2nd Sunday of Advent
December 10th, Year of Our + Lord 2023
Our Savior’s and Our Redeemer Lutheran Churches
Hill City and Custer, SD
End Times Posture
Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” Luke 21:28
How’s your posture? As Jesus teaches about the End Times and how His disciples are to behave as they seen signs of the Last Day, He calls for us to have good posture, to stand up straight and hold our heads high.
I hope that Jesus doesn’t literally mean that my physical posture effects my readiness for His Final Return on the Last Day. Because my posture isn’t great. In my study, and at home, I work on a kneeling chair, with no back. It pretty much forces me to sit-up relatively straight. Otherwise, in a regular chair, I will quickly slide down till I’m almost falling off. Seven years with the Marines means I know how to stand up straight, when I have to. But my natural tendency is to walk around staring at the ground right in front of my feet, especially if I’m thinking hard about something.
Good posture is a blessing they say, good for your health and good for the impression you give people around you. But your physical posture is not what determines your eternal fate. Although, maybe the things good posture does for you in daily life can help us understand why Christ calls us to straighten up. When you straighten up and lift up your head, you can see what is going on around you. You can see what’s coming your way, who’s near you, what’s about to happen. With good posture, you can better bear the weight of whatever loads you must carry, without making your back sore, or causing an injury.
Jesus is teaching us about the End Times again today. We’ve had a lot of End Times Scripture lately, especially if you’ve been coming to our midweek Advent services. Hearing about the Last Days toward the end of the calendar year is traditional, and fitting, as the darkness increases and the temperatures drop. And we should always be hearing a good bit of what the Bible has to say about the End Times, because we are living in them. Jesus very specifically tells us we don’t get to know when the Last Day will be. But we know when the the End Times began: when He Ascended into heaven, 40 days after His Resurrection from the dead. The Time of the Church is the End Times, for however long they last.
Recent news of the world and the discord in our society certainly seem pretty “End-Timey.” Whenever there is a major shooting war in Eurasia, as there has been in Ukraine since Russia invaded last February, people instinctively worry that we are seeing the “these things taking place” that Jesus mentions. We wonder how directly we should connect the news to Biblical prophecy. To say nothing of our reaction when violence and fighting gets worse in the Middle East. Add in the street protests and chants of “intifada” going on in our own country. With large numbers of young people in the U.S. publicly siding with the terrorists who brutally attacked Israeli civilians Oct. 7, hearing the Bible describe the End Times may be even more unsettling.
But fear not. As Christians, people of the Word of Christ, we should interpret everything through the Truth the Holy Spirit has given us in the Bible. As we have the Church decorated for Christmas, hearing these End Times Bible passages this morning might not be our first choice. But again I say, fear not, there is good news of great joy for you today, rock solid promises from the One born in a barn in Bethlehem, gifts of grace to make you ready to rejoice on the Last Day, and to help you deal with whatever disturbs your life today. Indeed, the key to having a faithful, Christian, Biblical perspective on the Last Days is right there in the name of our two congregations. You see, whether our physical posture is good or bad, today our Savior calls on us to spiritually straighten up and lift our heads, because our Redeemer is drawing near.
As baptized believers in the crucified and risen Jesus, signs that the Last Day might be very near are good news for us. Because on that great and awesome Day, our Savior, our Redeemer, our God, is coming to gather us into His glorious presence, forever. And, through the power of His preached Word, through the loving promises of His Baptism, through the mystery of His Supper, the One who will one Day come visibly to us on the clouds is also always with us. Hidden from our physical eyes, but visible to the eyes of faith, Jesus is present with us to bring us through each day, until that great Last Day.
Not that living in the End Times is easy. If it were, I don’t think Jesus and His Apostles would have filled the New Testament with so much teaching about how Christians are to live in these latter days. Straightening up your soul and lifting your head to look confidently for your returning Savior is hard, because so many evil things try to beat you down, try to make you duck and cower.
We have been blessed as Americans; we have not had a shooting war on our soil since the Civil War, which ended 158 years ago. Maintaining a hope-filled, faithful Christian outlook on these things is decidedly more difficult if you are literally caught in a war zone. But Christians do it, and have done it, for almost 2,000 years. War is hell, but wartime is also a time of great faith. How does that work?
Sickness and death stalk all of us. We rightfully celebrate every broken bone that heals, every cancer that goes into remission, every successful surgery. Thanks be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who heals us. And yet faith knows that our true and permanent healing, the eternal health that Jesus promises to all His beloved, doesn’t come until the End. Jesus died a physical death, in order to win eternal life for you. As His disciple, you too will pass through physical death, unless He returns on the clouds first. Come Lord Jesus, come. But until that Day, the journey through physical death is scary, for everyone. And yet Christians for centuries have faced death with a calm peace. Where do we find such confidence?
Our most precious earthly blessing, our families, are very often also the source of our greatest struggles. We love, and we crave to be loved, but our love for each other is always imperfect, and sometimes breaks down altogether. The culprit of course is us, each one of us, sinners who fail to love each other as Christ has loved us. We are tempted by the world, which derides and denies and attacks God’s plan for marriage and family. We are tempted by our own sinfulness, which only wants to be served, and never to serve. And yet, the Christian family endures, fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and grandparents serve and sacrifice and forgive, thanks be to the Spirit of Christ. What is the key to family harmony?
Ironically, to straighten up and lift up our heads requires us to bend over and bow our heads. When Jesus ascended into heaven, and disappeared from sight into the clouds, the Eleven disciples were there, standing up straight, heads lifted, staring into heaven. Until two heavenly messengers appeared and corrected them. Don’t stare up into the clouds. Jesus will come back in the same way you saw Him go. In the meantime, you need to get to doing the things He has given you to do. Which, for the Apostles and for the Church they built, meant putting their noses in the Book, studying God’s Word, so they could preach it, and so the Apostles could write more of it.
Standing straight as Christ’s faithful Church has always meant bowing down, in prayer, and kneeling to receive the Body and Blood of Christ in His Supper. Straightening up and looking for Jesus has always meant reading and hearing and praying and pondering His Word. For it is in and through His Word that the Holy Spirit straightens our souls, and lifts up our heads with the Word of forgiveness, free forgiveness that flows from the Cross. This is the encouragement of the Scriptures, written for us. By God’s grace His Word also sounds forth among us, Sunday by Sunday and day by day.
All the scary signs of the End, wars and rumors of wars and famines and earthquakes and discord and violence and hearts grown cold, all of these evils, including the evil of your sins and my sins, all of these have been taken off our shoulders, when Jesus took them on His own shoulders, and paid for them, through the cruel instrument of a Roman cross. The Babe of Bethlehem, born to die, is not a tragic story. Rather, it is the story of Love, God’s love for sinners, and the story of victory, revealed when the same Jesus who bore our sins and died our death, didn’t stay dead. Your God and Savior rose to reveal new life, eternal life, founded in Jesus, and shared with all who trust in Him. Jesus did all this, to redeem the world, to save you, to win your place in God’s family, today, and forever and ever.
How do we straighten up and lift our heads to joyfully await the visible return of Christ on the Last Day? Well, it is less that we do this, but rather the Holy Spirit does this in us, by the power of the Word of Christ, which forgives, restores and strengthens us, day by day, and forever and ever. God grant us the wisdom to hear Him and trust Him, for ourselves, for our families and neighbors, for the world that He died to save. God is faithful, He will do it. Amen.
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