Sunday November 16th, 2025 Worship

Before I get into my sermon for today, I want to remind us that these Scripture stories are contextual. While we will get into the context a bit in a few minutes, I want us to proceed with caution because these stories cannot be a one-to-one comparison to our world today. Doing so avoids the nuance and the socio-religious history of people and places that have an impact on how these Scripture readings were understood. We interpret them for our time, but we cannot just simply copy and paste. For example, we should not take Paul’s comment about how “anyone unwilling to work should not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10b) out of the larger context of the believers who were so focused on the day of the Lord that they didn’t want to live in the present and use it as justification for allowing people to go hungry in our world today. It is far too easy to take that half verse and weaponize it today. With that being said, let us dive into the sermon for today.
As a society, we love a good hero story! From literature arcs to superhero movie franchises, we want a story that has a satisfying ending. It is such a common theme that it literally has its own name: “The Hero’s Journey.” The hero is challenged, but they have overcome those challenges, growing in the process and enjoying a clean resolution and a happy ending. All the better if we throw in a few action scenes or confusing riddles that must be solved along the way. I’m not criticizing the model, as I love those stories too. But, if that is what we look for in our entertainment, as a model for how we hope our lives go, we shouldn’t be too surprised with the way this gets brought into our religious life too.
From Malachi’s time to ours, there has been this desire by people to focus on the day of the Lord and what that will mean for them. There are several ways that this plays out in reality, but there are two that I want to focus on today: this desire for God’s judgment and as an attempt to make sense of the pain and suffering of our world. We all know that there are terrible things that happen in our world every single day. Events that are scary, heart-wrenching, unfathomable, yet they happen anyway. And we do not know what to do when those things happen because it feels like there is absolutely no way that God can be a part of letting any of this occur, but we also don’t want to imagine that God doesn’t care. When we don’t know what to make of the realities of our world, we will find a way for it to make sense in our brains. For many of the past and in our present, this reasoning rests in the end times, that the events are signs that the end is near. In many ways, these challenges are talked about like trials in our heroic quest, with a desired outcome in mind at the end of it.
For all that people are pushing for the day of the Lord to come, or crying out that it is already here, we are reminded in Scripture that the day of the Lord is not at all like we imagine it is going to be, nor do we know when it will be here. In Luke’s Gospel today, Jesus talks about there being earthquakes, famines and plagues, wars and violence leading up to the day of the Lord (Luke 21: 9-11). But, these warnings are also deeply grounded in what the people had already experienced in their lifetimes. Remember, they were a people whose ancestors had been enslaved, had been taken into exile, had watched their Temple be destroyed (twice), and had to endure life under Empire after Empire. I’ve talked about before how there was this strong desire for the Messiah to be this mighty warrior who would come to defeat their enemies and usher in a new reality. They wanted a hero to come in and save the day, defeating all their enemies in the process! There is still this attempt to have the warnings, then, fit into this heroic, mighty Messiah that they so desire.
This is why I want to talk about the God’s judgement in the sense of the day of the Lord too because it is tied in with our understanding of this heroic Messiah, since all of the conversation around it focuses on the righteous vs. the evildoers. Like all superhero movies, we want to see a triumph of good over evil. We are disappointed in the ending if that isn’t the case. Except, what becomes problematic is that we turn it into us, as the righteous, versus all of the people we don’t like or agree with who will be punished. It is yet again another way in which we turn ourselves into the judge and jury. After all, we’re reminded by our Psalm that “the Lord will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with equity” (Psalm 98:9). This isn’t the case of God’s supposed favorites versus our least favorite.
These warnings by Paul and Jesus also remind us about what it is that we are called to be doing, even as the people around us proclaim that the day of the Lord is here, or that we are saved so why should we bother with doing anything now. But, we are instead calling to continue living in the present and doing the work of the Gospel, of caring for others and creation, working for peace and justice. We don’t know when the day of the Lord is going to be, and they are bringing us back to the reality that there is still work to be done now. When Paul criticizes people for not working and relying on the generosity of others (2 Thessalonians 3: 6-13), it is a criticism of this inclination to become so preoccupied with the end times that we no longer desire to do anything now to relieve suffering in the world around us, even when we have the means to. This critique by Paul is grounded in the reality that people had already declared themselves righteous, so they no longer felt like they needed to live in right relationship with their community; it didn’t matter that they took advantage of the generosity of their neighbors or that they were possibly taking the food from someone who really needed it. What mattered wasn’t how their actions impacted anyone else, so long as the day was near and they felt their place was secure.
These readings today aren’t supposed to instill fear in us or cause us to panic thinking that the day of the Lord us upon us. But, throughout history, these prophecies about God’s judgement and what will happen on the day of the Lord and the days leading up to it have been ways of calling God’s people to repentance. It calls us to take a look at ourselves and see us for who we truly are; beautiful, wonderful, flawed, scarred human beings. It is a call to humility, to remember that we are not God, but are God’s created. In that, we trust in God’s grace and forgiveness, but we do not overstep to take the role of judge into our own hands. It is not for us to decide when that day will be here or what it will look like. Instead, it is up to us to embrace this world fully as it is now, to walk with one another and ease suffering where we can, as we let others tend to us in our suffering too.
When I think about what Jesus is saying in the Gospel, and we talk about Christ coming into the world to give us a new reality, I can’t help but think about how this reordering of the world is chaotic and messy too. It isn’t this instantaneous shift that happens overnight; there isn’t a neat resolution at the end of three hours. But it happens slowly when people show up to love God and love the world. It happens when we make changes to the way we interact with one another and the world around us. Like Jesus is warning his disciples today too, doing the work of the Gospel, of truly following Jesus, of working for peace and justice in the world, will lead to opposition and sometimes even persecution (Luke 21: 12). It is because the way of Jesus is so radically different from the ways of this world that the people in power will be afraid of what they will lose when things change.
We have to decide if we will accept that calling, as we consider what it means for us to follow Christ, the one who breaks down walls, welcomes the outcast and the stranger, and is turning the world around. We are given the option between waiting around, chasing after those who want to tell us all about how the end is here, or living into our call to keep loving this world until the very end. Every little thing that we do in this world makes a difference, even when that is hard to see. For me, I’m going to choose to be more loving, to bring kindness and generosity into the world, to bring joy and laughter, as well as comfort amidst the sorrow and grief. We aren’t given a timeline for when the day of the Lord is going to be here, but I also trust that showing up for this world isn’t going to be in vain. So may we go out into this world to live! It may not fit the classic model of a quest, but it will be a journey all the same. And, may our living be a testament and witness to the love that God has for the world, and the love that we have for God in return.