November 30, 2014
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
We are now past the end of the church year and at the beginning of a new year. It’s Advent. But is this a time of beginning or a time of ending? What time is it?
Some of you seeing that it’s Advent came to church this morning with the sentimentality of the Christmas season on your mind. While we do have our first Advent candle lit today, there is no holiday good cheer in the passage we read. These verses follow a harrowing account of suffering and turmoil that resulted from idolatry.
There is this website that is called the “Rapture Index.” The purpose of this website is to “eliminate the wide variance that currently exists with prophecy reporting” into a “cohesive indicator.” The Rapture Index is a “Dow Jones of end times,” a prophetic speedometer. The higher the number the faster we’re moving towards the rapture.
These people with way too much time on their hands wait for the end of time to come with a list of 42 categories in which they assign a score of one to five. Indicators of the end of the world include the occult, Satanism, false prophets, the Anti-Christ, earthquakes, floods, plagues, unemployment, inflation, interest rates, globalism, ecumenism, liberalism, and civil rights. Civil rights? These people probably added Obama’s speech last week on immigration! The scale for the total score ranges from below 85—“slow prophetic activity” to above 145—“fasten your seat belt.” The last time I checked the rapture index was 164! Stay calm.
We know this is goofiness but how many times have we lived through these Second Coming embarrassments. One of the clearest things Jesus said was, “No one knows the day or the hour.” Fortunetellers have been guessing the day and the hour ever since.
Today, it’s Hollywood that is releasing blockbuster science fiction hits after hits of asteroids and tsunamis and supernovas. The apocalyptic genre of end-time movies includes astronomical catastrophe or one triggered by humans, usually by some scientific experience that went awry or our pollution of the planet. Now as good church members, are we tempted to believe in some of these Second Coming prophecies?
Mark’s Passage
The early Christians believed that the end of the world was around the corner. The Gospel of Mark was written forty years after Jesus’ death, just after the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. Mark writes to tell persecuted Christians about how two days before his death, Jesus told his friends about the end of it all.
Imagine if you were describing the end of time, what kind of language would you use? Would you use scientific language because of what we know about science today? Or would you use theological language that ministers might use? Or would you use the kind of apocalyptic language Jesus used? The word, “apocalyptic” literally means, “taking away the veil” or revealing what was hidden or “uncover.”
When things are at their most horrible, when it is worse than you can imagine, when the sun does not shine, the moon goes black, the stars fall from the sky, and creation falls apart, know that God is coming for you is what Jesus is saying. The whole universe will melt away like a dream and something new—something that has never entered into our heads—will come about.
Jesus said that we can know God is coming in the same way that a fig tree knows that summer is coming. The change of seasons can be seen in the tree’s softening branches and spouting leaves. We can feel God’s coming in the softening of our hearts. In this parable the signs of God’s coming are not the catastrophes that some look for in Hollywood movies, but the hope that stirs within our spirits.
Jesus’ next story gives the disciples insomnia. A master goes on a trip and leaves the servants to manage the house. They need to constantly be on the lookout, because though the master may have marked the date on his calendar, he decided not to share that information with his servants.
It’s like we say, “When the cat is out, the mice come out to play.” Any teenager who has ever been left in charge of the house knows how good the first few moments feel. The whole house is yours. You can eat what you want and leave your clothes on the floor. The dishes pile up. The plants need to be watered. But sooner or later, the teenager has to clean up the mess.
We have seen the bumper sticker that reads, “Jesus is Coming. Look Busy!” This parable tells us to get busy and pay attention. As you vacuum, keep watching for who may drive up on your driveway. As you pick up the living room, listen to hear the front door open. None of us ever know when the end will come—for us, for those we love, or for the world.
Jesus kept saying: “Don’t take anything for granted. God could show up any time.” If you fall asleep for fifteen minutes you might miss the most important moment of your life. You might wake up to find God standing over you with luggage in both hands saying, “Where were you when I arrived? The door was wide open, and there were no lights on. I told you to stay awake.”
Wake up and understand that what we believe about the future affects the way we live each day. When we look for God’s coming, we hear the ticking of the clock and understand that every minute is filled with hope and despair. Our job is to stay awake to everything that life brings—so that we do not miss God when God comes.
The main point that I am trying to say to you is that believing that the end belongs to God breaks the power of the world on us, and fills us with a hope that continues even in sorrow.
Waiting
When Jesus compares God’s advent among us to a thief breaking into a house, it all sounds rather frightening. And sometimes that’s the way apocalyptic writings strike us—“Jesus is coming! Are you prepared? Well, you had better be. Just you wait until Jesus comes and you’ll get yours!”
I can’t imagine that was the tone in which Jesus spoke these words. Rather, Jesus used apocalyptic language to make the point, in the most vivid way that God is coming! Be prepared to be surprised. Be ready to see God finally get what God wants in the world. Be ready for the God who at once seems so very far away to come very close to you. And one can imagine what a comfort these words were to the tiny band of believers on the fringes of the big, bad Roman Empire.
Even in the difficulty of present circumstances, Jesus is saying, “Take heart!” The day will come when your faith shall be vindicated, meaning that there will be triumph. We hope for the future on the basis of what we’ve already experienced of God in Christ in the past and in the present. The source of our hope is Jesus Christ and his love for us. We believe that Christ loves us so much he will bring to completion the work begun in his life, death and resurrection. So this apocalyptic message for us today is about God’s continuing invasion of the world, God’s determination to get back what belongs to God.
While we want to know what comes next and more specifically when will God appear so that we may banish our sense of aloneness, estrangement, of exile, even of doubt, the answer is “not yet.”
The heart of Advent is expectant waiting; eagerly we anticipate the future we cannot yet see, the very definition of hope. Patience is a virtue, we are told, and psychologists tell us that “delay gratification” is a sign of emotional health and maturity. Those reminders, however, don’t always make our waiting easier. We wait eagerly for the college admission letter, the outcome of our job interview, or our beloved’s response to our proposal for marriage. We pray that our offer on a new home will be accepted or that the stock market will improve before we retire. Some of us purchase lottery tickets in hopes of ensuring our financial future.
But it is much harder to be patient when the consequences that lie in the future are matters of life and death—a man fearing a potential diagnosis of cancer, a couple facing the possibility of infertility, or the life-threatening illness of a child.
And it’s even harder when an entire nation or race of people is at risk but we have been asked to wait and be patient. The people of West Africa grasping at the hope of when there would be enough health workers and medicine to stop the spread of Ebola. What about those who have been victims of systemic injustice for generations and daily confront the realities of racism and cultural biases that have led to mass incarceration and killings of young Black men in places like Ferguson, Missouri?
The response Jesus calls for is to keep watch, stay awake. We are to be attentive to the signs that God is about to do something new, that redemption draws near, that God is at the gates. Neither passive acceptance of whatever happens nor an urgency to bring about God’s kingdom by ourselves will do. We are to wait, but we are also to watch and to be ready. While redemption is God’s work, our participation is far from optional.
Know the Secret
God wants us to stay awake and wait. And while we are waiting, for now we know a secret. God is coming near. Every Sunday we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Your kingdom come on earth as in heaven,” and we pray that both as a petition to God and as a challenge to ourselves. We are to live as those who know the end of the story.
We already have assurance of God’s love in what we have already experienced in Christ—Emmanuel, God with us, even when the final victory is not yet secured. Instead of speculation on God’s future time frame whether it’s with the Rapture Index or Hollywood movies, we do know what God is doing now.
The near presence of God is not a human product; it is always an undeserved, and as Jesus puts in today’s Gospel, an unexpected gift. God’s transformation is different from merely human innovation. The Gospel message for us today is that God’s world is here already, is yet to come and is becoming a part of God’s move upon the world.
Christ is drawing all things to himself, about God continuing to create the world so at last the world is more in line with God’s original intent. For those of you who maybe interested, this is the reason why I have become a vegetarian in my commitment to live more in line with God’s original intent.
There is always some degree of un-fulfillment in our view of present time. We just know or feel that not everything is just right. Christ has come, but not in fullness. The kingdom of God has broken in among us, but not completely. God is near, but not fully among us. There is still pain and regret, tragedy and tears, and there is more yet to come.
But even in our honest recognition of the incompleteness of the world, we have an expectation that rests upon confidence in the ultimate direction of the movement of history. Every week we in the church testify to our conviction that all history will be gathered up into the loving grip of Christ, that all things in this world, good and bad, are being drawn toward him, toward final consummation of judgment and mercy of God worked out by God.
On this First Sunday of Advent, the “Coming of the Son of Man” that Jesus speaks about in today’s Gospel is simply a wonderful, richly apocalyptic way of speaking of God’s gracious intent to draw all to God. And when that happens, at some future time and place, we call that “salvation.”
This church and all that we do as the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco, in all our ambiguity and frailty is, by the grace of the “God With Us,” Emmanuel is a sign, a signal, an instrument, a foretaste, a vanguard, a seed of hope in God’s momentous turn toward us in Christ and God’s refusal to be a God without a people.
We are a congregation who knows the secret: God’s will shall triumph.
Be patient, stay awake, be ready. God is drawing near. Our salvation is at hand.
Let us pray.
Saving God, we pray that you stir us from our complacent sleep and deliver us from where and who we are that we may become all you intend us to be. That we be a church that never ceases to dream and long for that future day. We pray for the gift of fullness of faith that enables us to firmly believe for what will be beyond the present in that envisioned day. Help us to be ready to believe a new day is coming. In Christ we pray, Amen.