Do Not Let Your Love Grow Cold

Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

Marta: Well congratulations for waking up and coming on daylight savings and receiving all that information at what feels like 9:20 in your morning in your brain. So applaud yourselves you you've made it this far.

It was a year ago today that I was in the sanctuary. It did not look like this it was much dirtier, much sweatier with a bunch of other people cleaning for hours and hours, prepping and getting ready for our first Sunday meeting in this building, no longer in the evenings but in the morning. Yeah it's one year in our new building, which is I don't know how long we call it new before it's just building. Correy and Steve were moving a very heavy Facebook Marketplace find to get ready for the nursery check-in. I think Maggie and I were on our knees in the lobby scrubbing very questionable stains of unknown origins out of the carpet. Grace Keller was organizing all of the nursery toys that were donated through a buy-nothing group. Sheems and Debbie were shop-vaccing and wiping and Steve Manning had a very particular method of how we had to do things. I got it wrong so I picked a different job. Because this drywall had been put up on Friday and it was Saturday and we had to get all the drywall dust off of every pew. And I'm sorry if I'm forgetting anybody else that was there because it truly was just a whirlwind of people in and out all weekend.

And a funny story that I do want to share because Debbie isn't here and I'm gonna ask for forgiveness and not permission to share. We cleaned this floor and we realized we did not have this stage and there wasn't enough room for the preacher to stand up here. So our friends at First Universalist Church down the road had this stage that they weren't using and they said you can come get it it's fine. So it was a lot easier to just walk over and so Debbie and Steve are wheeling it down the sidewalk and I started taking a video. I'm like “oh they look so cute” like I love them. and like but as I zoomed in it just like the vibe was kind of off and it felt like, like you know, maybe this isn't as cute. I don't know.

So we we haul it up and we're getting it through those doors we're working on getting it through that hallway, and Jim from First U comes over and he goes “oh no no no watch out that wheel doesn't actually turn so you have to pick it up and move it,” and Steve's eyes get so big and he goes “I'm so sorry I did not know your wheel didn't turn,” and Debbie’s underneath it she goes “it's fine, it's just fine, don't worry about it.” So pastors, they're just like us!

My favorite memory of working on all of this a year ago was as the sun was going down, everybody had gone home except for Sheems, Debbie, and I and we were all in our own little areas. We'd run out of things to say, we were tired, we wanted to go home, but we just had this energy and life and just this impetus of knowing what was going to come the next day. And I had the size standing exactly where I'm standing right now and I thought this is my favorite International Women's Day I've ever had. And I am so lucky to be in this church with all of you, with everybody involved, but especially in a group that is so many badass women then that are leading this church in every way. So happy international women's day and happy anniversary.

And it's a little ironic that we're preaching on the text we're preaching today on the anniversary of setting up a new church building because it's about the destruction of the temple. When I was assigned to preach the state after I gave Justin a little grief of giving me the daylight savings Sunday, I started looking into what my text was. I just finished my New Year's sermon and I wanted to get a jump on the next one and so I read the text and I had this rare moment where I'm like I know exactly what I'm gonna preach on. I've got my intro my thesis like I know what I'm gonna do like I saw the whole thing. This does not happen if you ever give public speeches or preach or anything, like this is such a rare thing. And I was so excited to write it and this was when I thought we were still using the lectionary as our sermon series. And I thought my text was gonna be about the Woman at the Well it's a text I know well, and I can make it an easy parallel to International Women's Day, talk about a Jesus I know well, and I'm very comfortable speaking about.

But as Maggie said and we've been talking about since the beginning of Lent, we're stepping away from our lectionary text series and we're in a series called the Path to Palm Sunday and together with churches all over the country spiritually and physically we are prepping and preparing through Lent to walk the ways of Jesus fiercely loving God and our neighbors but this means my perfectly manicured sermon went out the window. I let it go and I opened up the text and I read this: Matthew 24:1-14 says:

As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. Then he asked them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” Jesus answered them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah!’ and they will lead many astray. And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

“Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. Then many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another. 11 And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.

This is not the sermon I wanted. I don't want to teach a apocalypse text. I don't want to think about these things. I don't want to have to confront them from the pulpit, right? I'm the pastor that likes to do the fun object lessons, I like visual metaphors, I like sermons where I can send you home with a little tchotchke, a reminder that you can keep in your back pocket of what we talked about today.

But unfortunately I don't need to send you home with your own little piece of rubble to give you a reminder of what this text talks about. And we don't have to stretch our pastoral and Christian imaginations to find very far to find parallels of what Jesus is describing here: “you'll hear rule here of wars and rumors of wars.” Well that doesn't feel like an abstract ancient warning, that feels like opening up your phone this week and reading the headlines about Iran, nervously refreshing for updates because you listen to news stories on a podcast on your whole way to work and it still doesn't feel like enough information.

“There will be famines and earthquakes.” Think of all the once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters we've had in the past five years alone. Like, Millennials, we're tired of once-in-a-lifetime events happening over and over. With all these AI rollouts coming to more and more into every sphere, we're already reckoning with how much clean water is needed to keep up with our desire for efficiency. “Tortured put to death” is not a far-fetched thing for our city. We've seen unnecessary killings at the hands of authority, we live in a place where people have been unjustly detained, abused, deported, or threatened simply because of their immigration status or because they look like someone who might have an immigration status.This kind of violence is not theoretical it's part of our collective experience and civic memory.

“Increased lawlessness” We're seeing powerful people be protected. we see systems bending over backwards to shield those who have committed unimaginable harm, and we watch cover-ups unfold, see justice delayed or distorted or quietly buried under layers of power and influence, right? Anybody else overwhelmed? like yikes! This is not what I wanted, this is not what any of us wanted, and for a lot of people in this room who grew up in church traditions there's a very particular story that gets told when we start to bring up text like this and I think that's important to name.

Maybe you grew up in or spent significant time in a tradition that taught us to celebrate war in the Middle East and compounding traumatic cultural events because that means the end times are coming. And if the end is the year near that means more people will convert to Christianity. And Jesus is going to come back soon to scoop up the faithful and leave the rest to burn in a fiery furnace as the world collapses. So the wars and disasters and sufferings become just signs, proof that the timeline is unfolding exactly as Jesus predicted. So just fasten your seat belts and wait for the turbulence to be over until Jesus lands the plane.

But here's the thing: that's not what Jesus is doing in this passage. He's not giving the disciples a calendar or a checklist for what will trigger the end times. Instead he's doing something that I think is more nuanced and more necessary: he's telling the truth about the world and he's naming the chaos that empires create. This whole story starts with the disciples pointing out the temple. And I think they're just trying to be real casual about it. The text comes from that we read from comes from what we call the synoptic gospels so that's Matthew Mark and Luke. And there's a lot of overlaps between the first three gospels. And the other versions in mark 13 and Luke 21, the disciples walk out of the temple and basically say like, “Wow look at that temple it's so beautiful.”

And they're right I mean it was a grand building and was a place that is central to faith and national identity. It represents the place where heaven and earth meet and God's spirit dwells. Herod had expanded the temple not just to be the building, but to fill up the entire mountainside. And they start calling it Temple Mount. It was the length of ten football fields, enormous retaining walls on all sides. And if you'd asked the disciples what's one of the most permanent things you can think of, a lot of them probably would have said the temple. Massive stones, generations of faith, the place where heaven and earth meet; it felt unshakable.

And I like to imagine after the disciples are walking through marveling at the temple and Jesus says “you know this will be thrown down and destroyed,” he turns around and says, “Come this way, I want to show you something.” And he leads them up nearby up the Mount of Olives. And so they step up and walk outside of the city center to a place that is already geographically and topographically higher than the temple, which is already a high and grand place. I had a mentor in college whenever I would spin out about something going wrong (which was a lot) and he would just say, “Lift the plane Marta.” Basically saying, zoom out; get more perspective on this. And the Mount of olives is physically higher ground than the temple is. It was there before the temple was built, it will be there after it crumbles.

Our good friend Cody Sanders writes, “In our over spiritualization of the teaching of Jesus, we often miss the very earthy ways that they are rooted for Jesus's first hearers. Our relationship to the landscape to our ecological and geological kin within the realm of God matters to the to our living of the Good News.”

So when Jesus lifts the plane for the disciples, what is he asking them to see that yes, awful things will happen. Unimaginable things. Moments of terror and pain and violence will happen, but strangely he decides to say these things are all but the beginning of birth pangs. And I've never been pregnant, so I asked some of my friends what their experience of the very end of pregnancy and labor is like. Non-pregnant partners talked about how helpless they felt in those last weeks and days and every phone call or text from their partner just set their heart rate going—even if it was nothing more than, “Can you stop and pick up a gallon of milk on your way home?” Someone shared how she was certain her water broke at work went in and she just peed her pants. One friend said that she went into false labor so many times with her firstborn that her husband stopped coming with her to the hospital. Which I asked I was like “How did that end?” And she goes “I was induced and he was right it wasn't labor any of the times.” Like the end of pregnancy can just last so long and it's scary and anticipatory you feel like this is it this is everything we've been waiting for you got to load up the older kids to go to grandma's and grab the go-bag just to turn around and come home for another be another day of being still pregnant.

It’s a lot of what I think the feeling of what we're talking about here: big pain, big feelings, real legitimate pain and feelings but somehow it's still not the end. And we have to keep going even though we just want it to be over. I talked to my friend Katrina and she is a hypnobirthing educator and her goal in her education is helping people to have a gentler calmer and more comfortable birth. And I asked her, I said, “What's your experience with clients talking about false labor and the pain of it?” Here's what she said to me. She said,

“We don't call it false labor in our practice. We call it practice labor because calling it false kind is kind of gaslighting and defeating. It's easy for me to tell my clients, ‘Try not to get frustrated or impatient, it's a good sign,’ but then you start to question your own intuition and lose faith in yourself, in the process. Because everything that's going on in your body is preparing you for what's to come. It's all part of labor even if isn't the full-on real deal yet.”

I don't know how many labors Jesus was a part of if any in his 33 years of ministry but what Katrina has to say about practice labor feels exactly what Christ is saying on the Mount of Olives. Big global crises all the way down to interpersonal issues we face with our neighbors are not a waste. They're not a false end of the world, but rather there are moments of practice labor practicing the labor of Christ. But what's the point of a practice labor? Like what's the real thing? What are we birthing here? What's the pain all for?

Remember how I said this was part of a synoptic gospel? That it comes the story happens in all three: Matthew, Mark and Luke. What's interesting to me and what my work as a preacher that I'm doing is not necessarily looking at what repeats itself but what's a standalone piece that a specific author wants us to see? And while most of this passage is echoed pretty much the same way in the other two gospels there's one unique line that's important that's unique to Matthew.

And it says, “Because of the increase of lawlessness the love of many will grow cold.” This is the same gospel that just two chapters earlier says “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind this is the greatest of first commandments and the second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And this is a verse that so many of us, after leaving a version of Christianity that no longer makes sense, have been able to say, “I don't know exactly what I believe, but this is something I feel like I can hang my hat up on at the end of the day and rest my faith on.”

Love is something that Matthew wants to make sure is emphasized and not missed in the midst of apocalypse and destruction. It's so tempting in the midst of disasters big and small to throw in the towel and grow cold. to grow numb and dismissive in catastrophe, to assume nothing will change, to slowly withdraw from caring for people around us, to believe that false labor was not actually practice for anything and that nothing worthwhile was happening. We need to just go home and keep waiting and when that cold cynicism and dismissal happens something dangerous begins to take root.

Because the mission Jesus gave us was never to predict the end of the world and it wasn't to pave a path for his followers to find a shortcut or a cheat code around the pain and destruction. The mission Jesus gave us was to love God and to love our neighbor and to do it with the fiery and ferocious love that God models for us even in and especially in moments we did not want, we did not ask for. This is the gospel, this is what good news is: it's not standing on the street corner trying to convert as many people as we can before the end times, but rather the loving faithful endurance is what leads us back to our neighbors, in the rippling effect of coming back to each other and back to God, and back to each other and back to God.

And with all that said, I don't really see the birth pangs analogy as an accident because the work of labor, the pushing, the sweating, the pain, the waiting, stretching, crying, it's not for nothing. It's not for a prize or a tiara of the world's best laborer, it's to give birth to new life, and a new life that needs to be tenderly cared for and nurtured. This is the kind of love that God gives her people: a mothering laboring love.

There's a poem I want to share with you by a poet named Allison Woodard I first heard it several years ago on a podcast maybe many of you are old friends with called the Liturgists Podcast and later the audio was turned into a video on the Sojourners website which is we're about to play now and I think her words best describe this firing fiery laboring love:

“To be a Mother is to suffer;
To travail in the dark,
stretched and torn,
exposed in half-naked humiliation,
subjected to indignities
for the sake of new life.

To be a Mother is to say,
“This is my body, broken for you,”
And, in the next instant, in response to the created’s primal hunger,
“This is my body, take and eat.”

To be a Mother is to self-empty,
To neither slumber nor sleep,
so attuned You are to cries in the night—
Offering the comfort of Yourself,
and assurances of “I’m here.”

To be a Mother is to weep
over the fighting and exclusions and wounds
your children inflict on one another;
To long for reconciliation and brotherly love
and—when all is said and done—
To gather all parties, the offender and the offended,
into the folds of your embrace
and to whisper in their ears
that they are Beloved.

To be a mother is to be vulnerable—
To be misunderstood,
Railed against,
Blamed
For the heartaches of the bewildered children
who don’t know where else to cast
the angst they feel
over their own existence
in this perplexing universe

To be a mother is to hoist onto your hips those on whom your image is imprinted,
bearing the burden of their weight,
rejoicing in their returned affection,
delighting in their wonder,
bleeding in the presence of their pain.

To be a mother is to be accused of sentimentality one moment,
And injustice the next.
To be the Receiver of endless demands,
Absorber of perpetual complaints,
Reckoner of bottomless needs.

To be a mother is to be an artist;
A keeper of memories past,
Weaver of stories untold,
Visionary of lives looming ahead.

To be a mother is to be the first voice listened to,
And the first disregarded;
To be a Mender of broken creations,
And Comforter of the distraught children
whose hands wrought them.

To be a mother is to be a Touchstone
and the Source,
Bestower of names,
Influencer of identities;
Life giver,
Life shaper,
Empath,
Healer,
and
Original Love.

So maybe the question Jesus is asking us today is not: is the fault world falling apart or will the world come and give us hard trials and apocalyptic moments? Because we already know the answer to that. The real question is will your love grow cold? Will you numb yourself or gaslight yourself into thinking this is no big deal, or will you partner with the ferocious mothering love that even while surrounded by pain and fear burst new life fully attentive to what's around her?

Let's pray: Oh God of comfort and creation there is so much to be hurting over so much that has happened so much that we are on the precipice of and unfortunately we know that the things unimaginable are likely to come our way wrap us up in your arms show us how to love like you and to not let our hearts grow cold give us the wisdom to lift the plane and keep our eyes on the things that will last giving us rejuvenation to be fully present in the granular details of all that we encounter do not send a cheat code or a shortcut to pass by it but an endurance to walk through it with you labor with us. Oh God do not let our love grow cold. Amen.