Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

It is time to say good bye to Mark, to the gospel that has accompanied us through much of this church year. Today is the last time we’ve heard the gospel reading from Mark until the lectionary cycle brings it back to us in two years. Our very first reading of the year in Advent actually was also taken from Mark 13. ”But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father... Therefore, keep awake.” (Mk 13: 32,35) So we began with Mark, chapter 13, and are now about to end this year with it.

Why all this talk of the end? Why is it so important? Why are the beginning and the end of our church year embraced by these texts (since about the year 800 when the first lectionary book was compiled under Charles the Great)?

Do we still need to do it? Do we need to carry on with such traditions?

I think much of our discomfort with the talk of the coming end of this world has to do with our disapproval of the excesses of Christian fundamentalism and the growing influence it seems to have. Our dismay about radical, political Islamic fundamentalism plays its role in this mix of emotions as well.

People with fundamentalist views probably share with us the perception that our modern and postmodern societies have become secularized as they have not before. It is more than obvious that there is no collectively shared Christian identity anymore as the Western world has liked to see it and maintained for so many centuries.

There are however different ways to deal with the situation. Fundamentalist Christians are trying to save the divine dimension of our lives with human means, mainly by playing on that age old human phenomenon called fear.

When we disagree with such views, and we ought to, then we have to watch out though that we do not as we say in German “throw out the baby with the bath water”, namely in a counter reaction throw out crucial parts of our very own Christian faith, for example the traditions about the end of time and the last things about which as we know people with fundamentalist views have much to say.

We may indeed not have a collective sense of living in end times, maybe no society has ever as a whole had a collective sense of the end coming soon. But certainly Jesus and many of his contemporaries shared it, also St. Paul, it certainly was wide spread in the medieval times including Luther.

Individually, personally, however, we do know all about things coming to an end. Depending on our personalities and on the losses we have experienced, the endings which take place in our own lives are cosmic in a very real sense. Often our most dramatic losses occur in the death of a loved one. The loss of a person or of a relationship however can also occur long before the time of separation/ of death and can be just as painful.

The persistence of the Christian tradition to confront us with apocalyptic readings like today is good and it invites us to come to terms with the questions and doubts we might have in this respect.

Mark’s gospel is about the Kingdom of God. You can probably all say Jesus’ first spoken words in the gospel with me: “The time is fulfilled--, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.” (Mk 1:15)

We know it and we still ask for it all the time: “Your/ Thy kingdom come.”

This is the fervent prayer for God to be fully ruling our present and our future.

In Jesus God’s rule has been established so that where Christ is present the kingdom is present.

According to Mark though the place where we expect the Prince of Peace to arrive and hammer out that world order which would allow the entire human family, all of creation really, to reconcile and live together in love and peace is not the temple and also is not the Rose Garden. Jesus does not anchor God’s kingdom in our temples nor in our palaces.

Jesus openly disassociates himself from the temple. Three times he enters it, Herod’s temple, a truly magnificent structure at his time. Jesus heads there straight after his entry into Jerusalem. Inside the temple the shouts of glory are silenced, and Jesus says nothing. He only looks around at everything and leaves.

The next day Jesus comes again cleaning the temple. He does not just clean the temple, he is not even interested in a clean temple. He shuts down its business and religious functions and thus judges and disqualifies it entirely. (See Hebrews reading.)

On his third return to the temple Jesus has a lot of conversations with chief priests, scribes, some Sadducees, in short with the authorities. In these conversations and arguments, Jesus defines and defends his own authority against that of the temple and its power structure. And when Jesus walks away the third time, it is clear that his kingdom, the kingdom of God has nothing to do with the temple, Jesus is not going to be enthroned there as the Davidic Messiah. The kingdom of God is opposed to the temple.

When the disciples upon leaving the temple marvel in blissful naivete the magnificence of the structure, I am surprised that Jesus does not blow up at them, but simply says: “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” And then he walks back up to the Mount of Olives to sit there “opposite” of the temple.

The kingdom of God that Jesus has brought and that he has in mind for this world looks according to Mark somewhat like this:

God’s rule is spanning the world, it is reaching beyond borders as Jesus’ repeated boat trips across the Galilean Sea show. God’s rule means liberation, for Jesus performs multiple exorcisms with a massive exodus of evil spirits. The lowest on the social ladder, children and women, are brought into view as dignified human beings. Through his healings Jesus restores individuals to their lives, to their families and communities, so the kingdom can be advanced through those communities. Feedings of thousands take place on in Jewish and in Gentile territory for God provides everywhere. And if there should be a temple ever again, it would be a house of prayer of the nations and not just one nation

The kingdom of God, God’s rule, is nothing that we human beings, (sinful, willful, often just pathetic people,) can bring about. It is God’s rule. Finally. And fortunately.

That in itself is all the good news we need. The good news is also that God’s kingdom is not just coming in the end.

God’s kingdom is not a point in time to target and work hard for to reach it and hopefully be allowed to enter in the end, but rather a dimension we live in. The dimension we live in at all times. We already live in the end.

If God’s ruling is a dimension it means it spans, it embraces our life time, our history from start to finish and much more.

I am actually glad after all that the end time texts show up each year at the beginning and at the end, even though part of me always says, o no, not again. But how could something as dry as the selection of readings better symbolize that our own beginnings and endings are embraced and cradled in God’s time which through Christ’s coming is already the end time.

The Lord’s prayer brings it to mind each time we say it. We ask for the end of ends to come even sooner. Thy kingdom come. We also often say in the liturgy, as a response in the eucharist, “Amen, come Lord Jesus.” This is a quote from the last lines of the last book of the Bible, the Revelation of John.

One last point.

What about the bad guys? What about those who we might suspect could wake up in the final resurrection from the dead not to everlasting life but to everlasting shame and everlasting contempt?

Hear the good news again: God’s kingdom is coming. Our judge is God, and as we pray in this nave in the German services during confession I pray here as well: “Judge us, God, but do not forsake us, for we have nowhere to go but only to your mercy.”

Luckily, we do not have to judge our fellow sinners in the end, but - because we live only on God’s mercy, we have to do everything we can on this earth to deal even with evil people as human people.

Amen, come Lord Jesus.