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.”
Wow! It made me ponder my own theological assumptions. What have I accepted as unquestioned doctrine, but it really isn’t? Am I too judgmental of others? Is my faith too self-assured? What do I need to unlearn?
I think the more our faith matures, the more we become like Küng. We unlearn those smug assumptions we falsely built into our theological roadmap. Like blocks in a game of Jenga, God’s mercy allows us to remove them one at a time. And perhaps, just like the temple in Jerusalem, the whole tower will tumble. But only then can we see the true foundation of our faith which lies beneath.
Like Jesus’ words to the Jewish leaders, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it.” Jesus calls us to replace our false tower of religion with the true center of our faith, our crucified and risen Lord and Savior.
Being people of faith requires us to not fret when it seems like the landmarks of religion are toppling around us. Because what WILL NOT BE DESTROYED is the divine rock of our faith. The beloved hymn reminds us:
Built on a rock the church doth stand
Even when steeples are falling.
Crumbled have spires in many lands,
Bells still are chiming and calling.
The second thing Jesus’ words challenged was their reliance upon the solidness of the temple’s construction. This physical structure, such a marvel to behold, was just too permanent, too immovable, to be destroyed. It was bedrock, through and through!
And yet, in just a few years, Rome would come calling, and they would indeed destroy that temple. It would fall, just like Jesus said it would.
Something so permanent, its end was just unthinkable. And yet it was destroyed. I’m reminded of the words of Edward John Smith, the captain of the Titanic, who stated, “Even God himself couldn’t sink this ship,” But an iceberg did.
The plain fact is that we live in the realm of mortality. All things are finite, they will all come to an end. All things – our physical bodies, institutions, a bullish economy, nations, even the earth itself, all will come to an end. In his prophecy, Jesus reminds us that there is nothing in this world that is indestructible.
But Jesus’ prophecy doesn’t end with doom. It ends with a promise. He lets us know that the world can throw everything it has at us – plagues and famines, betrayal and desertion, war and oppression – but there is a higher power, an eternal power, which is greater than all these. And because of that, we need not fear.
And Jesus himself would be the demonstration. Evil and enmity would double down to destroy him. Jesus was arrested and falsely accused. He was flogged and condemned. He was scorned by his own people and crucified on the outskirts of Jerusalem. There he suffered until he gave his last breath. His limp body was removed from his cross and laid in a tomb. And there he was, cold and dead in his grave.
But on Easter morning he demonstrated that there is something beyond all ends. On that morning, the Son of Righteousness arose, with healing in his wings. This is what he showed us on that Easter. God’s love is greater than death. God’s life is eternal.
I remember a certain lady in one of my former parishes. I’ll call her Nancy. She was a lovely lady, so gracious she was. And then Nancy received the kind of diagnosis nobody wants to hear. She had cancer, liver cancer. She doctored at Mayo in Rochester, and they did all they could for her. But this was going to take her out. The cancer was going to destroy her earthly temple. Nevertheless, she continued to live with the grace that sustained her.
You could tell by Nancy’s color that her condition was worsening. And then one Sunday, we had a service of the word of healing. Near the end of the service, the congregation was invited to come forward for the laying on of hands and a prayer for healing.
Nancy very eagerly got in line. As the line crept forward, I could see that she would be coming up on my side. And then there she was in front of me, in her wan pallor, but her eyes were blazing with joy. And beneath her sallow nature, she was absolutely gleaming. Her death was coming, but she believed in God’s healing. She knew that not a hair on her head would perish.
And so I laid my hands on her head and I spoke the words: May God’s healing love fill every corner of your heart, every crevice of your mind, and every cell of your body.
Friends, this is our stalwart hope: in every end, there is a new beginning.
