Be Here Now (Luke 20 • HAGGAI 1 • 2 Thessalonians 2)

“Moses with the Burning Bush” © 1966 Mark Chagall

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on November 9 2025. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here.  
Scripture texts:  Haggai 1:15-2:9 • 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5 • Luke 20:27-38

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Good morning, Augustana! I am excited to be with you again today, to preach God’s word. And so I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart may be pleasing to Creator God, Brother Christ, Spirit of Breath and Fire. 

Before I begin, I’ll just note how rare it is for me to preach more than one, never mind all three, lectionary texts at one time but I will today, and for good reason, so buckle up and hold on tight because we’re gonna do some time traveling, and we’re going to start with a little imagination exercise I heard a few years ago when the hosts of one of my favorite podcasts made a whole episode about how truly bonkers the notion of time travel really is: 

Imagine, they said -- and I invite you to do so now -- imagine a person from the from Bronze Age stumbling upon a portal to Now, a fantastical time when all information, knowledge, and wisdom from every age, civilization, and empire that’s ever been -- including their own -- and every human advancement, from paper and ink to digital art and auto and air travel, and doctors who can replace a person’s heart with someone else’s, and computers and the internet through which we can organize people from all over the world for time-coordinated actions of global resistance to tyranny, or conversely teenagers can create mountains of dank memes; is available to them and everyone else they encounter, every moment of the day through a little black mirror of lights and sounds and moving pictures that fits in the palm of their hands and in the so-called pockets of these leg contraptions called pants. 

Imagine they’re stuck here for a decade or two, and somehow, against all odds, they learn to live with us —​ to speak our languages, grasp our technology, and participate in our cultural rituals like baptism and beer pong. 

And when they return to their own timeline with their iPhone that somehow remains connected to our modern satellites which can transmit all that Wondrous Reality Beyond to their community way back then, they are not immediately detained and executed but survive to share the mysteries of ages beyond, and try to explain it to all their neighbors. Imagine them attempting to explain the fact that other worlds exist beyond this one, beyond the moon, billions of lightyears away, and we know it because humans created tools that allow them to peer into the past, present, and future, through long metal tubes with a pieces of glass on each end which, when you look through them, can make imperceptibly tiny things huge and bring infinitely far-away things up close. “Look, let me show you,” they would say. “And let me tell you about how they’re learning to reconceptualize time altogether through the theory of quantum physics.”

As they tell their tale, they gain a following of devotees who truly believe them, and think they must be some kind of god from beyond, which they kind of are. But along with the fanatics are groups of people who haven’t lost their minds but are actually reasonable and understand how asinine these claims really are. So, for everyone’s sake, they set out to prove the traveler is a charlatan and liar, with “gotcha” questions that’re sure to be their undoing -- questions that will be, of course, rendered meaningless and nonsensical in light of the truth. 

I bet some of you can see where this is headed, but let’s not get there too soon.

Because there’s so much story to cover, beginning with the exiles of Judah who, in our frist reading, have returned to Jerusalem after years of occupation, with the support of the Persian King Cyrus, who even provided them with supplies to rebuild their temple. But things are not what they were, and they’re discovering what everyone eventually learns: That there is no going back to Life pre-apocalypse, to a time when catastrophe and devastation of the magnitude they survived were  only a bad dream and not the mounds of rubble and crumbling remains of their new reality. They have a governor but their king is Persian -- and while they have a high priest and did build a temple, it is all, as Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney underscores, embarrassingly lacking, even shabby, especially to those exiles who’re old enough to remember the splendor and glory of Solomon’s temple. They want to please God and worship as they once did but they can’t. They all know it and feel it, and God even names it, right before telling them to take heart: That their work is good enough -- that they are good and enough -- and God reminds them of the very First promise: that just as God was with them in and out of Egypt, through the wilderness and into their years of glory, through the fracturing of their one kingdom into two, and the two into exile, God remains with them now, God’s Spirit abides among them, and will remain with them into future glories they cannot possibly conceive. Do not be afraid, God says, be Here, Now, with me. For I Still AM. 

I could end it there, right, and Spirit would preach. But we only get to be with the Church at Thessalonica a few Sundays each year, and I don’t want to skip them, because they, too, are a worried and worrisome fellowship. As a congregation they seem to be living through some perilous times -- what kind, we don’t know -- and have heard some troubling information that left them afraid they may have missed Christ’s return and aren’t really saved. So they write to the apostles seeking clarity and hope. 

Before we go further, friends, let me just park here for a bit here and say how intensely I relate to these beloveds. I was raised deep in evangelical pre-millenial, pre-tribulation end times theology, with people who listened to and lived by the threat and promise of Larry Norman’s song “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” We were trained to believe that Jesus would literally return to earth some day to blink his eyes and take all the prayed-the-sinners-prayer born-again Christians up to heaven, leaving everyone else to the reign of the anti-christ. That was their punishment for not praying. This rapture, it was called, would happen either before, in the middle of, or at the end of a seven year “tribulation” during which the anti-christ would come to power, and all manner of natural and human-made disasters and calamities would upend the world and its empires. At the end, Christ would come back for the Final Battle of Armageddon, which would take place in the Valley of Jezreel located in Israel on the northern outskirts of the modern-day West Bank. There, in a war of unspeakable violence and bloodshed, Jesus would defeat the anti-christ once and all, and every human left would die, except a remnant of 144,000 Jews. Then, Jesus would bring all the Christians back down to earth and he would reign for a millennium from the Holy Land. 

This, friends, is why so many Christians right now not only doggedly defend the ongoing genocide of Palestinians across Gaza and the West Bank, but even cheer it on as they demand our own government keep funding and arming it: They believe that war and violence in the Holy Land are the most crucial evidence that the end times have come, and that by championing the current violence they are hastening the Lord’s return and their own perfect lives that’ll start seven years later. 

If you’ve never heard any of this and it all sounds like violent, chaotic gibberish, I praise God and beg you to do the same, for you have been spared a mighty weight. I was not spared. Like the Thessalonians, I was fed theological lies by people who claimed apostolic authority to keep me fearful and faithful to their teachings, even when they betrayed Christ’s own. So I spent much of my childhood and youth absolutely terrified of the end times, and praying, repraying, and repraying again for my salvation to take so God could rapture take me to heaven before all the real violence started. 

It never occurred to any of us that such eras of tribulation weren’t necessarily the mark of “things to come,” but were instead the tragic but entirely predictable and consistent and inevitable marks of human powers cooperating with the powers and principalities of cosmic evil to exalt themselves above all others and establish their own reign on earth as god. 

While the modern mess of end-times theology was most certainly not on these peoples radar, the Thessalonians were nonetheless persuaded by certain events, the rise of certain leaders, and some fraudulent letters sent by unknown actors that the apostles who brought them the gospel had withheld some crucial bits of good news and instruction, and they were afraid. Afraid they might not be good enough Christians, that they might be getting their theology wrong, and especially that they might have already missed Christ’s return and their chance at heaven and an afterlife to come. How, they’re asking, could they have failed to see Jesus come to them? 

In response these authors, writing in Paul’s name and with his authority, again name the very real fear that’s eating them up, and beg them not to believe lies told by deceivers or passed on in letters the apostles never wrote, but to instead stop watching and waiting for things to come — things none of us are equipped to predict or even recognize. Instead, they are implored to stand firm in the truth that salvation wasn’t a singular event past or some foggy future thing to come; it is their sure and certain Now. Their salvation simply, if confoundingly, IS. The way God is I AM. Do not be afraid, they beg, and do not busy yourselves with discerning the time and signs of Christ’s return. Through the Spirit who is Breath and is your breath, Christ is already with you, in you, moving through you, Here and Now. And so too should you Be: Here, Now.

Which brings us all the way back to the very beginning to our journey with the Bronze Age Time Traveler and into today’s Gospel where Jesus is put on the spot by Sadducees who don’t believe in the resurrection, which is demonstrably absurd. These fellow rabbis think they’ve got him trapped with their question: To which of the seven imaginary, heirless, and dead brothers, who all married the same woman, will said wife belong after the resurrection? 

It’s a preposterous question for sure, but I don’t think we should write it off entirely, because at its root is a perfectly reasonable and common one that I myself have wondered about. Because I really do love my husband and I really cannot imagine an eternity apart from him, or one in which we know each other but aren’t partners, in which our sons are not our sons, and our family is not our family. I’m not sure I like the idea of  “heaven” without him, anymore than I like the one where we all have our individual private mansions but don’t ever visit them because we spend 100% of all of eternity worshiping before the Blinding Light that is God, which to me, frankly, sounds boring!

And I’m not the only one -- in fact, I think those who haven’t wondered about such things are the exception. Which is why I believe Jesus answers them seriously, not to trap the trappers, nor even necessarily for their benefit, but for those witnessing the debate in real time, and hearing their own questions asked. We all want to know what resurrection is, how it happens, where we go when we die, and what then?

But Jesus’s very serious answer is that they’re trying to fit their heads into whatever lay beyond time and space and knowing, a brain-melting reality utterly outside their imaginations, but still asking questions that only make sense and have answers within the context and cultural norms of their own life and world. It won’t ever work. Eternity and resurrection can no more be explained to us who live in time than Earth of 2025 can be made rational to the Traveler’s neighbors who still live in the Bronze Age. 

But, ah… They can be trusted and believed. They can be witnessed and experienced in our bones and bodies the way Moses argued with I AM in a speaking burning bush. The way Mary bore I AM to flesh through the tearing of her own. The way the disciples and so many beloveds shared meals with I AM before he died, and then again once he was raised. The way the Thessalonians would see and meet and welcome I AM over and over again in how they met and welcomed one another. 

The way, the way, the way… 

Beloved, there are so many ways to witness and experience I AM, and all of them, every last one of them, begins with
Being. Here. Now. 

We all know as well as Judah’s exiles life can never go back to how it was. Many of us, like Jesus and the Sadducees, have probably gotten tied up in useless debates over doctrines that can’t be proven right or wrong and have no material impact on our current lives, or lost hours, even days to questions that paralyze us in their unanswerability. And most if not all of us have been like the Thessalonians, so wrapped up in who Christ will be or what he’ll look like if or when he returns in glory, that we ignore Jesus when he comes home from school and wants a snack, shows up on a Tuesday asking for cash, when he cries out “I can’t breath” as a knee crushes him to death, or begs us to protect him from masked men with badges, guns, and whiteness come to haul him away.

We’ve missed Jesus in the caw of crows, the whisper of falling leaves -- have you heard them!? — in mountain ranges that are older than bones, and gravity of ocean waves and kiss of everyday raindrops, that beckon us to remember and bask in our baptismal belonging which is more eternal than even these ancient waters where time began. Christ is everywhere everywhere everywhere in everyone and everything in every time, but especially in every person.

Across the hundreds of years between each of their stories in Scripture, and the millennia distancing them from us, to this very moment and hour and day, our stories are the same, and God’s Promise and Petition to us stays one thing: Come back to the Present, They say. Touch Grass! Engage every one of your senses to Be Here, Now, where I AM. 

Beloved, let us revel in being here, together, now. For Christ is surely, most certainly with us. All thanks be to God. Amen.