It is getting darker earlier.
I am sure you have noticed.
I want to begin there because the Church, in its strange wisdom, invites us to pay attention to the dark this time of year. The days shorten. The light fades. And our readings turn toward endings as we conclude the Church year.
It is tempting to rush past all that, but we are asked to sit with it. To look at the world as it is. To notice the parts of our lives that feel dim or uncertain. To trust that God is at work even in the dark.
In today’s reading from Luke, folks are admiring the Jewish Temple, the center of worship, culture, and identity. It is beautiful and strong, they say. The sort of place a person might believe would stand forever. Jesus looks at it and tells the truth they do not want to hear. It will fall. The world they know will shake. Hard things will come. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
But I don’t think Luke’s Jesus is trying to frighten anyone. He is joining them in the fears they already carry. He is saying, “Look, folks. I know you see how fragile life feels right now. I see it too. Let’s call it what it is. You are not imagining the unraveling. And you are not alone in it.”
Biblical scholars debate when Luke’s Gospel was written. The people who first heard today’s lesson, some scholars suggest, had already lived through their own kind of ending. Rome had destroyed the Temple some time before Luke put pen to paper. The persecutions mentioned in the reading were not predictions for them, but memories. Luke here is not erasing the loss, but noticing that such loss carries great meaning. Luke’s Jesus sees in the dark.
Isaiah speaks into a similar moment. Isaiah’s people have returned from exile to a life that does not look the way they hoped it would. Their society is deeply broken. The community is strained. They are trying to rebuild their worship and their lives again. Most days it feels like far too much. The world can look that way sometimes. Thin. Disordered. Heavy. The opposite of everything dreamed of.
Isaiah does not pretend it is otherwise. Yet into that tired world, the writer offers a vision that stirs the hope the people thought they had lost. Wolves and lambs eating together. Children who do not fear. A world renewed as a reminder of God’s character. God creates again. God surprises again. God brings life again. That God is not finished with them or with the world they inhabit. That another world is possible.
Of course, to make that new world a reality, Isaiah’s community both needs God to move in some profound way and they need to make different choices. And one of those different choices is choosing to see things differently. And to enact that difference.
Both Luke and Isaiah speak to people who wonder if good news is still possible. Both teach them to watch for God not only in triumph, not only when things go their way. In both cases, these communities are re-scripting or rewriting the world that’s been given to them and choosing instead a future oriented towards and by God.
A future that resists despair. That bears honest witness to the world around them. That embraces the in-betweenness of the moment and doesn’t try to escape it. They do not pretend everything is fine. They simply trust that God is at work even when it’s dark.
This is where these old texts meet us. We, too, know something about living in an in-between time.
It is getting darker outside.
And we wonder what to do about that.
The Epistle speaks into that wondering. The Thessalonians are also a community like those of Luke and Isaiah. They’re being persecuted. They’re anxious that the end is near. The lawlessness running rampant in their world. And some people in the community have become idle or disruptive because they think the end is around the corner. Maybe they think they have nothing to lose. But the writer encourages them to not quit on daily life. To not stop working. To not burden the community with their idleness and fussiness. Do the work, the writer says. Use that energy for others. Keep going. Be ready.
Our Collect today tells us how to endure. It asks God to help us hear Scripture, to read it, to hold it, to let it soak into us. That seems like an odd response for living at the end of time. How strange that a spiritual practice is thought of as a kind of hedge against a world in turmoil. And let me just say that it makes no earthly sense to read more Scripture while the world burns any more than fiddling does for Rome.
But of course that’s why it makes perfect sense if we want a future that plays by a different script than the one playing out right now. A future oriented to one where God breaks into the present in ways that build a new creation. Where Christ makes meaning of the hurt things in our lives. Where poets like Isaiah take over and lean into God’s imagined future. And where communities huddle together in the growing dark to find hope.
At the heart of surviving the end times is living with people who have survived the end times over and over again, like the ones in Scripture. And reconstituting those communities among ourselves. And practicing the future we’d like to see with each other – to join God’s dream for us. That is part of the good news for us. We do not face the dark alone. There is always an alternate ending available to us.
This is a way of setting our clocks back. Not to the glory days but to the times in our collective history where we know God has been at work even when it’s been dark.
It’s getting darker these days. The leaves and temperatures are falling. Signs of endings, all around us. You might say the earth has tilted on its axis. Our orientation has changed.
But of course in another hemisphere, at this very moment, the days are lengthening. Spring is erupting. And summer is on the way.
We feel the tilt of the world. We see what is ending. But God is already turning the earth. God is already leaning the world toward life again. Even in the dark. Even here at the end of time.
Can it be that from our endings,
new beginnings you create?
Life from death, and from our rendings,
realms of wholeness generate?
Take our fears, then, Lord,
and turn them into hopes for life anew:
Fading light and dying season
sing their Glorias to you.
~Words by Dean W. Nelson
Note: this sermon was shared at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina, based on lessons appointed for Proper 28, Year C.
