Christ the King Sunday 2022 -- Sermon Follow Up

Sermon -- How the Story Ends: Living Every Day in Light of the Last Day (1 Thess. 4:9-18)

A few notes, following up on yesterday's sermon:

1. Frank Senn on the eschatological/political background of Christ the King Sunday:

"Christ the King is not a festival of great antiquity, supplying the church year with neat narrative punctuation from time immemorial. In fact, the festival didn’t emerge until the twentieth century, and at first it had nothing to do with the end of the church year at all.

Pope Pius XI established Christ the King Sunday in 1925 to counter what he regarded as the destructive forces of the modern world: secularism in the west and the rise of communism in Russia and fascism in Italy and Spain, harbingers of the Nazism soon to seize Germany. Pope Pius intended to oppose the rule of Christ to the totalitarian claims of these ideologies. By intention or coincidence, the festival of Christ the King also landed on the last Sunday in October, coinciding with the Protestant celebration of the Reformation.

In the reform of the Roman liturgy after the Second Vatican Council, the festival of Christ the King moved to the last Sunday of the church year. Thus, it no longer served as a “Counter-Reformation Day” celebration. But the new location proved to be more than an ecumenical gesture. Placed at the end of the church year, with its traditional eschatological emphasis, the festival now proclaimed Christ as “the goal of human history, the focal point of the desires of history and civilization, the center of humankind, the joy of all hearts, and the fulfillment of all aspirations,” in short, a positive reconstruction of the festival’s original polemic against political ideologies. The three gospel readings—for the brand-new three-year lectionary—present Christ as the Son of Man coming in glory, confronting the rulers of this world, and reigning from the cross."

In Protestant churches that have adopted Christ the King Sunday, it basically functions as [a] the last Sunday of the church year, pointing ahead to the last day when Christ returns, and [b] a fifth Sunday of Advent, focused on the coming of Jesus. The church calendar as a whole tells the story of Christ, beginning with the promise of his coming (Advent) and his borth (Christmas). But that story should be allowed to fizzle out during ordinary time.  It needs to come to completion. That's why Christ the King Sunday is a worthy addition to the calendar. It is not about Christ becoming Christ, but Christ consummating his kingdom.

We do not want the church calendar to be like so many modern pop songs which lack a proper ending and just fade away. The church calendar needs to come to a proper conclusion. I agree with C. S. Lewis, Randy Alcorn, and others who have rightly suggested that the church would benefit from more, rather, than less focused teaching on the final coming of Christ and the new creation.

2. I touched on some of the problems with the dispensational rapture view in the sermon. No one before John Nelson Darby in 1830 had taught this view of the "end times." It really has no academic defenders today because it has been thoroughly discredited exegetically, theologically, and historically. But it hangs on at the popular level, thanks to movies, best selling books (I would argue fictional books), etc. It has a grip on the evangelical imagination. Think of the bumper sticker: "Caution! In case of rapture, this vehicle will be unmanned!"

The problem with rapture theology runs deep. It really brings with it a whole worldview with several unbiblical features: [a] It creates pessimism about the future. Things have to get worse so Jesus will return. This runs contrary to God's promises about the growth and victory of his kingdom in history. [b] It makes Christians into escapists. It truncates the Creation Mandate and the Great Commission. Instead of building a God-honoring civilization and discipling the nations, we prepare our souls for heaven and try to snatch a few more souls from the tribulation/hell before the rapture. [c] It teaches Christians they will not have to go through great tribulation. I believe the Great Tribulation Jesus referred to was clearly a first century event. But we should not think the the church in our age is going to be exempt from horrific suffering and persecution. Indeed, through our suffering, the kingdom grows. [d] The rapture view tends to make Christians into gnostics. The rapture doctrine overshadows the growth of the kingdom in history, the resurrection of the body, and the renewed (physical) creation.

I could go on, but this gives a good sense of the worldview problems created by the rapture theory.

3. If there is no meaning at the end of history -- if the universe simply peters out into death in the end -- then there can be no meaning during history either. In other words, without the right eschatology, life becomes meaningless. If everything ends with the flaming out of the sun in a few million years, nothing means anything at all.

The great struggle of secularism, at least since the rise of the so-called Enlightenment and Darwinism, is find meaning in a meaningless universe. Hence, the philosophies of Nietzsche, Sartre, etc, that call on people to, in one way or another, create their own meaning for themselves. But this is a charade. It does not work. At least Camus tried to be more consistent with nihilism.

Robert Rayburn's sermon on this text does a good job capturing the meaningless of life when we lose biblical eschatology:

"The most that can be hoped for if the future remains dark and unknown is some form of manufactured courage in which an attempt is made to make a virtue out of the meaninglessness of life — and the 20th century has devoted an immense amount of its literary and philosophical energy making that attempt.

Here is Bertolt Brecht, the German writer of several generations back:
Do not be misled!
There is no return.
Day goes out at the door;
You might feel the night wind:
There is no tomorrow.

Do not be deceived!
Life is very short.
Quaff it in quick gulps!
It will not suffice for you
When you leave it.

Do not be put off!
You have not too much time!
Leave decay to the redeemed!
Life is the greatest thing:
Nothing more remains.

Do not be misled
To drudgery and wasting disease!
What fear can touch you?
You die like all the animals
And nothing comes after.

It has been of course one of the most powerful arguments of Christian apologists in this century that this honest admission of the meaninglessness of life does not satisfy the human soul and does not prove possible to live with. Human beings who really have come to believe that they are mere animals with no personal future we have discovered to our terrible woe in this century, do not find meaning and freedom in life, but become like the cruelest and most heartless of animals and exact a vengeance on other human beings worse than anything we had imagined. Take away the prospect of a future, of a judgment day, of an ultimate goal for human life, and, we discovered, you take away everything that makes human life meaningful and tolerable. And, even then, no human being has ever come close to living out this philosophy of human meaninglessness. It cannot be done.

Human beings have within them a sense of eternity and of the true significance of their lives and they cannot and they do not adjust to the thought that they are merely animals with no connections before or after, that they are a piece of cosmic scrap thrown up on the shores of time. Made in God’s image as human beings are, they know they are more than that — they may not be able to explain how they know that, but know it they do.

But Christians have no such problems. They know not only that they were created by a personal God in his own image for the purpose of fellowship with him, they also know that life is coming at last to an end, to a goal toward which it has been pointing all this while. They know that there is a judgment awaiting all of mankind, a reckoning with God that makes every day that every human being lives in this world supercharged with significance, because every day will one day have to be accounted for. They know that the universal characteristic of human life in this world is sin and that left to themselves they could not escape the righteous judgment of a holy God. But they also know that God, who is merciful as well as holy, has intervened and made a way for sinners such as we all are, to escape his condemnation and to obtain in the eternal future not the woe we deserve but the joy and the fulfillment of eternal life in God’s very presence.

That way, of course, is Jesus Christ who came once into the world –as the author of Hebrews has it– to take away the sins of many people, and who is coming again a second time “not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.”

Now that prospect of the future gives a terrible and wonderful meaning to life. What is more, it gives exactly that meaning to life — that knowledge of right and wrong, that uneasy conscience in the face of the sinfulness of our lives, that conviction that goodness and love are true things and not mere sentiments, that instinct that our lives are important and have a true purpose, all of that and much more — I say it is the Christian view of the future that gives a basis and a foundation to all of those things that every human being knows to be true deep within himself or herself.

This is why the Christian faith never loses its power in the world — no matter that so many are offended by its doctrines and its laws, no matter that so many speak and act against it. It alone accounts for the most fundamental convictions that rest in every human soul and that alone give meaning to life.

The people who wish to believe — and there are many of them today — that they may do as they please do so on the usually unspoken and unconsidered assumption that the future holds no reason for them to act otherwise. Most people rarely consider the fact that, if that is true and the future is going nowhere in particular, then their lives now are without meaning and purpose and point and that it really matters not whether they live or they die. But, why do they believe that the future is empty of purpose and conclusion and fulfillment and judgment?

How do they know this? It is an assumption of terrific consequence. How do they know it is true? Ask a Christian how he knows the future, how he knows that Jesus Christ is, in fact, coming again to bring salvation to his people and to bring judgment to the rest, and he knows exactly what to say.

He says, as Paul says here in v. 14: we know it because Jesus has already risen from the dead, has already demonstrated his power over death. We know that this future is true because the extraordinary past of the Lord Jesus Christ is true.

What is more, as Paul says here in v. 15, we know it because Jesus taught it — and we have discovered that, unlike every other human teacher, everything Jesus ever said, all of his teachings, have been proved true and utterly reliable to us."

4. Last summer, when the TPC family was hit with several deaths in a short period of time, I send this note to the congregation, based on what 1 Thessalonans 4 teaches about the uniqueness of Christian grief:

"This has been a difficult week. The TPC family has been hit hard...Let us pray for those who are grieving: