"The World Without Us" | Nathan LeRud | November 17, 2024

I love these images that Jill Sajec, who's sitting up here, chooses for the cover of our bulletin week by week.

We have this beautiful Thomas Cole painting for you this morning, but the image that I get in my head when I hear this gospel about stones being thrown down and all of the detritus of a temple falling down– I remember when I was a kid, my grandparents had this Life magazine photo book, like the best photos from Life Magazine, and there was a picture that transfixed me. I have very vivid, vivid memories of it.

It's from 1960, it was the cover image for an issue of Life magazine in 1960.

Gloria Swanson in all of her incredible elegance standing in the ruins of the Roxy Theater, her arms outstretched, long cigarette holder in her hand, pink feather boa draped around her. She looks every inch a movie palace queen, and all around her is the remains, the deconstructed remains of the Roxy Theater.

That photo was taken in 1960. Gloria Swanson was 61 years old. She is still pretty fabulous at 61.

33 years earlier, when that theater opened, it was one of her films that opened it. That was 1927. And when the Roxy Theater opened to one of Gloria Swanson's films in 1927, it was the biggest movie theater ever built.

It was known as the Cathedral of Motion Pictures. It cost nearly $13 million to build, and in 1927, that was a fortune. It could accommodate 6,000 people in the auditorium. Can you imagine the size? The pictures are are are astounding.

It was more than a movie theater. The Roxy was a small city. There were two stories of private dressing rooms, three stories of chorus dressing rooms, huge rehearsal halls. There was a costume department, dry cleaning, laundry rooms, a barber shop, a hairdresser, a dining room, an infirmary, and a menagerie for the show animals. There was a cafeteria, there was a gymnasium and a billiard room and a library and a nap room, of all things.

Two years later, the stock market crashed. Everything changed. The owners went bankrupt. They sold the theater to Fox. Fox sold it to the Rockefellers.

In the 40s, the stage was rebuilt so they could put an ice rink in the middle of the thing for a Sonja Henning touring show.

By the late 50s, the Roxy was an albatross. Nobody could fill this thing, nobody was making money off of this thing, it was a relic of of a different era. So in 1960, that fall the demolition began.

And on November 7th of that year, Gloria Swanson showed up with a photographer in this beautiful black evening gown and raised her arm arms triumphantly in the middle of the movie palace that had been an icon of everything she was– and still was. She was an icon of glamour and sophistication standing among the desolate ruins. She is indomitable.

It's an iconic image. Steven Sondheim wrote a whole musical about that picture. It captured something about the death of an era. 1960 right? The end of glamour, the end of movie palaces, the dawning of television.

This was a new era, a frightening era. President Kennedy would be assassinated three years later, almost to the day.

Now there's a TGI Fridays standing where the Roxy once stood.

America has moved on.

The Jerusalem temple was the Roxy Theater of its day. Its roots went back to ancient times, but King Herod– another great impressario– King Herod had expanded and rebuilt it almost completely a couple generations before Jesus was born, so when Jesus and his disciples are wandering around the temple precincts looking up at the great sones as we read about them in Mark's gospel, the Jerusalem temple at that time was the largest religious structure in the world.

And it lasted a little bit longer than the Roxy. The Roxy lasted 33 years before they knocked it down. The temple lasted about 95 years between Herod's rebuild and the destruction in 70 by the Roman army.

That was about 40 years after Jesus died, and scholars think that Mark's gospel, the text we just heard, was written probably right around that time, right around the year 70– most likely by the very people who had just watched their great temple, the greatest religious structure in their world, collapse and burn to the ground.

The people of Jerusalem, the original followers of Jesus, had fled. They were in exile in places like Antioch and Libya and Alexandria, Rome.

It was likely in Rome that this first attempt to write down the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth happened.

We call that text the Gospel of Mark. It was the first gospel to be written, and in that text Jesus is wandering around this great building, and he asks his disciples, "Do you see these great stones? Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left upon another. All of it will be thrown down."

The liturgy nerds among you will prick up your ears; you will know that Advent is coming, it's just a few weeks away.

We're going to get a lot more of this kind of thing, right? This is the season where we head into the the doom and the gloom and the death and destruction, the clouds and thick darkness before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day.

You're going to hear a little bit more of it in a minute, the choir is going to sing Benjamin Britten's "Hymn of St. Columba." And you're going to hear it in Latin, so you're not going to catch (thank God) you're not going to catch all the gory details of the day of wrath and vengeance, stark day of shadows and cloudy dark thunder that rends the day apart, wonder amazes each fearful heart. It's really cheery stuff.

And the way Britten sets it, you'll get a sense of what's going on in this text. This is not the happy part of the year for us, and this text, these poems, these images, they are meant for us, I think, as sober reminders.

Nothing human will last.

Our species' time on this planet is a blip, it's a blink of an eye.

About 300,000 years that homo sapiens have walked upright on this planet: that's 0.007% of the history of the world.

And the indications are we might not last that much longer. I don't want to be a doom and gloomer up here, but in case you haven't noticed, things are not going great for us right now.

A couple of years ago, the writer Alan Weisman wrote a kind of an extended thought experiment.

The book is called "The World Without Us." It's about what happens to the built environment if human beings are suddenly gone.

I remember reading the book on the New York subway, and I was reading the part about how quickly the subway– the underground streams of New York fill up the subway channels and the roads collapse and decay and erode, how the rainwater and the snow melt, destroy all the concrete.

How– I mean how frighteningly quickly the island of Manhattan returns to its pre-European-conquest state.

The rats and the cockroaches disappear really quickly without human beings to provide food and warmth for them.

Your house is the same way. Your house starts to fall apart as soon as the rainwater leaks into the roof around the flashings, the wood erodes, the nails rust, the walls sag and collapse on themselves.

It only takes about 500 years before all that's left of the suburbs is like aluminum dishwasher parts and stainless steel cookware and plastic handles, all of it buried under the forest floor so that some future species of interplanetary archaeologists can find it someday.

We leave behind– I mean, we will leave our scars on this planet, human beings. We leave behind our radioactive materials, we leave behind our plastics, ceramics, bronze statues.

We leave behind Mount Rushmore, apparently that lasts– these four presidential faces carved into the granite of South Dakota, land that was illegally taken from the Sioux nation.

In 1980, the Supreme Court awarded the Sioux Nation $102 million for that illegal land seizure, and the Sioux have refused the settlement.

They don't want the money, they want the land back.

And if they wait long enough, I think they will get it back– because this American empire, I suspect, is destined for the same fate as every other world empire.

Any student of world history can can tell you this: our great temples, our cathedrals, our movie palaces, all of it will fall into ruin and decay.

Maybe I'm weird about this: I find I find those images oddly comforting, although I'll also admit I would so much rather read about somebody else's apocalypse than live through my own.

But the images that these ancient texts give us of what the end of the world, the end of our world, might look like– they were meant to be comforting, not to be frightening.

Jesus forecasts that when the prediction of the fall of the Jerusalem temple is written into his mouth by the very people who watched that temple fall.

Maybe they remembered that Jesus had predicted that fall, years before (maybe he had, that's entirely possible), or maybe his followers needed the comfort of knowing that Jesus had known in advance that their world was teetering on the brink of collapse and had actually the whole time been giving them the spiritual tools that they would need to survive. All along.

Because these traumatized people who have just experienced the total collapse of their society, these exiles who escaped with like the clothes on their back, the stories that were told to them as children about a savior who would return someday to save them; they remembered these words, or maybe they created these words, in order to comfort one another. In order to buoy up their children and help their children know how to move forward.

They remember Jesus saying, "Beware that no one leads you astray." When you hear of wars, when you hear of rumors of wars, don't lose your cool don't be alarmed, don't freak out.

All of this is going to happen all of this is inevitable. This is how history works.

The real end is not here, yet the real end is always still to come. Because in between, nation is going to rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes, famines, elections gone awry. The wrong people will come into power. There will be suffering and violence. It is not going to be pretty.

But you do not have the luxury of freaking out, not if you're going to be my disciples. I need you to learn how not to lose your cool, how to keep your heads, how to keep your gaze steady, keep your eyes on the eastern horizon, where the son of righteousness will rise again someday.

You tell your children the ancient stories, you teach them how God's people have always managed to survive the end of the world, time and time again.

Our religious traditions were actually designed for times such as these.

Our moment in history is not an aberration: this is normal.

Take heart, he says. There is a much bigger story at work underneath all of the hand wringing and the punditry.

What you're experiencing is not the end, it's the beginning.

It's the beginning of something new. It's like– he says it's like a woman going into labor. It's not the disaster, it's the Christ Child, coming once again to take up residence, to tabernacle with you in a whole new way.

This is not the end; this is the beginning. This is but the beginnings of the birth pangs.

The years to come will test this community in ways that you will feel unprepared for.

The world needs you to stay the course, because we know what our work is, right? We know what we're here to do.

If we're in danger of forgetting, the prayer book reminds us every time we baptize a new baby at that font:

Will you continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers?

Will you resist evil?

When you mess it up, will you acknowledge where you went wrong and commit to doing it better?

Will you proclaim by your words, by your actions the good news of God in Christ?

What does that mean? The freedom, the liberation that Jesus represents.

Will you work to find the spirit of Christ in every single person you meet, even– and maybe most especially– the people you can't stand?

Will you keep working for justice, even when justice feels like an impossible and unaffordable dream?

Will you respect the dignity of every human being? Every single human being?

Especially the ones most vulnerable to overreaches of power, the vagaries of demagogues, the fear of the lynch mob, the violence of the majority?

Will you keep your eyes on the ball?

Will you refuse to act out of anger or anxiety, but do the much harder work of staying centered, saying true to what you know to be right?

Are you willing to risk your life in service to what you know to be true?

That is how you survive the apocalypse.

You refuse to be made its victim.

You keep your eyes on the eastern horizon.

You raise your hands in the ruin like Gloria Swanson, every inch a queen.

Even the apocalypse is no excuse not to look fabulous.

And in the end it is Gloria, it's glory.

The glory of La Swanson or the glory of the Lord.

That is what rises from the dead detritus of a collapsed empire, the glory of the Lord rises with healing in its wings.

So we listen for the cry of the child at night.

We watch for the rising of the sun at its dawning.

Because, my friends: this is just the beginning.