Proper 28c 2025, Nov. 16
Isa. 65:17-25; Cant. 9
2 Thes. 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19
Jack Hardaway
HORIZONS
What is the horizon you see when the sun rises? What is the horizon you think of when you hear the word horizon? What vision does that call forth from memory?
Do you see it from your front porch? The backyard?
Do you see it on the road, or from a window somewhere?
What are your horizons? I hope they are many.
My horizons are from my early morning walks, at the end of my driveway looking through the trees, or downtown behind the library watching the sunrise burn bright on the rail road tracks.
Or, walking into the sunrise on the beach, everyone walking toward the sunrise together, toward the dawn, a vision of the resurrection.
Our horizons show us what we look toward.
This week has been a week of far horizons for me.
I saw an old Grace Year Book from 1916, with Edna and Mattie Brissey listed as children who earned perfect Sunday School attendance. Edna was the first person I buried at Grace, and I visited with Mattie for several years before she passed away three years later.
It was in the middle of WW I, soon before the Spanish flu pandemic, at the beginning of the most violent century in human history.
What kept them going on that long walk? What was on the horizon?
This week I also found an old sermon for this Sunday from 2001, just two months after 9/11. In that sermon I wrote of the horizon of God’s kingdom in the wake of that attack and the harm that followed, it was just getting started back then. I had only been ordained six years at the time, everything changed for the country and for the church, one continuous crisis ever since. The horizon of God’s kingdom has kept me going on the long walk.
Today and next Sunday are the last two Sundays of the Season after Pentecost, the end of the Christian year.
Two Sundays from now is the First Sunday of the Season of Advent, the beginning of the new Year.
Our scripture readings over these three Sundays deal with the great horizon of our faith, what is sometimes called the Apocalypse, or Judgment Day, the End, the Last Things, the Great Day, the Resurrection of the Body, the Return of the King. Three weeks to consider the horizon of God’s Kingdom, the horizon that shows the way forward.
How do we live with that Great Horizon?
That has been one of the great difficulties of the entire history of Judaism and Christianity. It is difficult because it is a mystery that more than anything else defines us as a people.
The response to the Great Horizon has varied wildly.
Sometimes it has been extremely militant and violent. Sometimes it has been very pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye.
It has been both a great source of abuse and a great source of indifference to suffering.
I hope these three Sundays will open up something different, a new horizon, the horizon that shows us the way forward.
How do we approach this horizon in the right way?
To put it simply, what is the right way to hope?
The scripture lessons today are a guide in navigating the way of hope through the troubled waters of paranoia and insanity that so often hide, blur and mar our horizon.
In Isaiah we see God’s peaceable Kingdom as the far Horizon, a vision that moves us.
Then there is Luke. He writes of history being healed, all the divisions of race and gender and politics and economics begin to “bleed into one” as soon as Jesus walks into the world. History is being healed, and Jesus is the anointing that begins and will someday finish that restoration.
The Lesson tells us, “Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.”
Do not go after the perusers of paranoia. Beware the babblers of insanity.
Rather, we are told that the horizon of hope will make us live out of step with those around us, and that we will suffer because of that.
That same hope will prepare and strengthen us for persecution and empower us to give witness to the hope, and life that Christ gives.
To hope rightly is not to be caught up in all the paranoia that we usually hear surrounding the day of Judgment, but rather to live out of step, and to be strengthened as a witness of that hope and mystery that is healing creation and setting us free.
Then there is Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians where he just says right out that those who hope in the right way do not live an idle life, they are not weary, rather they are strengthened to quietly do the work of what is right.
The Horizon of quiet work, of doing what is right, because we have a vision of what it means to be fully human, a whole person, because we see the horizon of the redeemed creation.
There is great wisdom in these lessons passed on to us.
There is life and confidence that we may hope in the right way, in the midst of confusion, in the midst of insanity, in the midst of evil.
In this horizon of hope we see the healing of history, we see a kingdom of peace, we see the quiet of doing what is right.
We have good work to do.
The work of Peace, in a world of violence and scorn.
The work of endurance in a world that is easily distracted.
The work of quiet in a world that has become very loud.
The sun is rising. The horizon calls.
The call is to the work of hope, stubborn as a bent nail, contrary, relentless and uncompromising. Keep walking the long walk.