Sermon – Now and Not Yet
Daniel 7:1, 9-14; Matthew 25:1-15, 31-33; 26:1-2
Farmville Presbyterian Church
11/16/25
Full disclosure – today may be frightening to some. I was frightened more than 20 years ago as I was listening to the radio while I was feeding my middle daughter. She was a wee baby and was strapped into her highchair as I was shoveling in spoonfuls of some kind of baby food. The radio was tuned into a certain school in Lynchburg that at the time had a school of prophecy. Yes, they had an actual school of prophecy at the time. And that’s when I heard something that stopped me cold. The person on the program said, “We know Jesus is returning in our lifetimes. We all just know it.”
The spoon fell from my hand. I could not believe what I had just heard – not that I was ready to pack my things. I was not worried that at any second Jesus might return. I was stunned that someone had the gall to make a prediction like that with such certainty. We have heard of claims like that in secretive cults. Every once in a while, there is a new cult revealed in which the group somehow was waiting for the return of the Messiah, but this was a whole different situation. I immediately ordered the audio tape of that program so that I could have the recording of one of the most ignorant things I had ever heard. It was so ignorant, it was scary.
Guess what? That school of prophecy which was tied to one of the authors of the Left Behind series does not exist anymore. There is, however, an ice rink with the name now. That seems safer.
Today, we are looking into something that might be scary for you, too, but for different reasons. The Second Coming or the return of Christ has been something working in Christian faith from the very beginning. Jesus himself said to his followers according to Matthew 16 that some of them would still be alive when he came into his Kingdom with the glory of God. This kind of talk fueled an expectation that the return of Jesus to set all things straight would happen sometime in their lifetimes. It was Paul’s assumption, too, but it did not happen – at least not like they expected. This does not surprise me, though, because God tends to NOT work as we expect. Ever since these beginning days of the Christian movement, people have puzzled over what it means for there to be a Second Coming and what Jesus and the Bible might mean from the many references to something coming. We read some of the passages today that point to a coming event that has a great significance. These passages are real. The expectations are real. Presbyterians think they are real, and today, I am considering how Presbyterians tend to make sense of the Second Coming of Christ.
It has caused the people of faith a fair bit of confusion over the centuries. Even the Bible had to provide an answer as to why things did not happen as people expected. That’s where 2 Peter 3:8 comes from, “…With the Lord, a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years are as a day.” People back then were concerned about this flagging expectation, so the Apostolic tradition tried to answer. It is not a terribly helpful answer, but it does express the basic, needed notion: we cannot know anything with the timing of God.
We cannot know anything about the timing of God. Jesus made the same assertion. He even said that he did not know the day or hour of the big day. We are left with certain basic ideas of interpreting the Bible and its predictions that have been working pretty well for nearly two thousand years. This is thanks to St. Augustine, and they shaped how the church looked at the coming Day of the Lord and the return of Jesus:
- First, the numbers given in the Bible around when “this and that” are going to happen are symbolic. They are not to be taken literally. So many people have gotten swept up in worrying and planning and mapping that they are reading a story that is not there. The Bible is bigger and harder than our brains can hold all together. We do not know the insights of the Spirit. We should not try to make the Bible say what we want it to say.
- Two, we are already participating in the coming of Christ. Augustine believed the first resurrection in Revelation was our rebirth in Christ. All who are in Christ are already reborn, born from above, and new creations. The process of Christ’s return is a process, and we have been living in it for nearly two thousand years.
- Three, Jesus has already won. This is critical. He conquered Satan with his resurrection. Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth when? Now. There is not more than one Lord. Jesus is Lord. The powers of death, sin, and evil do not rule anything. While human hearts and a broken world can reflect these lesser powers, they do not own us. Jesus and Jesus alone is Lord now.
- Four, the Bible says a number of things that do not fit neatly together. That’s OK. Following Christ is a process of discovery and learning. We are not born with all the answers, but as we live lives growing into greater love, we will come to a better understanding of what the Bible means. I find it greatly amusing how my own Scriptural understanding has changed since my first church even. I have no doubt that I will continue learning and changing for the rest of my life, too. One day I will look back at my time here and see how far I have come. God gave us brains, and God means for us to use them together. No one has all the answers.
So what are we supposed to do with the Second Coming of Christ as Presbyterians?
We believe that God is in control, even when it might not look like it – especially when it might not look like it. Chaos and chaos agents in this world are human hands and hearts, not God’s.
We should absolutely look forward to the return of Christ. I will not be able to figure it out or understand it, but I can absolutely look forward to meeting my Savior face to face, and I can unabashedly pray “Come, Lord Jesus, come.” To me, that is the best verse in the Bible (Revelation 22:20). It is the second to the last verse in the Bible which says to me that this is where we should all end up. This expectation is where the Bible leaves us, and this expectation that God is not done, that Jesus is returning, and that there is always hope is wonderfully important. In two weeks, we begin the season of Advent. It is a time of remembering this coming of Jesus, not just as a baby but more so as the returning King.
Most importantly to me, the work of the coming Kingdom of God is right here and now. We are not sitting around waiting on Jesus to fix the world, but we are at the work, little by little, every day. We are in the service of our Risen and Coming Lord in this very moment. No one knows the future. We cannot tell what will happen five minutes from now, but we can decide to use the time we have to God’s glory. We can decide to use what we have and what we can do to build the Kingdom of God in Farmville and beyond. Jesus is coming, and one day we will all meet him – one way or another. We should all want to meet him well. Like the parable of the talents, we should all want to use what we have, what we have been given, to the best of our ability while we wait and watch.
Both the Old Testament and the New Testament have a sense of expectation of what God is going to do. We are a future-looking people living in the present. Jesus is the Lord now, but his coming is not yet. We are participating in the Kingdom now, but it is not yet finished or perfected. We have a blessed place in the work of God’s people now, and one day we will see the result of our labor together.
It might well be that thinking about these things scares or worries you. It shouldn’t. It is meant to be a comfort in that no matter what the world brings, there is something greater coming. The Bible points us to our confidence and comfort in God. The language can be hard to understand, but it is meant to call our attention and to spur our action. We should not wait for something to happen to change the world in good ways. We are meant to be God’s change today.
To God be the glory. Amen.