Sunday, November 16, 2025… 23rd Sunday after Pentecost
“If Someone Told You the World Would End Tomorrow…”
Scripture Readings: Psalm 98; Malachi 4:1-6; 2 Thessalonians 3:1-13; Luke 21:5-19
Divine Service IV with Holy Communion, p. 203, Lutheran Service Book
Hymns: #516 “Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying”; #645 “Built On the Rock, the Church Shall Stand”; #655 “Lord, Keep Us Steadfast in Your Word”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
If someone told you the world was going to end tomorrow, what would you do? Would you laugh? Would you cry? Would you feast? Would you fast? Would you gather your family and pull them all close? Martin Luther is said to have answered this question by saying, “I would go out today and plant a tree.” We know that our Lord Jesus is coming, one day soon; but we also know that none of us knows when. What choice do we have but to “work for the Lord with all our hearts” and be ready for Him every day? Jesus says, “Blessed are the ones whom the Lord will find working on the day He comes.”
There was a story in the news last week about a bridge they built in China, called the Hongqui Bridge, 2500 feet long and spanning a gorge over the Yang-Se River. It was finished and opened for traffic just back in January of this year, to great fanfare in the Chinese press. They went on and on about their ingenuity, superiority, and technical skills, and about what great feats on engineering their system of government could produce. Then last week, amid landslides and minor earthquakes, cracks began to appear along the surface of the bridge, and then it suddenly collapsed into the gorge and into the river below in a huge cloud of dust - a complete disaster. I hope whoever designed that thing has a good place to hide! We human beings put a lot of pride into the things we build; but we forget sometimes how temporary things can be.
Our Gospel reading today takes place at the Hebrew Temple in Jerusalem – Herod’s Temple – another really impressive engineering project. The project was begun by King Herod the Great around 20 BC; it was actually a re-making and adding on to old temple. Each foundation block in the construction weighed between fifty to one hundred and fifty thousand tons. The blocks were quarried from the limestone hills around Jerusalem, moved to the building site by oxen and human labor by rolling them on logs, then lifted into place by oxen-powered cranes. The blocks were stacked until they towered above the skyline. The finished temple would be twenty stories high, bright white in the sunlight, and visible for miles.
Herod built his temple to last forever, more as a monument to himself than to honor God. At the time of Jesus, the project was forty-six years in the making, and still not finished. Herod himself died before seeing it completed.
As today’s Gospel reading begins, Jesus and His disciples had been walking through the temple. They’d stood by the treasury box and watched rich people putting in bags of money for everyone to see, and then watched a poor widow come and put in her last two pennies. And Jesus told them that her two pennies, because of the heart that gave them, were worth more than all the gold and treasure the temple could hold.
Then, as they were leaving the temple, some of the disciples – who didn’t get the point yet, as they often didn’t – were going on about how beautiful the temple was; all the jewels and gold and precious things, all the opulence, all the ornate furnishings and such, all (they said) dedicated to the glory of the name of God. And Jesus said, “Meh.”
And then Jesus told them something that must have just shocked them to the core:
"As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down.” How could this be? This place was the pride of every Hebrew, the glory of every Jew. The Jerusalem Temple was the center of their world, and it was meant to last forever, to stand for centuries, to still be standing there shining in the sun long after those who built it were gone. It was their rock, their sense of permanence, their assurance that they and their people would always have a place in the world to call their own. Who could even conceive of those massive, holy stones being moved from their place? It was unthinkable.
This is one of those passages of Scripture with more than one meaning; it has layers. Jesus, being the Alpha and the Omega, the God not bound by time, the God who sees the future and sees beyond the bend when we cannot, can do that. He’s God, after all.
Jesus if referring here, first of all, to the events that would take place in 70 AD, less than 40 years in the future from where they were standing, when the Jews would rebel against Rome one time too many, and the Romans would come to destroy their city and send the mighty stones of their temple tumbling down. All the disciples listening to Jesus that day would be gone from the earth by then, made martyrs for the sake of Christ, with the exception of St. John. They were dragged before synagogues and thrown into prisons, just as Jesus said, and brought before governors and kings to bear witness to Jesus, often at the cost of their lives.
Jesus is also pointing here to a time far, far in the future, to the judgment day and the end of the world. Jesus is talking here about the “time between the Advents.” An “advent” is “an appearing.” (We’ll be entering the season of Advent again, just two Sundays from now.) The first Advent was the birth of Jesus, when the Son of God came into the world as a tiny Bethlehem baby; the second Advent will happen when Jesus comes back to earth and appears again to judge the world. And somewhere between the two Advents is where we are.
The year 33 AD, just eight years from now, will mark 2000 years since the cross and Resurrection of Jesus. But in the years in between, says Jesus, there will be wars and rumors of wars, and earthquakes and famines, and pestilences and fearful events, that all of God’s people are going to have to live through; we’re not immune to those things. Most of us have lived long enough to see and experience at least some of what Jesus is talking about. All those things are part of the human condition, and part of living in a sinful, “between the Advents” world. “Do not be frightened,” says Jesus. “These things must take place, but the end will not happen right away.”
Jesus, to add another layer of meaning to this, is also referring to His body in this passage, and to what was about to happen to Him. He told the Pharisees and Sadducees, “Destroy this temple, and I will build it again in three days;” and the temple He was referring to was His Body. The Spirit of God was upon Him and in Him. Jesus was holy and sinless and perfect, Son of Man and the perfect Son of God. And He Himself was betrayed by a friend, and hated by the people He came to save. And they put Him to death. They destroyed His body, they crucified Him, they nailed Him to a cross, and then they took His body down and laid it in a tomb carved in the rock, and rolled a huge stone in front of it, and walked away. But the grave couldn’t hold Him, and the stone was rolled away. Death itself was rolled away. That’s how Jesus can make the promise in our Gospel, “Not a hair of your head will perish. By standing firm” – by standing firm in your faith – “you will gain life.”
And that brings us to yet another level, another layer, of this deep and wonderful Gospel passage. What about these bodies of ours, these “temples of the Holy Spirit,” these temporary dwellings the Holy Spirit came to live in on the day we were baptized? Will these bodies of ours last forever? No, they’re going to wear out, and one day they’ll fail us, no matter how hard we work at building a life for ourselves, or how much we exercise, or how many pills, vitamins, supplements, or miracle cures we swallow. No matter what we accomplish or build, or how hard we try, like King Herod, to build something the world will remember us by, “Not one stone will be left upon another; every one will be thrown down.” One day they’ll ring that All-Saints bell for me.
That’s the point Jesus was trying to make as His disciples were staring with pride at their beautiful temple. Jesus looks at what we build, and what we gather, and what we think we can keep for ourselves, and says, “Meh; doesn’t amount to much, does it?”
So what does matter? It’s nothing you can build or put a nail in or hold together with concrete or mortar. Your precious faith matters. The hope you have in Jesus matters. The love you give and the love you show matters; all that other stuff is going rolling down the hill. St. Paul says what matters is “God’s love and Christ’s perseverance,” and “never growing tired of doing what is right.” (And that, folks, is a recipe for time well spent and a life well-lived!)
If someone told you the world would end tomorrow, what would you do? Empty your bank account, pull your pile around yourself, go to your prep shelter, hide in a hole? Or would you “love all the more as you see the day approaching?” Would you go on trusting God? Would you go on planting seed, like Luther planting that apple tree? Would you go on working for the Lord with all your heart, until the moment you see Jesus appear in the sky?
And to add yet one more layer to this thing, what about this Church of ours? Will this place, beautiful as it is, still be standing one hundred or two hundred years from now? What are we here for, anyway? What are we doing here, as Advent after Advent passes us by? Are we here just to keep this place looking good, and the lights on, and the budget solvent? Or is there something more that God is asking of us? Why did the Lord see fit to set this temple down in this place, in this little spot in the Wisconsin woods?
Get yourself a map; draw a circle five miles or ten miles or twenty miles around this place. How many people in that circle need our help? Do we have hearts big enough for all those hurting people? Do we have a heart for those who don’t know that Jesus is coming soon? Do we have a heart for people who are scared to death, while their world falls down around them and they don’t know what to do? That temple in Jerusalem was meant to shine up on that hill, to draw the whole world to come and know God. This place can be that too, if we want it to be, for as long as we’re here and for as long as it stands. Father in Heaven, help us to be what You want us to be. In Jesus’ name; Amen.
Rev. Larry Sheppard, M.Div.
Trinity Lutheran Church, Packwaukee, WI
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Oxford, WI
pastorshepp@gmail.com