Don't Feed the Fears - Luke 21:5-19

This sermon is brought to you by the letters “A” for apocalypse and “T” for terrifying. For those of you who, on your way to church this morning, thought that this would be a good day to hear about the end times, today is your day. We’ve got a temple falling and wars, earthquakes, famines and dreadful portents from heaven. You can thank the lectionary. But if, like me, you don’t have much bandwidth right now for biblical stressors, I’ve got you covered. We can certainly explore the Gospel text and put the apocalyptic imagery in historical context, but if you only take one thing away from this sermon, I offer the following image. You know those signs in national parks with a picture of a bear that say, “Please don’t feed the bears”? Picture that, but change the B to an F “Please don’t feed the fears.” Today’s apocalypse is about how not to feed our fears.

Jesus is at the Temple in Jerusalem. People are amazed at its beauty. As they are talking about all the beautiful stones, to everyone’s shock, Jesus predicts its destruction: “not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” The crowd presses him about when this will happen, perhaps so they can prepare - emotionally or spiritually, and maybe financially, in case they’re going to need a building committee for a master plan and a capital campaign. What’s really interesting historically speaking is that Luke’s gospel was written some ten or twenty years after the Romans destroyed the Temple. Which means that Jesus is successfully predicting the future here. His message sounds like a correct prophesy, but it’s also a message to comfort and hope to encourage those on the other side of the disaster. On the other side of any disaster, really.

There are a few more terrifying details to mention before we get to the hope and the comfort. Jesus adds that other awful things are going to happen – there will be false prophets, wars and insurrections, nations rising against nations, natural disasters, persecutions, even betrayals by friends and family. It will look like the end times. Scholars suggest that Jesus is describing not a particular future here, but how the world works in general. There are disasters, which we see every time we turn on the news. When you hear of these things, Jesus says, “do not be terrified.” Which, you’ll recall, is a pretty standard move for him. He has a tendency to offer a word of peace in rough times. When his friends are scared in a storm or in a locked room, or whenever the people around him are worried about the direction things seem to be going, peace be with you, he says. Do not be terrified. Please do not feed the fears.

That is not his only message. He also says that whatever cataclysmic events are coming will provide the opportunity to testify. This is an odd thing to say. We usually think of testifying as something we do when a prayer has been answered or a life saved in some way. We don’t think of everything falling apart as the time for testimony. Yet Jesus is clear that that is precisely when to give an account of our faith.

And what is our faith? In the words of the letter to the Hebrews, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (11:1). As followers of Jesus, we are called to hope in God’s abiding presence and love, to hope in resurrected life, to have hope for the lost and the least, and to hope in the coming kingdom of heaven and our citizenship there. Jesus calls us to testify to our hope. When everything is falling apart, how will you tell the story of your hope in something greater than what we see in this present time? Like those who lose their Temple, we are sometimes shaken by momentous events, division, and at times, impending disaster. The world needs our hope no matter what is happening. That’s the call that comes from any good biblical apocalypse. They are not meant to scare us, but to make us bold in our hope.

There is a gift in this kind of apocalyptic thinking, according to the late preacher Fred Craddock. He said it this way: “Such thinking should keep our souls athletically trim, free of the weight of the excessive and useless. Such thinking should aid us in keeping gains and losses in perspective. Such thinking should chase away the demons… and cheer us with the news not only that today is a gift of God but also that in some tomorrow we will stand in the presence of the Son of man.” Hope in the bigger picture is always more powerful than fear in the present moment.

So if, by chance, you ever get anxious about the future, today’s gospel is for you. If you ever get stuck in a kind of worry loop about your own life, or about our community, or nation or planet, Jesus’ message is for you. His divine word of peace has the power to cut through our spinning thoughts and remind us of God’s faithful presence with us. And God waits for our response. Will we be faithful in return? Will we testify to our hope? Things can and do get rough. Sometimes there is an unplanned encounter with a hungry bear in a national park, and sometimes even grand temples fall. Whenever disaster strikes, or whenever we worry that it will, the false god of fear shows up and wants our allegiance. Fear wants to be fed, and it wants to be in charge. But we get to choose. The prophet Joshua once spoke to Israel with these words: “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve… as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15). The choice is ours, to serve our fear or to serve a steadfast God. From time to time, an apocalypse is a powerfully good reminder not to feed the fears.