Eighty-six-year-old Arnie was on his death bed. Doctors said he would not make it through the day. His wife Mabel was in the kitchen baking cookies. A miracle happened! When Arnie began to smell the cookies, he rolled out of his bed onto the floor and crawled down the hallway into the kitchen. From his kneeling position he reached up to the table to grab a cookie. Wham! Mabel smacked his fingers with her cookie spoon and ordered, “Don’t touch them, they are for the funeral!”
As funny as this is, it is also sad. In their early marriage Mabel would show her love for Arnie by baking him a batch of cookies. It awakened their love for each other. Sadly, over the years, eating became more important to Arnie than Mabel, and her baking hobby became more important to Mabel than Arnie.
How is it that what began in love can be turned into no more than a hobby or even an addiction?
Does this explain what is going on in today’s gospel? (Luke 21:5-11)
“While some people were speaking about how the temple was adorned with costly stones and votive offerings, Jesus said…”
What do you think Jesus said? Did he piggyback their comments by adding his praises to the temple art? Was he also impressed with the “costly stones and votive offerings?” The Temple had become a kind of “museum” to visit. People walked around admiring the beauty of the building. Yet it seemed the temple had become more important than the One dwelling in it. What began as an act of love had become more than an interesting tourist attraction. So, what did Jesus say?
“All that you see here-the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down.”
The temple had served its purpose and God was about to get rid of it and let the Romans carry off the costly stones and votive offerings. Though God was a living person of the present, the temple had become a thing of the past. Though God had not lost his love for Israel they lost their love for him.
“Then they asked him, ‘Teacher, when will this happen? And what sign will there be when all these things are about to happen?’”
The people shifted into an “end times” discussion. They wanted Jesus to go into more detail about when this “end” would take place and what sign of warning would be given them that it was about to happen. Did they catch onto why God was going to allow the temple to be destroyed? Did they realize that he was doing something new in the world and creating a temple much greater than the one being reconstructed by Herod? Did they realize that the new temple, God’s only Son, was standing right next to them?
When the buildings and the business affairs of the Church become more important than the living person of Jesus Christ whom they represent, church buildings will also be torn down. This is not a prediction but a fact. A church that I attended—beautifully constructed and rather new—was recently leveled by a bulldozer during the secretary’s lunch hour. Today the church, school, gym, and two other buildings no longer exist. In their place is a huge apartment complex. This, as we all know, is not an isolated incident.
God is doing a new thing in our time, “old has passed away, the new has come.” Those who choose the buildings over the person in whose honor the buildings were constructed will be sorely disappointed.
Have our churches become more museums than places where we encounter the living Jesus Christ and let him transform our lives. Jesus did not come to create a “church culture” but to create a “living Body” on this earth. When we allow ourselves to become a part of Jesus’s living Body, then the future of buildings and budgets will not be that important to us.
