"By your Endurance" given Nov. 13, 2016

          In this morning’s Gospel Reading, Jesus and the disciples are taking some time to pray at the Temple in Jerusalem. This was actually the Third Temple to stand on Mount Zion. The Temple of Solomon was destroyed in 587 BCE by the Babylonians. Nor was it the rebuilt, Second Temple of Ezra and Nehemiah a generation later. That Temple was destroyed in the period between the Testaments by the armies of the Hellenistic Empire.

This Temple was considered one of the wonders of the ancient world. It had been built by Herod Agrippa in order to win the hearts and minds of his people after the Romans had installed him as puppet king. Herod had been raised in the Imperial Rome of Augustus and was used to thinking and building on a grandiose scale. Even so, Herod's Temple was quite an architectural achievement.

It was intended to be the largest, most impressive building in Jerusalem—

and possibly the entire Middle East. Some of the blocks from that Temple have been unearthed. A single block was a large as a modern mobile home.

So it’s not surprising that while Jesus and his companions were trying to worship, some rubbernecking pilgrim oohed and ahhed out loud about the grandeur of the structure and started singing a chorus of “How lovely are Thy dwellings.” Hearing someone wasting their worship on a pile of bricks and mortar instead of offering it to God, Jesus whirled around.

          “One day soon there won’t be a stone left standing upon a stone!” He cried out. “All this will be torn down.” And of course, Jesus was right. The Third Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. All that is left of it is the Western or “Wailing Wall” – the most holy site in modern Judaism. It’s not known if that was an outer wall, or an inner wall of the Holy of holies.
             Then following His dire prediction, Jesus offered words of encouragement

for his followers about the times of persecution and struggle ahead.

“Don’t follow any of those who are going to come after me, claiming in my name that the end is near, claiming to be me. Don’t fear violence or natural disaster. Don’t be afraid of persecution and trouble and trials for your faith. Don’t be discouraged by betrayals, or hatred, or even by the threat of death.

All of these things may happen to you. Indeed, they probably will. But endure. Persevere. Whatever may happen to your body—by your faithful endurance you will gain your souls.”

        Good Advice. Folks claiming to be the Second coming of Jesus have been with us since shortly after the end of His First Coming. A couple of years ago, I discovered a website on the Internet by someone who claims to be Christ returned. She’s a fifty-some year old formerly homeless woman and mental patient. I didn’t take time to read them in detail, but she has pages of long quotes from the Bible cited to prove her authenticity.

       Predictions and beliefs about the end of the world have also had a long history in Bible thinking. And they’ve always had a strong appeal for certain believers. The truth is though, that some main-line Protestants haven’t always been too comfortable with that aspect of our faith. We’ve tended to speak more about the coming of God’s Realm in terms of Peace and Justice for all than about the Four Horsemen and the Anti-Christ.

       But many Christians do hold fast to a belief in an eminent End-time. Some of you have read some of the “Left Behind” books. They are a series of popular novels seemingly about the Rapture and the Apocalypse.

Maybe you don’t know the difference between the two. Over the past century or so, a rather elaborate belief-system has crept into thinking about the Apocalypse. It was originally called “Milleniumism” and was conceived, systematized, and popularized by a British Evangelist named Darby in the late 1800s. It’s a relatively modern addition to traditional End-time belief. It’s based around a rather complicated series of stitched-together passages from the Book of Revelation; the second half of the Book of Daniel; Matthew 23 & 24 and various passages from Paul’s Epistles.

The basic idea of the “Rapture” is that that one day, very soon, when Jesus returns to earth, before he does anything else, he’ll take his faithful—living and dead straight up to heaven. This will allow them to avoid the Great Tribulation of wars and natural disasters that will follow. (For more details, consult your favorite televangelist.)

The Book of Revelation does not mention the Rapture. It teaches that at the end of the Tribulation, the armies of Gog and Magog—China, Russia, Iran, Nazi Germany, the United Nations, Al Quada. ISIS—pick your evil empire—will unite under the Anti-Christ, and attack the defenseless, friendless state of Israel.

(By the way, that is why so many prominent evangelicals are so pro-Israel. It's not that they're so ecumenical, or in love with the Jewish people, or with Zionism. No, they believe the state of Israel has to exist so the prophecies of Revelation come to pass and Israel is almost destroyed. With friends like that, the Jewish people don't need any enemies.)

Just when that war seems to be lost, the God of Hosts will return to lead an army of angels and saints who will defeat the forces of evil at the battle of Armageddon. (In case you’ve ever wondered, that’s a strategically placed plateau in the Judean wilderness where countless battles have been waged over the centuries.)

Then the surviving Jewish people will at last acknowledge Jesus Christ as their Messiah, and Christ will establish an earthly reign of righteousness that will last for a thousand years. At the end of that Millennium, the Lord will separate the saved from the lost. He will grant the saved ever-lasting dominion over the new heavens and new earth, Then He will cast Satan and the Lost into the Lake of Fire.
One of the good things about Apocalyptic Christianity is that it makes our faith,

the Bible, current events, international politics, history and the world in general sensible—even meaningful. Everything falls into place, as one Commentator puts it, “like the clink of a lug nut on an axle bolt”. And it automatically gives the believer a sense of identity. You’re not only a “Bible-believing Christian”, you are also a “Pre-Mill” or a “Post-Mill”.

           As Garrison Keillor illustrates in his stories and writings, it’s kind of fun to argue about and figure out the various meanings of the rather arcane and obscure images found in the Book of Revelation. Many a cold winter night in Lake Woebegone has been whiled away in not-always-so-friendly Theological dispute about the identity of the Anti-Christ, or the meaning of the Seven Seals. And there’s a sort of delicious anticipation in knowing what literal hell all those pagans and sinners and backsliders and liberals are going to catch when Jesus comes back.

           And that, I suspect, is the really great thing about belief in the Rapture. The sense of certainty, the unshakable assumption that what you believe is going to spare you even the sting of death when the Lord returns must be terrific! Have you ever seen one of those bumper stickers that reads “Beware, in case of Rapture this car will be driverless”.?

It might seem to some to be a bit presumptuous to assume you are automatically already saved—but hey, who knows?

            In the last couple of decades in the last Century I met a lot of folks thought that the long-awaited end of the world, was going to come on New Years Eve 2000. Or maybe Christmas Eve—or perhaps 2001—depending upon if God was counting from the year one or the year zero.

The calendar we use is based on Jesus being born in the year one. But there are some historians who think that the medieval monks who invented it, may have goofed up the dating of our years by as much as 3 years, plus or minus. Other Bible scholars think that Jesus may have actually been born as early as 30 BCE or as late as the year 30 CE.

             Some years ago I received a book in the mail. The book was unsolicited and absolutely free. The author apparently printed it up at his own expense and mailed it to pastors all over the country. It uses a great deal of convoluted deciphering of Biblical passages to calculate the exact time and date of the Lord’s return. That’s the title of it, in fact.; The Day and Hour Jesus Will Return.

This guy has it all figured out. According to him the Rapture will occur on the first day of the seventh month of the Jewish calendar. That’s the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah—the Feast of Trumpets. That usually falls in late September or October. And since in Jewish belief a day begins at sunset—we also know that the Rapture will come around 6 PM—presumably that’s Jerusalem time.

And it so happens that I have a tract somewhere in my office that goes one step further and tells authoritatively what year! Whoever wrote this tract used the same sort of logic as the author of the book and supplemented it with information gained from what he calls “many visions and dreams” that God has been sending to various people around the world. All this allows us to state positively and authoritatively that the Rapture is going to come on....drum roll please...October 28, 1992. (Pause)

           Well whenever the Rapture comes, one thing is for sure. We’ll all be spared the sting of death. We’re all righteous here. And we all believe the correct dogma. Don’t we?

So we’ll all be among the saints, floating up in the air, looking down with pious pity and perhaps more than a little guilty pleasure in the plight of those sinners and theologically ignorant, would–be Christians who have to stay on this earth and slog it out through the Tribulation and the Battle of Armageddon. Won’t we?

       Now I hope that you don’t think I’m taking Apocalyptic faith lightly. I respect the beliefs of those who believe that the End-time is near. You and I pray for the coming of Christ's Earthly Commonwealth every time we pray the Lord's Prayer. “Thy Kingdom come, thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”
            I just don’t happen to think that there’s any evidence that the End is necessarily any closer today than it was a thousand years ago. Things are bad now—all over. Things were bad way back then. The difference is that now days we have Newspapers and Fox News and the Internet telling us how bad things are. I also don’t happen to think that belief in the Rapture itself is Biblical—but the rest of what I’ve described certainly is.

Personally, I’d love to have the rock-solid certainty that many who believe in the immanent End-time seem to have. I’d like to not have to struggle with tough personal decisions. I’d like nothing better than to know without question that I’m always doing exactly what Jesus would want me to do all the time in my life. As a pastor, I’d like to know that I am always teaching and preaching the absolute and unalterable TRUTH.

As a human being, I’d like to know, beyond question, that my wife and family and friends and loved ones and you all as well, are indeed all going to rise up in the sky to Heaven when Jesus comes back. I’d love to be able to base my life around that sort of unshakable-to-the core conviction.

But the truth is, I don’t have that sort of certainty. Like all of you, I suspect, I must struggle from time to time, with issues like life and suffering and death and tragedy.

Like all of you, I must wrestle, from time to time, with the occasional slippery question of

faith and ethics. Like you, I must deal with occasional doubts, with unanswered questions, with temptations, with desert times in my spiritual life. Like many of you I struggle to know God’s will for my life—even as I approach my seventh decade a year from now, I'm still not quite sure I've figured out God's Will for me.

            But above all, like many of you, I have to deal with the glaring contradiction between my belief that God is good, and my awareness of all the evil and pain and suffering in this broken, blood-soaked, tear-drenched world. Like you, I sometimes wonder, “what’s the point”? F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1936 that,

          “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

        So though I sometimes do think that things are hopeless, I continue to try to make them otherwise. So although I have no absolute certainty, I continue to live my life grounded in fragile hope. So although I profess the Christian faith, my faith must have

room in it for a certain degree of mystery and a few unanswered questions and even the occasional doubt—just to keep it alive.

My hope of personal salvation is not based on passing a Theology 101 exam given by St. Peter in front of the “Pearly Gates.” Nor is that hope based upon my belief in correct doctrine, or any degree of righteousness, or any amount of accomplishment that I can achieve upon this earth. Like the title character in “Schindler’s List”, I doubt that I could ever do enough, save enough, help enough, even believe enough. Certainly not enough to justify the Cosmic Christ personally beaming me up on a cloud straight to Heaven at the end of the world.

            My hope, your hope, the world’s last and best hope, it seems to me, lies in this man Jesus and the sacrifice that he made for the world upon the cross.

. “For God so loved the world, that God gave the only begotten Son that whomever believes in him, should not perish, but have eternal life.”

Frankly, I don’t know from Raptures or Apocalypses, or Horsemen, or Tribulations.

I don’t know from dates. Jesus admitted that even He didn’t know the day and hour—only the Creator knows. (Pause)

So why should you and I worry? Why should we obsess over it—much less even concern ourselves about it? Do we think we can outguess God?

After all, what would you do if you really did know the hour and date of the Rapture? Most people would probably decide to party hearty until about a week before, then plan to get saved, give all their earthly possessions to charity and proceed to run around like a crazy person doing good works for a week trying to save their soul. Knowing God’s sense of irony, anyone who tried it would probably drop dead of a massive heart attack at a massage parlor in Las Vegas the day before their planned conversion.

I used to have a bumper sticker on my office door that read, “Jesus is coming—look busy”. Friends, if you and I have to look busy—it’s already too late. Instead, let us simply resolve to live our lives as best we can, basing them and our hope around the Lord’s promises in this morning’s Gospel. Let us live each and every day as if the Judgment Day was tomorrow.

“Nation will rise up against nation, there will be earthquakes, and in various places, famines and plagues, and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven…

You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair on your head shall perish.

By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

                Let us trust the Lord of History to bring History to a close in God’s own good time.

And in the meantime, let us faithfully endure. Let us strive to give of our energies and time and prayers and of our material blessings to the cause of Christ. Let us share our faith and tell of the blessings we have received to all who will listen. And let us strive to live and love together in peace and in faithfulness, enduring and working to make this world a better and more blessed place simply because you and I have been here and believed. Amen.