Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Here and now — living into the new heaven and new earth
​Rev. Jennifer Masada - St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church - Kapa’au, Hawai'i
November 16, 2025 - Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, Year C
Isaiah 65:17-25; Canticle 9; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19

I’m in awe of how time moves! Can you believe we are almost ready to enter the seasons of Advent and Christmas? We are coming to the end of this year’s season of Pentecost, including a beautiful and thought-provoking celebration of the Season of Creation. How fitting that we started our readings this morning with Isaiah’s sweeping vision of a renewed creation. The words shimmer with possibility: “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth,” says God.

The vision speaks of joy, delight, and plenty of food and housing. No weeping or distress — only peace, long life, and harmony in nature. These words are the very pulse of God’s hope for us.

This isn’t a promise for some far-off day; it is an invitation to step into what is happening here and now. Creation is still unfolding! The Divine is still moving, still breathing, still transforming what we call reality into something ever more whole. 
Think about it: creation is still unfolding—through our hands, through our prayers, through every small act of love that ripples outward. What Isaiah saw in prophetic poetry, we live out in our daily choices.

When we look around, it can feel like the world is unraveling—wars, storms, divisions, and exhaustion. But Isaiah and Jesus both remind us that what looks like chaos to us can also be the labor of new life. Even if we can't see it, God transforms disorder into divine order. The old structures must crumble so that something truer, more compassionate, and more loving can rise.

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus looks at the temple — that magnificent structure of faith and power — and says, “The days will come when not one stone will be left upon another.” The disciples are stunned; they’ve been conditioned by society to place their faith in stones and systems. They can’t imagine what their world would be like without the Temple. It has governed their whole lives, providing the rules, the structure, and order for everything they have known. 

But Jesus is telling them something deeper: the presence of God is not contained by walls or systems. When the stones of our “temples” fall — whether buildings, institutions, or our own beliefs and certainties — God does not disappear. God lives within and among us. Love always remains, and God’s sacred pulse always continues. 

The early Christians had language for this sacred pulse. They spoke of two kinds of time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is clock time—the steady tick of the hours, our schedules, meetings, and deadlines. Chronos time is the rhythm that keeps us moving in harmony as community. 

Kairos is sacred time—those spacious moments when Spirit whispers, helping us discern right action at the right time. Those moments seem to stand still, like time outside of time. Perhaps you’ve experienced kairos when “lost” in thought. Or when playing with a small child, or doing something you love. Maybe you’ve felt it as a deep intuition, or a time when Spirit was nudging you to do something new.
Chronos and Kairos: we need both! Chronos helps us organize our lives; kairos helps us listen for the pulse of God beneath it all. Faith, at its heart, is the balance between the two — listening deeply enough to discern the rhythm of Divine time within our daily routines. 

At St. Augustine’s, we practice this balance through our shared work. We create a safe and inclusive spiritual home. Through our Thrift Shop, we offer relief from financial uncertainty and recycle what can be renewed. We feed our neighbors. We gather in unity to enjoy one another's company and make meaningful connections. We come together through art and music. 

These aren’t just tasks to keep us busy; they are the living edges of Isaiah’s vision--where heaven and earth meet in ordinary acts of love and care.

Through our shared work, we listen for the whispers of the Holy Spirit to help us discern how love can flow through our next actions at just the right time. 
When life feels uncertain, remember the words we've said throughout this season in our Prayers of the People: "In the beginning, God was. Here and now, God is. In the future, God will be." This holy thread runs through every moment! Past, present, and future are woven together in the eternal pulse of love. 

This is what it means to live into the new heaven and the new earth — not to wait for some perfect world to arrive, but to participate in its becoming. 

I think this is what Paul meant as he reminded the Thessalonians not to grow weary in doing what is right. The community there was convinced Christ’s return would happen soon — like tomorrow or next week at the latest! Why worry about neighbors, or jobs, or community work? If Christ is returning tomorrow to fix everything, why bother? 

Paul’s message isn’t about moral policing, and he certainly is not saying we should fail to feed the hungry among us. Paul is talking about being a community of faith. Faith can’t live in isolation; it comes through shared effort and mutual care in community. Faith is not passive; it is about our daily choices to embody love. This is what we do through feeding the hungry, tending our Thrift Shop, and creating safe spiritual spaces to gather. Christ’s second coming isn’t something we wait for; it is something we practice into being. It happens each time we choose compassion over fear, forgiveness over resentment, connection over control.

Jesus IS coming — not to us, but through us.

In the weeks ahead, as we move toward Advent, we are invited once again into a holy time of inner reflection, to notice Spirit stirring, to see where something new is being born in us and among us. We are invited to see beyond the fears about things falling apart so we can have faith in how things are being transformed.
So when you see change, remember: this is what creation looks like. What looks like an ending is the beginning of a new creation. When you feel the ache of loss or uncertainty, remember: love has not left you. And when you glimpse beauty, tenderness, or courage rising in the midst of it all, know that Christ is here — already coming, already creating, already alive in you.

We can’t see it in full yet, but we are already helping create the new heaven and the new earth. Through our work together in this community, let’s live as though God’s realm is already among us — because it is. 

​
If you would like to use any text in this or any sermon posted on this web site, please ensure proper attribution to the author.