"Here He Comes!" - A Sermon on Luke 21 by Steven Paulson
Let us not be
swine who think only, What’s for Supper? Rather, hear the words from Christ, who tells us what to expect from him on the
Last Day: The Final Judgment. Now it so happens in the lectionary one day every
year Christ gives the command: “Do not prepare your sermon.” This is my lucky day. Instead of my
preparation, Christ says, I will give you a big, fat mouth. At least there is no preparation if the
sermon is your self-defense for the Final Judgment. However, if when you preach it is nothing
more or less than handing Christ over to sinners, then you can prepare to your
heart’s content. So, watch out now, here he comes—ready or not—I’ve got my big
mouth going.
Grace and Peace to You, From God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
If you want to learn how to live here in this old world, you must not go to Seminary, but rather to the state University or Community College. At the Seminary we learn only how to get salvation. So you can see that when I preach to you at the Seminary, I speak to you not of this world as an endless stream of time—I speak of the End! Our chief doctrine (what we have that you should bother to listen to you) comes to this one thing: What happens in the End?
In the End, Jesus Christ, who sits at the right hand of the Father, will judge the quick and the dead. Naturally, we want to know, what is his measuring stick? It is works of the law-- plain and simple: “For it is not the hearers of the law, but the doers of the law who will be justified.” (Romans 2:13). Now, how are you doing?
Well, I’m a preacher aren’t I? I don’t need to wait for your vocal repentance. And I am certainly not a defender of myself or my opinions, as a politician or university professor would be. Instead, I’ll tell you straight out how it is going for you: the end—your end-- is destruction. Total, absolute, cosmic destruction. No stone will be left upon another even for the holiest of places on earth. You don’t need to wonder or guess how it all goes in the end.
So what do you do now that you know what will happen in the end? You must become evangelical—stripped down like the naked boy at Christ’s arrest (the only known Lutheran in the Bible) who runs away in his underwear asking the one necessary question: “Help! Is there any deliverance?”
Now, I also have been given the answer to that great question of justification, and I am bound and determined to give it—but not yet. This is what we call the true delay of the Parousia—which is that small delay between the beginning of this sermon and the end—no more no less. After all, we are not stones or swine, are we? How will you grasp the Deliverer in desperation, unless you first grasp what you are being delivered from. And what you need deliverance from is your slavery, your bondage—or simply what kind of pickle you are in. And I tell you solemnly you are all in a big pickle. In the End, there is no escape. But there is deliverance.
One day near his death, Christ was giving a temple talk to the laity (laos). Apparently he liked to go down early in the morning to start his talks, like a good Messiah would, since the early bird gets the worm. His sermon composition is predictable and boring. I would fail any decent preaching class every time for its lack of imagination. What he says is monotonous according to form and style. But it is precisely duotonous in the content—not one word, not three, but two: First the law, then the gospel. Of course you will no doubt beg him, “can’t you do better, Jesus, than this law and gospel?
On this day, some folks said “Look at this temple building!”—Always there are tourists, especially in Jerusalem. “Margaret, get a load of these stones—notice the nice Herodian border.” But Jesus replied bluntly: “In the coming days—these temple stones you admire will be destroyed—utterly.” There is Jesus, glass half full, taking the air out of the balloon and ruining a perfectly good morning at Temple. It will all be destroyed. But this is how it is with us: where we see glory, Christ sees destruction. Where we see destruction, Christ puts new life. In the End: All temple stones destroyed—none are overlooked, ignored—literally, there is no forgiveness for them. Destruction is the end even where the stones are holy, and the place is where God promised to dwell. By this, the law is fulfilled.
Strangely, destruction itself can get to be a hope—when you suffer like Judah, you start to long for the End as a day of Justice, come-uppance—the righting of all the wrongs done to us as even Immanuel Kant recognized was needed for pure reason. Without it, duty itself is destroyed. So these people listening to Christ that day sought a sign. But signs always breed contempt for the true object, because a sign points away from itself to something that is not there. So in seeking a sign, one misses Mr. Deliverance standing right in front of you. Shall I ever tire of telling you Christ is a present thing, not absent? I assure you, not even the church has to take his place—and become (say) a morally deliberative body in his absence. Watch out, he’s coming! You don’t need to fill in for him in the meantime.
In the end, why do people want a sign, and not their DELIVERANCE? A sign means: I have time, the end is not yet. And if I have time I can make this thing right before God. So here is what we have in our Scripture today: Christ sitting right in front of them, and his hearers are looking for a sign pointing somewhere else. Then they start running around looking for a replacement Messiah—a Vicar, who will say: “I am He,” but does not go to them. The Vicar leaves room for you to seek him out and find the deliverance yourself.
The Church has been no help to you. In seeking to be the Shepherd of you, its leaders have rob the true Shepherd of the sheep. The Lutheran Church in particular has proved itself unworthy to it’s one Lord every time in the last two centuries it has been given a chance publicly to be a martyr—to witness to the whole world what the chief doctrine is—justification by faith alone apart from any work of the law. In one statement or act after another these supposed evangelical churches have taught you either nothing concerning your Judgment Day (it is a discard-able myth) or that grace will save you according to the principle of love. Even at its greatest height, in the Joint Declaration of the Doctrine of Justification, with its most careful scholarship and desire for unity Lutherans have feinted and failed to speak about deliverance on the final Day, or taught instead that the chief article was merely grace that accepts your meager sacrifices of acts of love, as if what you needed on the Final Day is merely a loophole in the law, instead of the man we call Deliverance.
Strangest of all, none of you believe the End has come already in Him—since theology was invented to deny what I just told you: that is, to deny Christ’s all-encompassing judgment. So, here is our situation. The worst thing you can do on the Last Day is deny Christ is even here, and therefore, deny that there is such a thing as the Last Judgment Day. The liberal theology into which we have carefully trained you at this place denies there is such a thing as a Last Day. Maybe Paul believed it, but he was just wrong. Maybe Jesus did himself, but even the Son of Man got confused now and then. We even say the idea of Christ seated at the right hand in order to judge the world was so short lived that even Luke didn’t believe it, and so interpolated such things as: “the end is not yet.”
Sociologists called you—rightly or wrongly “mainline denomination” folk because you have hacked off the Final Judgment and act as if this world is it. You are secularists, meaning one world-ers, who have successfully denied the Final Day. This is much worse than Scientists taking Aristotle’s four causes, and hacking off the final cause. That was bad enough. But you have gone much further. Rejecting what happened at the Final Day has led to taking the great teaching on justification (that broke into the world again at the Reformation), and selling it for pottage by turning justification into mere justice. No pie in the sky by and by! The poor do not need a sermon, they need money. Rights and Justice is what is left of this once great doctrine and so the gospel is utterly confused with re-enfranchising people with rights, empowering them so they are slaves to no one but themselves, and then helping the poor just like the Salvation Army does it—that is, with love and no idea what the Gospel is (though you mainline imitators will never do it as well as the Army).
But the real reason that people never see Christ when he comes, is that their hearts are overcharged with the cares of this life. If you think for a moment of Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs, then spending time and money on preparing for the final judgment is the dead last thing you should ever bother with in this life. There are cares in life, that is certainly true, for example, how to make money and buy food. But these care are not to overwhelm the heart—which belongs to faith. Justification concerns the last day, not simply “the next” day. Because only on the Last Day do we know what a deliverer is—and why we would possibly need one if he should ever just happen to come to us one day. How will you know that the gospel is not love or affirmation, but resurrection, unless you know your death? How will you know the gospel is forgiveness of sin unless the sin is revealed? How will you know the gospel is freedom from the law unless you know what the law’s charge is against you? Instead, you were a good postmodern, seeking a sign, rather than the Son. You sought judgment on the basis of your careful preparation.
Now you have come to the end. Enough interpreting of signs -- hermeneutician, symbolist, semanticist. You are no better than a reader of Tarot cards, and I dare say a good deal more dangerous when you wear an alb. Fanatics run about looking for the “new direction” of the Spirit—or as you call it “discerning what God is doing in this place” But beware! The sign is a snare. Watch out, now, watch out—here He comes—Mr. Deliverance—so that you know your sin and destruction has a name, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He’s got your sin, he knows it all, he feels it, he claims it—he knows that it not only denies him, but forcibly removes Christ so that sin can attend to what it finds more crucial to its work. He’s got it, nows it, feels it, claims it, and now forgives you it. Listen—From this moment on there is no more death sentence for you, because you are in Christ. The end has two words, not one. You have heard the first word, destruction, now here the second: a new creation.
There now—no more waiting and wondering. The Parousia has come for you. The End is behind you now. All you await in this old life is to see what you now have in the words by faith. As the little Lutheran in underwear put it: Is there deliverance? Yes, here he is.
Now there is a great freedom I want to tell you about, which is at your disposal immediately in this old world—even with your old bag of maggots hanging on your neck. First, you are hereby freed from signs—no more seeking signs, since you have the real thing, Christ. Second, you are freed to just wait. Patience is now yours as a gift, since you have never learned how to earn it. It is true that there there are many other freedoms once Mr. Deliverance is here. But this one in particular will be at your disposal: “the world will hate you because of my name”—says Christ. I hereby declare to you the entire freedom from having to be loved, or even liked. You have the Deliverer—you don’t need any more. You are officially free from having to be liked—Why, I am enjoying this freedom right now in front of you.
Now the second coming of Christ is not really “second,” but the umpteenth time, each arrival is no different than the first, except for this one crucial fact: When Christ came the first time he had death in front of him and the sins of the world remained on you, when Christ comes the “second” time to you he has death behind him and the sins of the world are on Him.
So, here he is, your Redemption—ready or not.
Steven Paulson
Luther Seminary
Grace and Peace to You, From God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
If you want to learn how to live here in this old world, you must not go to Seminary, but rather to the state University or Community College. At the Seminary we learn only how to get salvation. So you can see that when I preach to you at the Seminary, I speak to you not of this world as an endless stream of time—I speak of the End! Our chief doctrine (what we have that you should bother to listen to you) comes to this one thing: What happens in the End?
In the End, Jesus Christ, who sits at the right hand of the Father, will judge the quick and the dead. Naturally, we want to know, what is his measuring stick? It is works of the law-- plain and simple: “For it is not the hearers of the law, but the doers of the law who will be justified.” (Romans 2:13). Now, how are you doing?
Well, I’m a preacher aren’t I? I don’t need to wait for your vocal repentance. And I am certainly not a defender of myself or my opinions, as a politician or university professor would be. Instead, I’ll tell you straight out how it is going for you: the end—your end-- is destruction. Total, absolute, cosmic destruction. No stone will be left upon another even for the holiest of places on earth. You don’t need to wonder or guess how it all goes in the end.
So what do you do now that you know what will happen in the end? You must become evangelical—stripped down like the naked boy at Christ’s arrest (the only known Lutheran in the Bible) who runs away in his underwear asking the one necessary question: “Help! Is there any deliverance?”
Now, I also have been given the answer to that great question of justification, and I am bound and determined to give it—but not yet. This is what we call the true delay of the Parousia—which is that small delay between the beginning of this sermon and the end—no more no less. After all, we are not stones or swine, are we? How will you grasp the Deliverer in desperation, unless you first grasp what you are being delivered from. And what you need deliverance from is your slavery, your bondage—or simply what kind of pickle you are in. And I tell you solemnly you are all in a big pickle. In the End, there is no escape. But there is deliverance.
One day near his death, Christ was giving a temple talk to the laity (laos). Apparently he liked to go down early in the morning to start his talks, like a good Messiah would, since the early bird gets the worm. His sermon composition is predictable and boring. I would fail any decent preaching class every time for its lack of imagination. What he says is monotonous according to form and style. But it is precisely duotonous in the content—not one word, not three, but two: First the law, then the gospel. Of course you will no doubt beg him, “can’t you do better, Jesus, than this law and gospel?
On this day, some folks said “Look at this temple building!”—Always there are tourists, especially in Jerusalem. “Margaret, get a load of these stones—notice the nice Herodian border.” But Jesus replied bluntly: “In the coming days—these temple stones you admire will be destroyed—utterly.” There is Jesus, glass half full, taking the air out of the balloon and ruining a perfectly good morning at Temple. It will all be destroyed. But this is how it is with us: where we see glory, Christ sees destruction. Where we see destruction, Christ puts new life. In the End: All temple stones destroyed—none are overlooked, ignored—literally, there is no forgiveness for them. Destruction is the end even where the stones are holy, and the place is where God promised to dwell. By this, the law is fulfilled.
Strangely, destruction itself can get to be a hope—when you suffer like Judah, you start to long for the End as a day of Justice, come-uppance—the righting of all the wrongs done to us as even Immanuel Kant recognized was needed for pure reason. Without it, duty itself is destroyed. So these people listening to Christ that day sought a sign. But signs always breed contempt for the true object, because a sign points away from itself to something that is not there. So in seeking a sign, one misses Mr. Deliverance standing right in front of you. Shall I ever tire of telling you Christ is a present thing, not absent? I assure you, not even the church has to take his place—and become (say) a morally deliberative body in his absence. Watch out, he’s coming! You don’t need to fill in for him in the meantime.
In the end, why do people want a sign, and not their DELIVERANCE? A sign means: I have time, the end is not yet. And if I have time I can make this thing right before God. So here is what we have in our Scripture today: Christ sitting right in front of them, and his hearers are looking for a sign pointing somewhere else. Then they start running around looking for a replacement Messiah—a Vicar, who will say: “I am He,” but does not go to them. The Vicar leaves room for you to seek him out and find the deliverance yourself.
The Church has been no help to you. In seeking to be the Shepherd of you, its leaders have rob the true Shepherd of the sheep. The Lutheran Church in particular has proved itself unworthy to it’s one Lord every time in the last two centuries it has been given a chance publicly to be a martyr—to witness to the whole world what the chief doctrine is—justification by faith alone apart from any work of the law. In one statement or act after another these supposed evangelical churches have taught you either nothing concerning your Judgment Day (it is a discard-able myth) or that grace will save you according to the principle of love. Even at its greatest height, in the Joint Declaration of the Doctrine of Justification, with its most careful scholarship and desire for unity Lutherans have feinted and failed to speak about deliverance on the final Day, or taught instead that the chief article was merely grace that accepts your meager sacrifices of acts of love, as if what you needed on the Final Day is merely a loophole in the law, instead of the man we call Deliverance.
Strangest of all, none of you believe the End has come already in Him—since theology was invented to deny what I just told you: that is, to deny Christ’s all-encompassing judgment. So, here is our situation. The worst thing you can do on the Last Day is deny Christ is even here, and therefore, deny that there is such a thing as the Last Judgment Day. The liberal theology into which we have carefully trained you at this place denies there is such a thing as a Last Day. Maybe Paul believed it, but he was just wrong. Maybe Jesus did himself, but even the Son of Man got confused now and then. We even say the idea of Christ seated at the right hand in order to judge the world was so short lived that even Luke didn’t believe it, and so interpolated such things as: “the end is not yet.”
Sociologists called you—rightly or wrongly “mainline denomination” folk because you have hacked off the Final Judgment and act as if this world is it. You are secularists, meaning one world-ers, who have successfully denied the Final Day. This is much worse than Scientists taking Aristotle’s four causes, and hacking off the final cause. That was bad enough. But you have gone much further. Rejecting what happened at the Final Day has led to taking the great teaching on justification (that broke into the world again at the Reformation), and selling it for pottage by turning justification into mere justice. No pie in the sky by and by! The poor do not need a sermon, they need money. Rights and Justice is what is left of this once great doctrine and so the gospel is utterly confused with re-enfranchising people with rights, empowering them so they are slaves to no one but themselves, and then helping the poor just like the Salvation Army does it—that is, with love and no idea what the Gospel is (though you mainline imitators will never do it as well as the Army).
But the real reason that people never see Christ when he comes, is that their hearts are overcharged with the cares of this life. If you think for a moment of Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs, then spending time and money on preparing for the final judgment is the dead last thing you should ever bother with in this life. There are cares in life, that is certainly true, for example, how to make money and buy food. But these care are not to overwhelm the heart—which belongs to faith. Justification concerns the last day, not simply “the next” day. Because only on the Last Day do we know what a deliverer is—and why we would possibly need one if he should ever just happen to come to us one day. How will you know that the gospel is not love or affirmation, but resurrection, unless you know your death? How will you know the gospel is forgiveness of sin unless the sin is revealed? How will you know the gospel is freedom from the law unless you know what the law’s charge is against you? Instead, you were a good postmodern, seeking a sign, rather than the Son. You sought judgment on the basis of your careful preparation.
Now you have come to the end. Enough interpreting of signs -- hermeneutician, symbolist, semanticist. You are no better than a reader of Tarot cards, and I dare say a good deal more dangerous when you wear an alb. Fanatics run about looking for the “new direction” of the Spirit—or as you call it “discerning what God is doing in this place” But beware! The sign is a snare. Watch out, now, watch out—here He comes—Mr. Deliverance—so that you know your sin and destruction has a name, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He’s got your sin, he knows it all, he feels it, he claims it—he knows that it not only denies him, but forcibly removes Christ so that sin can attend to what it finds more crucial to its work. He’s got it, nows it, feels it, claims it, and now forgives you it. Listen—From this moment on there is no more death sentence for you, because you are in Christ. The end has two words, not one. You have heard the first word, destruction, now here the second: a new creation.
There now—no more waiting and wondering. The Parousia has come for you. The End is behind you now. All you await in this old life is to see what you now have in the words by faith. As the little Lutheran in underwear put it: Is there deliverance? Yes, here he is.
Now there is a great freedom I want to tell you about, which is at your disposal immediately in this old world—even with your old bag of maggots hanging on your neck. First, you are hereby freed from signs—no more seeking signs, since you have the real thing, Christ. Second, you are freed to just wait. Patience is now yours as a gift, since you have never learned how to earn it. It is true that there there are many other freedoms once Mr. Deliverance is here. But this one in particular will be at your disposal: “the world will hate you because of my name”—says Christ. I hereby declare to you the entire freedom from having to be loved, or even liked. You have the Deliverer—you don’t need any more. You are officially free from having to be liked—Why, I am enjoying this freedom right now in front of you.
Now the second coming of Christ is not really “second,” but the umpteenth time, each arrival is no different than the first, except for this one crucial fact: When Christ came the first time he had death in front of him and the sins of the world remained on you, when Christ comes the “second” time to you he has death behind him and the sins of the world are on Him.
So, here he is, your Redemption—ready or not.
Steven Paulson
Luther Seminary