November 16, 2025
William G. Carter
When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful
stones and gifts dedicated to God, Jesus said, "As for these things that
you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all
will be thrown down." They asked him, "Teacher, when will this be,
and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?" And he said,
"Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and
say, 'I am he!' and, 'The time is near!' Do not go after them.
"When you hear of wars and
insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but
the end will not follow immediately." Then he said to them, "Nation
will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great
earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be
dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.
"But before all this occurs,
they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues
and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my
name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not
to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that
none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be
betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will
put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name.
But not a hair of your head will
perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”
A month ago, or so, I was flipping
through the TV channels and caught the end of an old film from 2004. The film
was called “National Treasure.” Remember it? Nicholas Gage plays a treasure
hunter. He and his team steal the Declaration of Independence out of the
archives, use it to find some clues, and discover an enormous treasure hidden
beneath Trinity Church in lower Manhattan.
It’s a bit far-fetched but satisfying. The treasure is found. The criminals are arrested. The treasure hunters are rewarded. The guy gets the girl. The sidekick gets a Ferrari. An ending like that is satisfying. So satisfying that I kicked back to see what was coming on next.
It was the sequel, “National Treasure 2 – Book of Secrets.” As that story got rolling, it was a few years later. The guy has broken up with the girl. The sidekick had his Ferrari impounded by the IRS. A good bit of the money is gone. It turns out that first ending was only a resting place. There was more to the story.
Isn’t that a lot more like real life?
It’s particularly true for church people like us. We enjoy a happy ending. We want a satisfying conclusion. We want everything to turn out well. Sometimes we will even skip the rough parts and wait for the resolution. Like the person who confessed they were going to skip out on the season of Lent. I asked, “Why are you telling me this?” She said, “You announced you were preaching a sermon series on the cross. I thought I would wait until Easter and the resurrection.” Turns out she also had a couple of weeks booked at a resort in Cabo, but I know what she was thinking.
We want the happy ending. Turn that frown upside down.
It’s the difference between the old mystery novels of Agatha Christie and P.D. James. Miss Christie spun those British tales with ingenuity. The wayward son returns home after many years. The governess blushes. The old man in the wheelchair has an unexpected heart attack. His cranky wife is the suspect. The visiting niece suspects it was more than a coronary event, especially since there was a trust fund involved. She investigates and discovers her hunch was correct. The governess is guilty of slipping Brazilian herbs in the old man’s tea. The niece discovers she isn’t actually a relative – which is good, because she has fallen in love with the wayward son. He proposes, she accepts, they inherit a seaside mansion on the coast of Devon, and they promptly become pregnant. Everything unrolls in a straight line.
That won’t do for P.D. James. Her British mysteries have far more grit. One tragedy occurs and it sets three more in motion. An answer emerges, a case is solved, but the damage created by the crimes still lingers. If there is a happy ending, it is provisional.
All this talking about treasure hunts and mystery novels provides a way into thinking about our text. Jesus says the end is coming. The mystery will be solved. Everything will work out – but not yet. There will be a lot more troubles to come. The meantime will be the meanest time.
The list of events that he gives is ominous. Jesus anticipates the Jerusalem Temple will be torn down. A charismatic leader will lead many astray. False prophets will predict the end of time. Wars will break out. Earthquakes will tumble down steeples. This will lead to famines, desolation, and widespread poverty. It’s a grim list. A lot of terrible things will happen. And every time something likes this happens, an anxious church might wave the Bible and cry, “See, he predicted this. It’s happening now. The end is near!”
What anxiety cannot perceive is that these terrible things are always happening. They always have. They always will. Jesus is not predicting these events. Rather he’s describing them. After all, in Luke’s story, Jesus says all of this within a week of being crucified. And yes – God will raise him from the dead. Easter does come – but Easter happens in a world that still creates a lot of damage. Earthquakes still happen. Good people starve. Solar flares appear in the sky and scare a lot of folks. Charismatic nut-jobs lead a lot of people astray. Has any of this changed? No, not at all. It’s always been true. It’s still true.
What has changed is that the troubles do not define us. The powers of death do not hold us captive. The dominion of evil has been cracked open. A world may be suffocating on its own lies, but that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as the truth. Jesus says now is the time to dig in. Now is the time to stick with what’s real, not give in to what’s false. Now is the time to breathe a sigh of relief. We belong to God, and not to the chaos. We belong to Christ who has been wounded yet now is full of life. We belong to the Holy Spirit, who gives us a Word to speak when we would otherwise be speechless.
The Bible word for this is “testimony.”
It is the remarkable, God-inspired ability to stand up when others are sitting
down. To reach out when others have pulled back in fear. To connect when others
are tempted to isolate.
To feed others when grocery prices are high and politicians have been playing games with our food programs. What do we do? We testify.
Thank you to all who built a mountain of food to share with the hungry and to the Deacons who took the food where hungry folks can obtain it. Thanks to all of you who fed hundreds of people from the Hickory Street neighborhood just a few weeks ago. Thank you to those who have now invited forty families to come to our drive-through food pantry once a month. We could have played it safe and stuck to ourselves. But you chose to testify that God wants his children to eat. It’s not about politics, but about the Kingdom of God. That’s what we are talking about.
The Day will come, the Blessed Day, when the Table is set before us even in the presence of our enemies. All of us shall feast at God’s banquet hall. That’s the End, the Final End. Before we get there, we have work to do.
Or there’s the reality that a lot of churches are running out of fuel. The old buildings are showing their age. Communities have changed. The numbers are declining. In the words of baseball great Yogi Berra, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” It is tempting to give in, give up, and go away.
But then we hear Jesus tell his gang, “Look at the big temple over there? See how big it is? Remember how it thought it was the only show in town? And it’s coming down.” He wasn’t telling that God is dead, but he was declaring the eternal God is not bound to our buildings, our structures, and our haphazard histories. God is greater than the temples that worship him. God is not bound by our circumstances.
That reminds me of First Presbyterian Church of Hazelton. In its heyday, the sanctuary seated about six hundred souls, most of them related to the management of the thriving coal industry around that city. That was then. These days, there are a dozen Presbyterians left who gather for worship. They meet in a small room downstairs.
To make ends meet, they rented the sanctuary to a Spanish-speaking congregation. Once upon a time, the community had a huge majority of English-speaking folks; these days, 75% of Hazelton speaks Spanish. The Spanish-speaking renters meet up in the sanctuary and filled the place. Yet the Presbyterians were on the hook for a monthly heat bill of $6000 and a lot of deferred maintenance. What to do? They were stuck.
Then the Holy Spirit spoke up, gave them some words, opened a way forward. The Presbyterians said to their guests, “Why don’t we sell you the building if you wouldn’t mind letting us worship downstairs?” A reasonable price was set, the deed transferred, and new friendships forged. Both Presbyterians and Pentecostals are testifying that all are welcome, that God is worshiped in many languages, and that, in the other famous words of Yogi Berra, “It’s not over until it’s over.”[1] And it ain’t over yet!
This is a broken world. It won’t be fixed until the final day. Jesus told his twelve, “There’s a lot of trouble that will still keep coming. There’s resistance to the work that I do. Don’t be surprised by that. But don’t be lazy. And don’t give up.”
A couple of weeks ago, some of you learned about Dietrich Bonhoeffer in one of our classes. He was a brilliant thinker, earned his Ph.D. at 21. A strong Lutheran Christian, he hated the Nazis and what was happening in his German homeland. When the Nazis were closing in on him and his family, he hid some of his theological writings. Some were stashed in the attic of his parents’ home. Others were buried in the backyard.
They were mostly essays on ethics. He was not quite ready to turn them into a book. If he had survived the prison where he was later held, this is probably the book he would have written. Here was the question he was writing about: what’s the right thing to do in an imperfect world? In an unfinished world? In a broken world? There will be the ultimate conclusion of God’s final salvation. But we live in the penultimate time, he wrote, the time before the end.
We can’t pretend all is well. And we can’t deny Christ has revealed what the Jewish prophets foretold: that all things will be made well someday. So, we live in between, living in the penultimate, not the ultimate. We keep our vision on what God will finish – yet we constantly judge “what is good and necessary” as we perceive the world as it is. We won’t get it right, but we can do our best to align our words, our actions, and our hopes with what we perceive God will be doing with this imperfect world.
In other words, before the happy ending, there is work to be done. There is truth to be told and people to be fed. There are children to raise in uncertain times and commitments to be kept. There are people to love and long-term colleagues to celebrate. There are bodies to care for, and stewardship of our bodies to consider after our days here are concluded. Each of us has a testimony to tell and a Gospel to share.
And the Risen Christ – the wounded Risen Christ – will be with us until the end. Even beyond the End. He is the One who says, “By your endurance, you will gain your souls.” There are a lot of words flying around out there, but this is the good news before the happy ending.
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
[1] There’s more to this remarkable
story. Read about it online at https://www.syntrinity.org/featured/a-century-later-first-hazletons-organ-goes-home-to-pasadena/
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