...And Jesus said, "This is but the beginning of the birth pangs." Birth pangs of what? Destruction, ruin, famine, earthquakes, wars...how are these the beginning of something like the Kingdom of God? And more to the point, what do we tell our youth about such dire predictions? Today we celebrate life-we celebrate the passage from one level of maturity to another, from one time of life to another. Today we will celebrate this in our Rite 13 liturgy for some of our most precious gifts-our children. Well, no longer children in one sense, but our future nonetheless.

In today's Gospel, Jesus is mad...he is angry. Reading today's Gospel requires us to know what's happened just before in order to understand any of it at all. Jesus has come to the Temple in Jerusalem, the holy place among all holy places for the Jews. Jesus has come to teach and to observe. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scribes, and others all have a go at Jesus, testing him to see what kind of teacher this guy really is. He isn't on the Temple staff, so obviously he can't hold any real authority; he's not part of their ministry, so his must not be legitimate. And so they've been hammering away at him ever since he got there, asking him one trick question after another, trying to find a weakness, to catch him on a clever technicality. And you thought you get hard tests in school!

But hey, Jesus doesn't run away, he doesn't tell them to shut up or back off. He lets them ask what they want to and to say what they will, and he leads them through their own questions with responses that teach them something new. Ever wonder about the Emperor's picture on the coins of the day? "Give to the Emperor the things that are the Emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." They were amazed at him, so the story goes. But it's a wonderful cosmic joke. Unless the Emperor is god of all he owns none of it; it is all God's. Or how about the commandment that is "first of all?" A scribe asks him this to figure out, I think, the basis for his teachings. After all, he was winning against the Temple staff scholars who were challenging him. For Jesus than answer is easy: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself." Hah! Jesus has recited the Hebrew shema, the prayer from Deuteronomy that began every service, that Jews recited at the beginning of each day. Shema means "Hear!" Jesus has only added a little bit, but oh, what a little bit! Think about it: anything you do with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength consumes you! There's simply no room for anything else! Jesus merely points out that, if you love God the way God loves you, respect yourself-love yourself-that way, remembering that God loves everybody else that way too. For Jesus, the shema was his basic rule of life, I think.

But what ticked Jesus off so badly was what he saw and heard that day. Here were the Temple officials who daily recited the shema and who were set apart for holy and important things. Their worship took place in the supreme monument of the holy relationship the Jews had with their God-the Temple. If anyone should have been living out the shema, living out their relationship with God, it should have been them. The widow we heard about just last week, who dropped her last two coins into the treasury-what happened there? The rich were dropping in large sums, she put in a tiny pittance. Jesus tells the disciples, "…all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on." All she had to live on?! She has chosen to starve and to die?! No one else did this that day while they were watching. Certainly not any of the folks who had plenty. The widow had come there to pray, and as any young person will tell you, your actions reflect the crowd you're in. Among the rich I suspect that she felt ashamed to be poor, to be a widow with nothing to offer for her time there in the Temple, taking up room among these others who seemed to have so much, who seemed to be entitled to have their prayers heard. The visual message must've been plain to her: the prosperous have been blessed by God in all things, so God must be expecting something in return. I think she must've felt very low to feel that she had to "give" God all she had just because others were giving so much. And for Jesus, that was the final straw. I think at that point he had to get out of there, to leave the Temple and go sit on the Mount of Olives.

Virtually everything leading up to this point in the story about Jesus visiting the Temple in Jerusalem is about the things we make, whether they are buildings, vestments, laws, money, or whatever…and how we miss the point when we use them to seek our own power and not the Kingdom of God. Like the youth we honor today in our Rite 13 liturgy Jesus and his disciples are the new kids on the block, so to speak, the new generation of prophets, teachers, healers and so on. And to Jesus it's abundantly clear that the older generation has made a mess of things and something's gotta change. But I think that Jesus' warning is not that the coming generations will tear the Temple down or that the wars will be started by the people who really live out the shema. His warning is that the older generations will do all of this to themselves, that what they have erected as monuments to themselves will, if they are not careful, be swept away as their world deteriorates. Aha!! So these really are birth pangs, the destruction and fury that signal something NEW! And what is this "new" world? What is this "new" Kingdom of God? It is a world in which we take seriously the shema, the great commandments Jesus lived by. It is a world in which we understand that creation is God's, not ours; a world in which shame has no place; a world in which the utter failure of war and the waste of famine are banished by how we choose to live and care not only for this creation but for one another. This, my friends, is such a radical Kingdom-even today-that perhaps it requires the energy and hope that young people can give to it and the support and love that we must give to them. In the Creed we begin, "We believe in one God…" I like to think that we also need to remember that "We believe in one God, who believes in us."

To the young people who are with us today for this Rite 13 liturgy, remember that you are no longer children: carefree and having few responsibilities-even if you clean your room every day. And you are not yet adults: you do not yet get to take ownership the monuments of power that surround you, even if you'd like to. You are hope and energy and love and all that: you are heart mind, soul, and strength without the baggage that age adds on. The world around you is in continuous birth pangs, trying to give birth to God's Kingdom. As our youth you are our precious, precious gift to that Kingdom. It lives and flourishes because of people, not in spite of us. Baptism, in a way, is the time when we acknowledge that we need to take personal responsibility for making the dream of God's Kingdom reality here on earth. And so I pray-with your parents and your friends and with all the good people of St. Thomas-that you will know that you are not alone in this task, that you share this dream with many and that God shares every moment, dancing with you in your joy and weeping with you in your sadness. I pray-we all pray-that you will find joy and peace in worship and work and that the shema of Jesus-the great commandment of life that brings about the Kingdom of God-will be the hallmark of all you do. Go always in peace, knowing we love you all dearly.

Amen