April 24, 2022
St. John’s United Church of Christ, Union, Illinois
Jeremiah 31:31-34; Matthew24:30-44[1]
We celebrated
the Resurrection this last Sunday. The tomb was empty and Jesus, alive again,
appeared to the disciples. Then, he ascended. Luke tells us, “He withdrew from
them and was carried up into heaven.”[2]
The first chapter of The Acts of the Apostles also tells us, “As they were
watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”[3]
He was gone, and they apparently stopped seeing him in the flesh. There would
be, of course, the whole Pentecost event, with the Holy Spirit and tongues of
fire, but that was not the same as seeing and touching Jesus. Jesus the person
was gone. Sorry folks, you can all go home now. Jesus has left the planet.
They waited for
him to come back. You see, he had said he was coming back. In the passage we
heard from Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus answers the disciples’ questions about the
end of the age by telling them, “They will see ‘the Son of Man coming on the
clouds of heaven’ with power and great glory.”[4]
And he even goes so far as to tell them, “This generation will not pass away
until all these things have taken place.”[5]
The Apostle Paul says basically the same thing in his letters. In fact,
there’s a whole section of First Thessalonians where Paul talks about the
return of Jesus. A scholar of Paul, Bart Ehrman, summarizes:
This world was soon to end, when the God who created
it returned to judge it; those who sided with God would be delivered, and those
who did not would experience his wrath. Moreover, the way to side with this
God, the creator and judge of all, was by believing in his Son, Jesus, who had
died and been raised for the sins of the world and who would return soon for
those who believe in him, to rescue them from the impending wrath.[6]
His converts had presumably taken his teaching to
heart; they were eagerly awaiting the return of Jesus to deliver them from the
wrath that was coming. But Jesus hadn’t returned and something troubling had
happened: some of the members of the congregation had died.[7]
Paul tries to
explain to them: “For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we
who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means
precede those who have died.”[8]
It’s OK, folks. Those who have died just get to be first in line, that’s all.
Paul fully expects that Jesus will be coming back before he dies. There’s a
small problem here; do you see it? Paul and all the disciples died almost
two-thousand years ago, and Jesus hasn’t come back yet.
The Second Coming
never happened. There have been many groups, or movements, which have predicted
the end times over the centuries. Do you remember the 2012 Mayan calendar
phenomenon? When I was serving the First Congregational Church of Western Springs,
I was told about a previous pastor who stood on the corner outside the church
at midnight, December 31, 1899, fully expecting the rapture. He was looking for
a new job the next morning.
Paul wisely
doesn’t try to make any predictions about exactly when Jesus is coming. And
Jesus didn’t either. Jesus said, “About that day and hour no one knows, neither
the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”[9]
So, you think you’re good with numbers and you want to do the math? Well, I
guess you must know more than Jesus…
Jesus tells us
himself that it is pointless to try to predict when the end times will come.
You won’t know what day, and it will be at an unexpected hour. But, be ready.
Expect the unexpected. Live as if it could happen any time now. And I think
that is what Paul, at least, was really trying to get at. We should live our
lives in expectation, anticipating with how we live that way of life that will
be ours when Christ does return.
Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet, told us to always be prepared:
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel and the house of Judah… I will put my law within them,
and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be
my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know
the Lord,’ for they shall all know
me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their
sin no more.[10]
That is the way
we are supposed to live. We are supposed to live as if we all know God. We are
supposed to live as if the law of God is written on our hearts. Love God… and
love your neighbor… you shall put these words on your heart and on your soul.
So, if Paul was
right, if Jesus is coming back at any moment, what are you going to do? If you knew that any moment could be your last on
earth, what would you do differently than you are doing now?
There is a song
by John Mayer called “Waiting on the World to Change.” I always thought of that
song as rather passive, just waiting. But if I am waiting expectantly, as if the
Lord will appear at any time, I might conduct myself differently. That is what
Jesus meant by “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord
is coming.”[11]
A pastor named Hugh Beck has said,
It is amazing how ‘expecting the unexpected’ changes
the ordinariness of life into a perpetual flutter of hope. It lightens the
darkness. It breaks apart the chains of sin and death with a lively life that
leaps for joy. For it knows that the ordinariness with which we are surrounded
every day is not the last word. It is not a binding word. Into it and around it
and through it there is a God who has transformed this ordinariness into an
unexpected extraordinariness.[12]
Seeing the
extraordinary hidden within the ordinary is one of the ways in which the Church
stays ready and awake. Seen from a distance, Jesus was a pretty ordinary traveling
holy man. You would have to follow him around for a while, listen to what he
said, and watch what he did, in order to begin to see what an unusual person he
was.
Even his
crucifixion might have been seen as just a tragic injustice perpetrated by a
sick imperial system, were it not for what happened three days later. Hundreds,
if not thousands, of people – Jews, rebels, political prisoners – were
crucified by the Romans in Judea. But wrapped up in the life and death of this
person in particular was the world-changing power of God.
And it is only
because of the Church, formed out of those scattered and fearful disciples,
that the meaning of Jesus has been, and is still being, revealed. In a most
extraordinary and unexpected way, God not only changed the course of the world
but also brought life into the midst of our dying, restored hope where hope had
vanished, and brought light into utter darkness.[13]
There is
something extraordinary hidden within the waters that were poured on us at our
baptism and the bread and cup we receive at the table of the Lord. To the
casual eye, it is the same water we use to wash dishes and the same bread and
wine that we serve at dinner. “But when we hear Jesus speak to us and say that
hidden there within the water and bread and wine, he is present for us, we
believe and know that this is the washing of grace, the bread of heaven, the
cup of salvation. To expect the unexpected here is to receive life and hope and
a new vision of what our lives can be by the blessing of God.”[14]
Amen.
[1] The
scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard
Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of
the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
[2]
Luke 24:51.
[3] Acts
1:9.
[4] Matthew
24:30.
[5] Matthew
24:34.
[6]
Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A
Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 3rd ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 2004), 307.
[7] Ibid., 312.
[8] 1
Thessalonians 4:15.
[9] Matthew
24:36.
[10] Jeremiah
31:31-34.
[11] Matthew
24:42.
[12]
Hugh Beck, from: http://www.predigten.uni-goettingen.de/archiv-7/041128-4-e.html.
[13] Ibid., paraphrased.
[14] Ibid., paraphrased.
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