2025-11-16 Luke 21:5-19 What Good Are Predictions?
Or, Breaking News for a Broken World
In today's lesson, Jesus is making predictions.
We like predictions.
Weather predictions. College football predictions.
The stock market.
Our health. Our kids.
Our marriage.
"Will you still need me? Will you still feed me? When I'm 64? Or 24?
We also like predictions when it comes to God.
If the apocalypse is this coming Tuesday, it might be nice to know.
But even if we know the future, does it matter?
Or will we still be living in the past?
What Good are Predictions?
Is it just that people are the same now as they always were?
Why make predictions when the breaking news broke 2000 years ago?
---
Maybe the Talking Heads were right.
The world, the news – it's all same as it ever was.
This is the Action News 10:48 Report. Live from Trinity Presbyterian Church (USA).
Your first source for news, weather, sports, AND Jesus.
We have Breaking News this morning.
According to the Gospel lesson, the beautiful stones of the temple are about to be thrown down and not one stone will be left upon another.
Citizens are urged to seek shelter and to stay away from the area.
In international news, there are reports of wars and insurrections.
Nations are rising against nation.
Kingdoms are rising against kingdom.
YOU'RE about to be persecuted and arrested.
You'll be betrayed by your parents and siblings, relatives and friends.
Everybody hates you.
They'd like to put you to death.
(Oh boy, sounds like a good day to stay in bed.)
Now, let's send it over to our Storm Team for today's forecast.
It's bad.
Really bad.
Dreadful portents and great signs from heaven indicate a 90% chance of earthquakes, famine, starvation, and plagues the likes of which we haven't seen since Moses.
Hey, weather.
Let my people go.
Now: sports. Thanks. Speaking of disasters, Brian Kelley. Hugh Freeze. Billy Napier.
Three Horsemen of the Apocalypses.
Get fired, get rich, like the Terminator, you'll be back.
We'll be right back after 10 minutes of mission from car dealers, injury lawyers, and the new medication for your crippling anxiety and nose hair loss.
Is this Action News? Or a repeat? Same as it ever was.
--
Welcome back. To the church of the future. And the past.
Funny how history – and predictions – repeat themselves.
Even after 2000 years.
Back in the good-old days, people went to their religious leaders for all kinds of forecasts.
Weather, wars, post-menopausal pregnancies.
In the Old Testament they'd sacrifice a bull and read its intestines.
Now, we've got devices that let us read the bull anywhere.
They link us to satellites streaming the future to wall-size plasma entertainment centers with 4K resolution and Dolby Atmos sound.
We have rings that predict our health,
watches that call 911,
and glasses that alert us what the food we're looking at is going to do to us.
"I'm sorry, Dave. I can't let you eat that."
Jesus made predictions.
But WE'VE got AI.
Containing the whole of human knowledge.
Is the world going to end Tuesday?
I don't know.
Let's ask ChatGPT.
And while we're at it, have an Amazon drone drop a milkshake from heaven.
If Jesus knew what we've got now, he'd come back just for that.
As far as predicting what's going to scroll up next in life, we've gone from "You need Jesus" to, "Who needs Jesus?"
We've got The Algorithm!
Progress!
Like and subscribe to life as we show it.
If tomorrow does come, our news feeds will feed us news even more alarming.
--
Planning for Apocalypse.
The Bible has a small number of scriptures like today's.
It's a kind of literature called, Apocalyptic.
The people around Jesus's time loved Apocalyptic like we love our podcasts.
Apocalyptic's that section of Barnes and Noble with the Left Behind books.
Apocalyptic's also some books in the Bible's library, like Daniel, Joel, and the best of all, Revelation.
They tell us what's going to happen.
But they're hard to understand.
We can choose to read these scriptures literally -- anxiously -- as on-the-scene news reports direct from the future.
Live from the cosmic end-times.
We often read it like that.
Inquiring minds want to know what's next.
We all do.
But. Is that what Jesus wants us to know?
Is the future what he wants us to worry about?
--
Biblical Apocalypse
A few times in the Bible Jesus goes Apocalyptic.
Very few times, but they're there.
Like:
You will see 'a blasphemous object that brings destruction' (the abomination of desolation), quoting Daniel.
And
'the sun will grow dark,
and the moon will turn to blood [not give its light].
The stars will fall from the sky (Mark 13)
And when Matthew says Jesus says:
If people are on the roofs of their houses, they must not go down to get anything out of their houses. If people are in the fields, they must not go back to get their coats. …. How terrible it will be for women who are pregnant or have nursing babies! Pray that it will not be winter or a Sabbath day when these things happen.
Jesus DOES get Apocalyptic.
A few times.
Not as many as people think.
But even when he does get predict-y, he outright denies – denies – he has any power to predict the future.
As in Mark 13, when he says:
No one knows when that day or time [hour] will be, not the angels in heaven, not even the Son. Only the Father knows (Mark 13).
Jesus is NOT our gypsy fortune teller.
We can get fixated on end-times.
Jesus doesn't.
Jesus refuses to predict with Doppler Radar accuracy.
Because he's not looking for end-times.
Jesus is looking at your-times.
Jesus sees our-times.
He talks about what's happening, in OUR news -- here, now.
Who's hungry, now.
Who's sick, now.
Who's in jail, now.
Jesus was a living live-stream of the news of the hour.
He broadcasted what it takes to endure -- to endure times like his.
He told us we'd have to endure days – days like ours.
We'd have to have the endurance to get ready now for whatever future days are surely coming:
Tomorrow, next week, next minute.
Jesus didn't tell us to put our hope in FORECASTS.
He told us we'd find our hope by ENDURANCE.
Endurance -- he said.
It's right there in black and white. In red, possibly, helpfully.
In verse 19 he says:
"By your endurance you will gain your souls."
Endurance.
That's Jesus's breaking news for a broken world.
That's his daily forecast for us.
For every day.
--
Enduring OUR apocalypses.
When tragedy strikes,
we remember where we were, who we were with, and what we were doing when the big news hit.
I grew up in Huntington, West Virginia.
I and everyone else who lived in the Tri-State area remembers exactly where we were the night of the Marshall University plane crash.
When the entire football team died.
What news days do you remember?
Like, when JFK was shot.
When the Challenger exploded.
We remember where we were and who we were with on 9/11.
We remember who we were quarantined with during COVID.
Whose nursing home windows we pressed our hands against.
I shudder to think what "little apocalypses" our kids and grandkids will remember.
Breaking News may not break us, but it sure leaves a scar.
Back in first century Israel,
if you were any kind of follower of Jesus,
if you were Jewish,
if you were just a traveler passing through Jerusalem,
you remember exactly where you were on that horrific day in 70AD.
You remember like it was yesterday.
In 70AD, on the day the Romans got sick and tired of putting up with you, your uprisings, your rebellions.
When they rode into town with weapons of massive destruction, and burned the Temple to the ground.
Not one stone left upon the other.
The literal home of God -- wiped off the map.
The people of God massacred.
The chosen children of God enslaved.
The left behinded herded off on the Trail of THEIR Tears.
The city of God, razed.
Gone.
If you had been there, you couldn't be blamed for asking, "Where was God, then?"
"Where was God reporting from, that day?"
Was he off the air?
A couple of generations after Jesus, a little church of believers wrote their history down.
They called it, "According to Luke."
It was a brand-new section in the Bible's library, called, Gospel.
Gospels are faithful souls weaving their memories into the stories of Jesus.
The writers wove their stories into God's story.
They wrote the truth.
Their truth.
Maybe not always literal truth.
God's truth.
The truth of their lives and the truth of Jesus's life.
The truth of faith.
Faith NOT for the future.
Faith for the now.
--
The Back of the Future.
One of my favorite Bible stories is from Exodus 33.
Moses wants proof that God is God.
He asks God, "Please, show me your glory."
God's glory: The glowing radiance of God's face, brighter than a thousand suns.
It's an outrageous request.
And God tells him so.
"No one can see my face and live."
So God makes a deal.
God will put Moses into a safe cave on a cliffside, and then cover it up.
God will walk past.
And when God gets a safe distance, He'll pull away his hand and Moses will get to see God's back.
Not God's blinding high beams.
But God in the rear view mirror.
Moses couldn't see God coming.
But he could see where God has been.
The people of the First Church of St. Luke weren't the disciples who saw Jesus face to face.
They may not have been there for the temple destruction.
But they could see where God has been.
Like Moses did.
Like we do.
We might not know what God is doing.
Might not know where God is.
And no one, not even Jesus, by his own admission, could predict when and where God was going to be next, or when and how the next apocalypse would happen.
But what you can't see, you can remember.
Together.
Those shared memories build a roadmap to the future.
The people of Luke couldn't predict the future any better than you and I can.
But they could remember the past.
Just like we do.
They could remember a Temple destruction.
They could hear wars and rumors of wars.
They could see nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom.
They could remember earthquakes and famines.
They could remember being rounded up and herded off, being persecuted, being killed.
They could remember those days just as clearly as we remember OUR times when it felt like the end was coming.
Our days -- when the end was here.
They could remember those bad days of the past.
But they could also remember the good days.
They remembered the disasters, but they also remembered the light, the hope, the love of Jesus.
And they wrote Gospels as their way of swearing they'd never forget.
When people never forget – together – God appears.
When our apocalypses happen –
and it's not hard to believe they will –
When tragedy strikes, we'll see the news the moment right after the moment the news breaks.
But by the saving grace of Jesus Christ, we won't break.
We will remain.
Not by our cleverness, not by our strength, not by our trust in some artificial intelligence singularly greater than ours will ever be.
Not by any of that will we go on.
Jesus tells us.
The Bible tells us:
By your endurance you will gain your souls.
Not by forecasting.
Not by forgetting.
Not by pretending.
Not by ignoring.
By our endurance.
Will we gain our souls.
When we remember together.
It's hard to tell when we read our Bibles, but Jesus is being very Southern in his speech here.
When he's saying YOUR soul, what he really means is, "Y'all's souls."
Jesus made declarations of DE-pendence.
Dependence on each other.
Dependence on God.
Y'all will all gain y'all's souls by your endurance. Together.
The Bible is an all y'all kind of book.
Nearly every "you" is plural.
Our Bible is meant to be read together, interpreted together, prayed over together.
Sometimes, we-all can be a little too independent.
--
Speaking of Independence, 249 years ago, the great patriot, Thomas Paine, described the troubles of his own days.
"These are the times that try men's souls."
His young American world was shaking, quaking, flooded with trouble.
There were wars and rumors of wars.
Kingdoms and nations at each other's throats.
Literally.
We see our news today.
These are also times that try men's and women's and children's souls.
These times try our united spirit.
It's getting harder every day to know what's true and what's not.
It's hard to make an accurate guess where the next shooting, or assassination, or hurricane, or fire, or war, or famine is going to be.
Could be anywhere.
Hard to know.
We have apps for that.
But still.
It's always a gamble.
Like Moses, we see God the moment God's passing by.
We'll know the future the split-second it becomes the past.
And then, it'll be our turn -- just like it was for Luke's faithful people –
it'll be our turn to figure out where God was.
It'll be our turn to figure out where God is when our next news breaks.
It's our turn to figure out where God is -- right now.
In our lives.
Separately.
And together.
Because we're God's "All y'all."
Jesus doesn't tell us WHEN we'll find our souls.
Our COLLECTIVE soul and spirit.
He doesn't tell us WHEN.
But he does tell us how.
By OUR endurance, he says -- by our unified endurance we'll find our souls.
If we keep on, together, we'll all find our souls precisely in the broken moments we need them.
When our predictions go stale, our ENDURANCE keeps us fresh, living just enough for one more day.
And one more day.
God doesn't bring us back to the future.
God brings us back to today.
God's endurance brings us back to our souls.
--
One Final, Big, Beautiful Prediction
In the Gospel According to Matthew, 6:34, Jesus predicts the future about as accurately as he or as anyone else ever could.
He examines the maps. He goes to the Big Board. He sees the bull.
And then, to a worried world, a broken world full of heartbreaking news,
He says, "So
do not worry about tomorrow,
for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.
Today's trouble is enough for today."
That was true back then.
And it's true for our todays.
How did Jesus know that?
That's all the prediction we need.
It's all the accuracy we can handle.
Let us endure THIS day.
Let us not live in the past.
Let us not try to foresee the unseeable future.
Let's live in this day, in this time.
With THESE troubles.
And with OUR endurance.
And let that be enough.
[eos]
Or, Breaking News for a Broken World
In today's lesson, Jesus is making predictions.
We like predictions.
Weather predictions. College football predictions.
The stock market.
Our health. Our kids.
Our marriage.
"Will you still need me? Will you still feed me? When I'm 64? Or 24?
We also like predictions when it comes to God.
If the apocalypse is this coming Tuesday, it might be nice to know.
But even if we know the future, does it matter?
Or will we still be living in the past?
What Good are Predictions?
Is it just that people are the same now as they always were?
Why make predictions when the breaking news broke 2000 years ago?
---
Maybe the Talking Heads were right.
The world, the news – it's all same as it ever was.
This is the Action News 10:48 Report. Live from Trinity Presbyterian Church (USA).
Your first source for news, weather, sports, AND Jesus.
We have Breaking News this morning.
According to the Gospel lesson, the beautiful stones of the temple are about to be thrown down and not one stone will be left upon another.
Citizens are urged to seek shelter and to stay away from the area.
In international news, there are reports of wars and insurrections.
Nations are rising against nation.
Kingdoms are rising against kingdom.
YOU'RE about to be persecuted and arrested.
You'll be betrayed by your parents and siblings, relatives and friends.
Everybody hates you.
They'd like to put you to death.
(Oh boy, sounds like a good day to stay in bed.)
Now, let's send it over to our Storm Team for today's forecast.
It's bad.
Really bad.
Dreadful portents and great signs from heaven indicate a 90% chance of earthquakes, famine, starvation, and plagues the likes of which we haven't seen since Moses.
Hey, weather.
Let my people go.
Now: sports. Thanks. Speaking of disasters, Brian Kelley. Hugh Freeze. Billy Napier.
Three Horsemen of the Apocalypses.
Get fired, get rich, like the Terminator, you'll be back.
We'll be right back after 10 minutes of mission from car dealers, injury lawyers, and the new medication for your crippling anxiety and nose hair loss.
Is this Action News? Or a repeat? Same as it ever was.
--
Welcome back. To the church of the future. And the past.
Funny how history – and predictions – repeat themselves.
Even after 2000 years.
Back in the good-old days, people went to their religious leaders for all kinds of forecasts.
Weather, wars, post-menopausal pregnancies.
In the Old Testament they'd sacrifice a bull and read its intestines.
Now, we've got devices that let us read the bull anywhere.
They link us to satellites streaming the future to wall-size plasma entertainment centers with 4K resolution and Dolby Atmos sound.
We have rings that predict our health,
watches that call 911,
and glasses that alert us what the food we're looking at is going to do to us.
"I'm sorry, Dave. I can't let you eat that."
Jesus made predictions.
But WE'VE got AI.
Containing the whole of human knowledge.
Is the world going to end Tuesday?
I don't know.
Let's ask ChatGPT.
And while we're at it, have an Amazon drone drop a milkshake from heaven.
If Jesus knew what we've got now, he'd come back just for that.
As far as predicting what's going to scroll up next in life, we've gone from "You need Jesus" to, "Who needs Jesus?"
We've got The Algorithm!
Progress!
Like and subscribe to life as we show it.
If tomorrow does come, our news feeds will feed us news even more alarming.
--
Planning for Apocalypse.
The Bible has a small number of scriptures like today's.
It's a kind of literature called, Apocalyptic.
The people around Jesus's time loved Apocalyptic like we love our podcasts.
Apocalyptic's that section of Barnes and Noble with the Left Behind books.
Apocalyptic's also some books in the Bible's library, like Daniel, Joel, and the best of all, Revelation.
They tell us what's going to happen.
But they're hard to understand.
We can choose to read these scriptures literally -- anxiously -- as on-the-scene news reports direct from the future.
Live from the cosmic end-times.
We often read it like that.
Inquiring minds want to know what's next.
We all do.
But. Is that what Jesus wants us to know?
Is the future what he wants us to worry about?
--
Biblical Apocalypse
A few times in the Bible Jesus goes Apocalyptic.
Very few times, but they're there.
Like:
You will see 'a blasphemous object that brings destruction' (the abomination of desolation), quoting Daniel.
And
'the sun will grow dark,
and the moon will turn to blood [not give its light].
The stars will fall from the sky (Mark 13)
And when Matthew says Jesus says:
If people are on the roofs of their houses, they must not go down to get anything out of their houses. If people are in the fields, they must not go back to get their coats. …. How terrible it will be for women who are pregnant or have nursing babies! Pray that it will not be winter or a Sabbath day when these things happen.
Jesus DOES get Apocalyptic.
A few times.
Not as many as people think.
But even when he does get predict-y, he outright denies – denies – he has any power to predict the future.
As in Mark 13, when he says:
No one knows when that day or time [hour] will be, not the angels in heaven, not even the Son. Only the Father knows (Mark 13).
Jesus is NOT our gypsy fortune teller.
We can get fixated on end-times.
Jesus doesn't.
Jesus refuses to predict with Doppler Radar accuracy.
Because he's not looking for end-times.
Jesus is looking at your-times.
Jesus sees our-times.
He talks about what's happening, in OUR news -- here, now.
Who's hungry, now.
Who's sick, now.
Who's in jail, now.
Jesus was a living live-stream of the news of the hour.
He broadcasted what it takes to endure -- to endure times like his.
He told us we'd have to endure days – days like ours.
We'd have to have the endurance to get ready now for whatever future days are surely coming:
Tomorrow, next week, next minute.
Jesus didn't tell us to put our hope in FORECASTS.
He told us we'd find our hope by ENDURANCE.
Endurance -- he said.
It's right there in black and white. In red, possibly, helpfully.
In verse 19 he says:
"By your endurance you will gain your souls."
Endurance.
That's Jesus's breaking news for a broken world.
That's his daily forecast for us.
For every day.
--
Enduring OUR apocalypses.
When tragedy strikes,
we remember where we were, who we were with, and what we were doing when the big news hit.
I grew up in Huntington, West Virginia.
I and everyone else who lived in the Tri-State area remembers exactly where we were the night of the Marshall University plane crash.
When the entire football team died.
What news days do you remember?
Like, when JFK was shot.
When the Challenger exploded.
We remember where we were and who we were with on 9/11.
We remember who we were quarantined with during COVID.
Whose nursing home windows we pressed our hands against.
I shudder to think what "little apocalypses" our kids and grandkids will remember.
Breaking News may not break us, but it sure leaves a scar.
Back in first century Israel,
if you were any kind of follower of Jesus,
if you were Jewish,
if you were just a traveler passing through Jerusalem,
you remember exactly where you were on that horrific day in 70AD.
You remember like it was yesterday.
In 70AD, on the day the Romans got sick and tired of putting up with you, your uprisings, your rebellions.
When they rode into town with weapons of massive destruction, and burned the Temple to the ground.
Not one stone left upon the other.
The literal home of God -- wiped off the map.
The people of God massacred.
The chosen children of God enslaved.
The left behinded herded off on the Trail of THEIR Tears.
The city of God, razed.
Gone.
If you had been there, you couldn't be blamed for asking, "Where was God, then?"
"Where was God reporting from, that day?"
Was he off the air?
A couple of generations after Jesus, a little church of believers wrote their history down.
They called it, "According to Luke."
It was a brand-new section in the Bible's library, called, Gospel.
Gospels are faithful souls weaving their memories into the stories of Jesus.
The writers wove their stories into God's story.
They wrote the truth.
Their truth.
Maybe not always literal truth.
God's truth.
The truth of their lives and the truth of Jesus's life.
The truth of faith.
Faith NOT for the future.
Faith for the now.
--
The Back of the Future.
One of my favorite Bible stories is from Exodus 33.
Moses wants proof that God is God.
He asks God, "Please, show me your glory."
God's glory: The glowing radiance of God's face, brighter than a thousand suns.
It's an outrageous request.
And God tells him so.
"No one can see my face and live."
So God makes a deal.
God will put Moses into a safe cave on a cliffside, and then cover it up.
God will walk past.
And when God gets a safe distance, He'll pull away his hand and Moses will get to see God's back.
Not God's blinding high beams.
But God in the rear view mirror.
Moses couldn't see God coming.
But he could see where God has been.
The people of the First Church of St. Luke weren't the disciples who saw Jesus face to face.
They may not have been there for the temple destruction.
But they could see where God has been.
Like Moses did.
Like we do.
We might not know what God is doing.
Might not know where God is.
And no one, not even Jesus, by his own admission, could predict when and where God was going to be next, or when and how the next apocalypse would happen.
But what you can't see, you can remember.
Together.
Those shared memories build a roadmap to the future.
The people of Luke couldn't predict the future any better than you and I can.
But they could remember the past.
Just like we do.
They could remember a Temple destruction.
They could hear wars and rumors of wars.
They could see nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom.
They could remember earthquakes and famines.
They could remember being rounded up and herded off, being persecuted, being killed.
They could remember those days just as clearly as we remember OUR times when it felt like the end was coming.
Our days -- when the end was here.
They could remember those bad days of the past.
But they could also remember the good days.
They remembered the disasters, but they also remembered the light, the hope, the love of Jesus.
And they wrote Gospels as their way of swearing they'd never forget.
When people never forget – together – God appears.
When our apocalypses happen –
and it's not hard to believe they will –
When tragedy strikes, we'll see the news the moment right after the moment the news breaks.
But by the saving grace of Jesus Christ, we won't break.
We will remain.
Not by our cleverness, not by our strength, not by our trust in some artificial intelligence singularly greater than ours will ever be.
Not by any of that will we go on.
Jesus tells us.
The Bible tells us:
By your endurance you will gain your souls.
Not by forecasting.
Not by forgetting.
Not by pretending.
Not by ignoring.
By our endurance.
Will we gain our souls.
When we remember together.
It's hard to tell when we read our Bibles, but Jesus is being very Southern in his speech here.
When he's saying YOUR soul, what he really means is, "Y'all's souls."
Jesus made declarations of DE-pendence.
Dependence on each other.
Dependence on God.
Y'all will all gain y'all's souls by your endurance. Together.
The Bible is an all y'all kind of book.
Nearly every "you" is plural.
Our Bible is meant to be read together, interpreted together, prayed over together.
Sometimes, we-all can be a little too independent.
--
Speaking of Independence, 249 years ago, the great patriot, Thomas Paine, described the troubles of his own days.
"These are the times that try men's souls."
His young American world was shaking, quaking, flooded with trouble.
There were wars and rumors of wars.
Kingdoms and nations at each other's throats.
Literally.
We see our news today.
These are also times that try men's and women's and children's souls.
These times try our united spirit.
It's getting harder every day to know what's true and what's not.
It's hard to make an accurate guess where the next shooting, or assassination, or hurricane, or fire, or war, or famine is going to be.
Could be anywhere.
Hard to know.
We have apps for that.
But still.
It's always a gamble.
Like Moses, we see God the moment God's passing by.
We'll know the future the split-second it becomes the past.
And then, it'll be our turn -- just like it was for Luke's faithful people –
it'll be our turn to figure out where God was.
It'll be our turn to figure out where God is when our next news breaks.
It's our turn to figure out where God is -- right now.
In our lives.
Separately.
And together.
Because we're God's "All y'all."
Jesus doesn't tell us WHEN we'll find our souls.
Our COLLECTIVE soul and spirit.
He doesn't tell us WHEN.
But he does tell us how.
By OUR endurance, he says -- by our unified endurance we'll find our souls.
If we keep on, together, we'll all find our souls precisely in the broken moments we need them.
When our predictions go stale, our ENDURANCE keeps us fresh, living just enough for one more day.
And one more day.
God doesn't bring us back to the future.
God brings us back to today.
God's endurance brings us back to our souls.
--
One Final, Big, Beautiful Prediction
In the Gospel According to Matthew, 6:34, Jesus predicts the future about as accurately as he or as anyone else ever could.
He examines the maps. He goes to the Big Board. He sees the bull.
And then, to a worried world, a broken world full of heartbreaking news,
He says, "So
do not worry about tomorrow,
for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.
Today's trouble is enough for today."
That was true back then.
And it's true for our todays.
How did Jesus know that?
That's all the prediction we need.
It's all the accuracy we can handle.
Let us endure THIS day.
Let us not live in the past.
Let us not try to foresee the unseeable future.
Let's live in this day, in this time.
With THESE troubles.
And with OUR endurance.
And let that be enough.
[eos]
