SERMON FOR THE FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT, DECEMBER 1, 2019 TEXTS: MATTHEW 24:36-44, ROMANS 13:11-14

“A problem with apocalyptic passages is that they frighten some Christians, or they are dismissed by others as dispensable for the Christian faith (one of those things that a person need not believe). But the message of Christ’s return is not meant to frighten us. It is to give us hope.” That is the conclusion drawn by one of my former colleagues at Luther Seminary about today’s Gospel. Then one of his colleagues comments that another professor had bemoaned to him the domestication of God that happens when we try to soften or explain away texts like this one. If you don’t take seriously Christ's coming again in judgment sometime in an unknown future, she objected, then Jesus ends up being not much more than a nice guy. The colleague concurs: “I think she’s right. As foreign, or even frightening, as the coming judgment of the Son of God might be, it is an inescapable element of the biblical witness. And for good reason. The flip side of judgment, you see, is justice. .. . So give up any notion of God’s judgment and you’ve also abandoned any meaningful sense of God’s justice, of God’s determination to hold us accountable for how we treat each other and creation.”

Advent always begins with an apocalyptic text like this one, a proclamation that comes across as both promise and threat. I think these words of Jesus are meant to frighten us, to open our eyes to the possibility of desperation so that we might take hope seriously. In the end, if we live fully in the present, the end times will take care of themselves.

Scholars think the Gospel of Matthew was written around 80 AD. The evangelist reasserts a firm expectation of the second coming of Jesus. After all, his readers had been waiting some fifty years for the event and were likely beginning to lose heart or interest. Yet although Matthew does affirm that Jesus will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, his foremost objective is not to reinforce right belief. He looks to the future so as to shape the present. He describes the last act of the drama so that his readers will take care as to how they write the middle of the story, where they are now living, between the first and the final coming of the Lord. They are moving ever forward towards that end, yet even more importantly, the end has begun. This in-between time is for the believer already a time of salvation, rich in the grace and truth of Christ. God is continuously making all things new within and around us, challenging us to have eyes to see and ears to hear the wonders of his love, calling us to be members of the body of Christ, workers together in the Kingdom of God here and now, urging us to be faithful, especially when it seems like there is no way forward, no blessed deliverance at the end of our struggle. We pray, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done.” In his Small Catechism Luther asserts that in fact, God’s kingdom comes on its own and his good and gracious will comes about without our prayer, but we are asking that both many come about in and among us. We are inevitably part of the problem, but as followers of Jesus, we can just as surely be a present part of the solution.

The point is not to try to second guess how long we have to keep up the rigors of discipleship or until when we can risk delaying them. Neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son and certainly no artful human calculation, tempting as those have been over the centuries, can predict the day or the hour, the year or century or millennium. Matthew insists that preparedness is the issue, and that it is always urgent, precisely because there is no way of knowing when the Lord will sound last call. When I was teaching in Berkeley, I had a student who had grown up in a Pentecostal family; he was himself an Assemblies of God minister. In a class on eschatology, the theological term for what the church teaches about the last times, he shared a personal story. His mom was a full-time homemaker, and everyday when he returned from elementary school, she would be waiting for him in the kitchen, ready to hear about his adventures while she prepared their family’s dinner. He came home one afternoon to find dishes soaking in the sink, vegetables half-peeled lying on the chopping board and a carton of milk left out on the counter, but no mom. As an eschatologically in-the-know eight-year-old, he concluded that his mother had been taken up in the rapture, but he, unworthy child, had been left behind. He ran outside, curled up in a garbage can lid and lay in the driveway sobbing, where his mother found him when she returned. Lacking a crucial ingredient for that evening’s main course, she had raced to the store, hoping to be back before her little boy arrived. He told us he never forgot the experience, and that as a minister, he was always mindful of the terror the prospect of the rapture might cause.

It all depends on how you come at it — whether you identify with the one taken or the one left behind. Two women will be grinding meal together; two moms will be making Hamburger Helper, one will be taken and one will be left. It is curious that in today’s Gospel, it is ambiguous whether the saved are the ones spirited away or the ones who remained, having survived the winnowing. Was Noah left behind in the ark to continue God’s work on earth while the rest of humanity was swept away, or was Noah the one taken up into protective custody, while all the rest were left behind to perish in the flood waters? Either way, Noah was the one who heeded God’s warning, while all those around him went heedlessly about their earthly business. This inattentiveness was their undoing. Just as it is his ignorance that trips up the householder. “But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.” It could be anytime, and that’s why you tell Alexa to arm the security system every night before you trundle off to bed.

Jesus will take us by surprise at the end, but he will not take us unawares. We know this Son of Man who is coming in glory to complete God’s work; he makes himself known among us every day. We have heard his word of judgment and clung to his mercy. We know what it is to be at our wit’s end as disciples and have Jesus put his foot in the door of our heart to keep it from closing. Each day brings us the experience of forgiveness and time for amendment of life. Why would we put off reaping the harvest of Christ’s grace in our lives? Our redemption is taking place even now, as we make the effort to look around us, to see, to struggle and then to change. Why would we live as those who have no hope when we have already come this far? “[Y]ou know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed; the night is far spent; the day is at hand. Let us then cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light . . . .” Let us put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.