Looking Ahead to November 23, 2025

The Scripture Readings this week are:

• Isaiah 65:17-25 
• Luke 1:68-79

Taken from FB,
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The Sermon title is MWGA (Make the World Great Again)

Early Thoughts: What does it mean to make something great again? When was the greatness and what has changed?

In the last few years, thanks to a certain 2016 Presidential campaign, we have heard a lot about making something great again. It started of course with MAGA (America) but has also been used by people to talk about Canada or Alberta. In last month's municipal election one candidate's signs said "Make GP Great Again".

So many questions come up. Great for who? Why is _____ not great now? Who wins and loses in your vision of greatness?

Some have tried to bring the church into this Make ___ Great Again discussion. Often under the auspices of Christian Nationalism, with the assumption that somehow greatness and Christianity are intrinsically related. As Brian Zhand points out in the quote pictured above, the church is not in the business of making America, or Canada, or Alberta, or Grande Prairie great again. The church is in the business of lifting up a different way of being.

This Sunday marks the end of the liturgical year, the Reign of Christ Sunday. It is a day when we are asked/encouraged to take seriously Jesus claim that in his ministry the Reign of God has broken into the world. It is a day when we are encouraged to ask where our loyalty is meant to lie. Is it to a nation state or is it to the world that God envisions? Here is a quote from C.S. Lewis about loyalty and sabotage...

I think we can all agree that the vision we find for a renewed world in passages like this week's reading from Isaiah is not what we see in our news feeds and TV screens. But here is the Good News. God is actively at work.

God is actively and continuously at work renewing the world. It might be a more gradual process than we would wish but God is actively at work making the world better, maybe even great.

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Here is another meme I screenshotted from Facebook earlier this fall. It helps describe what I think it means to say the God is making the world great/ Not again, again suggests that there was some sort of idyllic past we are trying to get back to. God calls us to look forward, to how things are being renewed. The Reign of Christ/Kingdom of God is not found in the past, it is found in the present and growing into the future. 

We are invited to catch the vision, to share in the dream of a world renewed and reformed. We are invited to join in the task that has been ongoing for millennia. In Christian terms, we see Jesus as announcing the inauguration and beginning of the Reign of God. This reading from Luke (which we we read again on Advent 1 as we move into another year of hope) is the song Zechariah sings at the naming of John the Baptist. In the final verses he sings about John but the early verses sing of the promised Messiah or Saviour -- the one we call Jesus. The one who will renew the people  as God has promised of old.

How do we see God making the world great? How have you been asked or invited or challenged to take part in God's great renewal? How do the promises and actions of the world around us help or get in the way of God's project of MWGA?
--Gord