What did you think the future would look like when you were younger? I grew up on Superman comic books, Star Wars, and Back to the Future. As a result, I always envisioned a future as being filled with unbelievable technology: flying cars, personal jetpacks, hover boards, cute robot helpers, trips to outer space for everyone, time travel without any sort of repercussions. In other words, it never crossed my childhood mind that the future would be anything other than completely awesome.

I was reminded of this complete awesomeness when I recently saw the movie from which this sermon takes its title: Tomorrowland. The idea of the movie is that many decades ago, the best and brightest scientists, artists, inventors, philosophers, etc. gathered together and somehow created a better and more beautiful tomorrow. The first time that we see this place, Tomorrowland is a gleaming futuristic city under a crystal blue sky. Everywhere is all of the technology that I imagined as a kid and more. It is clean. It is filled with green spaces full of trees. And its citizens are people from every nationality on the planet. It’s wonderful. As I shoveled popcorn into my mouth, I watched with awe. This is what I thought the future would look like.

But when you get to the future, it’s not always what you imagined it to be. Back to the Future Part II was set in the year 2015. Growing up that year seemed like the future future. Yet here we are and we don’t have flying cars or hover boards or many of the other wonders of technology that were in that movie. Science has six months to get its act together or this year is going to be a huge disappointment to the seven year old version of myself.

Even more important and more disheartening than silly things like flying cars is the state in which we find the world today and what that means for the future. It is not a bright and beautiful tomorrow. There is a scene in Tomorrowland in which the protagonist Casey, a teenage girl, sits through a day in school where teacher after teacher rattles off the ills that afflict this world: war, poverty, corruption, terrorism, global warming, famine, the surveillance state of Big Brother governments. And this terrible news is delivered so stoically by these teachers. Their faces are blank. Their voices are flat. They have given up and accepted the world for what it is. They do not have any hope for tomorrow.

My middle school cafeteria was a multi-purpose room containing a stage at one end for concerts and other events. Since they reasonably wanted to make the transition from cafeteria to auditorium seating as simple as possible, the round tables throughout the auditorium were the kind that could be folded up and rolled into storage.

Convenience sometimes has some unintended side effects. Somewhere along the way, a student figured out how to fold the table up. And thus began one of the most brazen, disruptive things a student could do at R. P. Dawkins Middle School. We called it jacking up the table. The typical move was to do it right before lunch dismissed. The table would fold up, the middle schoolers would gasp and laugh, and the perpetrators would scurry in all directions from the scene of the crime. One time, I saw a guy jack up the table while all the people sitting at his table still had trays full of food. He obviously was a sociopath.

Whenever this happened, a teacher or principal would scream at the perpetrators with bulging eyes. It seems quaint now, but it was one of the biggest ways you could make trouble. If there was a bad table jacking spree, teachers would threaten the entire grade with assigned seating or silent lunch.

This punishment probably only caused the act’s legend to grow in our adolescent minds. I was a play-by-the-rules kind of kid. The idea of getting in trouble terrified me. So I never was party to this brand of middle school crime. And if you asked me, especially when the specter of silent lunch hovered over our heads, I probably would have expressed my strong disapproval of those table jackers. But if I were to be completely honest there was a small part of me deep down that admired their rebellion. I never wanted to take part of it myself, but there was a side of me that wished that I had the courage to do so.

Today’s text in which Jesus turns overs the tables in the Temple is his rebellious, punk rock moment. It certainly is not as juvenile and pointless as middle schoolers jacking up a table. Jesus did not drive the moneychangers out just for kicks. But his behavior is a bit troubling to us.

One of my favorite TV shows of all time was Lost. I loved the writing, I loved most of the actors. I was even not highly offended by its controversial final episode. The story, initially, was about the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 and their struggles on a mysterious island that included, among other things, polar bears, a smoke monster, a roving band of kidnappers, and so on. One of the things that Lost could do like no other show is pull the rug out from under you. 

My favorite example—and you may want to cover your ears if you don’t want a seven year old television episode spoiled for you—is the third season finale. In order to help us get to know the characters better, the producers of Lost employed flashbacks in every episode. They were part of the show’s narrative DNA. These backstories shined a light on our characters actions and behaviors on the island. 

The flashback of the third season finale followed a character as he was going through a difficult time. It was interesting because it didn’t seem to fit with what we had seen of that person’s history up to that point. But there was a reason for that. The last scene revealed that this wasn’t a flashback. It was a flashforward. He and another character had gotten off the island and the scene (and season) ended with him screaming at the other, “We have to go back!”

That’s the sense I got when I came to the gospel text for this week. Last week, we read about the Transfiguration in which God says to the disciples about Jesus, “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him!” The Transfiguration is a pivot point in Mark. They go down that mountain and the momentum carries them towards Jerusalem and Holy Week. I expected the lectionary to continue forward with that story. 

But it doesn’t. Instead we come down the mountain and there is Mark standing there like a maniac screaming, “We have to go back!”