Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend
2 Thessalonians 3.6–13; Luke 21.5–19
‘When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.’
Slim Pickens goes out with a bang in Dr. Strangelove (1964).
The other night, I watched a Netflix blockbuster, released last month, named A House of Dynamite. (Trailer) In it, the American military detects an inbound object streaking across the Pacific towards the United States. It is soon confirmed as a missile headed straight for Chicago and its nine million-odd people, due to impact in just 18 minutes. Nobody knows who fired the object – it could be North Korea, or China, or Russia. Nobody even knows if there is a nuclear warhead attached to it at all. The President must make perhaps the most fateful decision in history in the face of conflicting suggestions from his top advisors—fail to respond, and they could invite further catastrophic attacks on American cities; respond, and they could trigger nuclear apocalypse.
One thing that comes across is the chaos as decision-makers are pulled from their daily routine to try to make an impossible decision on a group video call, in a matter of minutes. And that, potentially, is the sort of frayed thread by which the fate of the world could hang. For real.
We have lived, now for 80 years, with the possibility that the human race might wipe itself out in a nuclear war. For everyone here today, it is a possibility that we have lived with every day at least since childhood, in most cases for our entire lives. My primary school years took place during one of the most intense periods of nuclear fear, the 1980s, when the Greenham Common women were on the news every night and genuinely frightening movies like Threads, which depicted the effects of a nuclear strike on Sheffield, were prime time fare.
The depressing world situation we face at present brings those fears back. Two nuclear powers – Israel and Russia – have now been involved in years’ long wars on their own borders. As science advances, we read worrying stories about new possibilities of self-inflicted extinction, from genetic modification and artificial intelligence
“When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified.” None of us know what might be coming around the corner, for us and for the world. When Jesus taught at the great Temple in Jerusalem, those who heard Him had no idea that He was in the last week of His earthly life. Yet, behind the scenes, the clerical leaders of the Temple, fearing the wrath of the Romans, were plotting that it might be expedient for one man to die for the people.
“As for these things that you see”, said Jesus, looking at the Temple’s beautiful brickwork, “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another.” In the early 30s, the Temple looked particularly fine, fresh from a lavish expansion and renovation programme ordered by the Herods. Yet the Temple and the Jewish world of Palestine as it had existed since the days of Cyrus the Great – as far from their time as the Wars of the Roses are from ours – was also in its last decades. In the year 70, not as far in time from today’s Gospel reading as Greenham Common and Threads are from us, The Temple was destroyed during of a brutal seven year rebellion by the Jews. Sixty years after that, another great Jewish revolt would take place in Palestine, and the Romans would lose patience entirely, killing hundreds of thousands as they crushed it, and banishing the Jews from Jerusalem for centuries afterwards. It was the end of their world.
“…do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.”
How would you live if you thought the end of the world really was just around the corner? The early Christians thought that Jesus would be returning very soon to judge the living and the dead. They thought the present age of human existence was about to end and they actively looked forward to that. In today’s first reading, from the second of the two letters that survive from St Paul to the first Christians in the port city of Thessalonica, some of them clearly thought that if the end of the world was nigh, there was no point working too hard when you could sponge off others.
Paul wrote to them in characteristically direct terms, telling them off as idle busybodies and, to continue the Cold War theme, he wrote the only line of scripture to be included by Stalin in his Constitution for the USSR. Can anyone guess what it is? It’s: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”
But, to be fair to Paul, he doesn’t just tell the Thessalonians off, but also offers them a better way of living—“do not be weary in doing what is right”, he tells them. And in that, he resonates with the theme with which Jesus finishes today’s Gospel reading: “By your endurance you will gain your souls.”
Our job is not to pretend we can see the future, whether good or bad, but to be patient and persistent as we seek to build God’s Kingdom. Mostly, our work to build God’s Kingdom is in simple and small ways that we think can’t change the world—but can change the lives of those we live and work among far more than we might imagine, lives of souls loved by God and made in His image and likeness. It is right above all that, as followers of the Prince of Peace, we work for peace and pray for peace.
“Beware that you are not led astray”, Jesus warned His followers, “for many will come in my name and say… “The time is near!” Do not go after them.” That remains a warning as valid today as it was two thousand years ago in Jerusalem. The world is still full of religious charlatans promising the end of the world. It can solve a lot of mundane problems if we think the end is coming soon, like it did for those lazy Thessalonians. But the truth is that none of us knows what’s around the corner. Sometimes, we can catastrophise things—especially if we’re writing a disaster movie for Netflix. Sometimes, we worry so much about the potentially bad things that we forget about how much is good, in our lives and in the world. We live not just at a frightening time to be alive, but a remarkable one, full of wonders of medicine and energy and food and human contact.
Embrace the good things that God has blessed you with in this world, and seek to extend His Kingdom. But also, don’t store up treasure for yourself on Earth. Seek the things that will remain when all else has passed away—faith, hope, and love. Remember that, while doomsday may or may not be around the corner, time is short for each of us. You may at any moment have to give account to God for your life. Forgive and seek forgiveness. Do good. Remember to stay close to God in prayer.
Remember also that Jesus did promise to return. Would that we should be so lucky as to live at the moment when His just and gentle rule is enacted on Earth.
So, when you hear of the wars and insurrections that fill our news bulletins at present, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.
Now glory and honour be to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Father who made us, the Son who redeemed us, the Spirit who sustains us, this day and forevermore. Amen.
Top image: Armageddon by Zoom call – A House of Dynamite (2025).
