NEXT FROM LAST SUNDAY OF THE KINGDOM
17 November 2013
Readings:
Key Verses:
1 John 2:24b-25: “If that which you heard from the beginning remains in you, you also will remain in the Son, and in the Father. This is the promise which he promised us, the eternal life.”
Matt. 24:13-14: Jesus said, “He who endures to the end, the same will be saved. This Good News of the Kingdom will be preached in the whole world for a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.”
Reflection
So now we’re in the final stretch, the last two weeks of the church year. And as its draws to an end, we reflect on the “End Times”, a.k.a., “doomsday”. This latter name actually means “Judgment Day” (as it still does in Nordic languages, and cf. “to deem”), and many churches designate the Sunday falling between 20-26 November as “Judgment Sunday”. I’ve chosen to move the theme up one week, and reserve “Christ the King” (or “The Reign of Christ”) for the final week. The two Sundays share similar themes, but have different nuances that I want to observe and explore separately.
We’ve had a lot of “doom” in these past couple of years, haven’t we? Everyone remembers the end of the Mayan calendar on December 2012, but I bet you already forgot about that other doomsday prediction a year and a half before that. American Christian radio host Harold Camping declared that on May 21, 2011, Christ would at last return to judge the earth, and that the rapture would occur as St. Paul once foretold (1 Thes. 4:16). I confess that I had fun with that one! I googled paintings of the Last Judgment and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and tweeted them as: “BREAKING! Live photos from New Zealand #Doomsday!”. It was all in good and innocent fun.
But Judgment Day is no laughing matter. And before you think this is going to turn into another doomsday sermon, I ask you to stay with me for a moment. It’s a grave mistake for anyone at any point in history to think that s/he has “cracked the code”, and reached a definitive time, date, and even location of Christ’s Second Coming. To do so would be to know more than Christ himself, and it’s a part of our faith to profess that this is impossible.
Yet, the more I study Scripture, the more I find myself developing more respect for the idea of a “Judgment Day”. Jesus speaks for entire chapters in the gospels about “signs of the end of the age”: what will happen, who will betray whom, the wars, worldwide earthquakes, famines, calamities, the destruction of the heavenly bodies. This imagery figures so prominently in Jesus’ ministry, that we can be certain he actually preached this—especially because we know he wasn’t the only Roman-oppressed Jew doing so. And if this is so, then he’d probably sound more like Harold Camping than we’d like—and would we then make fun of him, or mock him on Twitter?
Obviously 2,000 years later, things didn’t turn out as they were preached or written. But apart from how this dissonance is usually resolved—namely that we should just live every day as our “Last Day”—I want to leave you with another thought. Both of today’s “doomsday” readings also include promises of salvation and of eternal life. We have the assurance from God-With-Us that God will indeed be with us—to save, redeem, and heal us. And if we’ve let God’s Word remain and abide in our hearts, then we will remain in God, we will live in God, we will have eternal life. Nothing can ever hold power over God’s infinite love and faithfulness towards us, and we will have these whatever “doom” may come.
Prayer of the Day
Lord God of all the ages,
the One who is, who was, and who is to come,
stir up within us a longing for your kingdom,
steady our hearts in time of trial,
and grant us patient endurance
until the sun of justice dawns.
We make our prayer through your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, forever and ever.
Amen.
—Collect #3 for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, p. 393 in the Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Hymn: “The King shall come when morning dawns”
(Words: Greek, anonymous; translated to English by John Brownlie in Hymns of the Russian Church, 1907; adapted by Joseph A. Soltero
Tune: ‘St. Stephen’, by William Jones, 1726-1800)
The King shall come when morning dawns,
And light triumphant breaks,
When beauty gilds the eastern hills,
And life to joy awakes.
Not as of old a little child,
To bear, and fight, and die,
But crowned with glory like the sun
That lights the morning sky.
O brighter than the rising morn,
When Christ, victorious, rose,
And left the lonesome place of death,
And conquered all his foes.
Still brighter than that glorious morn
Shall this fair morning be,
When Christ, our King, in beauty comes,
And we his face shall see.
The King shall come when morning dawns,
And earth’s dark night is past.
O haste the rising of that morn,
The day that e’er shall last.
And let the endless bliss begin,
By weary saints foretold,
When right shall triumph over wrong,
And truth shall be extolled.
The King shall come when morning dawns,
And light and beauty brings.
“Hail, Christ the Lord”, your people pray,
“Come quickly, King of kings!”
Amen.
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