Our Stalwart Hope In Uncertain Times

November 16, 2025

Rev. Mary Erickson

New Hope, Downsville-Little Elk Creek

Malachi 4:1-2a; Luke 21:5-19

Our Stalwart Hope in Uncertain Times

Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.

We are drawing very near to the end of our liturgical calendar. Next Sunday marks the final week of this current church year with Christ the King Sunday.

The scriptural texts in these final weeks focus on final things. It seems fitting to ponder final things in these waning days of the church year.

However, thinking about final things can be emotionally unnerving. We don’t really like endings. Like that empty feeling you get when you’ve finished the final episode of a favorite mini-series on Netflix. We want more; we don’t want it to end.

No, we don’t like endings. And the higher the stakes of the endings, the less we like them. Something like the end of camping season – we may be a little bummed, but we get over it quickly. But the prospect of our own earthly end – now that evokes much stronger emotions! What happens when we die? How will the process of dying roll out? What will the next chapter bring?

And there are many other final things: The conclusion of school years; the loss of a stable income; selling a family farm; a critically unstable marriage; the gasps of a planet struggling for its survival; extinct animals; the status of our nation’s ever-fragile democracy.

So many vulnerabilities, so many uncertainties with no guarantee for tomorrow. It all leaves us on edge.

Our texts today fall under the theological heading of “eschatology,” the study of final things.

Malachi muses on “The Day of the Lord.” The ancient Israelites believed there would come a day of divine reckoning. Evil will be consumed in a great fire. God’s cleansing fire will burn up and eliminate all wickedness.

But references to this Day of the Lord don’t stop with total annihilation. It’s not just about the destruction of evil. Something blessed follows. Malachi promises: “the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings.” This final reckoning ushers in a new day.

The final book of the Bible, Revelation, echoes these thoughts. The great tribulation John describes brings about the destruction of the earth and the vanquishing of the devil. But then John shares what comes next: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” And the One on the throne declares, “Behold, I am making all things new.”

Eschatology is the study of the final things. And that sounds scary at first. But eschatology is intimately and indivisibly connected to hope. Eschatology promises us this: in every end there is a new beginning.

And so Malachi assures us that, in the dark night of the soul, we await the sun of righteousness.

And then in our passage from Luke we witness Jesus and his disciples at the great temple in Jerusalem. This was the temple which had been built by Herod the Great. And it was truly magnificent! The stones were gargantuan. The labor to cut them, haul them from the quarry and perfectly situate them into place is mind boggling – especially since they didn’t have the modern equipment that we do now. You can still see some of these huge stones in what remains of the wall surrounding the Temple Mount area.

The doors of the temple and its gates were clad in gold. They glinted in the sun with dazzling array. So no wonder people were commenting on the temple’s grandeur.

And then Jesus announces, “All that you see here, the day will come when not one stone will be standing upon another.”

They must have been dumbfounded. Here was God’s holy temple. Here was the home of the Holy of Holies. How could this sacred place be destroyed?

And secondly, it was just too physically solid! It took 46 years to build it. What kind of Herculean effort would it take to destroy it?

Jesus’ words shattered two of their false assurances. Do we rely on them, too? First of all, he challenged the false god of religion. Religion itself can become an idol. We believe more in our brand of religion than we do in the God revealed through it. We believe our denomination, our way of being people of faith, is more true than that of others. But when we harbor these attitudes, we misplace the foundation of our faith. We are not looking to the great I Am; we are look instead to the how great We Are.

This really drilled me many years ago when I read an article written by the great German theologian Hans Küng, one of the great theological minds of the 20th Century, the author of the definitive tome “On Being a Christian.” The title to his article was something like “What I Have Unlearned after 50 Years of Theological Study.”