Text: Luke 21:5-19
Speaker: Mark Rupp

5 When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, 6 “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”
7 They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” 8 And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray, for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’[a] and, ‘The time is near!’[b] Do not go after them.
9 “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.” 10 Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; 11 there will be great earthquakes and in various places famines and plagues, and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.
12 “But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. 13 This will give you an opportunity to testify. 14 So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance, 15 for I will give you words[c] and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. 16 You will be betrayed even by parents and siblings, by relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death. 17 You will be hated by all because of my name. 18 But not a hair of your head will perish. 19 By your endurance you will gain your souls.

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In this time between our Anabaptism at 500 worship series and Advent, which will start in a few weeks, Joel and I had a little more flexibility with what we chose for our sermon texts. So of course, I assumed that a Sunday service that was going to include child dedications should obviously also include a scripture passage where Jesus warns about how we will be betrayed by our family. 

It’s all about balance…

In all honesty, when I first looked at the lectionary passage for this week, I’ll admit I hesitated. Wars, insurrections, famine, earthquakes, plagues, violence, betrayal. It’s not exactly the kind of text you might expect on a Sunday when we’re also taking time to bless and dedicate the precious new lives among us.

But the more I sat with it, the more I thought: How could I NOT choose this text? Because in many ways, this is the world we live in. These are the headlines that scroll across our screens. These are the worries that keep us up at night. 

And these are the conditions into which we dedicate our children and renew our faith.

In the cycle of the lectionary, we are nearing the end of one cycle as it turns over into the next. With Advent on the horizon we will soon turn toward waiting and hope and the promise of the Christ child. But here at the end of the cycle, we’ve gone through all that: Jesus’ birth, his ministry and teaching, his journey toward the cross and resurrection, and the sending of the Spirit to help form the early communities that attempted to live out his message. 

Here at the end of the cycle, we get passages that are looking forward, passages that point us toward the grand narrative, the cosmic victory, the fulfillment of promises, and visions of heaven and earth made one. And as our passage for today seems to be pointing out, we don’t get to the grand vision of heaven without having our very foundations being shaken first and a grand reveal (or Revelation) about the painful truth of just how far the world has strayed from the Kin-dom of heaven. 

Or at least how far we strayed this time around before we turn once again and await the God who shows up among us in the most surprising of ways. 

So yes, it’s heavy. But it’s also profoundly honest. And beneath all the heaviness, I believe there’s a word of good news that we desperately need to hear.

Luke 21 begins with Jesus standing in the temple in Jerusalem, looking around at the massive stones, the impressive architecture, and the center of the people’s faith. Someone nearby comments on how beautiful it all is, and Jesus responds, “The days will come when not one stone will be left upon another.”

That’s not just a shocking prediction, it’s deeply personal. The temple was more than a building. It was the visible sign of God’s presence, the heart of the people’s identity. To imagine it destroyed was to imagine life itself unraveling.

So they ask Jesus, “When will this happen? What will be the sign?” It is perhaps notable that they don’t ask why or how. They already know the world is unstable. This is not the first temple to be destroyed. This is not their people’s first time under occupation of an empire with seemingly limitless power. What they want is a plan. A timeline. Some control.

But Jesus doesn’t give them a schedule. Instead, he gives them a warning and an invitation.

First, the warning: “Beware that you are not led astray.” In times of fear, false prophets always show up. They promise easy answers. They tell us who to blame. They offer certainty in exchange for our trust. The false prophets are those who help reassure us that everything will be fine if we just do X, Y, and Z, which often involves oversimplifying situations, scapegoating the already vulnerable among us, and sometimes even padding their pockets along the way. 

And when the world seems to be falling apart, the temptation is strong to throw our trust toward whoever can reassure us the quickest rather than allowing ourselves to sit in the discomfort and the uncertainty. 

Jesus says, “Do not go after them.”

And then, the invitation: “Do not be terrified. This will give you an opportunity to testify.”

When the world feels like it’s falling apart, Jesus tells us that is not the time to hide or to panic. Instead, the time is ripe to bear witness.

That word testify is important in Luke’s Gospel. Throughout Luke as well as the author’s follow-up sequel, the book of Acts, testimony is the heart of discipleship. The shepherds testify to what they have seen at Jesus’ birth. The healed testify to God’s mercy. The apostles testify to the resurrection. The church testifies to God’s power even when they are persecuted.

To testify in scripture doesn’t just mean to speak. It means to live in a way that reveals God’s truth. It means to let not only your words but your very life and actions be a witness to the unfolding of God’s grace. 

But then Jesus also says something strange and beautiful. He tells his listeners that not only should they not be terrified, they should be so un-terrified that when they are called before the authorities, they should decide not to prepare in advance what they will say. 

I briefly considered NOT writing a sermon in advance of this morning, but I ultimately decided the thought of extemporaneous preaching is perhaps more terrifying than earthquakes and portents in the heavens.

Instead, Jesus tells them: “I will give you words and wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.”

This is the part of today’s passage that stood out the most to me because it is so alluring to think about being able to have just the right words to shut down opponents. We love a good mic drop moment. Last week Joel preached on one of the many passages where Jesus seems to be doing just this, giving an answer that stuns and silences his critics. 

We all want this, don’t we?

I think it is fair to say that our congregation is a fairly cerebral one, which has many gifts to offer but can sometimes lead us to think that faith is simply about getting our theologies just right or that salvation primarily comes through learning and education. 

If our opponents would just understand and accept the logic of our arguments, they too could experience this salvation.

But I do not think Jesus is promising the perfect argument or the clever words that will finally convince everyone else to have a change of heart, as helpful and tempting as those may be. That would just be another form of easy answers. When Jesus stood before Pilate during Holy Week and was subjected to his probing questions, he didn’t waste his breath arguing with the man who held his life in his hands. He mostly stayed quiet, occasionally throwing the questions back at Pilate. 

Jesus knew that who he was and the things he had done were the far greater testimony than all the logical arguments he might have tried to make. And I believe that here in our passage for today, he’s calling his listeners–and us–to a way of life that cannot be contradicted, a life of peace, justice, mercy, righteousness, and endurance in the face of all that would tear those things down. That is our greatest witness, our deepest wisdom. 

Against such things there can be no law. 

The logic of empire is a kind of logic that wants us to debate the inherent worth of our neighbors, to get trapped in endless discourse about the dignity of human lives as casualties of war. It wants us to argue ad nauseum over whether we should care for Creation. Empire delights in endless philosophical debates about freedom versus social responsibility that keep us distracted from all the ways it continues to reinforce its own structures and hierarchies. 

The promise Jesus makes is not a promise that everyone will agree with us. It’s a promise that our witness, grounded in God’s Spirit, will speak a truth deeper than debate. It is a truth that comes through the very way we live and the fruit that this life produces.

The kind of witness Jesus envisions is a Spirit-driven courage that cannot be silenced, even in suffering.

But then Jesus says something even harder: “You will be betrayed by parents and friends; some of you will be put to death. You will be hated because of my name.”

It’s not the kind of promise we want to put on a mug or cross stitch onto a pillow. Yet this was the lived experience of the first Christians. Luke’s community knew what it meant to face opposition, misunderstanding, and danger.

In that context, Jesus’ assurance—“Not a hair of your head will perish; by your endurance you will gain your souls”—was not naïve comfort. It was the reminder that though their bodies might be broken, their lives were held in God.

To “perish” in this passage doesn’t just mean physical death. It means ultimate destruction, the loss of one’s soul, one’s truest self. Jesus is promising that even when everything else is stripped away, God will preserve what matters most.

So what does it mean to gain our souls?

The soul isn’t a ghostly part of us that floats away after we die. It’s the living connection between our humanity and God’s breath. It is the place where divine and human life meet. Our deepest, truest self that connects us not only to ourselves, but to the world around us and thus to God. 

To gain our souls, then, is to deepen that connection. It’s to live in a way that is rooted in God’s presence, anchored through endurance, and matured by hope.

We gain our souls not by escaping the suffering of the world, but by meeting it with love, compassion, and trust. We gain our souls by refusing to let fear define us or to let terror turn us away from the truth that God is with us.

In a world obsessed with winning arguments and accumulating power, Jesus calls us instead to the slow, steady work of endurance and kin-dom building. Jesus calls us to keep doing what is right, to keep planting seeds of peace, to keep tending to just relationships, to keep trusting that God is at work even when we cannot see it. 

We don’t need to win every argument about food insecurity to do what we can to feed our neighbors. We don’t need to know exactly how the complex legal system works in order to offer sanctuary to those who need it most. We aren’t required to have all the answers about the tangled web of history to decry and stand in the way of the destruction of life in whatever ways we can. 

And maybe that’s what makes this passage surprisingly appropriate for a day of child dedications.

Because dedicating a child is itself an act of testimony. It’s saying, “We still believe in the goodness of life. We still believe that love is worth investing in. We still believe that God is faithful, even when the world feels unsteady.”

When we dedicate a child, we are bearing witness to the same truth Jesus promises in this passage: that life and love and faith are stronger than fear. We are saying that the story God is writing is not one of endless destruction, but of redemption and recreation.

We are choosing to live as people who see what God is building, even now, in the midst of uncertainty.

When we dedicate children in our congregation, one of the questions we ask parents and guardians to affirm is “Do you promise to gladly surrender your child to the ministry God has in mind for them, even if it might involve going to the ends of the earth?” And the truth is that anyone dedicated to this life of following in the way of Jesus will face hard choices. 

Jesus speaks of being betrayed by families, and perhaps the temptation is to protect those we love by sheltering them from the hardest demands of discipleship. Holding on rather than surrendering them to this way of life that asks us not just to quietly acquiesce to a few theological maxims but to commit our whole selves to the work of love and justice. We don’t need to go to the ends of the earth to find just how risky the call to follow Jesus can be. 

And so when we dedicate children, we recognize we need one another to help us hold on to this journey, to endure through the world crashing down around us. We need one another to help us remember that losing one’s soul is the greatest loss. 

We don’t have to have every argument prepared. We don’t have to fix every crisis. We don’t have to know how or when everything will be made right.

We are simply called to witness with our lives: To live with courage. To speak truth in love. To nurture goodness and kindness and gentleness even in fragile times. To entrust ourselves—and our children—to the God who holds all things.

The world may indeed come unglued from time to time. But even then, God is not absent. Even then, God is giving us words and wisdom enough for the moment. Even then, God is reminding us what it means to gain our souls as we connect ever more deeply with ourselves, one another, and the Divine that moves among us. 

We may not win every argument or convince every opponent, but by committing to a way of life following Christ and dedicating ourselves to helping one another endure whatever and wherever that call takes us, our lives and our communities will become a witness most worthy.