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.

Sermon delivered on All Saints Sunday, November 3, 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: Daniel 7.1-3, 15-18; Psalm 149.1-9; Ephesians 1.11-23; Luke 6.20-31.

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

Do you believe that God is really sovereign, i.e., that God is really in control of things in this world? I mean, look around you. Yet another shooting this past week. More turmoil in the mideast. The threat of militant Islam is ever present. The enemies of the cross with their aggressive agendas seem to continue to trample on God’s values and people on every front.  Closer to home, many of us are dealing with health and personal issues that are enough to weigh anyone down and even break them. Everywhere we look, evil seems to go unchecked.

We see it not only in our personal lives but also in today’s lessons. The prophet Daniel is writing while in captivity, having been deported by the Babylonians. The psalmist cries out for justice against those who oppress God’s people, even as he praises God for God’s goodness. Jesus reminds his followers that there are those out there who laugh at God’s people and take delight in oppressing them, just like the Babylonians and others mocked God’s people Israel as Judah was carried off naked and bound into captivity, and just like many mock us today as being outdated, bigoted, and narrow-minded. With all of this evil in the world and in our own personal lives, how could anyone in his/her right mind really think God is in control?

Today is All-Saints’ Sunday, where we celebrate the communion of saints, both those saints who are alive and in Christ as part of his body, the Church (the Church Militant), and those saints who have died in Christ and are enjoying their rest in the presence of their Lord as they await the resurrection of the dead and the culmination of God’s promise to sweep away evil, sin, and death and usher in his promised new creation (the Church Triumphant). We normally focus on the Church Triumphant on All Saints’ Sunday, but our readings today speak primarily to us as the Church Militant, and so I want us to look briefly at what our lessons have to say to us because they remind us without equivocation that God really is sovereign and in control, despite the persistence of evil and the impression that this gives to the contrary.

Daniel’s visions in our OT lesson speak to this very issue. As with other apocalyptic writings in Scripture, we must remember that the writer is speaking to us primarily in symbols. The four beasts that come out of the sea remind us that evil is chaos and antithetical toward the good and orderly purposes of God’s creation (cf. 1 Corinthians 14.33). The beasts with their kings will have their day and oppress God’s people because they hate God and his purposes. But the beasts’ days are numbered. They will not have the last laugh as Jesus reminded his disciples in our gospel lesson today. God is in charge and God will defeat the dark forces of chaos and evil, even when everything around God’s people screams at them otherwise. And it is precisely at this point that we must remember that Daniel was in exile in Babylon when he wrote these words. If anyone had reason to believe that God wasn’t in control of things, it was Daniel.

We have to take this promise on faith, of course, and because we don’t have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight this is very difficult for us to do. We want to know why God allows evil to continue to exist. If God is all-powerful, why doesn’t God just wave his hand and rid his creation of it? Of course, we cannot answer these questions because we are finite and our knowledge is incomplete. As God reminds us consistently through his prophets, God’s ways are beyond our understanding (cf. Isaiah 40.27-28; 55.6-11). This, of course, irritates those of us who deem ourselves to be quite intelligent. “What do you mean I cannot understand your ways, God?” we huff in our pride. Our huffiness notwithstanding, this does not change the truth of the matter. And if we think about it, would it really matter if we did understand why God allows evil to persist, at least for a season? Think it through by analogy. What if we smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for most of our life and then contracted lung cancer? We know why we got the evil of lung cancer but does that change anything? We still have it. We will still likely suffer and die from it. What does our knowledge change about our situation?

And of course if we are really honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge if God used the sledgehammer approach to rid his good creation of evil, we would all be swept away because Evil R Us™. Many of us find this notion equally offensive and get huffy over it as well. “What do you mean? I’m not evil. I don’t murder or steal or cheat on my spouse like others do.” But the truth is that none of us is sinless. None of us is perfectly holy as God calls us to be. We all miss the mark in God’s eyes. We all have committed evil at some point in our lives because we all have sinned and our sin is a conduit for evil to exist and flourish in God’s world. That’s why God had to become human and die for us so that we would be holy in his sight and be able to live in his direct presence forever.

But I digress and don’t want to pull us off the main issue here. God is sovereign and really in control of his world, and that takes faith on our part. What our readings help to remind us, both explicitly and implicitly, is that the existence of evil did not take God by surprise. Neither then should evil’s existence take us by surprise. The real issue for us is this: Do we know God and the story of God’s plan of salvation well enough to have the faith to believe that God really is in charge, especially in the face of empirical evidence that screams at us to believe otherwise?

Paul certainly believed that God is sovereignly in control as evidenced by what he wrote in our epistle lesson. Like Daniel, Paul acknowledges that we currently live in an evil age, in the wilderness of evil, sin, and death, so to speak. But just as God rescued his people Israel from their slavery in Egypt and delivered them to the promised land, so God has rescued us from evil, sin, and death by conquering them in and through the cross of Christ and raising Jesus from the dead. And just as God delivered his people Israel to the promised land, so God intends to deliver his people in Jesus the Messiah (that would be us) and bring us to a world free of evil, sin, and death—the promised new creation. One day God will flood the whole cosmos with his healing and creative love and power, just as God did in the beginning, transforming his world and us into a new creation with the dimensions of heaven and earth fused together and Jesus at the center of it all. This is the inheritance of which Paul speaks and it is God’s free gift to those who believe in Jesus. When the new creation comes, there will be no doubt in anyone’s mind that God is sovereign and firmly in control of his creation. This is the hope of both the Church Militant (us) and the Church Triumphant (the saints who have died in Christ).

But the new creation hasn’t arrived yet. We are still wandering in the wilderness. What to do? Here both Jesus and Paul have wisdom for us to ponder thoroughly and regularly. Paul reminds us that we do not wander in the wilderness alone. Like the pillars of fire and cloud that symbolized God’s presence with his people as he led them through the wilderness, so we have the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives to heal and transform us into the very image of Jesus our Lord so that we have the heart and mindset that Jesus described in our gospel lesson. You know. That loving your enemies thingy and wishing the best for all people, especially our enemies, in the same way that we wish for all the best for ourselves. We don’t have the ability to do that on our own. We can only become really and truly human with the help of the Spirit.

And as Paul reminds us, the Spirit helps us to live our lives with power, even in this present evil age so that we are not overwhelmed and overcome by the evil that sometimes afflicts us. Ephesians is partly a letter about power and we shouldn’t be afraid to embrace God’s power if we truly want to live as faithful Christians. “But,” you protest, “I don’t have that kind of power in my life on a daily basis. I am frequently overwhelmed when evil afflicts me. My joy is tied to my circumstances, not the presence of the Spirit in my life.”

In response, Paul would tell likely us that he doesn’t assume we automatically tap into the Spirit’s power when we become a Christian. We have to do the things necessary to cultivate his presence in our lives and we can start by praying Paul’s prayer in our epistle lesson regularly. Paul and the other NT writers believed this power was available to all Christians because of God’s power displayed in Jesus’ resurrection (you can’t find a mightier act of power than to raise someone from the dead, thereby conquering death forever) and in Jesus’ exaltation as Lord and ruler of God’s universe. King Jesus is on his throne in heaven (God’s space) and is present to his people in and through the Spirit. This power is ours for the asking and if we do not seriously ask for it and seek it through prayer, study, worship, fellowship, and service to others in Jesus’ name, we should not be surprised if we never receive it in our lives so that we could not only endure evil, but transcend it (cf. Matthew 7.7-12).

Receiving God’s power is necessary because God calls us to be his kingdom workers in the way Jesus describes in our gospel lesson. The kingdom comes on earth as in heaven first and foremost by the power of God. But God also calls his people and vests us with the awesome privilege and responsibility of working for the coming kingdom. God calls us to this work because that is what he originally created humans for—to be his wise, image-bearing stewards over his world. This is what we will be doing when heaven and earth are finally joined together in a mighty act of new creation so that the earth is filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11.9; Habakkuk 2.14). We don’t and can’t do this without the Spirit’s presence and when we experience God’s power in us, Paul reminds us that this is also the downpayment on the promise that the new creation is coming. This is our call and task as the Church Militant—to be healed and transformed by the power of the Spirit into the very image of Jesus to do the work God calls each of us and collectively to do. Is this your hope and desire? If so, the Spirit who lives in you will surely remind you of your inheritance and encourage you to embrace his power so that you can live your life in service, love, and faithfulness to the glory of the Lord who loves you and has claimed you from all eternity. That’s a promise worthy of all the saints, and it also means, of course, that you have Good News, now and for all eternity.

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