All Will Be Thrown Down

Daniel 12:1-3 & Mark 13:1-8 | Proper 28, Year B | 11.17.2024

I was visiting with an old friend in the Poconos recently, and I went onto Google maps to find a spot for us to take a little hike. I was in “satellite mode” so I could see the trees and towns, and as I was scanning the landscape nearby, I saw an odd, bright, clearing pop up a few miles away. I zoomed in, trying to figure out what it was; I thought maybe a mine or an industrial waste site. The name of the area popped up as “Boulder Field.” 

I quickly realized that it was a natural geological formation and part of a state park, and we looked at each other and knew we had to check it out, whatever it was. So we trekked out on a long gravel road, and walked through a wooded pathway until we reached a clearing. The trees opened up to where you would expect to see a big lake, but instead of water, it was just rocks. 

A huge, flat, expanse of gray-pink boulders. All shapes, all sizes. Some the size of a baseball, some bigger than a car. 10 feet “deep” and 18 acres across. Apparently the area had once been a solid sheet of bedrock, but over a few millennia, the ice, permafrost, and weather broke it apart into big chunks. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. 

When I read the Gospel for this week, I immediately thought about Boulder Field. Jesus, upon exiting the great temple in Jerusalem, says this stunning, devastating phrase: “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” All will be thrown down. Wars, earthquakes, nation against nation. 

And when you pair this Gospel text with our selection from Daniel, you start to see where we’re headed: towards apocalypse season (a.k.a. Advent). We are winding down this current season of growth and then harvest, and we are starting to hunker down and wait. We’re moving into a time of darkness, discernment, and preparation for divine revelation. 

Both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures are full of different kinds of stories and perspectives of this particular season: they speak of it as the “end time”, the “ultimate time”, the “fulfillment”, the “revelation,” and the “unveiling.” As we move through the next few weeks, we’re going to get a lot more of these images of temples crumbling, the skies falling, and cosmic battles. And like today’s Gospel, they can feel at best unsettling, and at worst, downright terrifying. 

It’s our responsibility to read these texts faithfully, but in context. It’s helpful to remember that the ancients spoke in poetry, allegory, and hyperbole. It’s also helpful to remember that apocalyptic texts were very often written as a response to a specific crisis: exile, famine, plagues, the literal destruction of the temple, and oppression under the Roman Empire. These texts were written within and for their own contexts. Our work is not to map these words directly onto our current context, but rather, to be attentive to parallels, connections, and insights. Our work is to study how our ancestors in the faith navigated times of apocalypse, and how they made meaning and found God within them. We are being called to consider what we might learn from them when we find ourselves in times and contexts that feel earth-changing, or apocalyptic. 

In scripture, apocalypses are times of unveiling. Times where once hidden truths become visible, and apparent. In light of today’s Gospel, they’re also a time of “unstacking.” A leveling, a destruction, a falling down of a temple. In an apocalypse, a structure (physical, social, economic, spiritual) that was admired and relied upon, that felt unmovable and unshakable, falls down. Or maybe an apocalypse is just the realization that the stones have been falling down or breaking apart for a long time: What we thought was solid bedrock has become a field full of boulders underneath us.

If and when we find ourselves here among the rubble, in the middle of the boulder field, then what? You could argue that our entire faith tradition is centered around that question. The New Testament certainly is. All has been thrown down; what do we do now? How do we continue?

Boulder Field has a compelling response to that question. The trail leading field was plastered with bold signage that said, “RESPECT ROCKS.” There were dozens of alerts asking us to not move or stack the rocks. One of them said, “It took 20,000 years to create this ancient landscape and a fraction of that time for rock towers, broken rocks, and pits to undo it.” I felt both amused and also sad, recognizing that instinct to stack, to rebuild, to remake. That compulsion to alter a landscape like that, to fix it, claim it, control it. And yet every message was telling us to resist that urge. 

As we were leaving, I came across another small sign that was labeled, “The Future of Boulder Field.” It said “About 13,000 years ago at the end of the ice age, the climate warmed and the forest slowly reclaimed the surrounding landscape through natural succession. This same process is reclaiming Boulder Field as well. Pine needles and leaves fill cracks between rocks then decompose to become soil in which seedlings take root. Over time the forest may once again cover Boulder Field.”

And that’s where it clicked for me. The instinct to rebuild isn’t bad or wrong, but it doesn’t happen by stacking and restacking the stones. It doesn’t happen from above, it happens from below, and within. Moisture seeps into boulders and cracks them when it freezes. Pine needles and leaves and organic matter find their way into the cracks and decompose. Slowly, and over much time, seedlings take root. That’s how the reconstruction, the transformation, happens. Not by recapitulating or even repairing the structures that existed before, but by the slow and subterranean work of decay and regrowth. 

I know I’m speaking in broad and symbolic language. And I do that intentionally because I want the Spirit to speak to you in particularities. I want whatever part of these images stick, to speak to your own experiences of apocalypse - whether it’s personal, national, global, cosmic. I am certainly interpreting these texts in the context of our current political moment, but you might be hearing something different, and that’s good and right. 

So regardless of where these readings and images take you, remember a couple of things about apocalypse:

It is appropriate and necessary to grieve the temples that are falling. Jesus tells the disciples not to be alarmed, that this must take place, but that doesn’t discount the feelings, which are real. Sitting in the ruins is an important part of the process.

Because as you sit there in the midst of the rocks, as I did at Boulder Field, you begin to come into some awareness of what’s going on. You start to notice signs of life and change all around you, in the cracks of the rocks. Lichen, decaying leaves, spider webs. I spotted a bright green patch of moss beginning to grow down in between some of the boulders. It became clear that the stacking of the rocks would have disrupted and slowed down all of these subtle processes of transformation. And this becomes our work in this time: to attend to what lies beneath, to vision what growth might be possible even if it’s yet hidden from view, to trust and lean into the slow, organic, creative work of decay. The work is to seek out and nurture the saplings as they begin to poke through. It feels small and counterintuitive; especially when stacking the rocks up is so visible and satisfying! But instead, let’s ride out the apocalypse here among the boulders, where the real change happens, where the new world is being born.