2nd Last Sunday of the Church Year, Series B. Mark 13:24-31 “God’s Word Never Passes Away” Forest City Mission 1st Service, Nov. 16, 2003.
A little over a month ago when I was talking with a friend of mine from college that’s also studying to be a pastor, I was telling him about the plans we had to begin to hold worship services here in Forest City and that I was planning for services to begin this morning. When my friend looked on his calendar and saw what day on the church year it fell on, he looked rather puzzled and asked “Why are you starting a new congregation and having opening services at a time when the readings point toward the end times?” I have to agree, at first, it seems like an interesting question to ask, and I didn’t have an answer for him. However, as I looked at the readings for this morning and thought about possible sermon themes and as I studied this text, I realized that perhaps this is a good text to preach on for my first sermon with you. And I hope that once I am finished, perhaps you will agree with me.
Traditionally, the last three Sundays of the church year feature readings that deal with the end times and Jesus’ second coming. Next Sunday, we will celebrate Christ the King Sunday, focusing on his return, and then begin a new church year with one of my favorite times of the year, Advent. Now the end times are a very popular topic for Christians and non-Christians alike. If you’ve ever been in a Christian book store and paid attention to the sections of books they have, it’s not uncommon to find a whole section of books devoted to the end times, the Left Behind series is a perfect example. A few years ago, especially, this was a very popular topic, with all the talk about Y2K. Do you remember that? Some people expected the end of the world to occur with the coming of the year 2000; others expected the end of civilization as we knew it. If you asked a so called “expert” back then on what to expect and what you would need to survive “Y2K”, you would get an answer that indeed revolved around survival. Things like dried foods, bottled water, large supplies of fuel, your own personal generator, some even went so far as to say you needed a gun and ammo to protect yourself and your family. And we heard many a false prophet, whether it was on TV, or in a magazine, or on the internet, focusing on certain portions of God’s Word that deal with the end times, and twist it to say something it didn’t to scare the daylights out of you and get you to buy their products, donate money, or in some cases, have you sell everything you had and go sit with them somewhere and wait for Jesus to return because somehow they claimed they knew the hour Jesus was to return. You know, it’s very easy to look back on the events that surrounded the whole Y2K time in our history, and laugh. As we all know, the world didn’t end, things went on as usual, and I doubt those people who sold everything they had to go sit on a mountain top are still sitting there waiting almost 4 years later. Hopefully, we can learn from seeing this craziness that there are benefits to preparing for what might happen, but there is a limit on how much we can accomplish on our own.
As we read our gospel lesson for this morning, we’re warned of many things that must happen before Jesus returns. And some of them are, well, rather frightening when we think about them. It’s safe to say that we live in a very uncertain world, a world where change is inevitable. We’re bombarded with messages that there are no absolutes. From these messages, there are people out in the secular world and also within the church that will want you to believe that God’s Word is one of those things that is outdated. They try to teach us that the Bible isn’t want it appears to be, that it contains errors, or some of it wasn’t meant to apply for all of time and what was not permissible then is okay in our society now. Our fallen world wants us to believe that we come first, do what makes you feel good, or that Jesus is just someone who taught tolerance and we should love other people, and leave the story at that. They conveniently leave out Jesus’ words to sinners who came to be healed as he tells them “go and sin no more.” This idea of putting ourselves before God isn’t new. In fact, all you have to do is go back to the garden of Eden, when Satan temps Eve and asks “Did God really say ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” and upon Eve’s reply Satan says “You will not surely die, For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Ever since then, that same lie has been repeated over, and over, and over again, maybe presented in a different package, but it’s the same thing today as it was at the time of the fall. Our sinful natures want us to do what’s right for ourselves, and just get along, and question God, the Creator, and prepare for Christ’s second coming on our own.
There are other ways some of these false prophets will try to get you prepared. They will frighten you with a laundry list of things you have to do in order to be saved. They will give you the other extreme of Jesus the world wants you to see. Rather than Jesus Christ, your Lord and Savior, these false prophets will want you to see Jesus as a stern judge. They look at Jesus’ second coming not as a time of joy, but a time of great fear. Horrible things will happen to you, and you better get your ducks in a row, or else you will be “left behind” or damned to hell for all of eternity. They might mention Jesus’ death on the cross in passing, but they remind us of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day who took 10 commandments and expanded them into hundreds of laws that had to be strictly kept. These false prophets forget that if we were able to save ourselves, Jesus wouldn’t have had to come in the first place to take the punishment of our sins on the cross. This image of Christ as a stern judge was an image that terrified Martin Luther early in his life. He knew he could never live up to those expectations that God has for us under the law, and that terrified him. When we focus on Christ as merely a judge, we see an angry God who will return in judgment to damn us to an eternity in hell if we don’t straighten up our act and do it on our own.
No matter which view of Jesus the world will give you, both of them demand that you meet a checklist of things when the end times arrive and you better have your house in order when Jesus returns. Either view puts the work on us, and that’s something that as sinful human beings, since man’s fall into sin in the Garden of Eden, has been impossible. There’s always something that we need to do, the law always demands from us, it always accuses us of our sin and shows us how we fall short of what God expects from us, even if the world or some false teachers within the church will tell you otherwise. That’s why it’s so important for us to cling to God’s Word, because in it, we hear of who Jesus really is. We see Jesus, the Son of God, who lived the perfect life you and I were unable to live and kept every single one of God’s commandments for us. He willingly went to the cross in our place to suffer, to die, and to rise again to break the power that sin, death, and the power of the devil held over us. It’s because of this Jesus, the true person and work of Jesus Christ, your Lord and Savior, that we can come to God and confess our sins as we did at the beginning of our worship service this morning, and hear those sweet words, our sins have been forgiven. In times when things in this world seem to get out of control, the times we cry out “Lord, how long will this continue”, we can cling to that promise that God has given to us in His Word. We know that the things of this world will pass away, but God’s Word never will.
That, my friends, is why we are here. That’s why I hope and pray that you will come back here to God’s House week after week, to let God serve you in worship by feeding you with His word and His sacraments. I hope you invite others to come and be a part of our new life together as a family of faith. We’re not here to appease the sinful and misguided world. We’re not here to come up with new marketing gimmicks, or reinvent the Gospel, turning it into something it isn’t. We’re here to get ready; we’re here to prepare for Christ’s second coming. We do that by hearing God’s Word, by growing in our understanding of it, and by sharing that with others. As a congregation in mission to this and surrounding communities, it’s my prayer that we will serve as beacon of light and reach out to those who need to hear who Jesus really is, to receive forgiveness of their sins, and be built up as part of the body of Christ. That’s what the church has always been about, and what this congregation will be all about.
Did you catch the second verse of our Epistle reading for this morning? “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” We live in an ever changing and frightening world. God has revealed to us signs of Jesus second coming so that we can be prepared for the time when Jesus returns. The things of this world will pass away. We as Christians are called to fix our eyes on Jesus, His promises and His word to us will never pass away. He’s not a moral guide, he’s not a stern judge, he’s your Lord and Savior. As we gather together here in this place week after week, we will gather around God’s unchanging Word to us in this ever changing world. I hope you invite someone to come and hear this unchanging message, to learn more about God’s Word to us, to gather together week after week in worship, and help prepare ourselves and those who do not know about Jesus Christ for His second coming. Many things in this world come and go, and even in the church, we’re reminded of that. People in our lives come and go. Pastors of congregations come and although some stay longer than others, they all eventually leave, retire, or are called to their heavenly home. Even Christian congregations are organized and some close. We’re reminded of that as we worship in this church, knowing that the Beaver Creek Lutheran Church doesn’t exist as a congregation anymore. Yet, God’s Word is eternal. His promises never change with time; they’re something we can hold on to in times of uncertainty. That’s what we have to offer to this community and the world. Indeed, after all, this did turn out to be a great text to start our new ministry together. It is my hope and my prayer that together, we will keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, and His Word which will never pass away, and not on the things of the world, which will pass away. May God grant this for Jesus sake, Amen.
