November 17, Ordinary 33B Mark 13:1-8

This essay is on a biblical text assigned for November 17, and I’m mindful that you may be reading it sometime after the November 5 election in the United States—though I can’t say for certain that the matter will be completely settled by then. If the very recent history of US elections and the rhetoric around this one are any indication, things will be very much up in the air. Or perhaps the counts have been so decisive that you know who the next president will be and now await their inauguration. Either way, chances are you currently find yourself in a liminal space.

That word liminal comes from the Latin word limens, which means “threshold.” You’re going from one space to another, but you’re not really in either space. It’s an odd and unstable place to be. In creative writing, a liminal space is the time between a major incident and the protagonist’s resolution about it. In anthropology, liminality is the ambiguity or disorientation that takes hold in the middle of rituals, which seems especially pertinent to the work a lot of you do.

I remember preaching from this Mark text during one of those weeks that drive preachers crazy. It was a week when events in the news compelled us to crumple up previous sermon drafts and start all over again—more than once. Two Black people were gunned down by a racist in broad daylight at a supermarket just minutes from where I work in Louisville, Kentucky. Three days later, 11 people were massacred by an antisemite during Shabbat services in Pittsburgh. Then another school shooting happened in the Charlotte area. And then a historically Black church near where I lived had to be evacuated for a bomb threat. Soon after that, a shooting in Thousand Oaks, California, left 13 people dead, including one who had escaped another mass shooting in Las Vegas the year before.