The Returning Jesus

Hebrews Series 8 – The Returning Jesus

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church 12 August 2018

Isaiah 53.11b-12; Habakkuk 2.2-4

Hebrews 10.24-25, 35-38; 9.26b-28

Listen to the sermon here:
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/the-returning-jesus

Do you ever have those days when the tension between the world as it is,

            and the world as it should be, seems particularly acute?

Whether it’s something in your own life,

            or in the life of someone close to you,

or something in another part of the world entirely,

            affecting people you will never meet;

sometimes the world just isn’t the way the world should be.

The wicked prosper, the righteous suffer,

            and the world just keeps turning,

            grinding all to dust with the inexorability of an unfeeling machine.

And where, in all of this, we might well wonder, is God to be found?

            Where is hope? Where is life, joy, and love?

Now forgive me, I don’t mean to get you depressed on a Sunday morning,

            but these were the questions facing the congregation

                        who first received the sermon to the Hebrews,

            just as they had been the questions that Israel had wrestled with

                        through their long years of exile and oppression six centuries earlier,

            just as they are questions that still haunt our own lives

                        some two thousand years later.

The world is not the way it should be.

And this tension between the world as it is, and the world as it should be,

            is an unresolved tension that runs through all of human history;

and the question of where God fits into it

            is one of the great mysteries of theology.

So today, as we conclude our eight week series on the book of Hebrews,

            we find ourselves asking,

                        along with so many other people of faith down the millennia,

            what we are to make of the fact

                        that good so often seems to lose out to evil.

Certainly for the small and struggling group of Christians in Rome,

            to whom this sermon we call ‘Hebrews’ was first sent,

            things were far from the way they should have been.

Their faith in Jesus, in the stories of his death and resurrection,

            led them to believe that they were worshipping the Lord of all,

                        the King of the Universe,

            the one in whom power and love came together

                        to liberate the oppressed and to bring good news to the poor.

But their daily reality was that the Emperor still reigned supreme

            over not only their own city, but the whole of the known world.

They were required by Roman law

            to make offerings of worship to the emperor,

            and at risk of punishment for treason if they refused.

The world of their faith conviction

            simply didn’t match the world of their experience.

It was as if Jesus had come to the earth,

            inaugurated this wonderful revolution of love and forgiveness,

                        and new life, and eternal hope,

            and then vanished as suddenly as he had appeared,

                        leaving those whose lives his story touched and transformed

                        to work it out for themselves under hostile conditions.

You will remember, if you’ve been following this series over the last couple of months,

            (and if you haven’t you can catch up via our website),

you will remember that the congregation had a basic problem,

            which was that they had lost sight of Jesus.

His historical incarnation was receding into history,

            and his spiritual presence was on high seated at the right hand of the father,

leaving his followers lost, alone, and increasingly dispirited.

And nowhere is this sense of abandonment more acute

            than in the moment of tension between the world as it is,

                        and the world as it should be.

Maybe you too, like me, like so many who have gone before us,

            feel something of the frustration of this disconnect?

We pray, we try, we trust,

            we act, we hope, we persevere,

            but still the world is not changed.

In fact, if we are honest, still we ourselves are not changed,

            or at least not changed enough.

We still sin, we still get it wrong,

            we still hurt others by our ignorance and by our design,

            we still stand in need of forgiveness, in the hope of transformation.

Was this what Christ died for?

            Is this the good news of his resurrection? Is this it?

Is a hope never realised all we have to hope for,

            even after two thousand years of Christian witness?

I mean, forget the 35 years

            that was causing problems for the congregation addressed in Hebrews,

what about us???

And here we need to start hearing the wisdom of the preacher of Hebrews,

            as he points his congregation to one final, further vision of Jesus.

He has already shown them the Sustaining Jesus,

            present in and through all things;

and the Pastoral Jesus,

            entering fully into human weakness and suffering;

and the Speaking Jesus,

            declaring God’s words for all who will listen;

and the Familial Jesus,

            inviting his followers to be part of his family;

and the Accessible Jesus,

            opening the pathway to God;

and the Visible Jesus,

            revealing God to humanity;

and the Vulnerable Jesus,

            dying for the forgiveness of the sins of the world;

and then finally, he points them to the returning Jesus,

            who has not, he asserts, left the earth for good,

            but returns to bring to completion

                        that which he started during his earthly ministry.

And here we find ourselves in the middle

            of the theological doctrine known as eschatology.

That is, the doctrine of the end,

            the theology of the last things.

And as we try to get to grips with the preacher’s description of the Returning Jesus,

            I’d like to sound a note of warning…

There’s a great danger with eschatology,

            and it is that it can simply push the solution to our problem,

                        of a disconnect between the way the world is,

                        and the way the world should be,

            into some imagined or hoped-for future,

                        when wrongs will be righted and tears wiped away.

In some versions of eschatology this is depicted

            as a heavenly judgment scene which everyone experiences after death;

and in other versions it is a re-creation and purification

            of the earth through some process of tribulation

                        by which the evil get their come-uppance

                        before the righteous get their crowns of eternal glory.

Sometimes, you get a combination of these two,

            in ever more creative eschatological schemes

                        relating to debates about pre-, post-, or a-millennialism,

                                    partial or full rapture, and pre- or post-tribulationism.

                        Not to mention the debates around dispensationalism.

If none of this means much to you,

            then I’m going to say ‘fine’,

            and my suggestion is to spend your time more productively elsewhere.

But there will be those here this morning

            whose past includes a certain kind of church

                        where these things REALLY MATTER,

            to the extent that if you disagree on some finer point of eschatology,

                        you run the risk of being declared a heretic.

Some of us will have grown into faith

            haunted by a future image of the Returning Jesus

                        descending from the clouds with wrath and punishment,

            coming back to kick sinners and take names.

Sing it with me if you like:

You better watch out

You better not cry

Better not pout

I’m telling you why

Jesus Christ is coming again.

He’s making a list

And checking it twice;

Already knows Who’s naughty and nice

Jesus Christ  is coming again

He sees you when you’re sleeping

He knows when you’re awake

He knows if you’ve been bad or good

So be good for goodness sake!

O! You better watch out!

You better not cry

Better not pout

I’m telling you why

Jesus Christ is coming again.

Sound familiar? I think it sounds terrifying!

But maybe you have experienced the other kind of eschatology,

            where the whole earth itself is going to be judged, destroyed, and re-created.

This is particularly prevalent on the other side of the Atlantic,

            and is often linked to a lack of concern about, or denial of,

                        issues like climate change or conservationism,

            whereby we don’t need to care for this planet

                        because it is quite literally going to hell anyway;

            and what matters is moral purity

                        and preaching salvation to those who are lost.

This kind of eschatology has tended in recent years

            to focus around the issues of abortion and human sexuality

            as the defining markers of orthodoxy.

So, in the face of these two eschatologies,

            the personalised and the globalised,

how are we to hear the preacher of Hebrews’ call

            to encounter the Returning Jesus?

I’m going to suggest that the beginnings of an answer

            lie in the Lord’s Prayer, and the Old Testament.

Firstly, the Lord’s Prayer,

            which we have already said together this morning, as we do every week.

Jesus tells his disciples to pray,

            ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’

The transformation in view here

            is not something to be experienced post mortem,

            or in a renewed creation.

The Christ-like prayer

            is for the kingdom of God that is beyond us,

            to come into being in the world around us.

The Lord’s Prayer is for ‘the world as it should be’

            to break in upon ‘the world as it is’.

As with all things theological, there’s a technical term for this,

            and it’s called ‘realised eschatology’,

which is basically a way of saying

            that instead of the solution to our problem

                        being somewhere in the future,

                        or somewhere eternally beyond us,

            it is actually breaking in upon us in the present

                        as the world beyond us becomes the world around us.

And so the preacher of Hebrews takes us, through a textual allusion,

            to the time of the Israelite exile in Babylon,

to a time when the world as it should be

            was very far removed from the world as experienced by the exiles,

                        so far from their homes, with no prospect of restoration.

It was to the exiles in Babylon that the prophet known as Second Isaiah

            wrote the songs of the suffering servant,

which depicted the suffering of the people of Israel, God’s servant,

            as the precursor to their restoration to their land.

Israel’s suffering is depicted as absorbing the sins of her tormentors,

            and as opening the possibility of a new world

                        breaking into their present suffering

            to transform their world as it is

                        into something closer to the world as it should be.

Then the preacher whisks his readers through another allusion

            to the writings of the prophet Habakkuk,

who was addressing the situation faced by the post-exilic Jewish community,

            who had been repatriated to their native homeland.

All, it seems, was not well in paradise,

            and the Chaldeans, the New Babylonians, were threatening their safety.

The book of Habakkuk takes the form of a dialogue

            between the prophet and God;

the prophet raises a complaint to God

            about rampant social injustice in Judean society,

and God’s response is to challenge the prophet

            to write on a billboard large enough for even a runner to read,

            the promise that the world will not be like this forever,

                        because the future is continually breaking in upon the present.

In these two Old Testament prophetic readings,

            we have a view of history that is essentially cyclical;

oppression and evil give way to justice and restoration,

            but then evil raises its ugly head again,

            and so on through the centuries…

And is this the answer, ponders the preacher:

            sometimes the world as it should be breaks into the world as it is,

            and sometimes it doesn’t?

Well, kind of, but he goes further…

            because he addresses the role of the faithful people of God in all of this.

What is it that keeps evil at bay?

            How does the world beyond us break in upon us?

The answer he offers

            is that it is as the people of Christ proclaim the gospel of Christ,

                        that Christ returns once again to the earth

                        bringing new hope, new life, new love.

So he encourages his readers to not give up meeting,

            to persevere in worship and prayer,

            and in encouraging one another.

He tells them to never abandon their confidence in Christ,

            because this is what will give them the endurance

            to run the race of life to its faithful conclusion.

And key to all of this is the repeated proclamation

            of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ,

who like the suffering servant Israel in Babylon,

            takes the sins of the many into his own suffering

            to bring healing and freedom and release to all.

And here we come to the crux of the preacher’s point.

            For him, Jesus has broken the spiralling pattern

                        of good giving way to evil, giving way to good, and so on ad infinitum.

            Because in his death,

                        Jesus has overthrown the pattern of death followed by judgment.

Listen again to the verses from our reading from chapter 9:

Hebrews 9.27-28

And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment, ²⁸ so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

In Jesus’ death, the power of sin

            to continually re-ensnare and entrap humanity is broken.

Jesus does not return to punish, but to rescue.

            He comes to gather and not to trample.

He comes again, and again, and again,

            wherever and whenever his people proclaim the good news of his resurrection,

            and he comes to bring new life.

And so to us, today.

            We each of us, individually and collectively, need a daily new advent;

                        we need Christ to come to us again,

                        to break us out of our acquiescence.

Our meeting together, our worship, our prayer,

            our naming of Jesus as Lord,

all these keep us from re-enslavement to sin,

            as the one who is beyond us

            keeps breaking in new ways into our present,

                        with love, and forgiveness,

                        and new life, and new hope,

                        and a new vision for the future.

So what does this mean for us, here at Bloomsbury in 2018?

            How are we to encounter the returning Jesus?

Well, firstly, I think we can lay to rest

            the fear of the future that unhealthy and unhelpful eschatologies have given us.

The Returning Jesus is not a cause for fear,

            or for disengagement from the world.

In fact, it is the opposite.

            The Jesus who comes to us again and again,

                        calling us to pray that the kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven,

                        calls us to live and work for that coming kingdom.

But where and in what ways will we meet the one who will not let us alone,

            because he comes to us daily from beyond ourselves,

            calling us to new life and fresh purpose?

Some of you may have noticed

            that the language I’ve been using to describe the doctrine of eschatology

            was borrowed from the Citizens UK community organising methodology.

They talk continually about the fact

            that the world as it is, is not the world as it should be;

and the purpose of their networking and organising strategy

            is to build enough power to be able to make changes in the world

            that will have lasting effect.

It is no coincidence that so many churches, including our own, are part of this,

            along with mosques, synagogues, school, universities,

            and other community organisations.

The preacher to the Hebrews knew the benefit of not giving up meeting together,

            because he knew that together we are stronger than when we are alone.

And so in London, in 2018, we need our allies, our partners,

            if we are see people’s lives lifted up and gifted with new life.

From Dragon Hall to Citizens UK to the Simon Community,

            from the Soho Gathering to ecumenical partnerships to our commercial hirers,

we need to find ways of working together with others,

            in order to bring the world beyond us into the world around us.

But we must never forget that we do this because of Jesus,

            it is the one we worship who has lifted our eyes above the horizon,

and given us a glimpse of an alternative

            that he then calls us to live and work towards.

It was Martin Luther King who once said that,

            ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’

What is not often realised about this quote

            is that for King, it only made sense to say this

in the context of his living faith in the power of Christ

            to effect change in the human heart.

The danger which liberal, socially minded Christianity can face

            is that we end up losing sight of Jesus,

                        in the midst of our striving to bring into being the new world

                        for which we have been so earnestly praying.

‘Well’, said the preacher of Hebrews to a congregation that had lost sight of Jesus,

            ‘there he is, coming to you again and again and again,

breaking into your present with a promise of something different,

            and calling you to act, collectively and individually,

            in response to his presence.’

So provoke one another to love and good deeds,

            do not neglect to meet together,

work with others, encouraging one another,

            do not abandon that confidence of yours,

                        because it brings great reward.

And you will need endurance,

            for the change you seek is coming,

            but it comes slowly.

Don’t shrink back, but live righteously by faith,

            and trust that your failings and sin are removed from you by Jesus,

who leads you from death to life,

            as he comes to you again, and again, and again.

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