Wars and Rumors of Wars: But the Kingdom’s Still Coming!

Sermon delivered on the 2nd Sunday before Advent, November 18, 2012, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: 1 Samuel 1.4-20; 1 Samuel 2.1-10; Hebrews 10.11-25; Mark 13.1-8.

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

We can all relate to the “fab four” in today’s gospel lesson. Jesus has just told them that the very dwelling place of God among his people, the Temple, is going to be destroyed. To appreciate how the disciples felt, imagine that someone you know who is very credible and whom you trust intimately tells you that the White House and the Capitol building complex are going to be destroyed in your lifetime. It would catch your attention and probably make you feel quite anxious. You would also likely ask your friend to give you some more information about this, just the way Peter, John, James, and Andrew did with Jesus.

And then there’s Hannah in our OT lesson today, sitting in God’s house and praying so intensely that old Eli mistakes her for being drunk. Hannah was barren, the worst kind of affliction for any woman to endure in ancient Israel because it was believed to be a sure sign of God’s curse. To add insult to injury, Hannah also had to endure the ridicule of a rival wife, and so we see Hannah bringing her case to God. Surely the “fab four” could relate to her despair and anxiety. So can we.

Then of course we have our own anxieties with which to deal. I’m still hearing quite a bit of buzz and hand-wringing around the aftermath of our recent presidential election and the selection of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, +Justin Welby. There are many who are firmly convinced that our country has made a turn for the worse, not to mention the fate of the Anglican Communion. It is not my place to comment on this except to say that clearly these folks did not listen to or read my sermon from last week. How else to explain this angst? 🙂

At a more personal level, many of us also deal with various anxieties related to our relationship with God. Certainly every one of us here has said or done things we regret and wish we could take back but cannot. These things haunt us and make us afraid that we will somehow be found out and disgraced, not to mention our related anxieties about what God thinks about our deep, dark secrets and how God will eventually deal with them (and us). Don’t believe me? How many of you here have never had any concern or doubts over how things will go for you when you meet your Maker? I thought so. Given all this pervasive anxiety, I want us to look briefly at what our texts have to say about the anxiety-producing things of the world and within ourselves, looking especially at our lesson from Hebrews. And if you are one who is particularly afflicted with anxiety this morning, take heart and hope because there is good news for you to embrace.

The first thing we note from Mark’s gospel lesson is that Jesus warns us not to let catastrophic events like war and natural disasters that regularly afflict our world distract us and/or afflict us with anxiety so that we are led astray. The somber tone of Jesus’ warning is striking, given that the major theme of his teaching, at least in Mark’s gospel, has been that the kingdom of God is at hand. How can God’s kingdom be at hand with so many nasty things going on? It is a question that we still ask 2000 years later! Jesus doesn’t provide an answer but simply warns us not to be led astray from following him. But as we learn from Hannah in our OT lesson, and from countless other Christians who have had to suffer for their faith, God will often use our suffering to draw us closer to him, just as he did with Hannah. It is the consistent testimony of the saints—from Hannah to Ruth to Paul to Augustine to Bonhoeffer—that when we approach God in faith and trust in the midst of our anxieties and the chaos of life that can bring about our suffering, God will often redeem our suffering and draw us closer to him so that we are enabled to persevere and rise above our suffering for our good and God’s glory.

Moreover, when we think about and reflect on what the writer of Hebrews tells us, we understand why Jesus told his disciples (and us) to hang on and not lose hope because in today’s lesson there is wonderful good news for us on all fronts. The writer reminds us that Jesus is now ascended to heaven (God’s space) and is seated at God’s right hand, NT code meaning that Jesus really is Lord, as we saw last week. And the groundwork is now being laid, even though we cannot always see it, for Jesus’ enemies to be vanquished completely one day. The bad guys may appear to be winning. The world may reel and rock with social and natural disasters, but this only reflects the reality of our broken world, not the real state of things. Jesus is Lord, his enemies are being vanquished, and his kingdom is coming, even as we speak!

To be sure, this requires great (not blind) faith on our part because it flies in the face of what our senses often observe. But the reason we can have confidence that the enemies of Jesus will ultimately be defeated and God’s kingdom fully established is because of Jesus’ unique, unrepeatable accomplishment on the cross. As the writer reminds us, Jesus has made the perfect sacrifice to atone for our sins so that we can be reconciled to God. In doing this through Jesus, God also established the basis to defeat the evil that was (and is) unleashed by our sins (cf. Colossians 2.15). Jesus only needed to sacrifice himself once and that is why he can now sit down at God’s right hand. Unlike the priests of the old covenant who had to stand to offer continual sacrifices to God to atone for their own sins and the sins of God’s people, Jesus has brought about radical reconciliation and healing through his death on the cross, once and for all. The writer surely wants us to take great comfort from this because this is the basis for our new and reconciled relationship with God, and the foundation on which we as Jesus’ followers are to build our lives so that he can use us to be his tangible signs of light and salt to a broken and hurting world that desperately longs for and needs God’s healing and forgiveness offered in Christ.

Of course, we cannot be tangible signs of Jesus’ light and healing love if we ourselves are not first forgiven and healed by the love poured out for us on the cross, and we note carefully there are no sins listed here that are too awful or great for God to forgive through Jesus’ blood. None. In fact, the writer encourages us to draw near to God with a sincere heart and the full assurance of faith because our hearts have been sprinkled (with the blood of the lamb) to cleanse us from a guilty conscience. What does the writer want us to see here?

Well, first it is possible for us to have a clean heart because we have been given the Spirit to live in and transform us over time. Our changed and truly human heart is the chief marker of the promised new covenant from Jeremiah 31.33-34 that the writer cites. We typically aren’t changed overnight, but it is the consistent testimony of Christians that we are changed, and in the process we become more and more like the image-bearing humans God created us to be. But often we need others to help us see and acknowledge that the Spirit is changing us.

Second, we note the emphasis the writer places on faith throughout the whole lesson. Faith isn’t something we just get or develop on our own. To the contrary, it is a gift given to us by the Spirit dwelling in us. The Spirit helps us develop our faith as we think actively about and reflect on the object of our faith—Jesus. The more time we take to reflect on all that Jesus has done for us and God’s world, and the more we work out the implications of his death and resurrection for us and the living of our days, the more the Spirit will help deepen our faith so that we really do believe the truth that in Jesus’ death God has completely and totally forgiven us and that we really are God’s children. If this is true, why would we not engage in these activities?

Growing in faith is not unlike getting in physical shape (cf. Philippians 3.12-14; 1 Timothy 4.7-8). We have to do our part to get fit and we have to use our minds to engage Scripture and other devotional material to reflect on and pray about Jesus so that we have a solid foundation on which to base our faith. Think about it. We typically do not make big decisions rashly and without forethought (and when we do, it often results in disastrous consequences). We muse over the evidence, weighing all the information. The writer is telling us that we are to do likewise with Jesus. Faith is a gift but we must put in our sweat equity to assist the Spirit who gives us the gift.

Third, our growing faith will then result in our guilty consciences being wiped away, precisely because we know that we are saved by the wondrous atoning sacrifice of Jesus. When that happens, our anxieties about our worth in God’s eyes will typically disappear and interestingly, so will many of our anxieties about the world around us. But without Jesus, we have every reason to be anxious about our eternal destiny and the world around us because we are effectively admitting that we are left to our own devices to cope with the world’s evil and our own, which surely cannot turn out happily or well.

And finally, God’s great love for us expressed in and through Jesus and verified in the power of the Spirit inevitably leads us to worship God. If we really believe God has done what it takes for us to be reconciled to him and to defeat the evil that bedevils us and God’s world, why would we not want to worship this God of ours? But even here the writer is wise about the inherent weakness of our human condition because he reminds us that we are to worship together so that in the power of the Spirit we will not despair when wars and rumors of wars break out and so that we can encourage each other to love and to good deeds. In other words, God calls us to worship together, in part, so that we can help each other be the fully human beings God created us to be in the power of the Spirit. And if we stop coming to worship, so will others and we thus impede the work of the Spirit. That is another reason why worship matters!

As forgiven and healed people, together we are to build on the unique accomplishment of Jesus to bring his rule of healing love and light to his world so that all might have the chance to find the forgiveness and grace that has claimed us from all eternity. This is what it means to be God’s holy people. And when know we are God’s holy people, we know that we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity.

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