Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Title: "When the Time Comes"

Text: Luke 21:5-19

on the wrong side of the San Andreas fault.

You know some day

the big one is going to happen.

And not one stone will be left upon another

when it’s over!

And sometimes there are signs,

like little earthquakes every now and then,

but they come and go,

and they aren’t the big one.

And there are experts who try to interpret the signs

and make a prediction

but they’ve been wrong before.

For a while, maybe we would worry.

Every loud noise, every little tremor,

we’d run to our safe place.

We’d have food stored up,

and drinking water.

And we might even try to persuade our neighbors

that they ought to be getting ready too.

But it doesn’t happen.

And it doesn’t happen.

And soon enough, we quit worrying.

We eat the food we had stored away.

We chuckle at new neighbors

who still run around worried.

We put up with inferior construction in our homes

because that makes them less expensive

and who worries about that old earthquake any more, anyway?!

We begin to believe,

quite possible it will never happen.

At least, not in our lifetime.

And pretty soon,

not only have we stopped worrying about it,

we don’t even think about it at all.

Of course, out here we don’t worry too much about earthquakes . . .

We also don’t give much thought to

the end of time as we know it,

and that could be more of a problem.

But science tells us that the sun will be around

for at least another several billion years,

and I don’t plan to be around then!

But what happens if God has things in mind

that aren’t dreamt of in our philosophy?

Or our science? Or our wildest imagination?

The people of Jesus’ time

seem to have had a great interest in the "end times,"

much more so than we do.

I’m not quite sure why.

Maybe because those were more difficult times,

and they suffered repeated persecutions,

so an end to it all would seem appealing.

Perhaps their cause would finally be vindicated,

and their enemies defeated.

It may have had to do with

some things they heard from the prophets

about the "day of the Lord"

which would someday come

and set the world straight.

Later on, it came to be associated with

ideas about Christ’s coming again.

But here, Jesus is simply talking about

the end of time as we know it.

First, he warns that there will be many

who will try to mislead the people.

Who will claim to be able to read the signs,

and predict the end.

Do not follow them, says Jesus.

He then goes on to describe the end times:

There will be wars, and rebellions,

and great earthquakes, famine and plague.

Which sort of sounds to me like

most of the world’s history!

But before all that gory stuff, he says,

we, his followers, will be arrested and persecuted.

We will have the opportunity to give testimony

concerning what we believe.

Even loved ones may betray us,

but by standing firm, we will gain our souls.

It seems to me that these "in between times"

are where we live now.

The end has been foretold,

but it hasn’t yet come.

At one point in time, our ancestors in the faith

expected it to arrive any day.

But it didn’t.

So, like with the big earthquake,

we gradually lose interest, become complacent,

maybe even forget about it altogether.

Which is a problem,

because some of what Jesus predicted is happening,

though perhaps not precisely as he described.

Wars and insurrections?

Nation rising against nation?

Let’s look at Iraq.

And/or Afghanistan.

India and Pakistan.

Israel and Palestine …

what will happen with Arafat gone?

 

Famines . . . in Africa,

in North Korea.

Dreadful portents and signs from heaven:

Who ever heard of four hurricanes hitting one state

within one hurricane season?

And if you think Florida was bad,

you should see what it did to Haiti,

which was much worse, and which our media virtually ignored.

Flooding along the Trinity River,

and evacuations for fear the levees were going to fail.

Great plagues?

Like the spread of AIDS in Africa,

where in some countries, more than 20% of the adult population is infected?

The signs are all definitely there.

Only problem is,

the signs have been here at countless times throughout history.

In fact, all those kind of things were going on in the world

at the very time Jesus spoke these words!

There is always conflict between nations;

always natural disasters of some form or another;

always disease and famine somewhere.

So, beware of those who claim to be able to interpret the signs of the times.

Those who will say, "The time is near!" or "I’m the one for you to follow!"

At almost any time in human history,

someone could have lifted verses like these out of their context,

and claimed to find parallels in his or her day and time.

Most of us probably aren’t terribly tempted

to follow someone like a David Koresh

or join a group like Heaven’s Gate to wait for the comet . . .

and yet, I’m always surprised by the number of

highly educated people who do sign on with groups like those.

People about whom you would want to say,

"I thought they knew better!"

And what about that "Bible Code" book that’s been on the bestseller list?

If you just get your computer to rearrange and line up the letters often enough,

you can make the Bible predict JFK’s assassination.

And a whole lot of other things.

Of course, if you’ll notice,

it only predicts things that have happened in the past.

I mean, it was the future for the Bible,

but it’s the past for us and for the author of that book.

I’m astonished and more than a little frightened

by the huge popularity of the "Left Behind" books …

How can so many millions of people

find appealing the spiritual arrogance of authors

who claim to know better than Jesus

what the end times will be like?

But . . . what’s behind all of this

is a temptation even for us, I think.

Sometimes we get tired of ambiguity.

Sometimes we grow frustrated with not having all the answers.

Sometimes we grow frustrated with

preachers who don’t have all the answers!

Sometimes we want a clear word, or a clear sign, and it’s not there.

And it is tempting, when we are surrounded by confusion,

to look for something that will make sense of it.

So even people who are highly educated, even Presbyterians (!),

are sometimes going to want clarity where there is none,

and certainty in the midst of doubt.

And there are times, I think,

when even clarity about a sense of doom,

about signs of the end times,

about the end of this world and life as we know it . . .

may seem more comforting than not knowing at all.

At any rate,

Jesus apparently knows that about us,

because he warns us to watch out for it!

And then he tells us what we do need to do

in response to whatever is going on in the world around us.

We do not need to understand the signs, whatever they are;

we shouldn’t even try.

Instead, we are to testify.

To bear witness to what we know about God.

He is talking about it in the context of persecution,

which isn’t a part of our daily lives, thank goodness;

but it’s also what we need to do

in simple times of confusion.

The future is not clear.

We don’t know what is or isn’t going to happen.

But what do we know?

We know what God has done in the past.

We know that God is with us in the present.

We know that in the past, God has led us through troubled times.

We know that God is walking alongside us here and now.

Even if we don’t know what lies ahead,

we do know who is there.

Probably for most of us here,

we are never going to be strongly tempted

to go about trying to interpret the signs of our times

and predicting the end.

That’s not part of our tradition;

it’s not something we have a particular interest in.

But, we do have to be careful that

our lack of anxiety about signs and portents and destruction

doesn’t lead us to a lack of energy about our faith.

The advantage to believing that you know when the end is going to be,

is that it pumps you full of a lot of energy

to share that information with as many people as you can;

at least, people you care about.

Because we aren’t anxious about that,

we tend to be pretty low-energy about our testifying,

our sharing of what we do know.

It doesn’t seem so urgent.

But it is.

Even if we don’t want to get into the question of

whether there is a heaven or a hell,

and whether non-believers will go which place . . .

it makes a difference in this life.

How would your life be different

if you didn’t know that God was with you?

Would the good times have been as good?

Would the pains and sorrows have been bearable?

Knowing what you know about the world we live in,

would you have any sense of hope?

Our testimony matters.

The world, and our culture especially,

need to hear a voice that says,

we don’t have all the answers,

and some days we don’t even ask the right questions,

but nevertheless we know:

Even in the midst of wars and uprisings,

famines and plagues,

disasters and persecutions,

we know:

God is good.

God is in the midst of this, even if we can’t see where.

God will bring good even out of monstrous evil.

If Jesus could affirm that in the world he lived in,

surely we can do the same.

And our world needs to hear it

every bit as much as his did.

God will give us words and wisdom to speak.

God will give us the opportunities as well.

Are we willing?

Who might be lost

if we will not speak?

May God grant us not only the opportunities and the words,

but the courage to use them!

Amen.

© 2004 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)