Quick Summary:

There are two poles in our readings this morning—two wildly divergent visions of where the world is heading and what God is up to in the midst of it all.

The first come from Isaiah, who speaks of the new thing God is about to do: "I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight..." Bright words. POLE ONE.

And then there’s the gospel reading, where we find Jesus in the Temple district, warning anyone who’ll listen that the majesty of what they see around them is really a mirage...
TWO POLES—one marked by rhetoric of hope, the other by rhetoric of entropy.
Well, this morning, in the midst of our wondering, we have an answer to the question, where does hope reside? Everyone knows that to get unstuck—to get anywhere, really—those two poles need a bridge— they need an axle. And as it turns out this morning we have one!