Eternity!

 16 November 2025

Readings

Isaiah 65.17-25

Song of Isaiah

Luke 21.5-19

In my humble opinion, the best-known and most widely quoted preacher Australia has ever known is Arthur Malcolm Stace - an illiterate WWI soldier, petty criminal and alcoholic.  You might not even know the name. Maybe it will help if I also say that Stace is also Australia’s earliest, greatest and most prolific graffiti artist ever.  Because Arthur Stace wrote the word ‘Eternity’ in flowing letters in chalk on the pavements of Sydney over half a million times between 1932 and his retirement in 1960. And on New Year’s Day 2000, Stace’s one-word sermon was immortalised by being reproduced in full – in letters a hundred metres high –in lights on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and surrounded by fireworks – which made Stace also the Australian preacher whose sermons have reached the widest audience ever, and certainly the only Australian preacher whose collected works most of us know off by heart.

Stace was preaching about the end of human existence – not the finish but the purpose, and the destination of human existence, which is Eternity. Stace also points us, in the sheer volume of his output and in the surprising ordinariness of the places it was likely to turn up, to the fact that the true purpose of human existence is among us and all around us, right here and now.  The destination of our lives is hidden from us, but turns up unexpectedly, as Jesus also suggests, like treasure buried in the backyards of our suburban lives, or like the love note from your spouse that you discover half-way down your shopping list.

Every year, around the end of the cycle of readings before we get into the exciting business of Advent, the church gives us for the Sunday readings a set of texts that directs our thinking to the end of all things.  For the mainstream church and for modern theologians this poses a few problems.  We’re more at home talking about how Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom challenges the way we live, challenges the assumptions of a comfortable Western lifestyle, challenges us to re-order our priorities in line with God’s preferential concern for the have-nots, for the ones who are left out.  We’ve bought into the busyness of our own time and to the urgency of its claims on us. We’re not quite so much at home as Arthur Stace; putting on a sandwich board and walking up and down the footpath with a sign that says, ‘the end is nigh’.  There are enough people out there doing that already, secular prophets predicting the end of civilisation as we know it as a result of global war or global warming, pointing with alarm to the collapse of old securities and alliances and the rise of populist demagogues peddling simplistic and toxic falsehoods. We live in an age of heightened anxiety, heightened conflict and dangerously raised expectations. So - what’s the message for Christians today in Isaiah’s prophetic vision of the new heaven and the new earth, or in Luke’s dire warnings of the end of the old ones?

Two words probably sum up everything we need to say – the first one like Arthur Stace’s message, scrawled everywhere if we would only notice it – Eternity. And the second message from Jesus hidden away in today’s gospel reading – don’t panic! But let’s look, firstly, at the message of Isaiah.

The first thing to notice is that these last few chapters of Isaiah were written some time after the Jewish people returned from their long exile in Babylon in successive waves beginning in 538 BC - after the homecoming, after the temple had been rebuilt early in the 5th century BC. And these words are written for a people who are disillusioned and disappointed because even though they have returned to the land, the reality hasn’t turned out quite as wonderful as the expectation.  The glorious future they’d built themselves up to expect had turned out to be fairly ordinary. In this section of the writing, the message of 3rd Isaiah says that Israel’s expectation of political restoration was too narrow, what God is on about is nothing less than a new creation – and if we read it carefully, Isaiah’s vision of a new heaven and a new earth where meat-eaters turn into vegetarians, where people will live heroic lifespans and children will not be born for calamity – where peace will prevail for every creature except that old trouble-maker, the serpent – Isaiah’s vision reminds us of the creation story of Genesis, it’s a vision of Eden before Eden went wrong.  

It’s a vision of a new creation where instead of trying to keep secrets from God, and trying to compete with God, humans will depend on God and trust in God’s good purposes. Everything that has prevented creation from being what God intended is going to be taken away – the details of this utopia are less important than the vision itself – of a new creation in which the daily disasters we see on the TV news aren’t going to determine the future of God’s creation – neither terrorism nor military force are going to have the last word in God’s creation – neither political deception nor domestic violence, neither environmental neglect nor poverty are going to limit what human life can be.  The suffering in Sudan or Ukraine or Gaza is not going to have the last word. God’s plan for creation is not going to end with rising temperatures and sea levels submerging human civilisation and the mass extinguishment of natural life. Isaiah promises that despite natural disaster, despite political upheavals, despite human evil and stupidity and ignorance and cruelty - the future belongs to God.

And so the prophet announces that there’s going to be a radical makeover of the whole creation, a re-integration of the physical and the social and the spiritual aspects of life, and the renewing of our relationships with one another and with God. This promise of the renovation of the whole creation has always been a part of Judaism - and as Christians, we understand it as the outworking of God’s kingdom that Jesus promised in his ministry and demonstrated in his death and his rising into new life.  So Isaiah reminds us not only of the beginning and the purpose of creation, but of the one event within creation that holds everything together - the joining of heaven and earth that begins with the birth of Jesus, and is completed in the resurrection of Christ.  

The initiative in all of this is God’s! And our job is just to trust in God’s purposes, and to trust God’s intention to complete and fulfil the creation that God loves.  When we give in to the temptation of fatalism or despair at seeing the triumph of stupidity and selfishness and the failure of humanity and goodwill – when we look around and say to ourselves, ‘what if this is as good as it gets?’ - that’s when we most need the reminder of Eternity.

And so to Luke, where, at first glance, Jesus seems to be predicting the exact opposite of the vision of Isaiah - not peace! - but destruction and chaos and instability. Here again, we need to know the context, because Luke is writing after the event, 20 or so years after Mark’s earlier Gospel, after the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. And Luke’s readers, this group of Christians towards the end of the first century, know what it is to have lived through catastrophe and terror, when everything that seemed solid had collapsed around them. And what Jesus is saying is this - know where your centre is. When you see people trading on despair to whip up religious or political fanaticism, when you hear people who claim to know the secret code of history – and we have enough modern doomsday merchants for this to be familiar – when you see that the realities of the world you live in are driven by fear, and hatred and suspicion, and the temptation is to retreat into factionalism, to fall for the hype and the self-serving one-liners of political snake-oil salesmen - when you find yourself living through times like these, Jesus tells you to remember where your centre is, to live out of the wisdom of God and the centre of your being which is the Holy Spirit. And don’t be afraid. 

When we face the temptation of despair, as so many Christians have in times before ours – when we look around at the madness and the darkness of our world and say to ourselves, ‘God must be dead’ – that’s when we most need the reminder and the promise of Eternity. Jesus is realistic – he knows something about conflict and betrayal, he’s not promising that Christians are going to be immune, that we’ll have special protection, but he is telling us we have what it takes to live in the trust that our future is in God’s hands, and to trust in God’s care for us even in adversity when we can't see the way forward. 

Trusting God doesn’t mean withdrawing from the events of our time; quite the opposite. It means opposing the narrow-mindedness and hatred that fear creates, it means opposing oppression wherever we find it, it means standing up for those in our community who are on the edges, it means listening to the voices of rationality, living generously and openly, but above all it means living out of the stillness and the wisdom of God, trusting in God’s purposes and God’s intention to complete and fulfil God’s creation.

Today, Jesus says to us, don’t panic.  When you’re faced with a world gone mad, don’t despair. Live from the perspective of Eternity, instead.