An aged patriarch who lacked neither bread nor milk nor wine in Egypt speaks, at the very end of his life, about someone who will tether a donkey to a vine and wash his robe in the blood of grapes. These startling images from Jacob’s blessing over Judah (Genesis 49) turn out to be a record of a longing our books and films still repeat, the longing for someone who will finally set the world right. The sermon leads from a dying father’s tent all the way to the wedding at Cana, where the promise begins to come true. Listen if, for all your comfort, you still sense that something is missing.
The Promised King
The Promised One
When we live in the present, it’s sometimes easy to forget about eternity and live as if what is here and now were all we can expect. However, the Apostle Paul, in his First Letter to the Thessalonians, though writing about very everyday matters, constantly reminds his readers of eternity, and every chapter of this letter ends with a reference to the second coming of Jesus. He does this because, even though we live in the present and struggle with the here and now, we can learn to view our lives, our daily struggles, and our everyday choices from the perspective of eternity-and that changes everything.
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