Luke 21:5-28 (Pentecost 23C) 
St. John, Galveston 11/26/2025
Rev. Alan Taylor
 
+ In Nomine Jesu +
 
Grace and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.  Amen.
 
    Jesus will come on the last day to judge both the living and the dead. We’ve confessed the certainty of His coming throughout our lives in the Creeds of the Church and we take the certainty of His return to heart each year as we close out the church year and move toward the Sundays of Advent. Jesus comes, not to judge all of the sordid details of our sinful lives, but to judge one sin, namely, the sin of the unbelief. After all, unbelief is what leaves the sinner accountable for his or her sin before God. Ultimately, the sheep and the goats of Matthew 25 are separated, not by the lives they lived, but by whether or not they were sheep or goats by virtue of their baptism into Christ.

“Then woe to those who scorned the Lord
And sought but carnal pleasures,
Who here despised His precious Word
And loved their earthly treasures!
With shame and trembling they will stand
And at the judge’s stern command
To Satan be delivered.”
 
    Perhaps though it seems strange to you that God would judge unbelief so harshly. We live, after all, at a time when every viewpoint, every idea, every thought, is granted equal status. Right and wrong are no longer objectively measured. Truth is no longer contrasted with error. Rather, truth is measured against other truths. In such a world, each of us can have our own truth, since truth is defined in pragmatic terms. Thus, if something makes me happy, or, something else altogether makes you happy, those things are said to be our personal truths.       
 
    Faith and unbelief are the distinguishing characteristics though of the living and the dead. The contrast is as real and as sharp as the difference between light and dark. It is witnessed in turmoil’s and struggles of this world. Those who believe in Christ have faced and will continue to face the scorn of those who don’t believe in Him right up to the time when Jesus returns. In that, perhaps we could say that the unbeliever, in their quest to destroy the church, or at least to undermine it, recognizes the cavernous divide that exists between those who believe in Jesus and those who do not.    
 
    In the Gospel reading for this morning, Jesus prepared His disciples, even as He prepares you and me, for the days ahead, days in which the unbelieving world will grow less and less tolerant of the Church and her message of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus. “Nation will rise against nation (He says), and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences (or plagues). And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.” “Before all this they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake.” Of course, these signs, as well as others, will be dismissed by unbelievers as ordinary occurrences. You and I, however, will see them as prophecies of the unfolding drama of God’s narrative, leading us to the glorious day of His return. 
 
    The tension between faith and unbelief has been evidenced and will continue to be evidenced, not just in the groaning of this fallen world, but also in our relationships. Perhaps the most startling and painful thing we’ll experience as Christians is being delivered up, being turned over to authorities, by “parents and brothers and relatives and friends. Of being hated, for Jesus’ name’s sake. And (for some) being put to death.”
 
    The Christians who lived in the first century got a of glimpse of the world’s hatred of the Church in the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple was destroyed in 70 ad, some 40 years after the death of Jesus. In a sense, it was a vain attempt of those who despised God and His Church to rid the world of the dwelling place of God. Though He was speaking prophetically, Jesus described exactly what the event would be like. “Some fell by the edge of the sword (He said) and some were led captive among the nations and Jerusalem was trampled underfoot by the Gentiles.”
 
    It is amidst all of these prophecies of doom and gloom that Jesus offers us hope as we anticipate the troubles that are sure find us. “But not a hair of your head will perish (He says). (I suppose that’s a bigger challenge to God for some of us than for others). But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your lives.” As we prepare for the day of our Lord’s coming and as the world grows more and more hostile to the Church, we have our Lord’s promise that He will shelter us and keep us in the faith of our baptisms. And, we also have His promise that He will strengthen us that we might endure to the very end.
 
    We need that promise because endurance is one of the qualities that we often lack. I looked up endurance in a thesaurus and I found words like courage and fortitude and grit and mettle and gutsiness. As opposites, I found words like timidity, weakness, compliance and fear. I was reminded of St. Paul’s struggle with the thorn in his flesh. God wouldn’t remove it. And so, by it, Paul learned endurance, saying, “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”    
 
    In his letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul encouraged them to face their trials and struggles with courage, knowing that endurance is part of a process that begins with being justified before God in Christ and ends with hope. He wrote, “therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
 
    Endurance then, is not solely a product of a steadfast will, rather, it is a product of our having been justified before God in Christ. “Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” And, since we are at peace with God, we know that even sufferings serve a purpose in our lives. They are the fire, if you will, that heats the gold, that allows the artisan of our faith to skim off the dross that on the day of His return we will be found to give praise, honor and glory to Him. 
 
    Paul’s encouragement to endure in the face of suffering, having been justified by Christ, is really another way of saying that, in Christ, God is on your side. He is for you. He’s in your corner. As Luther taught us to sing in his great Reformation hymn, “He’s by our side, upon the plain with His good gifts and spirit.”
 
    And so, as we close out the Church year, we anticipate all the more fervently the day of the coming of our Lord. And we find hope and endurance in the faith that He given us in our Baptisms. And we long for the day when the strife of this world will have passed and we will finally be free of death and every evil.   
 “O Jesus Christ, do not delay,
But hasten our salvation;
We often tremble on our way
In fear and tribulation
O hear and grant our fervent plea:
Come, mighty judge, and set us free
From death and every evil.”

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
 
The peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting.  Amen.
 
+ Soli Deo Gloria +