A promise full of hope
I used to live in New York City. Almost every morning, I took the subway from Grand Central Station. On my way down the stairs, I’d often pass a petite elderly woman who spent her mornings standing just outside the turnstiles. She was always neatly dressed, with her hair up in a scarf and a Bible in her hand.
“No one knows the day, and no one knows the hour,” she’d say. Over and over again.
In those days, I sometimes wondered if she was talking about the second coming of Christ—or the equally inscrutable New York City subway schedule.
Her words sound different to me today. “No one knows the day, and no one knows the hour.” So much of life lately feels uncertain and fragile. Maybe it’s just the relentless pace of the news, but the sense that something apocalyptic might be on the horizon is a feeling I understand better today than I did all those years ago in New York.
But still, I’ve never been entirely sure what to make of much Christian talk about the end of the world. There are a lot of words for it – the apocalypse, revelation, the second coming of Christ, the eschaton. A lot of words, but pretty much one idea: The idea that somehow, somewhere, sometime, perhaps even tomorrow, the world as we know it will come to an end, and Christ will return to usher in a new eternal reign of God.
It doesn’t help that I come from a long line of folks who find public talk about the end of the world to be about as comfortable as public talk about our more unpleasant digestive disorders.
And so today’s assigned readings wouldn’t have been my first choice of preaching material.
Wars and insurrections. Famines and plagues. Betrayal and death.
And it doesn’t help that all those things sound so very much like current headlines. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had quite enough of the apocalypse lately.
We hear talk of climate catastrophe. Of threats to democracy. Of war and collapse and the “end of life as we know it.” We scroll through social media looking for distraction and find just another dose of fear. The language of crisis has become so constant that it’s beginning to feel normal.
And here it is again today – this time in holy scripture.
What should we make of all this Biblical talk of war and insurrection, of nation rising against nation and kingdom against kingdom? Of a time when not one stone is left upon another?
It’s clear that the early Christians really did expect the end of the world to come soon—probably in their own lifetimes. That didn’t happen. But the apocalyptic imagination has traveled with us through every age since.
The destruction of the Temple that we heard about in today’s Gospel reading must have seemed like the end of the world to the Jews of Jerusalem. The Black Death of the Middle Ages killed millions. The trenches of the First World War saw the death of a generation of young men. And two decades later, the Holocaust shattered any lingering illusions about the capacity of humans to do evil.
Each generation has known moments when the world seemed to crack open. Each generation has wondered if their own time might be the last.
We know that the earliest Christians found great strength in an apocalyptic worldview. There are so many stories of martyrs going joyfully to what ought to have been terrifying deaths. They believed that their true home was to be found in the eternal kingdom of God – and not in the kingdoms of this world – and that belief gave them an almost superhuman courage.
We don’t share their world or their assumptions, though. And so it was rather to my surprise that in putting together this sermon, I found myself concluding that we modern people ought to embrace the idea of the apocalypse. That we too can look squarely at the worst that can happen and see on the other side the Christian hope shining through.
I’m not about to head outside with a sign proclaiming that the end is near. But I think that we do need to grapple with just what the Christian promise is when it seems that everything is falling apart.
When I first read today’s Gospel passage, the phrases that stood out had to do with war and destruction, persecution and death.
But let me read a few other excerpts.
“Do not be terrified.”
“This will give you an opportunity to testify.”
“I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.”
“Not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”
Jesus doesn’t promise that our world will ever be calm or predictable. But still he says, “do not be terrified.”
Jesus warns against terror itself, against fear. Because fear can twist our imaginations, cloud our judgment, and pull our hearts away from God.
Fear narrows our vision until all we see are threats. Fear strains our relationships and makes us suspicious of one another. On a larger scale, fear can lead societies to harden their hearts and justify actions they would never take in calmer moments. Jesus warns us against terror not because our lives will always be safe, but because fear itself can deform the soul.
And at the heart of the Gospel message is a promise of God’s presence and care. I believe that promise is what sustained the earliest Christians in their faith. And I believe that promise can sustain us as well.
Living within an apocalyptic mindset like that of that first generation means that we hold to a truth that can outlast injustice and evil, a truth that is greater than death, a truth that can, in one of the many paradoxes of faith, give us the courage to act without fear in this world. It means trusting that chaos won’t have the final word. It means remembering that we are, first and foremost, citizens of the kingdom of God—and that God’s kingdom is a kingdom that does not pass away.
And so hear again just a few of Jesus’ words from today’s Gospel:
“Do not be terrified.”
“By your endurance you will gain your souls.”
The promise of the Gospel isn’t a promise of happiness or of an easy life. It’s a promise that often carries with it a call to action. But it is, nonetheless, a promise full of hope.
In our own challenging times, may we live into that promise without, perhaps, perfect understanding, but trusting that God will be with us in whatever struggles we encounter.
If we hold to that truth, we might just find ourselves with the strength to trust in God even, or maybe especially, when it seems our world is collapsing around us.
I think of that woman at Grand Central sometimes, standing by the turnstiles with her Bible, speaking her truth to the rushing crowds. She didn’t know the details of the future, but she knew one true thing: no one knows the day, and no one knows the hour. But the kingdom of God stands forever.
And that makes all the difference in how we face whatever comes.
This is a portion of a long-duration composite image taken by astrophotographer Ignacio Fernández at Alfacar, Spain last month, and recently featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day. It shows comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) with two tails: a straight one composed of dust, and a blue-hued ion tail. Extreme solar activity caused the ion tail to be unusually large and intricate. Comets were widely considered to be portents of unrest and calamity until the late 16th century. More recently, it has been suggested that comets brought significant amounts of water to Earth after its formation, and possibly even some chemical precursors of life itself.