Sermon ‘The day of the Lord’ Brentor Sunday 15 November 2020 2nd before Advent
Zephaniah 1v7, 12-18         (Psalm 90v1-8)         1 Thessalonians 5v1-11         Matthew 25v14-30

What deep and searching words we have heard in our readings this morning, words whose meaning may not necessarily be immediately obvious. So do not expect in this short reflection a full elucidation of what is called ‘end times prophecy’, a subject which in itself is a contentious issue, for that we need at least a few in depth bible studies.

But as we are now about to enter that wonderful Church season we call Advent, a season, maybe like me, that you find full of excitement and hope, we can see that our readings start to take on great relevance.

The Old Testament teams with prophecies of our Lord’s first advent at Bethlehem some two millennia ago. That time which Daniel prophesised so precisely of Jesus birth in 3BC; and to which Micah located the exact place of our Lord’s birth, and Isaiah to the nature of Jesus birth, to a virgin, the blessed virgin Mary, and there are so many other prophecies.

We love to hear those prophecies, and to acknowledge that they were fulfilled in Jesus, God’s chosen and anointed Messiah, born to reconcile us to our holy God and Father, if we will but put our faith and trust in the Lord Jesus.

But is there anything more? Yes, the Old Testament has even more prophecies relating to Jesus second advent, than to those referring to his first advent, and if they have all been fulfilled, then we must expect to see those referring to his second advent also fulfilled. Prophecies that relate to the return of our Lord to rule and reign upon earth, a time which we attest to in the mystery of our faith, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

However, these prophecies need very careful study to remove any confusion and contradictions that they may seem to contain. That is why we also need to read from our New Testament what Jesus himself, and the Apostles, taught concerning the second advent, and maybe that is to be a soon coming time.

The ‘day of the Lord’ that the prophet Zephaniah, a contemporary of Jeremiah,  mentioned in our reading, first refers to the immanent time of distress that was about to fall upon the people of Judah and Jerusalem. The king Nebuchadnezzar was soon to come and take the people into exile in Babylon, and to destroy the holy and magnificent Temple of Solomon in 586BC. This was the consequence, as had been told to the people by Moses a millennia before, if Israel practised idolatry and neglected the commandments and statutes they had promised to keep.
Perhaps we should ponder what may befall this our generation for its similar idolatry and rejection of God’s purposes for humanity at large.

But the prophet Zephaniah also mentions ‘a day of the Lord’ that will be experienced ‘by the whole earth and all its inhabitants’, which he describes as ‘a terrible end’. It is here that we have to take care not to confuse that ‘day’, that time, with the time mentioned by the apostle Paul which we read of in his letter to the Thessalonian Christians.

Paul says to them that they know that the ‘day of the Lord’ would come like ‘a thief in the night’, just as our Lord said it would in his discourse to the disciples on the Mount of Olives just before the last supper, which is recounted by Matthew in chapters 24 and 25. There Jesus makes it clear, as those early Christians knew and were expecting, and as we also should know, that he could return at any moment, like that thief in the night. That is why he gives us many warning that we should be ready, with our loins girded and our lamps lit, waiting for him our bridegroom, like the five wise virgins in the parable, who had trimmed their lamps.

Describing that time, still to come, the Lord said (Lk17v34), “I tell you, on that night two people will be in one bed: One will be taken and the other left”, but his coming could equally well be during the day for the Lord also says, “Two men will be in the field: one will be taken and the other left” (Mtt24v40).

We must guard against being ‘caught out’ through our complacency, mistreating our fellow servants, and hiding the talents that God has so graciously given to each one of us to serve him and our neighbours. Talents we are to use as we seek to build and hasten the coming of God’s kingdom in the here and now. Jesus expects us to be ready, ready to be ‘caught up’, snatched away in the twinkling of an eye, and so to be fore ever with him, our Lord.
Brothers and sisters I ask, are we ready and waiting for that time?

Paul says we are to encourage one another with these thoughts and promises, no wonder, especially when we look around at the many uncertainties that still remain for us all during this ongoing time of lockdown.

But Paul also goes on to give us another word of encouragement. God has not destined us, his born again children, for the prophesised ‘wrath to come’; no, we are to enjoy and rejoice in our salvation. We have the promise of life eternal with him, of transformed and glorious bodies to come in the new creation, and the presence with us now of God’s Holy and life-giving Spirit.

In psalm 32 we read, ‘Great tribulation remains for the wicked, but mercy embraces those who trust in the Lord’. Let us brothers and sisters be those who do indeed ‘trust in the Lord’.

Yes, there is a time of wrath, of great distress and tribulation that is coming upon the world, you can read about that in Saint John’s Revelation. It is a time that will proceed our Lord’s second advent, his second coming, and that ‘day of the Lord’ shall be unmistakable, it will be seen by all.

Jesus said that as the lightening is seen across the skies so will his coming be.
The angels at Jesus ascension assured the disciples that just as Jesus had gone up in the cloud, in like manner he would return to the Mount of Olives. No one shall miss that event, the time of which no one knows but God the Father.

Yes, Jesus will return. Jesus shall return to judge and to rule and reign in righteousness and peace, and you and I shall come with him and the entire heavenly host. That is our hope for a ‘new creation’, the hope for us who believe in what our Lord has promised; a new creation that will far exceed all our imaginations and expectations.

So brothers and sisters, as we look forward to this coming time of advent, may it be with great hope and expectation. We are to ‘keep awake’, for we are ‘children of light’ and are not to be as those who sleep. Let us ‘be sober’, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, together with the helmet of salvation. Let us then make every effort to support and encourage one another as we see that ‘day’ approaching.

Let us pray:
Heavenly Lord,
you long for the world’s salvation:
stir us from apathy,
restrain us from excess and revive in us new hope
as we see the dawning of the day of your coming,
that day when all creation will be healed,
we ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.         Amen

Sermon St Eustachius 9.45 Sunday 18 October 2020  Luke the Evangelist (19after Trinity)
Isaiah 35v3-6                        Psalm 147v1-7            2 Timothy 4v5-17                        Luke 10v1-9
May I speak in the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen

As this morning we celebrate the festival of Saint Luke the evangelist, I want to ask you, ‘what do you know about Luke’?
Perhaps your first answer is that he wrote the gospel that carries his name, and that he then went on to write the book of Acts. If that is so, and the early church fathers like Jerome and Eusebius thought it to be so, then Luke wrote over a quarter of the text of our New Testament. But what else comes to mind?

Perhaps that he travelled with Saint Paul on mission, and was described by Paul in Colossians (4v14) as a ‘physician’ and one of his faithful companions.
Many scholars believe Luke was indeed a Greek physician who lived in Antioch in what is now Turkey, and so was most likely a gentile Christian. Early church tradition says that Luke died at the age of 84 in Boeotia in the northeast of the gulf of Corinth in Greece, and that he may have been martyred by being hung from an olive tree. His tomb was then located at nearby Thebes, and his relics later transferred to Constantinople in AD 357.

Perhaps one surprising tradition is that Luke, besides being a physician and historian, was also a gifted artist, and the first icon writer. Especially in the Orthodox faith Luke is credited with icons of the virgin Mary and child, and the Saint Thomas Christians of India claim they still have one which Thomas took to India with him in the first century.

There is in the Armenian quarter of Old City of Jerusalem, the small and ancient Syrian Orthodox Church of Saint Mark, which claims to be the location of the last supper and the home of the evangelist Mark and his mother Mary. I have seen there, a painting on leather of Mary and the infant Jesus, supposedly done by Luke, but experts date it to much later Byzantine times.

We have read in our gospel that Jesus sent out seventy of his disciples to go on ahead of him to ‘heal the sick, and to proclaim that the kingdom of God has come near’. A very good message for our time as well. One of the early church fathers, Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis, thought that Luke was one of those seventy apostles, but that to my mind is pure speculation. Our reading however, does contains a number of important lessons for us this morning.

Jesus could see that even in the religious society of his time there was little substance and that ‘the harvest was plentiful’, but that there were few labourers to reap that harvest. That sounds more than ever like the times in which we live. How necessary it is for us to pray to the Lord for labourers for the harvest.
To pray that God will raise up more labourers in our time, like the evangelist of old, labourers from our churches who are called and anointed for mission. Let us give thanks for Fiona, who has recently joined us to do just that in the fields of growing young families as our town grows and develops.
Labourers who like John the Baptist and Jesus, will call people to repent, and as Peter said to the crowd at Pentecost, ‘repent, be baptised and filled with the Holy Spirit’.

Clearly a call to that work in not easy. It needs the leading of the Holy Spirit and the exercise of a strong faith. Those seventy were called to go out and rely on God’s provision as they were to take no purse or bag. There are many missionaries who today still live such a life of faith, relying upon God to provide for their needs through the generosity of God’s people. Maybe you know someone like that, and can encourage them in their essential and sacrificial work through your prayers and support.

When writing to Timothy, Paul could see that his active time of mission may have been drawing to a close, “I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come”. Since his ‘Damascus Road’ experience, Paul had given himself tirelessly to the service of the gospel, much of it at his own expense, he still worked at his trade as a tent maker. And what an epitaph he wrote for himself, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith”. May that be said for each of us when our time comes.

Our Christian pilgrimage, our walk with Jesus our Lord, may have been, may still be, like ‘a fight’. A fight against the distractions and deceits of the materialism of this transient world, this physical world in which we now live, those attractions that do seem so attractive to us but must not be allowed to become our idols. But what may not be so obvious, is the fight that we as Christians also face in the spiritual realm. Peter in his first epistle (1Peter 5v8) reminds us that we must, “Be sober, be watchful, for your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour”.
So then, do we live out our lives taking care to watch out for, and to recognise those attacks that come from the evil one, and how do we then respond? That fight is another good reason for us to constantly bare one another up in prayer.

Paul could also see that the Christian life had been like a race for him, a race for which there was to be a prize at the end, ‘a crown of righteousness’. Are we running in that same race as Paul? Are we living out our lives as ambassadors for our God, and trusting to hear those beautiful words from Jesus our master (Mtt 25v21), “Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.”
I for one, and I trust you also, do hope to hear those words, and to indeed enter into the inexpressible joy of our Lord. So how do we ensure that we run the particular race set before each one of us successfully?

Some words from the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews may help us to run a successful race (12v1-2).
“Therefore, let us lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race set before us”. Fortunately the verse does not end there, leaving it just up to us alone to find strength to run in the race. We are told to, “Look unto Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith”.
How essential it is for us as Christians to walk our daily lives aware of the presence of our Lord with us. Let us remember the words of psalm 73 (v23) “Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand”.

And I wonder if we feel like Paul that “we have kept the faith”? Maybe we have had some ‘wobbles’ along the way; maybe we have had times of great faith when we could say to the mountain, ‘be removed’ and it would have removed, but maybe we have also experienced some times of doubt.

Those may have been such times when we were driven to the Lord (Mark 9v24), like the man who came to Jesus with a son having a dumb spirit, and said to Jesus, “Lord help my unbelief”. And what was the Lord’s encouraging reply? “All things are possible to him who believes”. So let us hold firm our faith and trust in the Lord, He is always with us even when we doubt.

Paul experienced God’s constant presence as he walked his pilgrimage life, because he maintained his trust in the one true God, creator of the universe. The God whom we too have come to believe in and to trust, a God who knows each of the million, million, million stars by name, and yet knows you and me.

I trust that we all hope, and look forward with confidence to the promised coming time, the day when our God will come to judge this forlorn, cruel and unjust world in righteousness. Not to judge as we so often do with only half the truth before us, but as Isaiah says (Is 11v3-4), “He-Jesus- shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth”. As Abraham said, “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right” (Gen 18v25).

It will be a time when God will heal the brokenhearted, and bind up all their wounds. A time when God will lift up the poor, open the eyes of the blind, and the lame shall certainly leap for joy, as the salvation of God is fully realised. I hope the thought of that time sets your pulse racing, it certainly does mine.
Let us then make sure this morning, that as we come together around the table of our Lord, to remember him in the breaking of the bread, we also allow Jesus, as he did with those two disciples at Emmaus on the first Easter day, to ‘make Himself known’, to reveal himself afresh, when we break the bread together. Let us look to be strengthened with this spiritual food, the bread of life, and may we also join with Paul, the Holy Spirit and the bride in crying ‘come’, for like them we ‘long for his appearing’.

So to return to Luke, like all the four evangelists, they each have a special symbol, and in Luke’s case what is it? Yes, it is that of a winged Ox or bull. Remembering the agrarian culture of New Testament times, that symbol would have been associated with sacrifice, service and strength. So for us as Christians it reminds us that the call to follow Jesus, our Lord and master, is a call that leads us into a life of sacrifice and service, only made possible through the strength of God’s indwelling Holy Spirit.

Let us pray;         the shorter collect for this 19th Sunday after Trinity:-
Faithful Lord, whose steadfast love never ceases
and whose mercies never come to an end:
grant us the grace to trust you
and to receive the gifts of your love,
new every morning, in Jesus Christ our Lord.   Amen