Keep Awake

Biblical Text: Mark 13:24-37

The last Sunday of the Church Year. The gospel reading was the second half of Jesus’ Apocalypse. It is in this part that I think Jesus is doing two things. First he is more fully answering the disciples two questions. After shocking them with the revelation that the temple would be destroyed, the disciples asked two questions. 1) When and 2) What are the signs? There is a base sense that everything Jesus says can be taken as answers to those questions. The second thing that Jesus is doing is letting that destruction of the Temple – the End of A World – stand in for the End of The World. And the reality that Jesus is revealing is that we all meet the End of A world. This sermon expands on that. Those experiences he calls the tribulation. “But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened… (Mk. 13:24 ESV).” After the tribulation comes the end. We ask for the signs in the hope of skipping or mitigating the tribulation. But that isn’t what it is for. The tribulation is there so we might learn to trust God and his faithfulness. The sermon also expands on that. Instead, how do we live in such times? Jesus ends his apocalypse with the parable. “A man is going on a journey, and he leaves his servants in charge of the house, each to his own work…”. How do we live? We do the work of the house. When Jesus says stay awake, that is what he means. The sermon also expands on this, that we might stay awake.

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The Alpha and the Omega

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Biblical Text: Revelation 7:2-17

In the Church Year the Day was All Saints (Observed). What is a saint is a little bit different from one tradition to the next. The Roman Catholic tradition a saint is only someone that the Papacy has recognized as “experiencing the beatific vision” (i.e. we know they are with God and not in Purgatory or Hell because reasons.) So All Saints becomes a catch-all feast of the recognized saints whose own day has not been celebrated. No other tradition has a formal recognition process. The Orthodox, Saints are first the martyrs, and then those recognized by public acclimation and what used to be called “the cult of the saints.” Protestants, including Lutherans here, use the term closer to how it is used in the bible meaning all the faithful. One of Luther’s slogans is simul justus et peccator, at the same time saint and sinner. That really describes us – the Church in Warfare. Or following the text of the day, the church in the midst of the great tribulation. The church at rest no longer has that problem with sin. What All Saints becomes in the Lutheran tradition is a celebration or remembrance first of those who have recently died in the faith but also of the great cloud of witnesses in general.

This sermon and the text from Revelation is a look at that great cloud from two directions: the beginning and the end – the alpha and the omega. John’s vision is a vision of All Israel, all believers in all times and all places. The first part is the sealing by God of his own before time. The last part is the outcome of that sealing at the end of the age. The time in between is the tribulation, the time under the cross. What Revelation does so well is comfort. Yes, we are in the tribulation. But you have been sealed by God in the blood of Christ, and he will bring you through it.

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Christ the King

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Biblical Text: Mark 13:14-23, 24-37

The day on the church Calendar is the last Sunday of the Church Year, sometimes called Christ the King. The sermon completes our reading through Jesus’ last things sermon from Mark 13. You might call it the distinction between the end of a world, a time of tribulation, and the end of the world, the deliverance of Christ the King. The first of those we should be able to recognize by the “sign of the fig tree.” The last of those, we do not know, but we await that day. For that day is the day the Kingdom comes in its fullness. The Day of our deliverance.

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