End Times
This section of teaching material dives right in to some of the hardest to understand bits of our creeds
Coming, ready or not!?
Welcome to Advent. In our church calendar Advent is the 4 weeks leading up to Christmas. In our church theology it is a time of waiting. We wait for the Christ child. The themes of Advent stir up longing and hope, a keen awareness that life is not how it should be or how it will be, that we are caught in the in-between times this side of eternity. The prayer of Advent is, ‘Come, Lord Jesus, Come’.
The trouble is, the four weeks before Christmas don’t feel like that at all. Christmas each year seems to jump out and grab us before we’re quite ready for it. Oh no not Christmas again, already! There’s hardly time for waiting, it’s more - ‘coming ready or not!’.
Over the last month we have been through a series on the last days, the big tough hard-to-get-your-head-around questions about the meaning of life and ultimate destiny of the universe. Our readings and questions lead us to Jesus’ words we heard this morning. Jesus taught his disciples about a coming day … the very end of our reading says “that day will suddenly catch you”. “That day”. Which day? In my Bible the word ‘Day’ is written with a capital letter. That Day. As Jesus said, the Kingdom of God is about to come. When? You don’t know when, but keep an eye out for any day could be That Day. Jesus did prophecy some sign posts, which could point to the coming of the Kingdom of God, when Jesus himself, the Son of Man, will return in glory … troubles, wars, conflicts, people afraid of the raging tides and the falling of stars.
You probably know folks who see world events through the lens of these verses. Any day, any time now, could be That Day.
I honestly don’t know quite what to make of these teachings of Jesus. I do not dismiss them, but they are not the main way I see the world. I figure that if the Lord is coming back it’s not up to us to try to figure out when or how or where …
What interests me is what Jesus asked of his disciples. In the light of the ultimate future of turmoil and God’s remaking of the universe, what is required of us here and now? That’s the question that interests me.
And Jesus if pretty clear in his teaching about this. Jesus called his followers to live ready. Alert. Don’t get too embroiled with this world, with the troubles or the parties. Don’t live in fear and don’t sobble up your problems with food and wine.
To me Jesus words are pretty clear. Live in this world and invest yourself in doing your best to care for other people and to care for the world, but keep your head up, keep your ear out, keep your eyes open, for there is more to come. There is a Kingdom not of this world which is coming into the world. Jesus said that we who follow him are not “of” this world.
John 15:19 If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but you are not of the world. I chose you out of the world, and because of this the world hates you.
So it’s a ‘both-and’ thing. Yes we get on with life, we do eat and drink, especially at Christmas time. We do tackle the problems of this world, but we are not fully immersed in this life, these problems, this world. We are waiting for the Kingdom of God to sweep everything up and us with it, and while we wait, we get on with it.
My husband’s family have a saying. When things are not entirely in your control they say, “hurry up and wait”.
Sounds like Advent to me. Life rushes on and yet in a Jesus place in our hearts we are waiting. So we say ‘Come Lord Jesus’. Even in the busyness we can rest a while. Even in the stresses and anxieties and so much that is not working out as we think it should, we can trust.
Our Advent candle for today is hope. This is something to lean on as everything else comes and goes. Hope gives us the courage and resilience to wait. Hope is the glimpse of what is coming.
Welcome to Advent. In our church calendar Advent is the 4 weeks leading up to Christmas. In our church theology it is a time of waiting. We wait for the Christ child. The themes of Advent stir up longing and hope, a keen awareness that life is not how it should be or how it will be, that we are caught in the in-between times this side of eternity. The prayer of Advent is, ‘Come, Lord Jesus, Come’.
The trouble is, the four weeks before Christmas don’t feel like that at all. Christmas each year seems to jump out and grab us before we’re quite ready for it. Oh no not Christmas again, already! There’s hardly time for waiting, it’s more - ‘coming ready or not!’.
Over the last month we have been through a series on the last days, the big tough hard-to-get-your-head-around questions about the meaning of life and ultimate destiny of the universe. Our readings and questions lead us to Jesus’ words we heard this morning. Jesus taught his disciples about a coming day … the very end of our reading says “that day will suddenly catch you”. “That day”. Which day? In my Bible the word ‘Day’ is written with a capital letter. That Day. As Jesus said, the Kingdom of God is about to come. When? You don’t know when, but keep an eye out for any day could be That Day. Jesus did prophecy some sign posts, which could point to the coming of the Kingdom of God, when Jesus himself, the Son of Man, will return in glory … troubles, wars, conflicts, people afraid of the raging tides and the falling of stars.
You probably know folks who see world events through the lens of these verses. Any day, any time now, could be That Day.
I honestly don’t know quite what to make of these teachings of Jesus. I do not dismiss them, but they are not the main way I see the world. I figure that if the Lord is coming back it’s not up to us to try to figure out when or how or where …
What interests me is what Jesus asked of his disciples. In the light of the ultimate future of turmoil and God’s remaking of the universe, what is required of us here and now? That’s the question that interests me.
And Jesus if pretty clear in his teaching about this. Jesus called his followers to live ready. Alert. Don’t get too embroiled with this world, with the troubles or the parties. Don’t live in fear and don’t sobble up your problems with food and wine.
To me Jesus words are pretty clear. Live in this world and invest yourself in doing your best to care for other people and to care for the world, but keep your head up, keep your ear out, keep your eyes open, for there is more to come. There is a Kingdom not of this world which is coming into the world. Jesus said that we who follow him are not “of” this world.
John 15:19 If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but you are not of the world. I chose you out of the world, and because of this the world hates you.
So it’s a ‘both-and’ thing. Yes we get on with life, we do eat and drink, especially at Christmas time. We do tackle the problems of this world, but we are not fully immersed in this life, these problems, this world. We are waiting for the Kingdom of God to sweep everything up and us with it, and while we wait, we get on with it.
My husband’s family have a saying. When things are not entirely in your control they say, “hurry up and wait”.
Sounds like Advent to me. Life rushes on and yet in a Jesus place in our hearts we are waiting. So we say ‘Come Lord Jesus’. Even in the busyness we can rest a while. Even in the stresses and anxieties and so much that is not working out as we think it should, we can trust.
Our Advent candle for today is hope. This is something to lean on as everything else comes and goes. Hope gives us the courage and resilience to wait. Hope is the glimpse of what is coming.
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Seated at the Right Hand of the Father
One of the main claims made in our Bibles and in our Creeds about Jesus is that he is seated at the right hand of God. Not that God has hands, not even a right hand, literally - so that is this word-picture trying to tell us about Jesus and God and where does the Spirit fit in? In this sermon I explore the common understanding of this metaphor as a ThroneRoom, and argue that Jesus might have preferred the metaphor as a dinner party! I’m still bothered about the throne thing. It just does not work for me very well as a metaphor. I can picture God the Father telling Jesus what to do and Jesus telling the Spirit what to do in a kind of military chain of command … and it just does not feel right to me. How about you? And you know why it does not feel right to have a throne-room metaphor for the Trinity? Mainly because that simply was not how Jesus described the kingdom of heaven. |
CREEDS: a document containing several major creeds as well as the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand's statement of faith.
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Resurrection of the Dead: "But wait there's more!"
I am embarked on a series of tough questions of theology, questions which lead us through to Advent, those hardest of questions, the ones we normal keep safely tucked away in the too-hard-basket – questions of eternity, destiny, the ending of things and the remaking of things. Questions about where is the universe going? How does our story end? What’s the punch line of it all?
A couple of weeks ago I kicked this off with an odd question – where is God? which got me into a claim that God lives in heaven, with Jesus seated at the right hand of the Father, and that heaven is God’s dimension, which can flow into our world dimension in everyplace and every time, in our hearts and lives through the Holy Spirit.
So that’s the first big claim of the Christian faith – that there is a spiritual dimension to life, the universe and everything, and that we call this heaven and we have particular ideas about the values and even personality of this spiritual dimension, that we sum up in the complicated idea that it is Father, Son and Spirit in one God.
The second big claim of the Christian faith is that this other-space we call heaven is the reality that we enter when we die. My sermon today is a small attempt to say something about Christian theology about the here-after, the after-life.
The obvious point to begin is that we can’t know what is beyond this life. In a few minutes I can hardly explore the vast body of thinking about what happens to us after we die. All I can hope to do is to ask: what does the Bible say about it?
And I must leave space before I sit down to ask the ‘so what’ question – what does it matter? If we are willing to entertain an orthodox Christian theology of eternal life, if there even is one to be found, how might that affect you and I in our daily lives, this side of eternity?
I am embarked on a series of tough questions of theology, questions which lead us through to Advent, those hardest of questions, the ones we normal keep safely tucked away in the too-hard-basket – questions of eternity, destiny, the ending of things and the remaking of things. Questions about where is the universe going? How does our story end? What’s the punch line of it all?
A couple of weeks ago I kicked this off with an odd question – where is God? which got me into a claim that God lives in heaven, with Jesus seated at the right hand of the Father, and that heaven is God’s dimension, which can flow into our world dimension in everyplace and every time, in our hearts and lives through the Holy Spirit.
So that’s the first big claim of the Christian faith – that there is a spiritual dimension to life, the universe and everything, and that we call this heaven and we have particular ideas about the values and even personality of this spiritual dimension, that we sum up in the complicated idea that it is Father, Son and Spirit in one God.
The second big claim of the Christian faith is that this other-space we call heaven is the reality that we enter when we die. My sermon today is a small attempt to say something about Christian theology about the here-after, the after-life.
The obvious point to begin is that we can’t know what is beyond this life. In a few minutes I can hardly explore the vast body of thinking about what happens to us after we die. All I can hope to do is to ask: what does the Bible say about it?
And I must leave space before I sit down to ask the ‘so what’ question – what does it matter? If we are willing to entertain an orthodox Christian theology of eternal life, if there even is one to be found, how might that affect you and I in our daily lives, this side of eternity?
The Destiny of the Universe and the Second Coming
I’ve been asking you some tough questions this month. We had: “Where is God?” We had “What happens to us after we die?”. And here’s my tough question for you this morning: “How long have we got?” … as in, when will it all end? And how?
If you Google ‘how will the universe end?’ you get a curious mix of possible scientific answers. The possibilities hinge, apparently, on the precise measurement of how fast the galaxies are travelling away from each other, which is complicated because apparently they are travelling away from each other faster and faster, which is, apparently, quite hard to explain and involves something which no one can measure called Dark Energy, which apparently there is quite a lot of in the universe even though no one knows what it is or how to observe it – basically the scientists are all guessing. But the fact remains that the universe is expanding, as in, all the galaxies are flying away from each other quite quickly, which obviously means that eventually everything will be a long way away from everything else and the stars will eventually burn themselves out and even the black holes will implode on themselves until there’s really not a lot left. Apparently, eventually, the universe will just get really cold and really dark. All a bit gloomy really.
What you need to know is that this picture of how everything turns out in the end is utterly utterly different from how the Bible pictures how everything turns out in the end. ...
Two levels of dystopian futures for life the universe and everything … the long view of a universe floating apart becoming cold and lifeless through the eons … and the more immediate view of our planet rapidly losing the beauty and diversity of life that God has created.
Help! We desperately need hope. We are promised hope, it’s part of the Gospel promise, part of the gifts of Advent. Hope is basic, essential to our faith … and we need it now more than ever, surely. Hope is in short supply out there.
What, then, is the Christian hope?
I absolutely reject the idea that it is a ticket to “get us out of here” … no way does the Bible paint a picture of a few faithful people getting whisked up into some super-spiritual paradise to live forever with Jesus while the rest of the universe goes to hell in a handcart. That is absolutely not what the Bible teaches.
I also absolutely reject the idea that God has washed his hands of us. It’s common enough in our secular world view to have a vague idea that the universe might have a spiritual creative force behind it, but when we look around at the huge problems that face our world it’s quite understandable to feel that God, if God exists, has left us to our own devices, given us up as a bad job. That is absolutely not what the Bible teaches.
So if not those, then what? What does the Bible teach?
I have three claims which I read when I read the Bible. I think the Bible is reasonably consistent about it; the problem is that when we come to those bits of the Bible which talk about this kind of thing we tend to glaze over and skip ahead to bits that make more sense to us. So our Bible readings today are not ones I have preached on before, or even really thought much about. They just don’t fit very well with what feels normal to us. But here goes. Three claims of our Bible regarding the ultimate fate of the universe.
First, that God is capable of stepping in and taking over.
Second, that one day heaven and earth will merge.
and thirdly that faith and hope in the future return of Jesus puts our everyday lives into a different frame of reference.
Hebrews 12: 22-29
Mark 13: 3-10, 24-27
I’ve been asking you some tough questions this month. We had: “Where is God?” We had “What happens to us after we die?”. And here’s my tough question for you this morning: “How long have we got?” … as in, when will it all end? And how?
If you Google ‘how will the universe end?’ you get a curious mix of possible scientific answers. The possibilities hinge, apparently, on the precise measurement of how fast the galaxies are travelling away from each other, which is complicated because apparently they are travelling away from each other faster and faster, which is, apparently, quite hard to explain and involves something which no one can measure called Dark Energy, which apparently there is quite a lot of in the universe even though no one knows what it is or how to observe it – basically the scientists are all guessing. But the fact remains that the universe is expanding, as in, all the galaxies are flying away from each other quite quickly, which obviously means that eventually everything will be a long way away from everything else and the stars will eventually burn themselves out and even the black holes will implode on themselves until there’s really not a lot left. Apparently, eventually, the universe will just get really cold and really dark. All a bit gloomy really.
What you need to know is that this picture of how everything turns out in the end is utterly utterly different from how the Bible pictures how everything turns out in the end. ...
Two levels of dystopian futures for life the universe and everything … the long view of a universe floating apart becoming cold and lifeless through the eons … and the more immediate view of our planet rapidly losing the beauty and diversity of life that God has created.
Help! We desperately need hope. We are promised hope, it’s part of the Gospel promise, part of the gifts of Advent. Hope is basic, essential to our faith … and we need it now more than ever, surely. Hope is in short supply out there.
What, then, is the Christian hope?
I absolutely reject the idea that it is a ticket to “get us out of here” … no way does the Bible paint a picture of a few faithful people getting whisked up into some super-spiritual paradise to live forever with Jesus while the rest of the universe goes to hell in a handcart. That is absolutely not what the Bible teaches.
I also absolutely reject the idea that God has washed his hands of us. It’s common enough in our secular world view to have a vague idea that the universe might have a spiritual creative force behind it, but when we look around at the huge problems that face our world it’s quite understandable to feel that God, if God exists, has left us to our own devices, given us up as a bad job. That is absolutely not what the Bible teaches.
So if not those, then what? What does the Bible teach?
I have three claims which I read when I read the Bible. I think the Bible is reasonably consistent about it; the problem is that when we come to those bits of the Bible which talk about this kind of thing we tend to glaze over and skip ahead to bits that make more sense to us. So our Bible readings today are not ones I have preached on before, or even really thought much about. They just don’t fit very well with what feels normal to us. But here goes. Three claims of our Bible regarding the ultimate fate of the universe.
First, that God is capable of stepping in and taking over.
Second, that one day heaven and earth will merge.
and thirdly that faith and hope in the future return of Jesus puts our everyday lives into a different frame of reference.
Hebrews 12: 22-29
Mark 13: 3-10, 24-27