Scripture: Luke 21:5-8; Isaiah 12:1-6; Judges 12:5-6; Matthew 12:38-40
Jesus refuses to give us signs for predicting the future or for sorting insiders from outsiders, and instead, through the Holy Spirit, the church, and the Wesleyan General Rules, calls us to stop judging and simply love our neighbor now.
Illustrations: aggie-12th-man, aggie-symbols, grandfather-john-huebel, reading-to-preschoolers, this-little-light-of-mine, augustine-vestiges-footprints, shibboleth-jordan, political-shibboleths, sign-of-jonah
November 16, 2025
Symbols and Signs
Isaiah 12 Luke 21:5-8
You will say on that day: “I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, and you comforted me. Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and will not be afraid, for the Lord is my strength and my might; he has become my salvation.” With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And you will say on that day: “Give thanks to the Lord; call on his name; make known his deeds among the nations; proclaim that his name is exalted. Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously; let this be known in all the earth. Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.” - Isaiah 12
When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, “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.” They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray, for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them. - Luke 21:5-8
Symbols are very evocative. I grew up in College Station, Texas, right by Texas A&M University.
Hook ‘em.
And there’s a lot of symbols at A&M. Some of you are Aggies and you went through all of that. One of the first symbols they teach you about is the 12th man. Unlike for the Seattle Seahawks, the 12th man was a real person,
On Jan. 2, 1922, the heavily outgunned Texas A&M football team was facing the top-ranked Centre College Praying Colonels in the Dixie Classic in Dallas. E. King Gill, an Aggie basketball player and former member of the football team, was up in the press box helping reporters identify players on the field below.
The Aggies found themselves plagued by injuries, and their reserves dwindled with every play. As Texas A&M Coach Dana X. Bible looked across his rapidly emptying bench, he suddenly remembered that Gill was in the stands.
Bible waved Gill down to the sideline and told him to suit up. Gill ran under the bleachers and put on the uniform of injured running back Heine Weir, who had been knocked out of the game in the first quarter.
Gill returned to the sideline, where he stood ready to play for the entirety of the game in case the 11 men on the field needed assistance. This earned him the title of “12th Man.” When the last play was run, the Aggies found that they had pulled off one of the greatest upsets in college football history, winning the game 22-14. And Gill remained standing, the only player left on the team’s bench.
Today, the 12th man is a symbol of the Aggie fans themselves, they’re not just cheering on their team, they are ready to go in to the game when called for. There’s a lot of other symbols at A&M: there is the century tree, the Aggie ring. Reveille. My grandfather, John Huebel, graduated from A&M in 1940. So he was a student the last and only time A&M won a national championship.
Aggie symbols help Aggie’s deepen the relationship with the university but also with each other: symbols like the Aggie ring, help them recognize other Aggie’s in the wild.
A lot of life is filled with symbols, active symbols that deepen our understanding of places and locations. The Bible is filled with symbols, stories with extra meanings, stories with meanings in which you can go deeper.
People have been over-interpreting the Bible for centuries, taking a word here and turning it into a 600-page treatise. Sometimes the symbol is thick enough for that, sometimes it’s not. What’s interesting about symbols that I wouldn’t know if I didn’t read Bible stories to three, four, and five-year-olds twice a week, is that little kids aren’t really great with symbols. Kids aren’t wonderful with metaphorical language.
Tell them the story about Noah’s ark and they are there for it. Tell them the story about the wise man who built a house up on a rock and they’ll think about the rock and the storm, but the extra level that Jesus is teaching in that moment isn’t there. They can sing “This little light of mine.” But not make the leap to being light:
At some point in our development, we begin to look for signs and symbols. Symbols go from being unimportant to extremely important. Metaphors become important. Milestones in the literal sense of stones that mark the miles of our path to let us know that we are going the right way.
Gospel
In our Gospel text, the signs and symbols that Jesus is speaking of here is for a sign that the temple will be thrown down. A warning sign that something cataclysmic is about to happen. And Jesus says there’s not going to be one guys; it is going to happen before you realize it. But there will be people who claim they know. There will be people who act like a sign, who act like a symbol. Beware of them. Beware of them.
Jesus doesn’t offer us a faith without signs. Again, he uses symbolic language over and over again. The parables are filled with symbolic language. The Sermon on the Mount is filled with symbolic language, metaphorical language. Jesus isn’t saying that our future is bad, but that it is going to be different from what we expect. We each have signs and symbols in our own lives that let us know how we are doing, signs like maybe our bank account, our retirement account, calls from our children, presents at Christmas, a raise, a commendation, signs that mark that we are going on the right track. These are not the signs of the kingdom of heaven, and this is what Jesus is saying.
The kingdom of heaven marks a radical departure. It is going to have different signs, but we should not be looking for them. They are not going to help us predict what is to come.
Jesus says at one point, “Look for the sign of Jonah.” This is to predict Christ’s death and resurrection. It is confusing in this it only is understandable retrospectively. That’s what Jesus offers you:, symbols that we will understand retrospectively, we will understand by looking back, which means we need to look back.
We don’t need to live looking back. We don’t need to live in the past, in the suffocating world of nostalgia, but we need to be able to look back, to see how God has moved in our life, to see the symbols of God’s movement so that we can be affirmed in where we are today.
St. Augustine would talk about vestiges of the Trinity throughout Scripture, and throughout our life. A vestige, vestigium in Latin means footprint. The footprints in the sand. That’s another way to see the symbol of God present and alive, like footprints in the sand that we glimpse, and then is blown away by time, by weather, by events. A footprint can be destroyed by the tide coming in, by the wind blowing it off, by a rainstorm, but also by another person stepping in it or kicking it over. That doesn’t mean we didn’t see it. We hold onto these vestiges by faith. Our tradition offers us vestiges throughout history, holy people who have lived holy lives that are possible for us because of faith, because their holiness, their specialness is not because they were special, but because God was in them. And that same God can be in us. That same God is in us.
Signs help us mark a way, but they also mark other people as safe or unsafe. In the book of Judges, there is a strange passage about signs for people.
And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not pronounce it correctly.
A shibboleth is a phrase used to test if someone is in the right group with you or if they are outside of the group. We all do it, consciously or subconsciously. I do it with saying hook ‘em horns. Aggies do it with gig ‘em.
Christians do it a lot. For most of us, unfortunately, when you meet someone who says they are Christian, we might think to ourselves: Are you the good kind of Christian or the bad kind of Christian? And depending on what group you’re in, your definition of good Christian and bad Christian is going to be different. Especially today with the hyperpolarization of politics that make most everything, even religion, downstream of politics. A shibboleth is often who you voted for.
Jesus, though, should make all of us uncomfortable. Jesus is not apolitical, he just follows the politics of the kingdom of God, which is a radically different politics than any human kingdom or nation or state. Jesus never calls his followers to set into law the politics of the kingdom of God, but to practice them here and now in the midst of the world. And this is why Jesus is dissmissive of signs of the future destruction of the temple. It is a dismissal of the signs of whether other people around us are in the in-group or the out-group.
Jesus tells us not to judge others in the specific way of not marking good christians from bad christians. As well, of not marking people as deserving of mercy or undeserving of mercy.
When Jesus tells us not to judge others, what is implied there is that we should instead love them. Love them not because they deserve it. Love them, especially when they don’t deserve it. We should see what is ours as theirs. Nor should we look for signs in how they behave, what they say, what they look like, where they’re from.
When we look at other passages of the Bible, Christians have often taken the challenging words of the Sermon on the Mount and the other teachings of Jesus that commend us to follow the way of the kingdom of God now as ideals that are impossible. Jesus never says that they are possible on our own. Every Christian will fail on his or her own. We need the Holy Spirit. We need the church, each other. The church is an attempt to live into God’s call Forrest now together. To not over interpret the future, to not over interpret the boundaries of who is included in God’s love, but to proclaim mercy, grace, love: to proclaim it and live it.
Let us not wait for a sign to love our neighbor. For that is what the Pharisees are getting at. They are looking to signs for the future as a way to avoid loving the neighbors in our midst. Jesus knows that and not only tells us to live another way. He shows us and he gives us the tools to do so.
In the Methodist tradition, we have a set of General rules to guide a life. Rules like ruler not rules like no speeding.
- First, do no harm. Before we know what we should do, we should make sure we are not currently harming anyone. The ends do not justify the meeting.
- Second, do all the good you can. Not all the good, but what you were able to do. Through prayer, discernment, and Christian conversation, we discern what all we can is. For most of us, unfortunately, it is more than we are currently doing. The point is not to murder our self with good works, but to realize that our life has been blessed with an amazing gift and it is an honor to serve others. Each of us, wherever we are in our life, has been given this gift and we should not let that gift go to waste.
- Finally, to follow the ordinances of God to do the things God tells us to do m: love our neighbor, pray, for those who persecuted us, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, worship together, come to communion, pray together, converse as Christians, fast, give. three simple rules.
Jesus doesn’t make signs for us to follow, but he helps us in how to live as children of God today. As we move toward the holidays, may all your family and personal traditions move you towards loving your neighbor and loving your God. May you give thanks to the Lord.
In the name of the father and the son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.