Quick Summary:

What Jesus has to say in Luke today sounds a lot more like bad news than good. But in light of recent events in our world, the language spoken by Jesus in these opening verses rings true.

The downing of the Russian passenger plane; deadly attacks carried out by ISIS in Paris and Beirut; heightened tensions between Russia’s Putin and Turkey’s Erdogan—these developments form a powerful context for hearing this text this morning. And the highly anticipated climate talks in Paris this week add their own element of angst.

By so many measures, in so many ways, our world is out of balance. Foundations that once seemed solid are shaking. Institutions that were once trustworthy have lost their shine. Rhetoric is hardening; gulfs are widening; and fear is trying to seize the wheel and steer us away from the “better angels of our nature.”

But the point of Jesus' teaching is not to inflame the crisis. The point is to keep your head and act out the ethic Jesus taught and lived with confidence that this is exactly what God intends for you to do.

Henri Nouwen puts it this way: [As] we wait… for the coming of Jesus, [we wait] in the conviction that we have already seen God’s footsteps….As we wait, we remember him for whom we are waiting, and as we remember him we create a community ready to welcome him when he comes.

Any community ready to welcome Jesus must make room for refugees, including Syrian refugees. To compromise our faith for the sake of fear-laced political expediency is to miss Jesus’ point entirely.

The upshot of the gospel—the real GOOD NEWS—is that no matter what the size of the canvass on which we live our lives, we live them faithfully in this MEANTIME because we know the one who holds us in the ENDTIME.