What To Do When the World Ends

Plant A Tree, of course.

Note: I don’t normally share sermons on this Substack, but I wanted to share yesterday’s sermon here. The congregation I serve is in St. Paul, MN, and the Twin Cities were in the spotlight this weekend after the shooting of two state lawmakers in an apparent political assassination that took the life of the former Speaker of the House and her husband. I wrote about hope in what seems to be a very hopeless time. You can watch or listen to the sermon in addition to the text below. I do want to talk more about the increasing danger of political violence, but that is for another time.

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A Sermon on Trinity Sunday based on Romans 5:1-5

God, who is three in One, bless this time together. May the word that I speak be your words. May it take root in our hearts, and may we give thanks. Amen.

“and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

Yesterday was a shocking day as we saw two state lawmakers shot. State Senator John Hoffman and his wife were shot, but are expected to survive, while former Speaker Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed. As we are processing the news from yesterday, I just want to share this thought: Is this what we’ve become?

Have we become a people, a nation that can’t disagree with each other? Are we a people that can’t handle an argument? Disagreements and arguments are part of the messy process of democracy, and yet there are people out there who seem threatened by this. Are people so scared that some need to pretend to be policemen and seek to assassinate lawmakers, actually succeeding in killing one lawmaker? Is this who we are?

Our Bible passage from Romans talks about hope, but it is hard to have a sense of hope this morning. It feels like hope has died. Our body politic is broken, and we don’t know or even care to put it back together. Despair hangs thick in our world today as if it were humidity. Some believe things will never change. Maybe this is the musings of a middle-aged man, but I long for the 1990s when it felt like life was simpler and the world made sense. Now it feels like the world is ending. Unlike the movies, the killer is not an asteroid, a virus, or a nuclear weapon. Instead, the killers are people like you and me. The problem is coming from inside the house.

When Martin Luther was asked what he would do if the world ended tomorrow, his reply was startling: plant a tree. Plant a tree? Why? When things are going south quickly, why would the great reformer do something as useless as plant a tree? Maybe because he believed in the same God that the prophet Jeremiah believed in. Lutheran pastor and writer Nadia Bolz-Weber reminded me in a Substack post that the great prophet decided that when Judah was about to fall, he bought land. Again, why? Other than the fact that Jeremiah probably got it at a steal, why would he do this? Hope. Jeremiah believed in the God who said to him, “The days are coming, when I will fulfill the good promise I made to the people of Israel and Judah.” Even as Judah was about to be captured and their king dragged off in chains, even as the upper echelon of society were soon to be exiled to Babylon, God tells Jeremiah that God would keep a promise. Jeremiah had hope in God who keeps God’s promises.

Nadia Bolz-Webber writes, “The promise that God is not done and we will not be left alone still holds. This hope to which we cling is not a naive hope. Nor is it an escapist hope. But quite the opposite. It’s the hope of people who have heard the dangerous rumor that there is life beyond death and hope beyond suffering and that love eventually conquers the soul-crushing bullshit (crap) we humans keep perpetuating.”

The apostle Paul wrote in Romans that you and I are justified by faith. There is nothing we do to earn our justification; we receive this through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because we are justified, we can stand before God, and we have this audacious, godly hope. The hope we have isn’t optimism. Bolz-Weber talks about how expectation can become an entitlement, that we will get what’s coming to us. Instead, she argues we should be expectant, which is very different. It is believing that God will act even when the world tells us that it can’t happen.

Being expectant means having hope in a God that can do the impossible, even when the world is ending. We can boast in our sufferings, sufferings like what happened yesterday, knowing that we have a hope that is beyond all understanding, beyond all suffering. We have a hope that is beyond us and the powers of sin and death, a hope that tells us that the devil and those who follow don’t have the last word. Those powers may injure and even take life, but they will not ever win. This is why Paul can tell the church in Rome that hope, God’s hope, will never put us to shame because the love of God has been poured into hearts by the Holy Spirit. If we walk with God, we can see things differently. We can see hope where others see despair. We work for justice and unity when others see only division and injustice. We can plant trees and buy land because we know God will prevail.

In his last speech, given the night before his untimely death, Martin Luther King Jr. talked about how there were difficult days ahead, but he wasn’t worried because he had been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. He saw the future God was building, and that made him no longer fearful of the future. He said, “I just want to do God’s will.” He held on to God’s promise, knowing the days were dark because he saw the promised land and God’s coming reign.

My friends, the days we live in are very dark and they may get darker still. I surely hope this isn’t the case. But no matter the times we hope in a God that never leaves us. A God that created us and then became one of us to set us free from sin and death. We have a hope in a God that will never let us down. On this day that we remember God is Trinity this is something worth remembering.

The world that we once knew is ending. It feels like an asteroid is headed our way. And yet, we are not without hope. What kind of trees are you going to plant? Thanks be to God. Amen.