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“It Ends With God”
Matthew 24:36-44
December 2, 2007
But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken, and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. 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. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Beginnings and Endings
For all practical purposes, we are at a Beginning. Today we enter a New Season in the life of our church, called Holy Advent. The paraments and stoles with their rich purples and blues look new to our eyes, grown accustomed to the Green of Ordinary Time. The lectionary through which Kyle and I preach has changed. Last Sunday on Christ the King, we completed Year C and today begin the three year cycle anew with Year A. It’s a New Day. I still consider St. Andrews our new church. You are still our new parishioners. Certainly this white stuff outside speaks loudly and clearly that a New Season is upon us! We are at the beginning….
And yet, how does our gospel reading make such a Beginning? How does Matthew begin Holy Advent? Does it speak of new beginnings? No it does not. In fact, Matthew does just the opposite. The Jesus whom we hear in Matthew begins the New Year with news of the End.
But the end of what, you might be wondering. Is it the end of the Year with holiday parties, snowmen in the yard, and the waiting up late on December 31st until 11:59pm, the last minute of 2007? Is that end to which Matthew speaks? Does he tell us today stories of young Mary and Joseph beside the manger? Is it with the heart-warming tales of the Wise Men and Shepherds and animals which play themselves out in our minds when we see these beautiful crèches here beside the tree?
No. This 1st Sun of the 1st season of this 1st lectionary year Jesus begins with the End in mind. Not the end of the year, but the end of it all. The End of Time, End of the World. Whatever we want to call it, that’s what Jesus is getting at.
It Ends With God
And I tend to hesitate preaching on these End of the World texts for several reasons. But at the knee jerk level, it’s because in one of my previous churches there were a few people who were hooked—I mean hook line and sinker--on the Left Behind series. They spent a great deal of time explaining to me the specific details they had acquired about the End of the World. And, it turns out, they had the inside scoop on logistics of international conspiracies, biological probabilities of multi-headed dragons, and the rules of how to survive when the End comes. And it’s true—to give the Dispensationalists their due— that there’s a lot written by a lot of people over a lot of generations about what scripture might or might not be suggesting about what might or might not a trustworthy timeline of what might or might not be the last events of the ordered creation as we know it. A lot written, but ultimately I suspect, not a lot known, other than the kinds of things we hear today from Matthew.
And what Matthew teaches us, calmly but firmly, is that the End is not an Event, but rather a Person. The End isn’t about global conspiracies or being left behind so much as it is about Waiting and Watching. For someone is coming…
But who is that someone exactly? If I assume that we are like most American Protestant congregations, than I’d wager that if we flip open our blue hymnals to the Advent/Christmas section and picked the top Ten, we’d pick songs like these:
Silent Night, O Come O Come Emmanuel, Gentle Mary Laid Her Child,
Hark the Herald Angel Sing—glory to the newborn king; Infant Holy, Infant Lowly,
O Little Town of Bethlehem…songs that sing of the beautiful babe
Away in the Manger, no crib for his bed, the little lord Jesus laid down his sweet head.
Beloved songs of the Christ Child.
But there are other hymns too, hymns that congregations hope their pastors might just overlook. Songs with titles that sound altogether different, almost un-Christmas-like:
Comfort, comfort You My People, Jesus Comes with Clouds Descending,
Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates, Savior of the Nations Come,
even Prepare the Way O Zion!
These are songs that speak not of the Child, but of the Coming Christ. And though these hymns have a long way to go before they hit the Christmas Eve Top 20, they sing a truth that is embedded in the Gospel of Matthew. The One for whom we most patiently wait in Advent “is not the baby born in a barn, but the Son of Man Who is coming to meets us at the end of time” (3).
Do you hear that difference? When we can grasp it…we find that the scales simply explode! We’re not just talking about shepherds and wise men following a star one cold night. We’re talking about the cosmos. We’re thinking the All in All. We’re hearing Eschatology. Advent is exponentially bigger than we thought.
And there’s an historic reason behind it. You see, the earliest Christians back in Matthew’s day were nervous, maybe even embarrassed. They had staked their lives on the return of Jesus. He will come again, they said and preached and sang and prayed. But the last time most people had seen Jesus was last Sunday—on Christ the King—as he hung on the cross with his crown of thorns and died. Morning by morning the people of the early church woke hoping to find Jesus out and about in their world. So day by day they waited, and year by year their theological counterparts scoffed and smiled patronizingly: silly little Christians. These earliest faithful were waiting for the end. Like those in our own time they were watching for the return of the Christ.
Our text today, in many ways, is Matthew’s attempt to remind them, and through the centuries, to remind us, that about the Son of Man’s return there is much unknown. In the end, none of us really knows the when or where or how—not the angels in heaven, not even the Son himself, but only the Father. All we know is that it ends with God.
At the end of the day, at the end of all our days, is God coming.
Twenty Minutes Upstream
And somehow, knowing even that little bit of what will happen then and there, changes how we live here and now. The Eschatology of this text bleeds into Ethics. “For to believe, that the Son of Man is coming some day to gather up and redeem all of the brokenness and loose ends of the world and of our lives is to mean—in the meantime—that our lives have purpose and direction” (4).
In the words of Tom Long, “If the dam twenty minutes upstream breaks, then the Rembrandt on the wall is less valuable than the rubber raft in the attic” (4). Knowing what lies ahead clears away the fog, and suddenly we see what’s important now.
Ted Wardlaw, who was my supervisor at Central Church in Atlanta and now President at Austin seminary, writes in the Journal of Preachers about this text: “Years ago I knew of a prominent African-American pastor who served a large and powerful church in Harlem, above 125th street in NYC. From its gothic spire, one could see just about anything one would want to see. Or, to put it more accurately, one could see just about anything one would not want to see: blocks of burned-out buildings, shabby little pawn shops and boarded-up storefronts and roach infested grocery stores, in the shadows of which prostitutes and crack dealers plied their trades. Many churches had given up and moved elsewhere, but that church just continued to hang in there—keeping watch, staying alert, as if every moment mattered! They organized a locally-owned bank (so the neighborhood could have a bank), they set up latch-key programs for children. They put together neighborhood redevelopment agencies, they set up Bible studies in high-rises. But still, it was Harlem.
A newspaper reporter once interviewed this pastor. “Sure,” he said as he framed one question, “you’re doing great stuff. But it’s hard to see what difference any of that is making. What enables you and your folks to keep going?” The pastor said, “We’ve read the Bible and we know how it ends. We aren’t at the end yet, “ he went on, “But we know how it ends, and that’s what makes the difference” (4).
St. Andrews Knows How It Ends!
And that is what makes the difference for us too. We know how it ends. Which is why we, the members and affiliates, the friends and staff of St. Andrews keep on doing the things we do and being the church we are and always have been. We know how it ends—for it ends with God.
So we keep on collecting food for Thanksgiving Baskets and giving good clothes and furniture to BACN. We keep supporting the special offerings of the PC(USA) and providing housing and education for mission workers around the globe. We keep buying coffee that was grown and sold fairly, and paying down the mortgage on this beautiful church. We keep building Habitat Homes and sending workers to Mississippi, and each Sunday offering a bit of what we have for God to keep up the good work.
We do it not because we see the results right away. Each week we still get phone calls from more people who need help with food and rent, and each month we still see how much more debt we’ve got to pay off. But we know how it ends, and it doesn’t end with us. Thank God, we are not God.
So we gather at St. Andrews on this 1st Sunday of Advent, to worship One whose very presence rips us away from the world as we know it, in order to get a view of the world as it might be. We, the people of St. Andrews, gather in God’s presence, because it is this God who continues to feed us this holy bread, offer us this sacred wine, and cleanse us with this ancient water, in order to go and be God’s people again.
A people who live here and now in this world, working and playing with courage and wonder, because the here and now is not all there is. In the end, as it was in the beginning, will be God.
So stay awake friends, for Someone is coming. Awaken the wonder that’s within you—that childlike awe that sees so clearly the holy all about us. Stay awake and work on, even when we do not see results.
In Thomas Merton’s words, in his Letter to a Young Activist, “Do not depend on results. When you are looking at the sort of work you have taken on…you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps the opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself…”
Let’s keep up the good work, the true work, let’s keep awake. For even as we begin a new year, a new advent, a new season of life together, we already know how it ends. The Peace of Christ be with you. Amen.
Rev. Shelaine Bird
***With gratitude to the authors of the Journal for Preachers, Volume XXXI, Advent 2007, pps 1-4 from which I took several of my ideas and quotations. Thanks for sharing your passion for Advent! ***
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