Festival of Christ the King – Last Sunday of the Church Year – Sunday of the Fulfillment Series B
The sermon gives the big picture to the hearer – a picture which allows the hearer to place his or her experiences right now into that picture. The goal is to ratchet down the fear and provide the hearer with the great gift of the hopeful expectation in God. I don’t use the word hope here, I could. It would be biblical, but the word hope has migrated for many people into a sort of wish or desire but something which they do not expect to see. Hope, in the Biblical sense, is much firmer than that. It is the expectation which comes from something you are confident in. An employee in the ancient world would say that he hopes to be paid. That is not a statement of doubt about the financial status of the employer, it is simply the statement that the check is not yet in hand. But he expects, having labored all week, that the employer will hand over the agreed upon salary. It is much more an expectation. That is the real goal of this sermon. God has told us a few things about the last days. We have a reasonable expectation, just as the employee who awaits the pay check has a reasonable expectation.
