TIL THE END OF TIME. when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? Recall that the Son of

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Sandra Harmon
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1 TIL THE END OF TIME Gen. 32:22-31; 2 Tim. 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8 Jesus asks a provocative question after telling the parable of the unjust judge: when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? Recall that the Son of Man is a mysterious expression which can mean nothing more esoteric than the human one, the human son of human beings, a human being. Or it can be taken to mean a heavenly figure from on high who will come at the end of the world to bring the judgment of God. In the history of our faith, the Son of Man has often been identified with Jesus and his Second Coming, though when Jesus uses the expression, as in our Gospel story for today, he does not identify himself as the Son of Man. In the context of this Gospel lesson, let s assume the Son of Man is one who comes at the end of the world to execute God s judgment. The question Jesus asks is then, at the end of the world will there still be faith? But which faith? Faith in God? Christian faith in God? Faith of some other sort, such as faith in science or in the regularities of nature or faith that someone is telling the truth when they say they are telling the truth? Faith in what? Do you ever watch South Park on TV? It s a cartoon show for adults about 8 year-olds who live in South Park, Colorado. The show is often crude, almost always irreverent, and very funny. One episode is about Richard Dawkins, famous evolutionary biologist who denies the existence of God and the value of religion, which is what the real Richard Dawkins is best known for doing. Anyway, one of the South Park boys, 1

2 Eric Cartman, as unlikable a little creep as you can imagine, manages to be projected 500 years into the future where he finds that a religion has cropped up that worships Richard Dawkins as God. The point, of course, is that people will always find something to make into God, even the pompous God-denier Dawkins. So, yes, there will always be faith in something or other. But Jesus seems in the passage from Luke to be thinking of not just any faith but faith in the God of his people, the God of justice. Since we re Christians and in church, let s take Jesus question a bit farther and ask if in the future there will be faith that is Christian, whether or not the Christian faith will continue for the rest of human history. So far, the Christian faith has been around for only 2000 years, which is a blip on the screen of all human history let alone the history of the earth, let alone the history of the Galaxy or of the Universe. Is it likely that the Christian faith will be around for as long as there are human beings or human-like beings? This seems to be the force of Jesus question, and it is a rather daunting question for people who have come to believe they have found the way and the truth and the life that leads to God in Christ Jesus. So far, we ve been thinking far forward and wondering what will be in the future. Let s think far back, though not too far back in the grand scheme of things, just far enough back to catch the very primitive and much-edited story of Jacob s wrestling match. With whom is he wrestling? A man? An angel? God? Well, some supernatural being, maybe the god of the stream called Jabbok, who wants to prevent Jacob from crossing the stream. As dawn approaches this mysterious wrestler perhaps the wrestler is a night demon who has to go back to his lair by daybreak urges Jacob to let him go. Jacob, realizing the supernatural character of his opponent demands a blessing. In the 2

3 legend, Jacob seems to have superhuman strength himself, and this is in keeping with certain suggestions in the Old Testament that Jacob was a giant. Anyway, the picture we are left with after all is said and done is that Jacob has wrestled with an angel of God and in the course of this bout has had a change of character as signified by the change of his name to Israel. He has striven with God, it seems, and though physically lamed is spiritually regenerated. I bring all this up to indicate the complicated history of the primitive and confusing legend of Jacob that is taken up into the Old Testament in the course of the development of the faith of the Jews, a faith which, of course, we have inherited. The legend seems rooted in superstition but in time it is developed into a much more noble understanding of God that would have been unrecognizable to the people who first told the legend around the campfire. Such tales are at the origin of our faith, which is a slow, slow development of thinking about God, or to take a phrase from the story of Jacob, of striving with God. We ve now gazed out into the unforeseeable future and back into a mist-shrouded past. Let s examine the present state of our own faith, our own striving with God, and what it means. Has your faith developed over time? Do you believe now just as you have always believed? Where is your striving with God heading, if you are striving with God? Is it not at least in part the purpose of our gathering as we are this morning to seek greater understanding of the faith we believe, and is it not to be expected that our faith, with greater understanding, will change and grow? I would hope that you would answer yes, but there are many religious people who approach their faith as something fixed and absolute and fear the change that striving with God might bring, such that if they thought 3

4 deeply about their faith and examined and questioned what they have been led to believe, they might lose their faith, so that striving with God is like the condition of itching ears that is described in the Second Letter to Timothy, leading them down the garden path to teachers that will turn them away from listening to the truth and cause them to wander away into myths? Where will all this striving lead? They fear that it will lead to them being fooled out of their faith? Let s look again into the far distant future and consider whether there will always be a Christian faith in the form we know it. In all likelihood the answer is there will not. But thinking about this question a little father, might there always be a faith beyond religious rituals and church doctrines that believes that God s truth is in a life lived in the spirit of compassion and love such as we have come to know such a life, we who live now in this time and place, in the story of Jesus? Will there not always be people striving with God in the sense of seeking to know how it is best to live and what is the true life to be lived? And might not we believe that there will always be faith in the Holy Spirit, no matter what becomes of the world s religions, including our own? The language of faith may change, the institutions of religion may come and go, but devotion to the Holy Spirit will never disappear, and in the terms of Jesus question will be found on earth to the very end. At the risk of sounding like a complete geezer, it seems to me that the world these days is moving much too fast. Nor do I think that it s just myself who can t keep up. I don t think that you can either, not even the quickest and most technologically well-equipped of you. Everything is happening at Twitter speed and faster. People are bombarded by information they cannot process or assess and for which they have no context. 4

5 Institutions and economies are too large to be manageable, even with the benefit of cyber-technology. We can t even judge whether we are better connected to one another or less well-connected to one another what are hundreds of friends on FaceBook worth? The world is, of course, always in flux, but the flux has never been so blindingly fast and, it seems to me, so out of control as it is today. Where is it all going? Who knows! But don t lose heart, you who live by faith. The Holy Spirit is alive and will always be alive, the Spirit of God we know as Christ, our hope and our salvation. Amen. 21 st Sunday after Pentecost, October 17, 2010 Emanuel Lutheran Church 5

The Twenty Second Sunday. Pentecost. October 16, 2016 Grace Lutheran Church. after

The Twenty Second Sunday. Pentecost. October 16, 2016 Grace Lutheran Church. after The Twenty Second Sunday after Pentecost October 16, 2016 Grace Lutheran Church GATHERING Prelude If You But Tr st in God to Guide You J. S. Bach Announcements Confession and Forgiveness Blessed be the