I said to my family yesterday, "I'm sorry, I can't go on the homeless walkathon with you, because I have to write a sermon." The irony was not lost on me. I felt like the person in the letter of James who says to a homeless person "Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill," but doesn't do anything to help them get warm and fed. And it's worse, of course, if you're the preacher. Sorry, I can't DO the word of God, because I'm too busy PREACHING the word of God.

I'll come back to that.

We have fierce lessons this morning ...lessons about the end of time.. the time of reckoning .. the cataclysmic moment when things come to an end and truth is revealed. Daniel calls it a "time of anguish," Jesus refers to great suffering. In the church year we're moving in to the waiting time of Advent. We ponder the end of one way of being as we prepare for something new to come.

Jesus talks this morning, in the gospel, about the "desolating sacrilege . . . set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand)." That's a pretty mysterious image, and the aside, telling us that the phrase is also some kind of code, is also quite daunting. What on earth are we to make of this?

(And I've come to terms with it, but when I first read today's Collect .. and then the lessons .. it seemed ironic . and almost humorous .. that when the Collect talks about all holy Scripture being written for our learning, the Scripture that day is so remarkably hard to understand.)

But Mark's hearers might have recognized the phrase "desolating sacrilege" right away - Daniel and the book of Maccabees use the phrase - and it probably refers to the descecration of the temple some 200 years earlier, when the Greek ruler of Palestine desecrated the altar by erecting a statue of Zeus on it.

It's been suggested (Ched Myers) that Mark's Jesus isn't talking about a mythic end time at all this morning, but is preparing his Judaen community for the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans that is to come in the years 68 to 70. He's talking to them in code - "let the reader understand" - so the authorities won't know what he is talking about. In this reading of Mark, Jesus ‘s command to take to the hills is profoundly counter-cultural. He is telling his people to ABANDON Jerusalem -this city that means so much to them - not to stay and fight for it. He's telling them that it's the armed resistance fighters who are standing up to the Romans who are false messiahs who can only recycle the old ways of oppression (so that they come out on top) instead of, as Jesus does, work for the creation of a totally new order. It's like the people who, after 9/11, said that violent retaliation only played into the hands of terrorists, that meeting violence with violence leads only to ... more violence. I supported the bombing of Afghanistan. Jesus wouldn't have.