Pastor Chip's Sermon, August 11, 2019

"TILL HE COMES"

I Corinthians 11:23-26

          " I read that the anxiety level of the American people is higher now than it has been since the early days of the Second World War. The frequency of mass shootings has made us nervous about our personal safety.  The politics of fear and hatred have made us paranoid about the future of our nation. The evidence for global warming indicates that within the foreseeable future, much of the earth will become uninhabitable. Our personal, national, and global future are all threatened. How are we to live in such a time? What does our faith in Jesus Christ tell us to believe?

            The Biblical message is that yes, the world is broken. God gave humanity freedom and that freedom has been misused to create chaos. Human nature itself is broken by the threat of suffering and the fear of death. John Leith used to say. “Ours is a broken and dying world that does not obey it creator.’ The four horsemen of the apocalypse, plague, war, famine, and death continue ride forth in our world.

            But the Bible also says that God has decided to redeem his world and make it again into the place he created, a place where there is no violence or hunger. Revelation promises the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of God and of his Christ. The first evidence for this redemption of the world is the preaching of Jesus and God’s victory over death in his resurrection. In these events, the future has been announced and it is in God’s hands.

           I would point out two things to you. First, human history has always been in danger of annihilation. It has skirted the edge of a cliff from the beginning. In ancient times, plague and famine destroyed cultures and nations defenseless to stop them. Medieval Europe lost one third of its population to the bubonic plague. The First World War killed sixty million people and effectively depopulated western Europe. The influenza epidemic that followed killed another twenty to fifty million worldwide. I grew up during the cold war when Nikita Khrushchev was pounding on the podium with his shoe yelling, “We will destroy you.” The human endeavor has always faced potential doom, but guess what? We’re still here, still stumbling along creating problems and then solving them. The future is a mystery, but there is a future. God isn’t through with us yet. I believe he is just getting started with us.

          The second point I would make is that the story of Jesus and his followers begins with twelve men being told, “This is my body broken for you. This is my blood, shed for you.” Twelve largely uneducated men on the fringe of the empire during a tumultuous time are commissioned to redeem the world. They have zero chance. But the power of the resurrection resonates with the human heart. People hear it and say, “Yes, It must be so!”  Today, the church of Jesus Christ is present in over two hundred countries. The number of Christians in the world has quadrupled in the last one hundred years from six hundred million to over two billion.  God promises the prophet Isaiah, “so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”

          Paul tells us that when we take the cup and the bread, we are remembering the death of Jesus against the day when he will return. It is the second coming of Christ that is God’s guarantee that human history will find its way to a point God has already chosen. Within our little lives, our few years upon the earth, we walk by faith and not by sight. Like a grain of sand on a beach, we are too small to see the grandeur of the dunes or the sweep of the ocean. But we live by the faith that God can be trusted to keep his promises."