23rd Sunday after Pentecost

Grace and peace to you from God the Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

This text is tempting for me to play “amateur prophet.” The wars, insurrections, earthquakes, dreadful portents and great signs from heaven are all things I could easily point to as happening right now in our lifetime…

There are wars taking place in our world killing millions. There were at least two great and destructive earthquakes in the lower part of the Asian continent in Myanmar and Japan this year. There was a dreadful heavenly event – a portent, perhaps – the most powerful hurricane ever recorded happened just two weeks ago and it slammed Jamaica.

I could easily play prophet today, assuring you that the end times have arrived! Just look at the events that Jesus predicts, they are being fulfilled!

And so they have been for ages. And people have “played amateur prophet” from time immemorial. Just in the last couple of centuries – the great war, what we call World War I, was to be the war to end all wars, the end of time had arrived as the entire industrialized world was fighting itself. The world didn’t end….

World War Two was next, the most awful events took place in the form of the Holocaust – 6 million people were exterminated, family condemned family to the concentration camps. But, the world didn’t end then either…

And now in this time of fast moving climate change, we have giant weather events, like the hurricane two weeks ago, heralding in the end of the age… And yet, each storm passes and people grieve their losses and then pick up the pieces - the world doesn’t end then either.

But, our imagination is captivated by end-times literature and by end-times theories. We, like the people Jesus speaks to in today’s Gospel want to know: “Teacher, when will these things be, and what will be the sign that all of this is about to take place?”

We want to prepare ourselves.

The Discovery Channel even produced a television reality series called “Doom Preppers” from 2012-2014 – it was three whole seasons of interviews with people mostly in America who were interpreting “the signs” of the end times and preparing to survive the various “terrible portents.” It’s was an entertaining and captivating series that, after you watched it, something creeps up inside of you and whispers – I should definitely buy that pallet of 150 cans of beans at Costco next time I go…

As much as it’s tempting to “play prophet” ourselves by reading the signs of the end-times, we cannot ever know exactly what the end of time (as we know it) looks like.

It, unfortunately, does not belong to us.

So, why does Jesus even talk about it with these people gathered around him?

I think it’s because Chapter 21 in Luke’s Gospel marks the end of Jesus’s ministry. Chapter 22 begins the story leading up to Jesus’s death and resurrection. So, Chapter 21 then, is a dramatic climax of Jesus’s entire Messianic journey – and it’s shared with us by Luke in dramatic fashion! This apocalyptic sermon given by Jesus, leads directly into the story about Jesus’s own earthly end, his death. To use some Lenten symbolism: we’re talking about the death of the Passover Lamb which has deep symbolic meaning for what will happen to all of creation after the “terrible portents” take place… The Passover Lamb echoes the Jewish Passover, when God set the Hebrew people free from Egyptian captivity to be led to the promised land. And in our Christian tradition, Jesus, the Lamb-Who-Was-Slain, sets us free and leads us into ever-lasting life in the Kingdom of God.

That is to what Jesus then calls his disciples to witness to in the text saying, “this will give you an opportunity to testify.” When we are weathering our time’s “dreadful portents” we are called to testify to God’s promises of life, love, peace, forgiveness, service, and justice for all of creation. Because we know that the dreadful portents herald a new dawn when God’s Kingdom comes, the low will be lifted up, war will be no more, justice will reign, all will be fed and there will no longer be enemy nor outcast.

We know these things because we, along with Christians around the world, study God’s Word. In our study, we have gleaned understandings about what God’s fullness looks like, and we strive to live into God’s fullness now, we strive to testify to God’s fullness now even amidst the turmoil and all the “dreadful portents.”

And, perhaps our church is a place of small refuge for us… we study and come to know God’s Word together and so we have each other in this little slice of God’s Kingdom on earth, weathering the “dreadful portents” together.

And every generation has experienced some kind of instability, some kind of dreadful portent, some series of events that may have been interpreted as the end of time. It wasn’t the end of time, and so they carried on. Today, we live amidst that great Communion of Saints who have weathered their storms. Who have been faithful to the Gospel message that the Lamb-Who-Was-Slain sets us free to live life in love. An anchor that keeps us stable in the storms around us.

And today, we are blessed to be adding new members of this great Communion of Saints to our community here at St. Matthew. We have 10 saints here today who are committing to join us in our study of God’s Word and Promises, who will help us to testify to the world about Jesus’s saving grace by joining us in our praise and proclamation amidst the ”dreadful portents” of our time, and by serving alongside us and reaching out to our communities. Welcome! And thanks be to God for your presence among us!

And speaking of anchors, this sanctuary is actually built to resemble an upturned boat. The architectural idea is that the hull of the ship forms the roof. So, I wonder, can our building itself remind us that, with Christ our King, God’s Word, and each other we can see the turmoil churn through those windows, and yet our ship is firmly rooted in the promise from God that the Lamb-Who-Was-Slain sets us free and it is through that Lamb that God’s grace pours out abundantly and the Kingdom arrives.

The end of time as we know it cannot be truly known by you or by me, because it does not belong to us. But what does belong to us is the Gospel, the Word of God, and the Sacraments which anchors us as we weather the storms around us.

So let us cling together to what is ours to cling to and let us trust in Jesus Christ, our Lord who brings us forth into the fullness of God’s grace-filled promises.

Amen.

Rev. Ryan | November 16th, 2025