What do you do when the great buildings of your life fall, when not one stone is left upon another, and all has been thrown down? I think that’s the question Jesus is answering in today’s gospel (Mark 13:1-8). It’s a question we all come to at some point. 

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. I think it’s a question many are asking after the presidential election but I also think it would have been asked regardless of who won. It’s a question I’ve continued to ask following the Robb School shooting. And for a long time it was the question I asked after our older son died. 

Most every night on the news I hear stories and see images of fallen buildings and crumbling lives. I usually have one or two conversation each day with people whose great buildings are falling. Many of our prayers are about keeping the stacked stones in place or putting them back together after they’ve fallen.

The circumstances of our lives may vary but the question remains. How do you make sense of life and move forward when who or what you previously counted on is no longer there? How do you keep yourself together when it looks and feels like everything is being lost? What do you do when your life and world are falling apart?  

Those are the kind of questions we ask in times of grief and loss; when we are disappointed; when we lose our sense of safety, belonging, and dignity; when everything we thought we knew and believed is called into question; when the structures and order of our life crumble; when we feel uncertain and powerless; when it feels like we’re stuck and the future has closed. 

I know what those times are like and I suppose you do too. I suspect we’ve all come to moments when we asked ourselves, What do I do now? What can I do?

What are you asking that about today? In what ways does it feel like the walls of your life are tumbling down? What happened?

Every year at this time the lectionary holds before us these questions along with images of what look like the end. They will come up again in a couple of weeks. Those images and stories are the transition into a new lectionary year. Maybe that means they are also the transition into something new in our lives. That transition is neither easy nor comfortable. It’s hard work.

Here are some things that strike me about that work and what Jesus is telling us in today’s gospel. 

• Jesus names the circumstances of what’s happening but tells the disciples to focus on themselves. That’s not usually my first response. How about you? When my life and world are falling apart I can pretty quickly begin a combination of blaming others and working to control and manage the circumstances. Jesus, however, tells me to focus on managing myself. What does that look like and mean in your life today? Are you managing yourself or are you blaming and trying to manage others?
  
• “Beware that no one leads you astray,” Jesus says. Be careful that you don’t blindly follow the crowd, and don’t let others think for you or tell you how you should feel. Jesus is asking us to be discerning about the voices we listen to both within and outside of us. Not all voices are worthy of your life or being followed. He’s telling us to watch for imposters who say, “I am he” when they really aren’t. Sometimes the voice that leads us astray is our own voice of fear, anger, shame, guilt, grief, or some other emotion. I wonder in what ways you and I are being led astray and by what or whom. What are we looking for? And what would it be like to reclaim ourselves and take responsibility for our lives?
  
• What if Jesus is moving us from an exteriorized life to an interiorized life? That’s not an escape from what is happening around us but a refocusing on what is truly foundational. What if Jesus is asking us to learn to trust ourselves and to be trustworthy for others? What if we recommitted to the values and principles of Christ’s gospel and let them lead and guide us? What would that look like in your life today?
  
• When things fall apart it’s easy to become reactionary. It’s tempting to believe that we must come up with a new and novel solution. That’s just a distraction and it reveals our anxiety. Our work after the temple falls is the same as it was before it fell. Think, for example, about our baptismal vow to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving [our] neighbor as [ourselves] or our vow to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.” The who or the how might change but the what is unchanged and remains the same. In what ways are you doing that work today?
  
• “Do not be alarmed,” Jesus says. Fear is one of the great enemies anytime but especially when our world is in free fall. Don’t let fear or terror possess you. Don’t live too far out into a future you do not yet have. Don’t react out of fear or terror and don’t add to the chaos of the world or the pain of another. Instead, offer your peace. Let go of what you cannot control. Hold on to hope. And find others who are doing the same.   
  
• Some days will feel like the end. You’ll feel numb with grief, empty and exhausted, desperate with despair. You’ll hear about things that convince you it is the end. But it’s not. It is not the end but neither is it painless. It is, Jesus says, “the beginning of the birthpangs.” It’s the pain of opening to something new. It is a creative pain. Something is being birthed. Endure and push.

I can’t tell you what is being birthed or when it will arrive but that is the promise behind today’s gospel. It’s what Jesus was getting at when he said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). 

So maybe the falling of our great building really is a beginning and not an ending. Maybe the great stones are not the rubble of our past but the raw material for our future.

Maybe when everything has been thrown down there is only one thing left to do:

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” – Angela Davis

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Image Credit: Stones from the western wall Jerusalem Temple, 2008, by Olga Lyubimova, CC BY-SA 4.0.