard for them.
SPEAKER_02: Those other blocks, I'm worried, they just don't last.
SPEAKER_02: Because the truth is life goes on after that block happens.
SPEAKER_02: Now I had a good friend who told me once upon a time, most of us sit in the same seat.
SPEAKER_02: You know, I'll let you know.
SPEAKER_02: I'm kind of the worst at it.
SPEAKER_02: I pretty much sit in the same seat every Sunday.
SPEAKER_02: And he said, you know, sometimes we like to berate people because we're creatures of habit, and that's just where we go.
SPEAKER_02: But he said, you know, and I think he's quite right about this, we often sit in the same seat because once upon a time, one time, maybe it was the lighting or the way the music came or somebody at the piece went out of their way and we felt really friendly to us.
SPEAKER_02: There was something that happened to us in that seat.
SPEAKER_02: Something in that seat that made life a little brighter that morning.
SPEAKER_02: So we come back.
SPEAKER_02: We're faithful to that block.
SPEAKER_02: We put ourselves in the same posture to go back there again and again instead of saying that we're done with it.
SPEAKER_02: And I wonder if Jesus isn't saying, listen, instead of worrying there won't be tomorrow, what are you gonna do with your last day on the planet?
SPEAKER_02: Let's pretend there's not gonna be tomorrow.
SPEAKER_02: And how are you gonna be faithful with your last day on the planet?
SPEAKER_02: Instead of how you're gonna be wild and crazy and spend all this and stuff, how are you gonna live today faithfully?
SPEAKER_02: The way that you're not most excited about, the way you're most proud of.
SPEAKER_02: Spend your time on that mortar.
SPEAKER_02: And if your mortar's different, then hey, instead of looking at the phone, first thing when you wake up, think, man, I don't know if I got enough sleep or not.
SPEAKER_02: How am I going to be grateful for what I have today?
SPEAKER_02: At the end of the day, maybe after you look at the Facebook feed and see how everybody's doing.
SPEAKER_02: Build in some time to say, can I stretch to think how God showed up in my life just once today?
SPEAKER_02: Where our treasure is, is our heart, but you know what we don't usually remember is where our habit is, frankly, is where our heart is.
SPEAKER_02: I think that's why Paul says, people who are idle don't eat.
SPEAKER_02: I don't think he's talking about it as explicitly as it sounds.
SPEAKER_02: I think what he's saying is people who don't do the work of living into this kind of holiness are not nourished by what they're doing.
SPEAKER_02: And I want to suggest to you ultimately that's the real criterion for our faith practices.
SPEAKER_02: Are they nourishing us?
SPEAKER_02: Are they feeding a hungry world?
unknown: Are they?
SPEAKER_02: Or are they just taking us away from it all?
SPEAKER_02: I am sure God wants us here.
SPEAKER_02: I am sure God wants us to do the work of being nourished.
SPEAKER_02: And more sure of that than anything, I am sure God wants our faith practices to nourish other people in the world.
SPEAKER_02: Tough order for the week.
SPEAKER_02: Join me in spending some time thinking about where it is we put our praise in the temples that we're living into.