Hi everyone,

Welcome to worship for this 23rd Sunday after Pentecost, landing on November 16, 2025!

The bulletin for this service can be found here. In it, you’ll find the order and words of worship and the full sermon manuscript. You can use the bulletin to follow along with the service or simply use the words that will appear on your screen. The sermon manuscript is also included on this page below the video.

For a fuller online worship experience, you are invited to have a lit candle in your space for the service that can be extinguished near the end after the sending hymn. You are also welcome to participate in communion if you are comfortable, by having something small to eat and drink prepared for consumption. Further instruction will be given at the appropriate time.

May God’s unending presence and peace fill you with love and hope, this day and always!

Almighty God, through your Word and by your Spirit, may your salvation be revealed and your love restore our hope and faith given to us by Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

I may have mentioned this before, but one of my favourite movies of all time is 1985’s Back to the Future, starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd.  In spite of all the nonsensical plot holes and the famously mispronunced “gigawatt”, watching that movie almost daily as like a 10-year-old kid was truly magical.  It opened up for me a whole world of possibility, fantasy, and time-travel.

If by slight chance you haven’t seen this movie, I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.  Just kidding, you can stay, but the movie is about a high school kid named Marty McFly who accidentally activates his much older friend Doctor Emmett Brown’s time machine that he made out of a Delorean.  The way Doc saw it is if you’re going to build a time machine into a car, you might as well do it with some style.  And so circumstance has Marty going back in time to when his parents were his age and he almost destroys their chances of getting married which would paradoxically end his life before it even begins.  See this is what I meant with the plot holes.

This movie became a trilogy of the duo travelling back and forth through time, and it was interesting to see how Marty and Doc were able to operate in their adventures with this upper hand of knowing what will happen in the future.  But at the same time, the whole premise of these movies was that the future isn’t written, and that the slightest variance they cause in past events could set off this butterfly effect and drastically alter the course of their futures. 

And so Doc even says very clearly to Marty… well, the past Doc says to present day Marty, when present day Marty tries to warn past Doc about what happens to present day Doc in past Doc’s future, which is present day Marty’s past… you know what I mean.  Anyway, Doc tells Marty that no one should know too much about their own destiny as they could endanger their very existence… just like how Marty endangered his by almost causing his parents to never even meet.

That always stuck with me.  Even though there were millions of other time travel theories in various other movies franchises, like Terminator, Star Trek, and the Bill and Ted adventures and journeys, this thing that Doc says about us knowing too much about our futures just stood out.

I mean it makes sense.  Maybe not in the way that we’d break our parents up so we’ll never be born, but like if we knew exactly how our future looks, I don’t know if we’d bother trying anymore.  If we knew what our fate will be then we might stop caring.  If we truly believed that our destiny is set, then we could lose our sense of purpose, meaning, and hope.

But yet, we want to know the future, don’t we?  I mean, beyond the winning lottery numbers or when the bus we’re waiting for will finally get here, we want to know our future.  Like how we’ll grow and change.  Like where the next step in life will take us.  Or maybe even when our last day will be, just so we can prepare.  I know I often wonder what my kids will be like when they grow up, if I’ll ever be a grandparent, and mostly if they would ever make me rich.

So I do think Doc was onto something when his past self gave that advice to a time-displaced Marty.  Again, not in an inadvertent preventing yourself from being conceived kind of way, but in a complete demotivation, a taking the wind out of your sails, a sheer hopelessness that could come from knowing too much of our own future.  Because sometimes that future doesn’t come soon enough.  It doesn’t come about the way that we thought it would.  And it doesn’t line up with our preferences, our conveniences, and our timing.

I mean, that’s why parts of the gospels were written.  They were written much after the fact and people were antsy as they stared in the sky thinking that Jesus will be back any day now.  Any… day… now…
Those days turned into months, those months into years, and years into discouraging disappointment as things didn’t get better but worse.

So these gospels were written down to remind the people of who they are.  They were shared so that their spirits could be lifted and rejuvenated.  The purpose of these writings, this record of events, the re-telling of the gospel, was to show everyone that even when things aren’t going our way, even when the chips are down, even when the waiting is just too much, that Jesus’ promise of being part of our lives remains true.  But it’s not something that we can manipulate with the different signs and wonders and wars and rumours of wars,  nor is it something that will happen far off into the future.  Rather, Jesus is in our lives now.  In the present.  In the past too.  And will continue to be in the future.

See the second reading that we get from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians today talks about people being busybodies (which I find hilarious by the way) and not contributing really to the overall community and/or culture.  Many scholars suggest that what is happening here is that those aforementioned busybodies have it set in their minds that Jesus is coming back soon and everything will end with them as the victors.  So why work?  Why toil?  Why bother to do anything at all?

This is the danger I’m talking about.  This is the danger that Paul seems to be warning the Thessalonian church about.  And in a roundabout way this is the danger that past Doc was telling present day Marty about.  In that if we “know” our future too well, if we are too cocksure of our fate, if we are adamant that we somehow know better than others and moralize that, then we’ve missed the point.  We’ve misheard the call.  We aren’t living the life that God has given us.

In that Jesus didn’t save us just so we’d have a place to go to when we die.  Jesus didn’t hang on a cross so we’d then not have to face any kind of suffering whatsoever.  Jesus didn’t enter our lives just so we can sit on our hands just to wait for some kind of loud second coming.

No, Jesus saved us so we can live the life that is truly life, here and now.  Jesus died on the cross because of human greed and evil but God brought him back to show us how strong and powerful forgiveness and grace can be.  Jesus entered our lives so we could know true community, true relationship, true love, with Christ, through Christ, and in Christ by the power of  Holy Spirit.

And so when the people asked Jesus for the signs of when the end will come, when they were more concerned with the clues and hints that will tell them when it’ll happen, when they wanted a fortune teller or time traveller to tell them their future, Jesus reminds them that they aren’t living for the future, but they are living now.  They aren’t waiting for a Jesus to come later on but they are with Jesus now.  They aren’t to be sitting around, biding their time until the end, but they are called to be active participants in what God is doing now in the world. In grace, in love, and in peace.

See, Jesus never promises us an easy life.  In fact, he says it’ll be hard.  He says we’re going to go through some stuff.  He said that we’ll face hardship, turmoil, and death.  But he also promises that he’ll be with us.  Always.  Strengthening us.  Lifting us up.  And showing us the ways of God’s righteousness and faithfulness. 

So life will get hard.  Anyone of you have been paying attention know how hard just the past couple of weeks have been for us.  But through it all, we have each other.  We have our community.  We have Jesus living in us, among us, and all around us, reminding us that whatever the future might hold, we have our right now that continues to be full of God’s presence and truth, showing us joy, giving us reasons to worship and praise, and leading us into the peace that surpasses all understanding.

Peace in knowing that Jesus is with us now.

As we approach the end of this season after Pentecost and this church year, may we remember all that we’ve learned and seen of Jesus in our lives and in our community, that we might confidently live for him in love and service, knowing that God is present with us always.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.