SIGNS IN THE SUN

A Sermon Based Upon Luke 21: 5-28

Dr. Charles J. Tomlin

Flat Rock Zion Baptist Partnership

November 14, 2010   Proper 28C

Loren Rosenberg was struck by a car while attempting to cross a busy Utah street as her eyes were glued to her BlackBerry. 

Rosenberg is suing Google, blaming the Google Maps service she was accessing at the time of her accident.  It told her to walk along state Route 224, never warning her of high-speed traffic or the absence of sidewalks. She claims Google Maps should have more readily equipped her for her surroundings. 

In this case, the lawyers for Google might have a very simple defense: She could’ve looked up from her cell phone.  (From Homileticsonline.com).

During difficult times we all need the ability to “look up.”  

Toward the end of the gospel story for today, Jesus is trying to teach his disciples this very skill.  As the passage reaches its pinnacle in verse 28, Jesus instructs his disciples to “stand up straight” and to “lift up their heads” even when some while very some bad events take place.  

How could Jesus expect those following him to “look up” when it was the end of their world?   Having this kind of resolve is not easy.  It could feel quite absurd, not at all fitting the reality we experience.  

Jesus has just spoken of wars, earthquakes, starvation and spreading diseases.  He also speaks of religious persecution, family betrayal domestic disputes which may end in murder.  Jesus concludes the “end time” scenario with the image of invading armies surrounding Jerusalem, people “heading for the hills” and “running for their lives,” not only from human conflict, but because the wrath of God is being poured out.   

Even the high places are shaken, as the wealthy and powerful, who are usually immune to life’s daily struggles, find themselves stressed out with fear.  Only then, as if waiting to the last minute, does the “Son of Man” come to the rescue the faithful in full power and glory.  The picture seems like an old Superman movie, where Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen were wondering, what in the world took God’s man so long?   But this is not a movie, nor is it a comic strip.  This is how the end of will feel.

There are only three encouraging words in the entire passage.   Jesus says it’s going to be bad for “this people” (vs. 23) and many will “die by the sword” (v. 24); you too will suffer persecution and hate( vs. 12-17), but “not a hair on your head will be harmed” (vs. 18) and if you “endure” “you will save your souls”  (v. 19).  A final word of hope sounds just as out of place as the other two, when Jesus says:   ²⁸ “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near" (Luk 21:28 NRS).    Does all this falling apart sound like “salvation”  and redemption to you?  With stuff like this in the Bible, is there any wonder most people don’t come to church?

But the language here is as “strange” as real life.  “Truth is stranger than fiction”, they say, and maybe that’s just the point.  The Bible is not idealistic, fictitious gibberish, but Jesus is very much a realist.  Life is hard.  People get hurt (even the good ones).  God seems to show up “almost” too late.  Sometimes we wonder if he will show up at all.  Talk of salvation and redemption can seem useless and senseless.   However you want to interpret this passage, the “end of the world” certainly isn’t for sissies, is it?  

Three women were discussing the travails of getting older. One said, “Sometimes I catch myself with a jar of mayonnaise in my hand, while standing in front of the refrigerator, and I can’t remember whether I need to put it away or start making a sandwich.”
        The second lady chimed in: “Yes, sometimes I find myself on the landing of the stairs and can’t remember whether I was on my way up or on my way down.”
        The third one responded, “Well, ladies, I’m glad I don’t have that problem. Knock on wood,” as she rapped her knuckles on the table. Then she said, “That must be the door; I’ll get it!”

The “end of the world” comes in many different forms, doesn’t it?

My Father was a Sunday School teacher all my life, until he passed away 11 years ago this Christmas.   His Sunday School class was larger than my first Church, without almost 75 regular attendees.    Dad taught and believed that things were getting so bad in this world, that the ‘rapture’ was going to come before he died.  And Dad was no sissy either.  He was a veteran of WWII and the European Theater.  He landed in North Africa and fought his way into Italy, Southern France, and finally through the Netherlands and into Germany.  He almost lost his feet in the Battle of the Bulge.  Even though Dad saw bad things then, he still believed things were getting even worse and that Jesus was going to come back soon.   I grew up living in the “shadow of the second coming” he hoped for and taught about all my life. 

But Dad did not get to go up in the “rapture”, as least not as he envisioned or hoped.  He had to face end of “his” world with a Doctor telling him, “Mr. Tomlin, you’d better get your things in order, because you have an aggressive cancer on your thyroid and you have 2 - 6 months to live.”

How do we keep our “heads up” in this world that eventually hands us the worse news of all?   

What might be shocking to some is that Jesus doesn’t really address our individual questions and concerns, as much as he is talking to us all together, as the church, the community of faith and as his disciples who live as the people of God.  You might surmise that Jesus never expected us to try to face the troubles of this world alone.  There is very little “lone ranger”, or individualized advice about facing the end of the world.  The assumption appears that we wouldn’t be stupid enough try to go it alone.    

DON’T LET THEM FOOL YOU!

The first piece of wisdom Jesus gives about facing our very “bad news” world, is not to let these end times deceive us.  Before anything else he says, “Beware that we are not led astray” (vs. 8).

To explain the “deception” Jesus references, there appears to be two kinds going on in this text.  The first comes when the disciples are marveling over the grandeur of the temple, all the glory of human construction and ingenuity, assuming that this “greatness” will last forever.  To such a deception of permanence Jesus says, “the days will come when one stone will not be left upon another.”   These are 40 foot square stones Jesus is talking about.  Can you imagine the shock of hearing that they will crumple?   The temple seems invincible, indestructible, and imperishable.   The truth was, however, that within 40 years of Jesus’ warning, the temple was completely destroyed by a Roman invasion in 70 AD.

When we are young, healthy, and busy with life we all feel invincible, don’t we?   That’s exactly what Loren Rosenberg must have felt when she went walking into traffic with her eyes on her Blackberry rather than on the cars.  How many accidents happen because people don’t really think something bad could happen?  How many people are heard to say when the unexpected does happen, “I can’t believe this is happening to me?”  But it can and it does!  The real world has both beginnings and endings.

The other great “deception” Jesus mentions is both political and religious.  Jesus says, “Don’t be led astray” by those who go around saying “the end is near!?  In another place Jesus reminds us that nobody knows when the end will come, even “the Son doesn’t know, only the Father”(Matt. 24.36).  Jesus also says elsewhere that when the hour of the end does come, it will come “like a thief in the night” (Matt. 24.43), when people aren’t expecting it at all.    

I’ll never forget how in the 1980’s, a book appeared creating quite a stir when it boldly declared that Jesus would return in 1988.  But it didn’t happen.  Amazingly, using some strange Bible arithmetic,  Charles Taze Russell founder of Jehovah’s Witnesses claimed that Jesus returned invisibly in 1874 and most of us missed it.   His followers now revised that to 1914 and we didn’t see that either.  The world has been filled with people who predict and project the end is near.  Some of these would-be prophets are just profiteers on people’s ignorance, but others are down-right dangerous, like a David Koresh or a Jim Jones.  Jesus says to us, before he says anything else: don’t pay any attention to any of them.   None of them know what they are talking about because only God the Father knows.  

The core problem with such “prophets of doom and gloom” is not just what they tell you, but what they don’t tell you.  They use all these “biblical words” like Armageddon, Second Coming, Mark-of-The-Beast, or Anti-Christ to sell their fear-tainted ideas, but they tell you nothing about what these words meant when they were first used.  They are more interested in making you think the Bible is filled with all kinds of magical, crystal ball, secret, decodable information that they can decipher for you if you will buy their book or fund their radio program.   The wit of the late G.K. Chesterton relates well to such “false prophets” when he once quipped “There are all kinds of strange creatures in the John’s revelation, but none of them are as strange as some of his interpreters.”

How do we read the signs, the worries and face the tribulations of life and death, realistically, and not allow ourselves to get suckered into all the hype, shenanigans and charlatanism that can go along with it?  

Here, I’m reminded of what Mark Twain once said when someone misunderstood news about his sick cousin and mistakenly printed Twain’s obituary in the Newpaper: “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”   We “greatly exaggerate” these words of Jesus when we misuse them to decipher what only God knows, and what Jesus says he didn’t, and what many prophecy preachers they can. 

What strikes me most, as I read this long list of worldly troubles is not that they are signs of the “end”, but that the story line here is not that much different than what happens any and every day in this world.   These are signs of a fallen world keeps ending and beginning over and over again as life goes on.  Every day our lives are threatened with the “end”. One day the end does come for us, for other people, for nations and finally, it will come for the world.  The threat is always with us.  Though the end never comes, it is always coming, and it comes again and again.  The world is a glorious but also a very dangerous place and it is that way from the very first day until our very last. Don’t get carried away or be led astray.  The world is ending, but the “the end will not follow immediately” (vs. 9), says Jesus.  It is as the poet T.S. Elliot wrote in his poem Hollow Men:  “This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, (not all at once and not with sudden “bang” but with a slow, unnoticed “whimper.”      

TAKE EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO DO GOOD.

Since the world is always ending, but won’t end when you think it will, Jesus gives us a second important word of wisdom about the “endings”:  We must be careful not to miss the “opportunity” (vs. 13)  we have in this very moment, while we are here, living today.

The word here in verse 13 literally carries the idea of a “circumstance,” an “outcome” or some negative happening that could “turn” out in a positive way.  Paul uses this word to share with the church at Philippi how God has“turned” his suffering and imprisonment into a positive “result” for the gospel (Phil. 1.12) and for him (Phi. 1.19). The particular negative Jesus has in mind is not good.  Jesus is talking about “religious intolerance” and “persecution” of the faithful.  He’s talking something we all know about,  how during hard times, people tend to “scapegoat” or “lay blame” on other people, whether they are guilty or not.  

When they killed Jesus too, we can recall how the religious leaders made up the excuse that “it was good that one man die for the nation.”  That is a very old myth that claims that by doing violence to a certain person or a certain group of people, you will bring redemption or salvation for others.   The Jews tried it.  Hitler tried.  The South and the KKK tried it.  The Communist tried it.  Al Qaeda keeps trying it.  It just doesn’t work, but that doesn’t keep people from believing or trying it.  In hard times people will try just about anything.

What I think Jesus wants us to do, is not to succumb to the trap of negativism and so called “redemptive violence,” but to take the negative moment as an opportunity to be a positive witness to our faith.  We are called upon to keep doing the right things, no matter what happens, because the odds are, the “end will not come immediately.”   Jesus doesn’t want his followers to cave into all the negativism around them, because, if we are not careful, we could create a “self-fulfilling prophecy”--- believing something into reality that only happens because we give in to it.   Because the end of the world may not be “immediate”, it is much wiser, healthier and smarter to keep sharing, showing and living our faith and to realize that the “light” can shine brightest when times are the darkest. 

Someone once asked a great teacher what he would do if he knew the end of the world was coming.  His answer was that he would go and keep tending his garden.  In the book of Jeremiah (32.9); when the Prophet knew that Jerusalem would soon fall, he went out and bought a piece of land in the city from his uncle.  It wasn’t a business deal, but it was a down payment on hope.  Jeremiah knew the end was coming, but with God, even the endings have a way of “ending” and everything doesn’t end immediately.

The other day in Leadership Meeting at Flat Rock, we were discussing some ideas for ministry and I shared about a church in Winston-Salem, that last summer planted 4 community gardens which were being worked by adult and youth mission groups on behalf of the community, especially the poor.   I suggested that maybe next Spring we consider try doing something similar.  It could be the most constructive thing we could do, in these difficult days, as we roll up our sleeves and bear witness to both our hope and our help.   Use your “opportunity” to witness and to testify, says Jesus.   “By your ‘endurance’ you will gain your souls.”  There is no better time to be alive, than when you’ve just been told that you have only a few days left.  If you get a reprieve, and who knows, one might come.  If so, even ‘endings’ could be good for your spiritual health.  There is no better time to "turn on" the Light of the world, than when it gets dark. 

KEEP LOOKING UP AND DON”T LOOK DOWN

“Don’t be deceived!”   “Seize the Opportunity!”  That is the wisdom of Jesus, but there is one final piece of wisdom we must not miss.   A saying goes that “it is always darkest just before the dawn”  but what Jesus is saying to us is much more than this.  When things appear to be “ending,” Jesus would have us ‘look up’ and see the “redemption coming near” which is nothing less than the new beginning God will bring about.     

Let me explain that this rather “strange” word specifically concerned the destruction of the temple which took place less than 40 years after Jesus’ life.  The gospel of Luke tells us that when Jesus entered Jerusalem, as Luke 19 tells us, he literally saw “the handwriting on the wall.  As Luke 19:41,  has Jesus weeping while speaking these fateful words: “If you had only recognize this day, the things that make for peace!  But now they are hidden from your eyes.”  That was the great tragedy as Jesus saw it.  The city of Shalom, God’s peace, did not know peace when it “was right in front of them.”  Jesus had preached peace.  He had told them not to pick up arms and try to resist on the world’s terms.  He told them to “turn the other cheek,” to “love their enemy” and not to pick up the sword, especially against a strong adversary like Rome.  He knew, as he warmed them over and over again, that those “who pick up the sword, will die by the sword” and here, they are doing just that;“falling by the sword” (vs.24).  

Interestingly, when the Roman army came, there was a Christian community that did not pick up the sword, but did exactly as Jesus instructed.  They did not pick up arms.  They did not fight against their enemies, whether Jewish or Roman.  They did not resist, but they witnessed to the truth and when the armies did come, they weren’t cowards, but they ran for their lives and they escaped, helping any who would join them also to escape.  It was a day of terror, but it was also a day of redemption.  While thousands of Jews died trying to defend Jerusalem in a useless battle, the little, defenseless Church escaped with “not a hair of their head harmed” and moved out to survive in the desert.  (See Ray Summers Commentary on Luke, p.   

But there is more to this story.   Jesus told his disciples that when the armies came, it would be right after that when the “Son of Man”, would return in “power and glory”  (v. 27).   In just a few more verses, Jesus says very frankly that “this generation would not pass away until all this happens.”  (vs 32).  Was Jesus wrong to say the “second coming” would come then, when it didn’t?  It could appear so if Jesus had not  clarified that  he did not know when this would take place.

But Jesus did expect, right in that moment of ending and great darkness, some kind of “visitation” from God (Luke 19:44).  Shouldn’t we expect the same?  What Jesus knew for sure, and we must know for sure, is that God will show up, somehow, someday, and in some show of power and glory in the worst of times.  When endings come, here or there, the new beginnings also come, and more important than anything else, we can be sure that God is also here, there, and everywhere.  Whether we are facing an ending or a new beginning, God gives us the strength to keep going, keep believing, and keep hoping, because he promises to show up through Jesus’ glory, his power, his spirit, and through our witness to Jesus and to the truth.   Don’t give up and get drunk, Jesus implies (Luke 21: 34-36).  God always remains as close as our desire, our  willingness and our ability to live soberly, expectantly, and faithfully until he will “make all things new”(Rev. 21:5).

Can we trust God, even when “endings come”?  Writer Philip Yancey confronts this very question when he asks, “What good is God?”   What good is our faith when the hard times come?  In his most recent book, “What Good is God?” Yancey writes about several terrible recent events he was close to in his own writing ministry; the Virginia Tech massacre,  the Mumbai hotel bombing, Apartheid in South Africa, and of course, the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers in New York. During the crisis at Virginia Tech, a Christian Church, which loss 9 people in the shooting, invited him to come and share some words of comfort.  Yancey was recovering from a neck injury and spoke with a neck brace.  He spoke to those troubled and broken students, whose world up until that time seemed invincible, until 33 of their companions and faculty were senselessly murdered by Korean student, Seung-Hui Cho. 

Yancey began by reminding them, that when God walked in this world, even he was not immune to suffering.   But he went on to ask, in a world that is so broken, what is God good for, if he doesn’t take away our pain?  Yancey told them, that for him, our faith in God tells us, even in a time of great hurt, great pain, great suffering and even death, that with God, “nothing is irredeemable” (as quoted in Philip Yancey, Faith Words, 2010, pp 27-34).

As the Apostle Paul wrote, “God can work all things for the good of those who are called according to his purpose…” because “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus….nothing.   Only with God can a “dark Friday” be turned into a “Good Friday!”  The real question, said Yancey, is not “where is God when it hurts”, but “where is the church?”  When that great evil fell upon those innocent Amish children in Nickel Mines Pennsylvania, that grieving Amish community knew what good God was, and they knew the “good” they had to do, even when everything was bad.  They had to forgive and they had to trust that God could bring new beginnings even out of bad endings. 

J. R. R. Tolkien once spoke of the “joy beyond the walls of the world more poignant than grief.”  Can we speak of our hope for joy even in a world that comes apart at the seams?   Jesus did. And he wonders if we can see, through the eyes of faith today, what he saw---and what he wants his disciples to see then, now and always.  With the eternal God by our side, there are no absolute endings, only endings with new beginnings.   If we will trust him on this, he will help our fearful hearts discover where hope and faith can lead.  Amen.