Nov. 9, 2025 | Word Out!
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Sermon – Pastor Dan Peterson
Facing Apocalypse: Some Strange Advice
November 9, 2025
READINGS
First Reading: Job 19:23-27a
23 “O that my words were written down!
O that they were inscribed in a book!
24 O that with an iron pen and with lead
they were engraved on a rock forever!
25 For I know that my vindicator lives
and that in the end he will stand upon the earth;
26 and after my skin has been destroyed,
then in my flesh I shall see God,
27a whom I shall see on my side,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another.”
Second Reading: 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
1 As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you, brothers and sisters, 2 not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as though from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord is already here. 3 Let no one deceive you in any way, for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction. 4 He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God. 5 Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you?
13 But we must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the first fruits for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and through belief in the truth. 14 For this purpose he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. 15 So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter.
16 Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, 17 comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word.
Gospel: Luke 20:27-38
27 Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to [Jesus] 28 and asked him a question: “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman and died childless; 30 then the second 31 and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. 32 Finally the woman also died. 33 In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”
34 Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, 35 but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. 36 Indeed, they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. 37 And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. 38 Now he is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.”
Sermon:
Grace to you and peace from God, the source of life, and from Jesus, who is that light and life in the world. Amen.
Today’s message, as I shared earlier is “Facing Apocalypse: Some Strange Advice.”
And when I approach the readings for Sunday each week as a pastor, I often look for those that give me a puzzle to decipher or something to figure out. And so, in that spirit, when I looked at today’s Gospel reading, I thought, here’s a puzzle worth cracking. The debate, here in Luke 20, is whether there is an afterlife, which would necessarily involve a resurrection of the saints. Jesus is answering the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection of the saints. His argument, the clinching argument, is quite simple.
So, to pause there for a moment, the Sadducees were an elite class among the Jews living in Judea. They were the keepers of the temple and the leaders of temple worship. Because of that, they received temple tax, which gave them a higher economic standing. The temple, as some of you know, is destroyed in 70 AD, and so, with it, the temple priesthood dissolved as well.
The remaining group of Jewish leaders, the rabbis, one of whom earlier was Jesus, eventually became central to the Christian faith. In this case, what separated the Sadducees, the temple priests, from the Pharisees, is that the temple priests denied the resurrection and the Pharisees affirmed it. So in this context, the Pharisees are chiding Jesus, and the Sadducees are doing the same thing that the Pharisees often try to do. They’re looking for a “gotcha moment.” They’re trying to get him to admit a contradiction, or to ask a nonsense question that trips him up. They called the God, in this case, their God, “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Notice how that’s in the present tense. This implies that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. If these three great patriarchs are permanently dead and will never exist again, then God cannot be the God of these three men, because “God is a God of the living, not of the dead.”
So essentially, Jesus, as a rebuttal, affirms the present tense of something that they say constantly: that theirs is “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” and so with that, they are unable to trick him.
Their nonsense question about the resurrection, which seems to assume that there’s continuity between the present era and the era to come, is dismissed. They affirm the resurrection without apparently knowing that they do.
Jesus walks away; the code has been cracked; and I have done my job. I have deciphered what is otherwise a very easy text to decipher.
I don’t feel that is enough, and so I turn to our Second Reading for today, taken from Second Thessalonians, to see if I could decipher what it has to say. And I have to tell you, I ran into a few problems, truth be told.
One commentator writes, “This text probably does not get included in very many sermons because it requires a lot of explanation. Some preachers who naturally get excited about Second Thessalonians 2 probably obsess in an unhealthy way over end-of-time speculation that is ironically, the opposite of Paul’s purpose.”
Here’s the important part. “Paul provided no names of future tyrants, no months and years of cataclysmic events, no specific nations or lands involved. Preachers are encouraged, “the commentator concludes, “to avoid unnecessary and distracting speculation about times and seasons and to focus on the faithfulness of God and the steadfast love directed toward us by God in Jesus Christ.”
In other words, don’t preach on the Second Reading! Now, when I’m told that—some of you know me well enough to know, I don’t like to be told what to do. I don’t always follow directions. And so, I decided I’m going to preach on the Second Reading, and I know what I’ll do. I will decipher the ambiguities of this text so that each of us today can walk away feeling as if we had accomplished something in church: we now understand all the arcane references Paul was making in the first century to the end-of-times. What an accomplishment that would be!
And so I turn to a couple of commentaries. Here’s one: “First Thessalonians assumes that Christ’s appearance will be a surprise. In the opposite direction, Second Thessalonians—again, our Second Reading for today—infers that we can at least know that the day of the Lord will not come at once; a dire struggle with evil must first take place, and even this is to be delayed for a time. The specifics of this apocalyptic story, the rebellion, and the lawless one, and the mystery of lawlessness, as well as what is now restraining the lawless one and the one who restrains it, are references that may have been clear to the letter’s recipients, but are not clear to us.” That is, to those of us living long after the first century, that’s not helpful, that doesn’t give me any answers.
And so I thought, let’s probe the text some more. Let’s see what other commentaries say. And I found that, though the identity of the “lawless one” mentioned is unknown, some identify him as a false prophet or an emperor. That’s not very helpful. So it was an unnamed false prophet or possibly an emperor. There’s a reference to “the emperor occupying the temple,” for example, or rather “the lawless one.” Maybe that was Nero, who was famous for persecuting Christians. Maybe that was Nero who claimed himself to be his other emperor, a son of God. We simply don’t know.
Here is what we do know: claims like these about the end times were frequent throughout the first century, as Matthew, Mark, and Luke suggest. If you ever find yourself in conversation with someone who professes to be adept at reading the signs of the times, and tells you that “the end is near,” —as I was first told on the playground in 1987, then later in college in the early 90’s, then in the early 2000’s and graduate school, then in 2012 by Harold Champion, and more recently, several months ago, when the Rapture was supposed to occur on Wednesday, September 22—all of these are saying way too much.
If you go to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says he doesn’t know. So if somebody confronts you with certainty about when the end times are going to occur, based upon the seasons they have interpreted, just tell them this: “I stand with Jesus. He doesn’t know, and if he doesn’t know, I don’t know.” And then gently pop them in the face and walk away.
Given all this strange language, given all the uncertainty about Second Thessalonians and its reference to a cosmic battle and the lawless one, and so on and so forth, what am I supposed to do as a preacher living 2000-plus years later? How do I make sense of this text in a way that connects to our world, the world in which we live and move and have our being?
Well, Paul and the Thessalonians sometimes worried about a religious apocalypse, where angels and demons clash with one another, and the universe hangs in the balance.
Show of hands. How many of you worry about that before you go to sleep at night? That world is different from ours.
We might not have to worry about that particular problem, but we have potentially world-ending issues in the news related to ecological disaster, AI threats, economic collapse and nuclear warfare. All of these, in their own non-mythological sense, are apocalyptic. An apocalypse is an unveiling that the present order of things is about to end and something new is about to begin. Something, in each of these cases, potentially disastrous: economic collapse, nuclear warfare, ecological disaster, or again, AI threats.
Last night, I was at the Robot Apocalypse [event] in our narthex. It filled the narthex. There were lots of people like me wondering what to do in the event of a Robot Apocalypse, and what we were told was, “gather together in fellowship and tell stories,” just as we’re doing here.
After the event was over, I was talking with Scott McCullough, Brent and Karen’s son, briefly about this, the talk, and with Brent as well and a few others, and he described the AI threat, I thought, in a really helpful way. He called it “a digital tsunami.” Now think about that for a moment. A digital tsunami.
I majored in English as a college student because I thought writing would never become useless. And what I’ve discovered in the last couple of years, with the advent of ChatGPT and others, is that my world, the apocalypse of my world, is near. ChatGPT and others can now do things that I thought only human beings like I could do. (Or “like me could do.”—I guess we’d have to ask ChatGPT about which is grammatically correct.)
My point is this, there are “small-a” apocalypses happening around us all the time, all kinds of fears that we encounter in the news, in our conversations with one another, across the landscape of social media. Even if we don’t share the same cosmic worldview that Paul does, we do know what it’s like to fear with regard to the end.
Having said that, or because of that, if Paul had such an extinction-level threat like we have in our time, he probably would have given some advice, and this is the advice that I’m giving to you today, based on Paul. His advice in the advent of facing an apocalypse is, “Thank God.” Thank God for his generous salvation, and don’t worry about things above your security clearance, that is to say, above your pay grade.
This mentality, by the way, is not about being passive. It is about living and acting like God is good and great, in spite of whatever fears and uncertainties we have. The point is that some big things are yet to happen, and there is really nothing we can do to stop them, like a digital tsunami. That is unlike, by the way, issues of political strife and economic turmoil matters we certainly can and should address.
All of which is to say, we, like Paul, are living in uncertain times. We, like Paul, are facing our own set of apocalypses, and we, like Paul, are called to a response that is different than the world around us.
Instead of reacting in fear, we react with gratitude. Let me give you an example. Sometime back, I was especially afraid of flying. Now I hesitate to share this, because when I’ve mentioned this in other sermons, people always come up to me after the service and say, “Oh, I know, Pastor, I’m afraid of flying too.” That is not the point.
The point is that I was afraid in the face of uncertainty. And if you think about it, being in a metal ton bird 30,000 feet in the air is a lot of uncertainty. And I don’t know about you, but when I experience turbulence, I go from really calm, to really scared, really fast. Do you know that sensation, when your toes curl up, when it’s really turbulent? That’s the kind of fear I have.
And so, what I’ve started doing, before I take off, is exactly what Paul is recommending here. I give thanks. I commend my life to the God of Jesus Christ, and I give thanks.
And somehow, and in some way, that enables me to face the kind of uncertainty that flying brings. So my question this morning, in the face of all our uncertainties, is simply this: For what, or whom, do we give thanks?
For my part, I give thanks in three ways: first, for my faith. My faith teaches me, as it teaches you, that God has shown us God’s grace and mercy in the person of Jesus Christ, that God claims and loves us all the way down to the root of our being, and that nothing, not even death, can separate us from that love that God has shown.
I give thanks, secondly, for the kind of fellowship we have together. Several weeks ago, we heard about the hymn “Ask the Complicated Questions.” That kind of thing doesn’t happen in all kinds of faith communities. We have something really special here, and for that, I am extremely grateful.
There were two reasons I left being a university professor, left academia. Number one, I hated grading papers. But number two, I wanted the kind of fellowship we have here, the kind of fellowship that shows how people care for one another. People look out for one another. When somebody dies, people show up. When somebody’s sick, people show up. That’s the kind of fellowship I wanted. And over these past eight, nine years, I’ve experienced that fellowship again and again and again.
Last night at our event “Robot Apocalypse,” it was there once more, and this time, not only with members of our church, but with members of our community. That’s the thing I wanted, and that’s the thing for which I’m grateful.
The last thing for which I’m grateful, at least today, is my freedom as an American citizen. We are celebrating Veterans Day. Veterans, would you raise your hands please? Thank you. Thank you for your service to this country, for making this a place where you and I and everyone else here can gather in freedom and ask those complicated questions that we’ve talked about, celebrate the faith that we share together and live among others with peace.
So those are ways that I give thanks. In the face of uncertainty, in the face of apocalypse, my question to you this morning is this: For what, or whom, do you give thanks? It’s tempting, when we encounter readings like Thessalonians, to decipher what they have to say, but the most important thing is to gather from them the kind of comfort and reassurance that the Gospel, the Word rather, is all about: to face apocalyptic uncertainty with the comfort of knowing that God is with us, and to give thanks, the strange advice Paul gives for what God has provided.
In Jesus’s name. Amen.