Ordinary 32 Year C
Sunday 16 November 2025 | The Rev’d Ruth Wivell
When I’m feeling stressed about the state of the world, asking the big questions, like “will the economy crash shortly after we’ve purchased a house?” and “how close are we now to total ecological collapse?” I will flop on my bed and think about writing in my journal or praying or taking a nap.
I will think about doing one of those wonderful, soul-soothing options.
And then, I pick up my phone, and I doomscroll. I like to distract myself from my fears and questions by reading the news, which in turn gives rise to bigger fears and questions. And if things are going especially well for the algorithms, they might convince me to buy something or sign up for a newsletter. A distraction from the distraction, if you will. Are you familiar with this kind of dynamic?
There’s a similar kind of spinning from distraction to distraction that takes place in our gospel reading this morning.
Before today’s reading begins, Jesus has been observing the humble beauty of the poor widow at the temple. Unlike the rich who had devoured widows’ property and offered their gifts [to the temple] out of their excess, this faithful and desperate woman had, out of her poverty, put in the offering box everything she had to live on.
Well, as he often does, Jesus makes things awkward with his observation. This is where the reading picks up today. The people, feeling awkward, and desperate for a shift in topic away from the deep faith of the widow, remark upon the grandeur of the temple: “Well, would you look at that! Isn’t the temple magnificent? How grand it is, adorned with beautiful stones and offerings.”
Indeed, the Jerusalem temple was an impressive sight. It projected an imposing image of power and dominance in the city. And it needed to project such an image, because the political picture behind the scenes was not at all as secure as it appeared to be.
Indeed, what could be more impressive than a magnificent temple? A magnificent temple being destroyed, of course. And that’s exactly where Jesus takes the conversation next: it will all be torn down; no stone will be left upon another.
The people start to freak out, and demand to know how they can predict the destruction of the temple, and Jesus ramps it up even further: “There’ll be earthquakes! Wars! Uprisings!” he proclaims. “Famines! Plagues! Portents! Big and terrible things are going to happen!”
And then Jesus says, “By your endurance, you will gain your souls.”
Just like that, he shifts the focus from these giant cosmic happenings back down to how the people will move through these events in the smallness of their own lives.
Luke, the author of this gospel, was not foretelling terrible events that are to come in the future. His original audience would not have heard this as an apocalyptic story. Rather, Luke is writing this story shortly after the temple has been destroyed by the Romans.
So Jesus’s followers had already lived through the reality of what Jesus goes on to say would happen to them: they had been seized, persecuted, brought before authorities, betrayed by family and friends, and hated by everyone. You can read about it all in Luke’s other book, the book of Acts. The apostles truly understood that when buildings and institutions that we put so much hope and faith into eventually fall, no-one comes out unscathed.
Rather than being an apocalyptic text, our reading is meaning-making one in which Jesus, knowing he is moving closer to his own death, is offering wisdom from that place. When Jesus says, “By your endurance, you will gain your soul,” he means you will gain your whole being, your spirit, your full self. But it’s not clear that he means you will keep your life.
One way Jesus is suggesting we might endure, might gain our souls, is by observing and telling the truth about what we can see, and the truth of how we are in relation to what we see.
And as such, our reading today is an invitation for us to tend to our inner landscape of faith. As we move through and engage with a world that is out of our control and is in so much turmoil, we must tend to our faith, individually and collectively.
So Jesus says in the face of all these extreme events, “do not be terrified (πτοέω).” Literally, “do not fly away into erratic and unrealistic behaviour.” “Do not psychologically detach from reality by flitting to a distraction” (like, for example, doomscrolling, or admiring the temple stones, or predicting when the world will end… or whatever your choice of distraction might be).
Instead of distracting ourselves from the reality of our fragile and capricious world, Jesus is telling us to bear witness to it. Tell the truth about it. Do not practise a defence that you think the world wants to hear or one that means you must abandon yourself to false and meaningless ideas or ideals. Rather, speak from the depth of your being where Jesus promises to give you the words and the wisdom to do so. This is telling the truth.
A few years ago, I was living in Sydney. It was during the “Black Summer” when, for weeks on end, there were bushfires roaring all over the state and we lived in a constant cloud of smoke. A friend of mine told me that she had stopped going to church. Instead she had begun attending the local meeting of Extinction Rebellion. You might be familiar with this organisation. It is an international group of activists who try to compel governments around the world to act justly and urgently on the climate and ecological emergency.
Church had been a central aspect of my friend’s seventy-some years. But she told me that there she no longer felt like she could tell the truth of her grief about the fires and the loss of biodiversity that they had caused. And she confessed that on an even deeper existential level, she needed a place to grieve the reality that none of us are kept safe in this life. There was not a place for this truth in her church.
It’s hard to tell the truth about the state of the world. It’s possibly even harder to tell the truth about the state of our interior being. How fearful we are. How lonely or empty life can feel sometimes. How deep our anger or despair about world events can run.
The spiritual teacher and environmental activist, Joanna Macy, who died earlier this year, was a great proponent of truth in the face of ecological collapse. She wrote: “Truth-telling is like oxygen. It enlivens us. Without it we grow confused and numb. With it, we experience our own authority.” And for us in the church, we might add, that with truth-telling we experience the authority of the Holy Spirit who gives us the words and wisdom.
For my Australian friend, she found that speaking the truth about her grief and fear, anger and despair did not melt her into a puddle of ineffective sludge, as we might think it would. Rather she found that telling the truth of these hard things actually shone light on the love she had for the world. It showed her that she was not alone in her grief, but actually a part of a courageous network of care. Ultimately, truth-telling gave her energy and passion to continue to work for ecological justice.
Throughout his gospel, Luke constantly draws our attention to what is grounded and real and true, both in the world around us—like the faith and desperation of the poor widow and the collapse of entire institutions—and what is grounded and real and true at the core of our beings. Noticing and truth-telling is a part of the work that helps us to endure, and it helps us to not be weary as we do what is right (as Paul exhorts the Thessalonians in today’s epistle). It helps us to gain our souls, to become more whole, and more wholly connected to God and God’s work in the world.
Amen.