Birth Pangs

Mark 13:1-8
As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, "Teacher, look how wonderful are these stones and how wonderful these buildings!"
Jesus said to him, "You see these great buildings? No stone will be left upon another stone; all will be destroyed."
As he sat on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John and Andrew asked him privately, "Tell us, when will this be and what sign will there be when these things are about to be accomplished?"
Jesus began to say to them, "Watch that you are not deceived. Many will come in my name saying, ‘I am the one,’ and many will be deceived. But when you hear of wars and rumors of war, don't be alarmed; it is necessary that this happens, but it is not yet the end. For nation will rise up against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places, and there will be famine. This is only the beginning of the birth pangs.

The little Methodist Church in Ahuatapec, Mexico is just a humble little concrete and brick building on the outskirts of town nestled into a cornfield. Ahuatapec itself is not much of a town, maybe 5,000 or so when the men come back for the weekend after working in Veracruz or Chiapas harvesting sugar or fruit or whatever is in season. The town sits on the high desert plains of the state of Puebla. In the distance in every direction you can see massive purple volcanoes topped with snow. To the east there is the Pico de Orizaba, the highest mountain in all of Mexico at 18,000 feet above sea level. To the north is La Malinche, named after the Indian woman who became a guide and mistress for Cortez when the Spanish came to conquer Mexico in 1519. And to the west there is Popo, usually belching out plumes of smoke that can be seen for hundreds of miles.

But they are all in the distance. Ahuatapec itself is just a spot among the maguey plants and cactus that line the desert floor. It's a small place, dominated by a large Catholic Church in the very center of town. To be involved in the life of the community in Ahuatapec is to be Catholic. You can't be mayor without being Catholic. It's difficult to run a business without being Catholic. And to be Methodist is to be in the minority, to be on the outskirts of town, to be an outsider in your own community.

Despite that fact, for ninety years there has been a Methodist congregation meeting in Ahuatapec. I got to go there – twice - on mission trips to help build the new church, which is the first church building the Methodists have ever had. It doesn't have gold filigree and fine art like the Catholic Church in town, but it is better than the cramped quarters of the Sanchez family’s one-room house, which is where they met for ninety years.

It was during my first trip there in 1994 that I had my first encounter with the tensions between Catholics and evangelicos--the generic name for all Christians who are not Catholics in Mexico. We were holding church services in the new church, which was just a shell of a building with open windows at that time. As I was trying to preach in my strange mixture of bad Spanish and English, a man in a van selling ice cream came to the front of the building. He parked right in front of the church and began playing music over the loudspeaker on top of his van at an incredibly high volume.

Now it was good music. I like Mexican music and I’ve been known to play it from time to time. Earlier in the week as we were digging trenches for the surrounding wall of the church we had loved hearing the music from this man's van because it meant ice cream and a chance to take a break from the work. But this morning it meant something else.

There was no question of him being able to sell ice cream at this spot. The church was in a cornfield, a long way from any other house. The ice cream man had come to play music in order to disturb our service, in order to let us know that the town had taken notice of what had happened and was not entirely pleased with what we had done. He stayed for perhaps five minutes, during which I just had to stop preaching. Then he drove off slowly and I had my first experience of what my Methodist brothers and sisters felt each day in that community.

A few years later I took a trip to another city in central Mexico with a group of college students. Again we worked with the local Methodists who were a distinct minority in the town. Petra, one of our hosts, told me about growing up in the town and how when she walked down the streets, Catholics passing by in cars would put their hands to their foreheads in the shape of a ‘C’ to signify that they thought she was cursed.

I don’t tell these stories to talk about how bad Catholics are. Far from it. In this sanctuary this morning we are people who are from Methodist, Catholic and many other Christian backgrounds. Somehow, here, we have managed to find a unity in Christ that churches in Mexico still haven’t found. But these experiences for me were the first to tell me what it was like to be singled out because of my faith. In Ahuatapec and Cortazar, and more so in other parts of the world, to have and claim the Christian faith can be a dangerous thing. The persecuted Church is not just something we read about in the Bible; it still exists and there is much we can learn from those who still suffer for their faith.

Have your ever suffered for your religious beliefs? Has there ever been a time when you felt that your very life was threatened because of your faith in Jesus Christ? Most of us have never known that sort of insecurity. We live in a land which may ignore Christians and which may downplay its Christian heritage, but it is, by and large, not a land where Christians are persecuted. Rightly we celebrate the work of Jefferson and Madison in guaranteeing freedom of religion. But it is not so in most of the world.

Believe it or not, Americans and Europeans are now a minority of the world's Christians. Most Christians are not white and they do not speak English. Most of them live in the Third World and most of them are poor. It has been estimated that in China, only about 2% of the population is Christian, but even if it is only 2% that would amount to over 26 million Christians.

What is also true about the majority of Christians is that they live in countries where freedom of religion is not constitutionally guaranteed and in many cases they live with the real threat of persecution. In China religious organizations that are not officially registered with the government are subject to regular harassment, particularly around the major Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter. Amnesty International reports that those caught participating in services considered illegal are often detained or fined, the usual fine being the equivalent of several months’ income. Imagine the impact it would have on your family if you lost three months income just because you came to church this morning.

In Sudan we hear about the genocide and warfare in the Darfur region and in the southern parts of that country. What we often don’t hear is that there are religious dimensions to that conflict. As the majority Muslim population has instituted Shari’ a law, they have also begun to exterminate the Christian population. Christians are sometimes sold into slavery to Muslims. The government policy there mandates the forced conversion of anyone who is not Muslim. In Iran, Christians, Jews and Baha'is all face violent crackdowns and death because of a government policy forbidding conversion to a religion other than Islam.

In Palestine, there has traditionally been a large minority of Palestinian Christians who held high positions of leadership. As much as 15% of the population was Christian as recently as 50 years ago. Today that figure is 2%. In Bethlehem, where Jesus was born and which has had a large Christian population, Christians are leaving in droves. The new wall of separation that the Israeli government is building goes right through Christian neighborhoods, cutting off people from their businesses and families. Palestinian Muslim gangs produce faked documents claiming that they are the legitimate owners of Christian lands and push the owners out. Ibrahim Shomali, a Christian restaurant owner, is selling out and leaving. He says, “Here is where Jesus was born and over there, across the hill in Jerusalem, is where he was crucified. We Christians now feel like we are on the cross.”[i] If the projections hold, there will be almost no Christians in the land of Jesus’ birth in fifty years.

Even in nations that are allied with the United States, Christians are endangered. In Saudi Arabia, which receives so much money from our nation for its oil and so much military aid, there are severe restrictions on Christian worship. It is officially outlawed and only marginally tolerated. Christians are arrested and lashed in public if they practice their faith openly. Bibles are regularly rounded up and burnt. Christians are arrested and tortured and can be legally executed if they have converted from Islam.[ii] Much of the wealth that the nation has accumulated in the past few decades has been used to support schools and mosques that advocate the expansion of the kind of Islam that has produced these laws.

There have been cycles of persecution like this before. In 1915, across the Middle East, but particularly in Armenia, there were devastating genocides that wiped out Christian cultures that had survived since Roman times. It’s also true that we can find times when Christians used their positions of power to persecute and kill Jews and Muslims. But what we face today is grim and one-sided. Philip Jenkins, who wrote a book on the changing face of Christianity says, “In the world as a whole, there is no question that the threat of intolerance and persecution chiefly comes from the Islamic side of the equation.”[iii]

We saw this played out recently when Pope Benedict, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, quoted a remark from a medieval Turk that was interpreted as disparaging of Mohammed, the founder of the Muslim faith. In the violence that followed, the people who suffered were Palestinian Christians, whose churches were burned, a Somali Christian nun, who was murdered, and followers of the faith everywhere who suddenly wondered about their own safety in Western, religiously-tolerant societies. The Pope made his apologies, though I don’t think he should have, but he has said that he has a clear agenda for his upcoming trip to Turkey next week. He is seeking reciprocity. He wants to listen to Muslim demands for greater sensitivity to their faith, but is insisting on stronger protections and rights for Christian minorities.[iv]

Why is this important to us? Why should we spend time on this question? It cannot just be because we want to give thanks in this Thanksgiving time for this land and the freedoms we enjoy here. It’s a little crass to give thanks because we don’t suffer like our brother and sister Christians in Pakistan.

No, it’s important because we need to hear the challenge to us. Jesus says that we will hear about wars and rumors of wars, and indeed we do. There has not been a generation since Jesus’ death that hasn’t heard about these. But in the times we live in, the particular challenge we face is being faithful to the God we know in Jesus Christ, being open to those who do not know this God, and struggling (and that is the word) to create societies in which Christians and all peoples are free to practice their faith without fear of persecution.

It is also our challenge to create societies where we not only tolerate other religions but to engage them and confront them when they become violent and demonic. It would have been right for Muslims in the 12th century to question what Christianity had become if it could produce things like the bloodthirsty excesses of the Crusades. There are still areas where Christians should be challenged to examine their faith and practice. It is just as right for us to question what Islam has become when followers produce, in its name, horrors like terrorist cells, suicide bombers and beheading videos. We need some real, hard conversations about what it means that we live together and how it is that we shall do that peacefully and with full respect for each other’s existence. We need to love our neighbors enough that we will not ignore the distortions that lead to evil and death. And we need to recognize when we are putting others, and ultimately ourselves, at risk by not responding directly to threats. We need to respond as Christians, but we need to respond.

The words attributed to the German theologian Martin Niemuller following World War Two are just as appropriate to us today. Niemuller was credited with that saying, "When Hitler attacked the Jews, I was not a Jew, therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic and therefore, I was not concerned. Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church and there was nobody left to be concerned." When we stand with those who suffer and refuse to let them sink into oblivion, when we speak their names to those in power, we bear a witness that one day we may wish others would carry for us.

Coming into Jerusalem with Jesus near the end of his ministry, followed by great multitudes of people who were proclaiming Jesus as king, the disciples were convinced that their journey would end in glory. Standing among the great buildings of the capital city, in the shadow of the Temple, one of Jesus' disciples got carried away and said to him, "Teacher, look how wonderful are these stones and how wonderful these buildings!"

But Jesus would have none of it. He knew how fragile the institutions of the world are. He told the overawed disciples that the time was soon coming when not one stone would be left upon another, and within forty years his prophecy had come about. The Temple was destroyed and Jerusalem laid waste. And Jesus went on to warn the disciples about what their future really looked like. It was to be a time of persecution for them when they would be dragged before councils and hated because of his name. There would be war and famine and all manner of troubles. But these, Jesus said, were only birth pangs--like the pains of labor signaling the birth of new life.

We are blessed to live in a place like this, but the persecuted witnesses of the past and of today have seen the birth pangs in a way that we haven’t. Christians in the Sudan share the same gospel we do. They eat the same communion meal we do. They are baptized just as we are. But when they talk about the hope of the future, they see it in a very different way.

Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who was murdered for his witness to Christ in a time of civil war in his country in 1980, said, "A church that suffers no persecution but enjoys the privileges and support of the things of the earth--beware!--is not the true church of Jesus Christ." That’s a challenging message for a privileged church.

In the book of Hebrews, the writer asks those in the church to "recall those earlier days when, after you had been enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and persecution, and sometimes being partners with those so treated" [Heb. 10:32-33]. So what's it going to be? Are we going to be partners? Or shall we be forgetful? Forgetful of them, of Christ, and ultimately of who we are?

Thanks be to the God of the poor and the God of the suffering. Thanks be to the God of the persecuted, the God of Jesus Christ.

[i] “Christian population falls in Holy Land,” Brian Murphy, Associated Press Religion Writer, 11/11/06. Referred to hereafter as AP.
[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians, Wikipedia
[iii] Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], p. 170.
[iv] AP