Hope, in the End

This sermon was given by Pastor Ted Carnahan for the Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost on November 16, 2025.

Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

As I've mentioned before in the last couple of weeks, we are looking at stories and teachings, especially teachings of Jesus, connected to the end of the world.

It reminds me of R.E.M.'s famous song, It's the End of the World as We Know It. Do you know it? And I feel fine.

That's our message today. It's the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine because my faith is in my Lord Jesus Christ.

Visiting the Temple Mount

But it's easy for us to get distracted by things, the ugly things in this world, but also the beautiful things in this world.

I had the opportunity to visit the Holy Land as a seminary student, the second temple that was built after the Babylonian exile, and it was destroyed by the Romans in some of the events that are being prophesied by Jesus when He says, "As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another. All will be thrown down."

This prophecy of Jesus was fulfilled in the year 70 A.D., 37 years after the death and resurrection of Christ, when the Romans finally came in and crushed rebellion in Jerusalem and systematically dismantled the temple of God and threw the stones down and made it so that it was no longer any temple at all.

Even today, that land on the Temple Mount is still a revered place. Orthodox Jews will not go up there lest they accidentally step into the place where the Holy of Holies was, but Muslims have constructed two mosques and the shrine of the Dome of the Rock upon it, and so it is, in one sense, occupied territory.

The Disciples' Amazement

Jesus is asked a question, though. What will be the sign of this? "Golly, Jesus, look at the beautiful stones. It's so amazing!"

They're sort of, they're kind of being yokels as they're visiting this place that maybe they haven't gotten to go to before. They're from Galilee. They're kind of from the sticks. And now they've gone to the big city and their heads are on a swivel.

I was in Chicago recently to visit a friend, and as I went to visit him, he works in a skyscraper downtown in Chicago now. He just graduated his Ph.D., really proud of David, and he's downtown, and I got to visit him as part of going to a retreat in the Chicago area. I went down there for 50 minutes and paid $37 for parking — I kid you not.

And I've been to Chicago before. I've seen the sights in Chicago. It's not new to me. I've been there several times.

But even then, I felt a little like a yokel. I'm walking around with my head on a swivel going, whoa, look at the tall buildings! It's just amazing.

And so many people crushed together in such a small space, and for me, it was just a little overwhelming, honestly.

And frankly, that's, you know, all of us appreciate that. Even the most hardened bachelor would rather have nice things around them than shabby things.

(Yes, guys, I know that you would be perfectly fine with an air mattress and a TV and a beer fridge, and that's enough. Ladies, thank God for you, because that's how all of us men would be living.)

But even the most hardened bachelor would love to have something a little bit nicer around them.

And so these guys go into Jerusalem, and they look at the stones, and they look at the temple, and they're just amazed. "Look, Jesus, this is incredible. This must be a place of power and goodness."

And Jesus immediately quashes that idea, and he says, you see all these stones beautifully stacked? He just calls them stones. And he says, "Not one stone will be left upon another. All will be thrown down."

Well, immediately, they're worried about that. "Whoa, Jesus, really? This beautiful, enormous, expensive temple that took years, decades to construct, it's going to be thrown down? What are you talking about?!"

The Finite Nature of the World

What he's talking about there is the idea that the world will not go on forever. The world has a beginning, and it will have an end.

The temple had a beginning. It was constructed or reconstructed after the Babylonian Exile, and then, of course, it was destroyed decades after the death and resurrection of Christ.

But even the idea that things have a beginning and an end, when it comes to the universe itself, this is not an idea that has been universally held by the ancients. Ancient Greek philosophers believed that the universe was essentially eternal, except for guys you might have heard of, like Plato and Aristotle. And their idea was that the universe must have a beginning because something had to have been the first cause.

So why do I exist? Well, because of my parents. Why do they exist? Because of their parents, and going back and back. Everything has a first cause. Everything that happens is caused by something else. But when you keep going further and further back, you're going to come eventually to the question, well, why is there anything at all?

And to that, the pagan philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, understood that there must be some first mover, some prime mover, who was the first to act, the uncaused cause of all things.

And yet, natural philosophers, many early scientists, thought it was likely that the universe was eternal, that it had no beginning, and it had no end, and that we just simply occupy an infinitesimal slice of time on this earth.

It was Christians and Jews who said, no, our scriptures tell us that the universe has a beginning, and it finds its beginning in God, and it will have its end in God. That the things that we see around us, no matter how beautiful, enormous, expensive, powerful, impressive that they are, they are finite. They are not eternal.

And science in recent decades has confirmed these things. The universe has a beginning, and it will have an end.

If we cling to the material things of this world, even good things, even beautiful things, even powerful and godly things, like the great temple in Jerusalem, we are only clinging to things. We're putting our trust in objects instead of their creator.

Signs and Hope Amid Trials

Then Jesus says to them:

Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues, and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.

And people hear this, and they think, ah, now Jesus is telling me to get out my newspaper and figure out that this is the end times.

And that's not a correct interpretation of this passage. Because Jesus is not here predicting what will happen immediately before the end of the world. It's about predicting that lots of bad things are going to happen. And that even though bad things happen in this world, it is not yet the end.

There will be wars, there will be natural disasters, there will be ominous signs, but they are not the immediate source of the end times.

Jesus puts it this way in verse 9:

When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.”

The purpose that Jesus gives as he's predicting the Roman conquest and suppression of the Jews in 70 and then later in the 100s, what he's doing as he's predicting that there will be great signs and omens and kingdoms rising against kingdoms and showing us all of this apocalyptic language is to remind people not to be afraid, but to hold on to hope.

Hope is something, if it's genuine hope, if it's reliable hope, it will carry you through terrible trials. And the hope that Jesus is speaking of is hope that is grounded in him and in his cross.

The terrible trials that Jesus predicts for the apostles who are gathered there listening come true almost immediately after his death. Next he says, "Before all this occurs, they will arrest you." — He's talking to the apostles here. — "They're going to arrest you. They're going to persecute you. They're going to hand you over to synagogues and prisons. You will be brought before kings and governors because of my name."

And that sounds awful. It's like, well, this movement, you know, Jesus is going to die, rise from the dead, but then all these people are going to go out and get arrested and persecuted?

And he says, even when that happens, it's not the end. In fact, he says, this is not something to be mournful about. It's something to celebrate!

Verse 13: "This will give you an opportunity to testify."

Imagine opening your publisher's clearinghouse sweepstakes envelope and you open it up and it says, congratulations, you have won an opportunity to go to prison! What?! You have won an opportunity to be imprisoned and persecuted and testify, to witness to your hope in Christ in the face of adversity.

In fact, he's so confident that the Holy Spirit will be with them and give them the hope that they need to rely on that he says, make up your minds now not to prepare your defense in advance, for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.

He says, you don't even have to worry about what you're going to say when that happens. You're going to be arrested. You're going to be hauled in front of people of great power and authority. They're going to have the authority. In some cases, they're going to use it to kill you.

And yet you get the chance to testify to the truth. You get to live by hope.

He says:

You will be betrayed, even by parents and brothers, relatives and friends. They will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name, but not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance, you will gain your soul.

Persecution as Testimony

This is not the gospel of prosperity and health and wealth. This is not Joel Osteen's live your best life now.

Congratulations, you have won an opportunity to be betrayed by your closest friends and relatives to testify to Jesus Christ. Don't worry if you're persecuted. Don't worry if things seem to be going badly. Don't worry if it seems like it might be the end of the world. Instead, look at it as an opportunity to tell others about your hope in Christ.

So often, we moderns want to avoid suffering. We hear Jesus talking about, "take up your cross and follow me." And we cross our fingers and really hope he didn't mean it.

But the crosses that we bear, the sufferings that we undergo as Christians in the world — in Christ, they become opportunities to testify to our hope, not because we are powerful and good, but because Christ is.

The people of Rome, when the Christians began to be arrested, when figures like Peter and Paul were arrested and put on trial, when the early Christian believers were taken, dragged to the Colosseum and thrown literally to be attacked by soldiers, dismembered by animals for the entertainment of thousands, tens of thousands of cheering Romans in the Colosseum — the people of Rome were shocked and amazed because they saw how the Christians died, not in fear, but with a smile on their face and with a hymn about Jesus on their lips.

People of God, this is unfortunately the way that many live in our world today, testifying against the darkness, terrible situations. Martyrs are still standing firm in the faith even today.

Here are some examples of ongoing persecution:

• According to the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law, jihadist groups in Nigeria have killed over 100,000 Christians in the 16 years since 2009.
• North Korea, where it's illegal to be a Christian or to own a Bible.
• Pakistan, where having a church must be underground because you'll be arrested.
• Middle Eastern countries, like even our great "ally," Saudi Arabia, won't even allow Christian churches to be constructed.
• And of course, we can't forget about the 21 Coptic Christian martyrs in Libya in 2015 who, threatened by ISIS jihadist Muslims, were told that they must confess that Muhammad is the true prophet of God and renounce their Christian faith or they would be beheaded. And each one of those 21 men in turn confessed Christ and lost their lives because of it.

Clinging to Christian Hope

Thank God we live in a country where we don't have to worry about such things directly! But indirectly, we should because these are our brothers and sisters and their testimony to the world.

No, I will not renounce my faith in Christ. I will hold firm to the cross no matter what the world might say.

This is the hope to which our Lord Jesus calls us to cling in the midst of suffering. When we have hope, Christian hope, reliable hope, hope that is grounded not in things are going to get better, but things might get worse, but my Lord Jesus will call me forth from my grave. Hope in the resurrection of Christ to which we have been grafted in baptism.

Then we can even face death without fear. Because death is not the end of us.

And when we die, that even can be our witness to the world. That we can show people that as we go to our graves, we do so with a smile on our faces and a hymn on our lips. That we testify that Jesus Christ will in fact return.

And when he does, as Malachi tells us, the arrogant and the wicked will be crushed underfoot like dust. Which is bad news for them, but it's good news for us.

And in the meantime, in this world that is so difficult sometimes, there is still time:

• Time for us to repent and turn back to God to renew our willingness to follow our Lord Jesus Christ.
• Time for us to witness to others by the way that we live in this world so that they too might know the hope that we have in Jesus Christ and be saved.
• Time for us to pray and to celebrate and to love and serve this backwards world as a foretaste of the feast to come.
• Time for us to be on our guard. To keep watch for the return of Jesus. To tell the truth to an unbelieving world.

May you have this Christian hope. Hope that is unshakable. Hope that says there may be wars and rumors of wars, but my Lord Jesus is coming back for me.

May this hope sustain you in this life. And may the peace of God which surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and minds strong in Christ Jesus our Lord to life everlasting. Amen.