Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost: November 9, 2025 | The Rev. McKenzi Roberson

22nd Sunday After Pentecost: November 9, 2025

Haggai 1:15b-2:9 | Psalm 98 | 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17 | Luke 20:27-38

The Rev. McKenzi Roberson

Christians have always been story tellers. Of course we have, we have an incredible story to tell! God became human. What a premise. And this God lived a fully human life, bringing God-sanctioned dignity to all that we experience. Then this God died. What grief and sorrow. What despair. But then! In the denouement to end them all, through dying this God has defeated death and been resurrected, opening the door to new life and the fullness of love and justice and liberation.

 It’s a story Christians tell over and over again. We tell it in the eucharist. Rev. Nat and I tell reprisals of it standing here week after week. We tell it, to varying degrees of efficacy, in movies and novels and poems and paintings and plays.

 And across Christian history, from the very beginning in fact, we have shown that we really, really love to tell the story of The End Times (in case you can’t tell from my tone, the words “The End Times” are all capitalized. It’s a big deal.)

 It makes sense that we see this emphasis in the writings we have canonized in our scriptures. The period in which our scriptures were being written was concurrent with a period that is known by historians as Second Temple Judaism. There were some stories coming out of that period of Jewish thinking. I wish I could fly in a few of my seminary colleagues to teach classes on this stuff because some of it is bonkers. Lots of talk about angels mingling with humans creating beings which are basically demigods. Apocalyptic end times stories that fully capture the imagination.

 And of course this sort of story telling would appeal to Jewish and Gentile Christians. They had been pretty sure Jesus was going to come back within their lifetime. There was a real sense that they were living at the end of time, that the reign of God was just around the corner. And, they were living in a time of persecution. Cracks were beginning to show in the power of the empire, and political leaders who styled themselves as divine were looking for scapegoats, none of whom were more convenient than minority groups. (Funny how some people think history has nothing to say to the present.)

 In the way of persecuted groups who must speak truth to power in plausibly deniable ways, we see the characters of the Roman Empire turned into mythological characters. The concrete, active forces of evil at work in the world become these mythical beings who possess fearsome power but ultimately do not win. Speaking of the lawless one, like we heard this morning, or the antichrist in other similar readings, became a way to name the pain of the current time and the faith that things will not always be so awful. There is one final act yet to come, so don’t give up yet. Death will lose. Evil and injustice will not have the final say.

 It can be easy, however, especially in recent centuries, to focus so much on this part of the story that we lose the plot. By focusing our attention on the antichrist rather than Christ, we can blind ourselves to the ways we hold power and privilege that allow us to function in ways that further the work of injustice.

 We can also use a focus on the defeat of the lawless one as a way to cope with our anxiety about the future. Putting our attention towards figuring out who might be an antichrist, or carefully crunching the numbers on when Christ might return to overthrow the lawless one can give us a sense of control over an uncertain future. We can find ourselves taking comfort in having access to information about what is happening behind the scenes. We can start to put our faith in the wrong part of the story. We can begin to tell stories that are more about our insight into how things will end rather than about the God who will come at the end of all things to lift up the lowly and fill the hungry good things.

 The idea of a mythical being that represents evil can be helpful in framing how we think about justice and the power of death, but we cannot focus so much on the power of evil that we lose sight of the main story: God’s redeeming work in the world. Evil is real and something we must face, but giving it top billing or concentrating on figuring out the whens and hows of its defeat can cause us to miss the action that really matters to the story.

 Part of the Christian story that can make people uneasy is the fact that it does not neatly fall within the constraints of European empiricism. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is not something we can repeat for verification, carefully applying the scientific method to prove our claims. It’s not that kind of truth. As a professor of mine would often say, “Sometimes, the truth is bigger than the facts.” So when we Episcopalians tell the story, we are hesitant to tell the “how” of it all; we instead focus on the “what”. We cannot say precisely how we are united to Christ in our baptism, but we believe that is what happens through and in the prayers and the ritual. We cannot say precisely how Jesus is made present in the bread and wine, but we believe that is what happens in and through the prayers and the ritual. And there is a heck of a lot we cannot precisely say about how Jesus will return, bringing to fruition the Kingdom of God, but we believe that is what God is about.

 Just as we live into the substance of our faith without fully understanding the how in baptism and eucharist, we can live into the substance of our hope for resurrection life without fully understanding the how. So what does it look like to live into the substance of our faith? Well, in the language of our epistle this morning, we “stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter.”

 Are you ready for this smooth and utterly uncontrived transition? One of the traditions that we have been taught is the tradition of faithful stewardship. If you have been around for a minute, by which I mean a few years, then you know that this time of year is when the church regularly holds stewardship campaigns. This week you should expect to receive some material in the mail from the church about pledging. And if you don’t see some mail from us, I might direct you to the section in the newsletter that is titled Updating our Parish Register where you can find a link to update your mailing address in our directory.

 Christian stewardship is not just about money. [Pause] But it’s not not about money. God has given us many gifts: the gift of our time on this earth, the gift of our unique abilities, and the gift of the resources that sustain us.

 The way we use the gifts in each of these three broad categories become the ways in which we tell the story of our faith. We might not be able to say precisely “how” the Holy Spirit is working in our lives and souls, but when we are courageous in sharing the time God has given us with each other and our neighbors, when we are wise in applying the abilities God has given us to further the mission of God, when we are generous in redistributing the resources God has given us, then the “what” of the Holy Spirit’s activity becomes clear.

 In my sermon last week I touched on the bit of the general thanksgiving in the daily office in which we ask God to “give us such an awareness of your mercies that we may show forth your praise, not only with our lips but in our lives…” and that was unintentional foreshadowing for this sermon. The way in which we show forth that praise is our stewardship. One of the unique abilities God has given all of us is the distinctive way we each tell the story of God. We live into the telling of that story through the ways we share the gifts God has given us.

 Stories of provision do not make sense if they do not first acknowledge hunger, but it can be easy to fall into the trap of telling the story of the lawless one who withholds access to food while elevating their own position, rather than the story of the God who will ultimately right these wrongs. As we work to tell God’s story, we must guard against the temptation to try to gain a sense of control over the ending, whether by grasping at knowledge of the ending through telling stories of exactly how the lawless one will be toppled, or by embracing the story of this world which says we can guarantee a good ending to our stories by hoarding our resources for ourselves so that we can come out ahead in the final chapter of the story, or in some Christian circles there is temptation to give away everything to the point of suffering in a different approach to controlling a positive outcome for ourselves in the next life.

 This grasping for control is not the way God is calling us to tell our stories. God is not inviting us into a story of scarcity or anxiety. The story of God is a story of endlessly giving and receiving love. The story of God is a story of hope and justice. The story of God is one that we are all invited to collaborate in writing.

 So let us listen to the wisdom of our tradition, discern with the Spirit how that tradition most faithfully looks today, and then let us take actions that boldly tell out the story of God with the confidence that “our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us, and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, [will] comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word.” Amen.