Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost: November 16, 2025 | The Rev. Nat Johnson
Readings: Isaiah 65:17-25 | Canticle 9 | 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 | Luke 21:5-19
Karl Barth, a prominent 20th-century theologian who wrote at the height of Nazi nationalism and counted himself part of the “confessing church” alongside others like Deitrich Boenhoffer, is often credited with saying that the people of God ought not consider themselves a religious society concerned only with certain themes, but should remember that they are in the world and therefore need both the Bible and the Newspaper. For Barth, Scripture provides the lens through which we interpret the circumstances of our world and our lives and guides us in our discernment of how to live faithfully amidst the calamities of this world. This is, admittedly, much easier when we read passages that speak about loving one another and one’s neighbor than it is when we encounter the doomsday readings like we heard this morning.
In our Gospel reading, Jesus’ disciples admire the beauty of the temple and comment on its grandeur only to be met with Jesus’ prediction of its destruction and the coming calamities the nascent church would face. “Wars and insurrections… nation rising against nation, kingdoms against kingdoms… earthquakes, famines, and plagues…” What Jesus names here, recorded in Luke’s Gospel, reads an awful lot like the headlines of our newspapers reporting on the global affairs of our contemporary moment. Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, civil war in Sudan, heightened political and military tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela, among many other “wars and insurrections,” all threaten global and regional stability. Epidemics of disease and famine effect millions of people around the world. Earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, wildfires, and other natural disasters are displacing millions worldwide. Random acts of violence and terrorism destroy communities and leave a trail of brokenness, confusion, and despair in their wake.
Some see in these calamities proof of God’s judgment. I suspect that many of us here can think of times in our recent past when disasters like 9/11, hurricane Katrina, the mass murder at Pulse Night Club, and many others were proclaimed to be proof of God’s judgment on “immoral” and “alternative lifestyles.” Others see in these kinds of events signs that Christ’s return is imminent and offer up doomsday prophecies that condemn all but a select few to damnation. Still others see these calamities as a way to sow fear and unrest as a means to proclaim themselves saviors who alone have the power and intellect and intuition to provide a path forward. I’m fairly certain that this is not what Karl Barth meant when he suggested we need to read the newspaper through the lens of Scripture.
So how might we do this interpretative dance more faithfully, in a way that opens us up to the hope and invitation of the gospel? With passages like we read this morning, this may seem a daunting task. A little bit of contextualizing might help us here. Most biblical scholars agree that Luke wrote his gospel years after the destruction of the Temple that Jesus spoke about. Its beauty and splendor would have already been reduced to rubble and the persecutions Jesus named were already underway. Luke writes about these in his Acts of the Apostles where we learn about Peter and John being arrested for preaching about Jesus after healing a crippled man. After spending a night in jail, they were brought before the religious council to defend themselves, at which point Luke tells us that Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit and emboldened to give testimony about Jesus.
Later, the apostles were arrested again and miraculously escaped prison. The next day, temple police found them and brought them before the council. Again, we’re told that the Holy Spirit empowered them to bear witness to the Gospel. Then, Stephen, the first recorded martyr of the Christian faith, was arrested on false charges and when he was asked to give an account of himself, we find out once again that he was filled with the Holy Spirit and given the words and wisdom he needed to speak truth to power. When we hear the gospel reading this morning in this context, it becomes a little easier to see the hope and invitation that it offers. When Jesus warned his listeners about the hardships coming their way, he insisted that it would be in these very circumstances that they would be given an opportunity to testify – to bear witness to a hope and certainty about the way things are and will be, founded not on the permanence and stability of social, political, or religious institutions, but on the permanence and stability of God’s presence and grace.
We learn from the witness of the apostles recorded in the book of Acts, the martyrs of the early church, and so many of the saints who have gone before us, that our calling to testify is not about painting a utopian picture of social progress. From our vantage point in history, it is easy to observe how applicable Jesus’ words are to every age that has come before us. No generation to date has been exempt from wars, insurrections, natural disasters, famine or disease, and there is no reason to think that any generation after us will be exempt from the same. This observation should temper any temptation toward a theology that defines hope in utopian terms as if we were moving toward some pie-in-the-sky future that we somehow build or bring about on our own. In this sense, hope is not at all about what we can accomplish but instead is about what God will accomplish.
Our hope is in the God who is bringing to fruition the world that is to come and who invites us to embody that hope in the particular patterns and practices of our lives, patterns and practices that reject and disrupt the status quo of our social, political, and even religious systems. It is, to be sure, a hope that looks beyond our present moment, but it is not a hope that ignores the here and the now. This kind of hope is an invitation to fearless endurance in the face of the suffering that results from so much of the destructive forces that Jesus names. It is embodied in the ways we pattern our common life together, in the ways we seek to fight against injustice, in the ways we break down barriers of social norms that harm, marginalize, and oppress.
This invitation to fearless endurance is not an invitation to pretend that suffering is absent from our lives or our world. Suffering is real, it is present, it should be named, especially when it is the result of oppressive and violent systems. Theologian Mary Shawn Copeland, in an essay titled ‘Wading Through Many Sorrows,’ says this: “Suffering always means pain, disruption, separation, and incompleteness…It can render us powerless and mute, push us to the borders of hopelessness and despair.” I’m certain that Jesus was well aware of what suffering means. And yet, he invites us to embody power, to raise our voices in times of destruction, to have the audacity to be courageous in the face of despair, to be witnesses to the truth in systems of corruption.
That is our invitation.
What, then, is the promise in our gospel passage? I want to suggest two things. The first, is that our witness is empowered by God’s presence in our lives. This is what marks us as a people of hope! It is our capacity to stand up, to raise our heads and to bear witness to a kind of life that rejects the false securities and certainties of this world; a kind of life that claims that the suffering, violence and injustice so prevalent around us will not have the last word. That, indeed, as the prophet Isaiah proclaims, God is making a new creation in which antagonism, threat, and violence have no place.
We are not left to our own devices to stand against the destructive forces of the world. We do not have to just grit our teeth and bear the pain, disruption, separation, and incompleteness that characterizes suffering, nor do we need to just dig down deep to find the strength to get through it. The patterns and practices that form us as the people of God are the means through which God transforms and strengthens us to live lives worthy of the gospel, that infuse in us the words and wisdom of the Christ who redeems us, and that give us the audacity to fearlessly endure the calamities of our day.
The second promise I want to name requires us to do one more small contextual analysis. Our gospel passage is found in a unit that does not end where our reading today did, but goes on to speak about the coming of the Son of Man. The One who promises to empower our endurance and quiet our fears is the same One who promises to return and to bring the redemption he offers us to fruition. We proclaim this mystery of faith in various ways every time we gather around this altar – we eat and drink in anticipation of a heavenly banquet where we will experience the abundance of God’s love and the fullness of the reconciliation that God offers us in Jesus Christ. Our eucharistic prayer is a corporate prayer, a testimony to the God we serve, a statement of our belief that the One who created heaven and earth, who took on human flesh to show us the depths of love, who offers us freedom from sin and death, is the same God who we profess will come again in glory to bring about a new heaven and new earth.
These promises fuel our hope, they compel us to lean into a future characterized not by the modern myth of progress but by the faithfulness of the God who creates, redeems, and sustains. These promises enable us to accept the invitation of Christ to show forth God’s praise – not only with our lips but in our lives. These promises remind us that the Holy Spirit empowers us and strengthens us to take what we profess in this space and embody the gospel in a world desperate for good news. So let us be bold as we take the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other – let’s not give in the doom and gloom of the headlines, but seek instead where God is calling us to bear witness, to tell our stories of hope and redemption, and to live fearlessly into the resurrection life that God offers us in Jesus Christ. Amen.