HOPE UNKNOWN November 28, 2010, The First Sunday of Advent Matthew 24:36-44 Erin M. Keys, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York

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1 HOPE UNKNOWN November 28, 2010, The First Sunday of Advent Matthew 24:36-44 Erin M. Keys, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Come, Holy Spirit. Meet us where we are and bring us closer to you. Inspire your word that it may become a living presence among us. Now may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. I was about fifteen when I went to my first judgment house. I was on a date actually, a first date no less, with a young man from my English class. He picked me up and as we pulled out of my parents driveway he told me we were going to an event at his church. Ok, I thought, I like church. This will be fun. I assumed a first date at a church was no big deal. It was maybe even sort of nice? As we drove up to the Mount Carmel Church he parked the car and we got out. What s the event? I asked. A judgment house, he said. A what?! He laughed and said, You ll see. It turns out that a judgment house is similar to a haunted house only instead of ghosts and witches, you get a dramatic portrayal of the Apocalypse. As my date and I were led through the various rooms of the church it was like we were walking through the final days before the Second Coming. All the signs were there: It became very dark. Angels appeared along with the Anti-Christ. A member of the church dressed like Jesus showed up and sorted out the elect from the damned

2 There was wailing and gnashing of teeth. All in all, it was very elaborate and surprisingly detailed. In fact there may have even been a clock on the wall counting down the years, months and even minutes to Jesus final return. Of course the purpose of this grand performance was to convince youth like myself that Jesus was coming back and when he arrived he was going to be angry. Outlining the specific events that would foreshadow Christ s return, the creators of the judgment house hoped we would realign our values and thereby ensure that we would be among those who were caught up in the eventual rapture. Knowing how the end would unfold, they believed, would make it easier for us to see it coming. Of course the problem with the judgment house and other attempts at forecasting the spiritual future is that Jesus tells us quite simply that it can t be done. According to Jesus, no one knows neither the day nor the hour of his eventual return. Not even him. Don t you just love this? We have gathered together on this first Sunday of Advent thinking about Christmas trees and the coming birth of Christ. But the lectionary text leads us w-a-a-a-y past the story of wise men and angels and on to the much more ominous story of Jesus second coming. The setting for this story is the Mount of Olives. Jesus has retreated to the Mount after a particularly nasty exchange with the Scribes and the Pharisees where he essentially told them that life as they know it is about to change. My assumption is that Jesus went up to the mount for a moment of peace and quiet to gather his thoughts. However the disciples, in their typical clueless fashion, follow him up the mountain and ask Jesus to describe the signs of the end of the age. Jesus then begins to tell a story that goes on for 94 verses. This morning we jumped into his story right as Jesus informs the disciples that no one knows when the end will come. Playing off imagery from the story of Noah, Jesus goes on to emphasize just how surprised we will all be when, in the midst of our daily lives, the flood suddenly comes and sweeps us away

3 Two will be in the field and one will be taken and one will be left. Two will be grinding grain and one will be taken and one will be left. The son of God will return like a thief in the night sneaking in when you least expect it and startling you from your slumber. Matthew wisely does not tell us how the disciples responded to Jesus words. Perhaps we are to assume that they understood his odd story because they don t ask again. However for most of us this passage raises more questions than it answers, especially for those of us who don t like to be left in the dark about what is going to happen next. This propensity towards fearing the unknown has pushed many to search for a more concrete equation by which to anticipate the end times. Seeking to fill the void left in Matthew s text, the trend has been to comb through Jesus words pulling out words and phrases that are then interpreted as a literal forecasting of what is to come. One pastor who took this task to heart is John Darby, an Anglican priest who lived during the 1800s. Darby spent the majority of his ministry creating the theory of pre-millennial dispensationalism, or more simply put: a timeline of the rapture. Darby believed that there are seven ages leading up to the end of time. The last age will contain what has become known as the Great Tribulation. This is the final cosmic battle and it is during this battle we are told that Jesus words from our passage today will come to fruition as all hell breaks loose. For many people Darby s theory answers questions that scripture leaves open. Not knowing what will happen tomorrow becomes easier when we know how the world will end. And loving one s neighbor becomes decidedly more convenient when we assume that the person left gaping in the field won t be us. However the problem with thinking we know what Jesus specifically tells us we can t know is that we always end up getting it wrong. And somehow the message of Christ gets manipulated into a judgment house. Or a hate-filled website proclaiming God s wrath for those of different sexual - 3 -

4 orientation. Or cruel, public demonstrations at the funerals of war veterans. These are the sinful by-products of Christians who have lost their patience, who have decided to fill in the blanks themselves rather than wait for God s revelation. And what I was surprised to learn is that the word rapture doesn t even occur once in the Bible. The word rapture comes from the Latin word rapio, which is a translation of the Greek verb harpazo, which means caught up. It seems to me that there is a big difference between being caught up with Christ and the idea of the rapture that has taken hold in our society today. My hunch is that the reason Darby constructed his elaborate narrative about the end times, and the reason as to why so many still believe it, is because we are afraid. Afraid of the fact that there are spaces in our faith that ask us to be OK with not knowing. Afraid of the fact that there are aspects of our future we can t control. We all fear what we can t see, which is why we will do almost anything to avoid being left in the dark. But if we try to convince ourselves that there is an ending we can know. If we get caught up in the apocalyptic images that Jesus uses and misinterpret them as pointing towards some future event, then we make a disastrous mistake. Because the truth is Jesus doesn t answer the question the disciples asked him that day on the Mount of Olives. At least not in the way they, and we, thought. Jesus doesn t answer the disciples question by telling them what to expect. Instead he answers their question by teaching them how to live in a world that God created and that Christ has already redeemed. In other words, we are to see the world through Christ now rather than looking for him in a world to come. Jesus used the drama of apocalyptic language to point to another time and another world, only it turns out that the other world is the one in which we already live. Apocalyptic is not the future. It is the disruption of our world by God s world and when Christ uses the outlandish language of the rapture, he isn t pointing to what is - 4 -

5 to come. He is saying, I have already come. I am right here. Why not get caught up with me now? This twist of language can best be illustrated by a quote from the Roman Catholic short-story writer Flannery O Connor. O Connor is well known for her narratives that contain outlandish characters and strange happenings. When asked about her dramatic style of story telling she says this: You have to make your vision apparent by shock to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large, startling pictures. 1 You have to imagine that the disciples were both deaf and blind to go up to Jesus and ask him when he was coming back. He was already right there. He had already revealed himself as the Messiah. He had already told them everything they needed to know. But instead of calling them out on their ignorance Jesus tells them a story. A story of war and destruction. A story of evil and suffering. These images of doom are not a prediction but a sign pointing to the one who was standing before them then and the one who stands before us now. The one who is peace in the midst of war. The one who is love in the midst of hate. The one who is greater than any evil our world can conjure up. And the one who teaches us how to live when we don t know how the story will end but we do know who it ends with. In his typical, roundabout way, Jesus tells the disciples that their questions about the future need not be asked because what matters is how they live now. Because the thing is Jesus didn t just come once as an unknown child only to come again at an unknown hour. Christ breaks into our lives repeatedly. Every year. Every hour. Every moment. And our job is to be awake so we don t miss it. There is a reason we light candles in church and there is a reason we light extra candles at Christmas. It s because a long time ago when people were afraid of the - 5 -

6 dark, they lit candles to remind themselves that God was with them. The light of the candle came to serve as reminder of the one great light of the world. Christ. Emmanuel. God with us. Starting today in churches and homes all over the world, Christians will light candles to mark the advent of Christ s birth and to remind themselves that he comes again. They have been doing it thousands of years and will continue to do it until the need to wait is over. And, if you think about all those candles stretching out before you into the dark of the unknown, you will be able to see one thing: light. Apocalypse names not the future but the present time. 2 A time that requires waiting. A time that requires hope. Because that s what hope is: Simply waiting for the light. But it s not a waiting that looks to the sky in hopes of being caught up in what is to come. Rather it is a waiting that looks around for where Christ already is and where he is coming next. It is a waiting caught up in the hope of all that is being made known. Right here, right now. All praise be to God. Amen. 1 Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961), Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006),