Real Antidotes to Despair and Alarm

Sermon delivered on the 3rd Sunday before Advent C, November 10, 2013, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

If you would like to hear the audio podcast of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Haggai 1.15b-2.9; Psalm 145.1-5, 18-22; 2 Thessalonians 2.1-5, 13-17; Luke 20.27-38.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today I want us to look at what our texts with their theme of resurrection have to say to us regarding our tendency to fall into despair or become alarmed at the events that sometime afflict our lives. It’s easy for us to fall into despair or become alarmed at events in our world, especially with the instantaneous reporting of news these days. And based on our readings this morning, it is apparent that falling into despair or becoming alarmed is not just a modern day phenomenon. We see the prophet Haggai exhorting his people to not fall into despair over rebuilding God’s Temple, despite its evidently nondescript appearance. God had graciously returned a remnant of his wayward people Israel from their Babylonian captivity but now God’s people were struggling in rebuilding both their lives and God’s house. We can instinctively relate to their plight and feelings, especially if we are or have struggled to rebuild aspects of our life.

Likewise, we see the psalmist exhorting his people to persevere in times of trouble and hardship but it is sometimes hard for us to see how he can tell us to praise God, especially when life is smacking us right in the face. Then we see Paul exhorting the little church at Thessalonica to stand firm and not be alarmed over rumors swirling around the Day of the Lord.  And while Jesus was not directly addressing the issue of despair with the Sadducees who had been sent to trap him, it is clear that they were sad, you see, because they didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead and therefore had no future hope.

Despite the bad pun, this last point really gives us our cue about how to think about what these texts have to say to us. In each of our readings we see common themes emerge in the exhortations and arguments. The first thing we notice is that each of the persons in our lessons acknowledges that we really do live in a world that can cause us to despair or be alarmed. This is primarily because of human sin and rebellion, which among other things, has allowed evil to enter into God’s good creation and corrupt it. This in itself is enough to make us fall into despair but the Bible contains the story of how God is rescuing his world and us from evil, sin, and death, and this is what gives us real hope, which is the only true antidote to despair and alarm.

Second, we notice that all the voices in our lessons speak of God’s abiding presence with his people. Haggai reminds his audience (of whom we are part), that God has notably demonstrated his presence when he brought his people Israel out of slavery in Egypt and led them by pillars of cloud and fire as they wandered forty years through the wilderness on their way to the promised land. Presumably Haggai’s audience would have also realized this was the same God who had rescued them from their captivity in Babylon and who had commanded them to rebuild God’s house in Jerusalem. But now God’s people were once again discouraged and we see God’s prophet reminding his people that the God who is powerful enough to rescue them from slavery is present to them in the power of the Spirit, a message almost identical to Paul’s in our epistle lesson. And Jesus essentially reminds us of the same thing when he speaks of God being the God of the living, not the dead. God is sovereign, even over death, and God is present to his people always. God as an absentee landlord is not the God of Scripture.

Third, we see all the voices in our lessons reminding us one way or another of our future hope, which is the resurrection of the dead and the coming new creation. Haggai speaks of the day when God will shake again the earth and the sea, as well as the nations, to judge sin and evil so that the nations will come to recognize God as the only true God and respond accordingly. Paul talks about obtaining our future hope, which is the glory of Jesus in his resurrected body and exalted state as ruler of the cosmos. We can have the hope of sharing Jesus’ glory because of God’s glory demonstrated on the cross that defeated evil decisively and brought peace and reconciliation between God and humans. Jesus himself speaks of our resurrection hope by reminding his opponents that there will be both continuity and radical discontinuity in the coming new creation. We will no longer need to marry and procreate because our bodies—while still being bodies—will be radically different from our mortal bodies. In the meantime, our dead whom we have lost for a season and who are now hidden from our sight, are nevertheless alive and with the God of life, the same God who raises the dead and calls into existence things that are not. Each person in our lessons reminds us in his own way that for those who are God’s people, life is our destiny, not death.

And while we have to believe these things primarily by faith, each of our voices reminds us that the kind of faith we need is not blind faith. So fourth, each of the voices in our lessons reminds us look at what God has done for us in the past so that we can have real confidence that  God will deliver on his future promises. As we have seen, Haggai reminded his people to remember God rescuing their ancestors from Egypt and leading them through the wilderness all those years. The psalmist implores his people to remember God’s mighty works and to tell them to the next generation so that they too might know of God’s mighty acts among them, something we have sadly stopped doing in our own generation to our detriment. Is it any wonder why our anxiety levels are so high? Paul gives the Thessalonians a condensed version of their salvation history, from God’s call to them as Jesus’ followers, to all that Jesus’ death accomplished, to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit so that they could count on Jesus’ presence with and among his people, to their future hope of glory with the risen Lord. And Jesus himself appealed to the story of Moses, an integral figure in Israel’s salvation history, as Scriptural proof that God is the God of the living, not the dead. Of course Jesus’ own resurrection is the most dramatic example of God acting on behalf of his people to rescue us from evil, sin, and death. This focus on remembering and retelling God’s mighty acts in history to help bolster our faith and future hope ought to make sense to us. After all, how do we come to trust some people in our lives while distrusting others? We look at their track record with us and we respond accordingly. If we can do that with fallible humans, how much more can we do this with God who is always faithful and never changes?

These things, then, are the only real antidotes to despair and alarm—our future hope in the resurrection of the body and God’s promised new creation where we are finally free from evil, sin, and death, and where all of our hurts and tears will be wiped away forever, our faith that this future hope is sure and certain based on the rock solid track record of God’s faithfulness to his covenant, his people, and his creation, and our conviction that God is both sovereign and active in his beleaguered world even when we cannot readily see or understand it. Why would we be alarmed at anything if God is sovereign over the worst kind of evil, death?

And here again, if we think about this, we need a promised future like this to give us hope for the present. This works at many levels in our life and experience, not just with God. For example, I sometimes ponder a future of growing old and based on my experience with others who have gone before me, it scares me. I don’t want to grow feeble and/or lose my mental capacities. I dread the prospect of spending my final years in a nursing home, all alone and a prisoner in my own body. This isn’t everybody’s fate, of course, but I’ve seen too many people I know and love beset by these various things so that it is a real possibility for me. This has sent me into despair at times because there is no hope in that future, just increasingly bad stuff. But if I don’t stop there and think about my ultimate future with Jesus in the new creation, everything changes. Sure, there’s still the unpleasant potential realities of old age and death, but when I remember that God has counted me worthy to share in his promised new creation, something I patently do not deserve, and that God is even now present to me in the person of the Holy Spirit and through you all (and others), the despair dissipates because in its place there is real hope. No analogy is perfect but I hope this one is good enough to make the point that real hope for the future is the only real antidote to falling into despair in the present.

So what do we do with all this? First, we are reminded that we need to learn the story of how God is rescuing his world (including us) from all that ails it (and us). If we don’t know our story—and we never will without regular and careful reading and study of the Bible—we will be prone to being deceived by the Evil One and his minions. We learn God’s rescue story to help us really trust God’s reliability and faithfulness, so that we can trust his future promises to us.

Second, Paul gives us another important reminder in our epistle lesson. Since we are confident that God is sovereign and in control of things, we are not to spend too much time pondering the future. To be certain, we need to have a good idea as to what that future looks like, at least as much as humanly possible, but we are to focus on living our lives faithfully and together right now. Paul assures us that doing so will somehow mysteriously allow God to work in and through us to accomplish his good will and purposes to rescue his world and people from all that assails it and us. Here again, this takes faith on our part but Paul invites us to consider how this works by renewing our mind in and through the Spirit and God’s word (cf. Romans 12.2). For example, consider how this little church last week reached out to one of our own in her grief to comfort her. Paul is reminding us that when we do things like that, we can be assured that God is working in and through our faithfulness to bring in his kingdom on earth as in heaven.

And when it hits the fan, as it inevitably will, we are to go back to God’s word and consider his faithfulness and character, especially as they are revealed in the life and death of Jesus. This will not only bring us comfort, it will give us strength to stand firm against even the gates of hell (cf. Matthew 16.18). That is why we need to know and be looking for God’s power in our lives and the lives of others because there are times when all we can do is stand firm and brace ourselves when evil tries to do its worst to us. But even when that happens, we have hope because we know God is stronger than the worst evil can throw at us. Think on these things and take them to heart because they are Good News for you, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.