"Back to God's Future" / Rev. Dr. Richard Coble preaching / 7.26.26

O Lord, you are my God, I will exalt you.

I will praise your name, for you have done wonderful things.

Plans formed of old, faithful and sure.

For you have made the city a heap, a fortified city, a ruin.

The palace of foreigners is a city no more.

It will never be rebuilt.

Therefore, strong peoples will glorify you.

Cities of ruthless nations will fear you, for you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat.

When the blast of the ruthless was like a winter rainstorm, when the noise of foreigners was like heat in a dry place, you subdued the heat with a shade of clouds, the song of the ruthless was stilled.

On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a rich feast of food and well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.

And God will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the covering that is spread over all nations.

God will swallow up death forever.

Then the Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of God's people God will take away from the earth, for the Lord has spoken.

We have waited on the Lord, so that God might save us.

This is the Lord for whom we have waited.

Let us be glad and rejoice in God's salvation.

So I got a question for Isaiah as we're getting started.

Did you notice the change in tents halfway through there?

It's like at first, it seems like God's kind of already delivered all the people, but then it sounds like it's going to be something that's going to happen in the future.

The first half of the reading, it sounds like it's something that's already happened.

You may have caught it.

It says, God made this oppressive city into a ruin.

God has become, or God has been, a refuge for the poor.

So, okay, got it.

Thanks, Isaiah.

The Lord has broken the rod of the oppressors.

The needy in their distress have found their refuge.

Here and now it's done.

Bang, over.

But then, for all our grammar teachers out there, uh, you may have seen it goes into the future tense very suddenly.

Suddenly, it's about what's going to happen in the future.

On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food.

God will swallow up death forever.

The Lord will wipe away the tears from all the faces.

So I'm left asking as I'm preparing for this sermon, you know, Isaiah, could you make up your mind?

Which is it?

Is God's promise something that's happening right here in our lives, in our very midst?

Or is it something that we gotta hold out for sometime in the future?

Should we expect it now or should we wait for it later?

Seems like a pretty pressing question to us all right now, right?

So about a month ago, I was out on continuing education.

Uh, I was fortunate enough to sit in a class with Dr.

Brian Blunt.

Uh, Dr.

Brian Blunt, he's the retired uh president at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond.

He's one of the foremost experts in what's known as Jewish apocalyptic writing in the Old and New Testament.

So he helped me make sense of all of this.

And um, does anybody know Dr.

Brian Blunt's work?

I saw a couple people nodding along.

Uh, he's amazing.

He can do two things that I can't do.

One, he's Presbyterian through and through.

He was the president of Presbyterian Seminary.

He still preaches like a black Baptist preacher, uh, which I have tried to do and failed miserably.

Maybe you've noticed.

Um, when he teaches a class, he doesn't have notes.

The words just kind of like roll off of them way more fast than I can write down.

So, needless to say, what I got from it, it's gonna be a bit more simplified than what he actually said.

But I think it's still pretty true to what he said.

Uh, what I'm gonna share with you today follows what he has to say about what God's future means for us right now, today.

What God's future promises mean for us right here today.

Uh I'm gonna start with an illustration that he gave.

So in the second century AD, around like the 180 or so AD, there was an outbreak of something.

We don't know what it was.

It kind of sounds like smallpox, kind of sounds like measles, but obviously there wasn't enough science to really know.

There was a plague of something, and it was catastrophic.

It was known as the Antonian Plague.

It wiped out a quarter of the entire Roman Empire.

Some people say up to 10 million people, which is crazy, right?

That something like that could happen, and you and me never hear about it.

Or at least I had never heard about it.

Have y'all heard about the Antonian plague?

A couple people.

10 million people lost their lives.

So Roman culture was an honor-bound society, it was a transactional society.

You didn't do something for somebody unless you thought you were gonna get something back for doing that.

Which maybe sounds familiar.

Um, in the middle of the plague, you have to think it makes sense, right?

One of the first things we ever hear about about Christians, written by a non-Christian, was how Christians were acting during the Antonian plague.

In fact, the Roman emperor of the time, Justinian himself, he writes about it.

And let me tell you, he hated what the Christians were doing during the plague.

What the Christians were doing was this.

They were caring for people who had the plague.

At great risk to their own lives, mind you.

Plenty of Christians died because they were caring for other plague victims.

They would even bury the dead, which I don't know if you know this, you don't do that much during a plague.

Most of the time, when people die of plague, you just kind of like leave them where they fall, because that's where you can catch it.

Not the Christians, though.

They buried the dead, both Christian and non-Christian alike, during the Antonian plague.

Now, I have some questions.

First off, did these Christians caring for plague victims think that the world was coming to an end?

It may have looked like it, right?

And of course, they had read Revelation, they had read Isaiah.

Did they think that those visions were about to come true?

Did they think that they could put themselves at mortal peril?

Because pretty soon, to quote Isaiah, you know, God was gonna swallow up death forever.

God was gonna wipe away all the tears from every face.

And if they believed that, were they being, well, stupid?

Another question I have for you.

Can I use that word from the pulpit?

Um, Lindsay and I got into a bit of an argument about this as I was writing the sermon on Friday.

Um, she said no.

I obviously said yes.

Um, I think it warrants a better word than naive.

It's not just naive, right?

They were being a bit stupid.

It's okay if you take her side.

I'm fine with it.

But okay, let me say this.

It was kind of foolish, right?

Because the world didn't end, and death kept going mighty strong throughout that whole time and still today.

One more question for the sake of argument about God's future and our present.

Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that the holy mountain that we just read about in Isaiah, uh, let's say it came.

Let's say it comes tomorrow.

Here's my question about that.

If that happens, if God wipes away every tear from every eye, if death is no more, uh, doesn't that make what we do here and now and during a plague kind of pointless?

I mean, what do you think?

I mean, why does it matter if you care for a plague victim, um, if God's just gonna wipe it all away, anyways?

Uh, what's the point of easing the little suffering right now if tomorrow God's going to wipe away every tear from every eye?

These are the questions I think about as I read Isaiah.

Um, what do you think about when you read about the promises of God in Scripture?

I gotta say, maybe you can tell, I struggle with it.

Here's what I learned from Brian Blunt, the seminary professor, a few weeks ago.

What he said is that over and over in scripture, uh, if you read Isaiah closely in Revelation, and in fact, if you look at what Jesus said, they all say, yes, future tense.

Um, God's future is gonna happen in the future.

You gotta wait for it.

But also, you'll notice if you read it closely, those future promises, they also appear, they also come true in a way that actually really matters for our lives in the present as well, right here and now.

Those promises come true in a way that actually matters for our lives right here and now in the present too.

Think about this.

Think about Jesus.

What does Jesus say about the kingdom of God as he's walking around Galilee?

Do you remember?

He goes around and he says, The kingdom of God has come near.

Not the kingdom of God is like way off in the future.

What he says is the kingdom of God has come near.

Now, when he says that, he doesn't say like the kingdom of God is like fully here, it's fully arrived.

Instead, what I think he's saying is when he says it comes near, he's saying like we're getting just a little bit of a glimpse of what the kingdom of God is like right here and now.

What Jesus is saying is that every time he heals the sick, every time he touches a leper that nobody else would touch, every time he befriends a tax collector that nobody else would go near, every time he empowers women to be leaders in ministry, every time he rebukes the religious hypocrites, every time he praises foreigners and migrants and outcasts, what is he doing?

Well, what he's doing is he's opening up a little pocket of the kingdom of heaven right here, right now.

What he's doing is he's sharing just a little bit of God's future promises, not just for the future, but in the present.

So you could say that if you think about the Christians during the plague, right?

Um, you could say that, well, you could ask, you know, of course, were they wrong when they thought they were living in the end of days?

Yes, big time.

But think of this.

Every time that they cared for the sick or they buried the dead when nobody else would, what they were doing was they were opening up a little pocket of God's future in the present.

To use Isaiah's words, they were making a place just for a little while where the poor actually have a refuge, where the shroud of death is actually broken.

I'll give you another more contemporary example.

I heard this actually not from Brian Blunt, but um from another preaching mentor, Tom Toole.

You may remember Tom Toole, he used to be the pastor at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian in New York City.

So Tom said that back when he was the pastor at Fifth Avenue Press, um, it was Christmas Eve.

And it was like, I don't know, just minutes before the Christmas Eve service, the big, big Christmas Eve service.

And a church member that Tom knew named Jim came into his office.

And uh and Jim had been one month sober.

And you may know this already, but but Christmas Eve, uh, for those who struggle with addiction uh is a really big trigger.

Tom knew that about Jim.

He knew that Jim's alcoholism had nearly killed him beforehand.

And on Christmas Eve, well, uh things weren't going well for Jim.

Came into Tom's office, he said to him, Pastor Tom, I'm about to go home, I'm about to have a scotch.

And I don't know about you, but um, you've probably never been a pastor just a few minutes before Christmas Eve service, but I have.

And what I'm thinking when I hear that story is I want to say, well, sorry, Jim, um, but I've got several hundred people who need me right now to proclaim Jesus Christ to them.

Uh, I can't do this with you right now.

But Tom's older than me, and um, he's a bit more level-headed than I am.

He didn't say that.

What he did was this.

Of course, he did uh go on and lead that Christmas Eve service.

It's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian in New York City, after all.

By the way, do you know that there are people who only go to church on Christmas Eve?

I know, crazy.

But you know, we ministers, we gotta go and proclaim God's promises when we can.

But this is what Tom said before he left, Jim.

He said, uh, Jim, can you promise me, uh, can you just sit down here in my office?

And can you promise me that you won't leave for 15 minutes?

And um, and Tom left.

Jim said yes, Tom left him in the office.

And uh Tom went out in front of his congregation and he started with an announcement.

He said, Um, hi everyone, Merry Christmas.

I'm really thankful that you all are here this evening.

Uh, before we get started, um, I have a quick question for you.

Are there any friends of Bill Wels Bill Wilson here in the congregation?

Uh, if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't think too hard about it, don't worry about it.

Um, but if there happen to be any friends of Bill Wilson here tonight, uh, would you do me a favor?

Would you go down to my office just right now?

It's just right down the stairs.

And of course, the vast majority of people had no idea what Tom Tool was saying.

But Tom could see after he made that announcement, of course, it was a big full room, about three people got up and uh and started walking towards his office.

And I thought that was brilliant.

Because Bill Wilson is the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And anybody who's ever been in AA knows that a friend of Bill Wilson uh is somebody who's in recovery.

So basically, what Tom was doing was he was sending three members of Alcoholics Anonymous down to his office to have an impromptu meeting with Jim, who was really struggling in that moment.

Could very well have saved that man's life.

So on Christmas Eve here in the pulpit, um, we like to think we're the big show.

Um, we proclaim God's great plan of salvation.

We talk about God coming to this earth in the person of Jesus Christ, God's promises made real for the whole world.

Oh death, where is your sting?

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, See, the home of God is among mortals, God will wipe away their tears from their eyes, death will be no more, mourning and crying will be no more, for the first things have passed away.

We proclaim all those promises.

And to all those promises, I gotta say, sure, one day, right?

But I have to think, uh, no matter what Tom said from that pulpit, that Christmas Eve night, uh, the real promises of God, the real promises of Christmas Eve didn't come from the pulpit.

The real promise of the kingdom of God appeared, not even in the room, but in the corner in the office, where four folks got together in a circle to make sure one of them was gonna make it through the night.

You know, every once in a while, I really struggle with God's promises.

There are some days I get so frustrated.

There are some days I get so heartbroken.

And I want to say to God, you know, where's all this heading, God?

Not all the time.

But definitely some days.

How about you?

If you ever have moments like that yourself, think of God's promises not as something that's gonna happen way, way off in the future.

Instead, when you're struggling with that idea, take a look around.

Go look for a church basement or a hospital room.

Go look for a place where poor folks are fed, and mourning people are comforted.

Go look for a place where lonely folks are visited.

And there's peace instead of war.

And there's love instead of hate.

Go to places like that.

Look for places like that.

Spend some time.

Places like that.

And what you will see is the in-breaking kingdom of God.

Friend, our God, friends, our God asks us to look for the kingdom.

Not just out in some far-off future, but right here, right now, as it breaks open in our very midst.

And our God asks us to look for it.

And join it too.

You're gonna find the final say.

You're gonna find a grief.

It's not going to overwhelm us.

You're going to find places where it was real.

And God is actually present.

It's not just something we gotta wait for, it's something right here.

Hallelujah.

And Amen.