Matthew 24:36-44
November 30, 2025
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, Oakland, CA.
After Halloween and before Thanksgiving, I started listening to The John Rutter Christmas Album on Spotify. After worship today, it’s the church’s Hanging of the Greens followed by having Stone Soup! We are decking the halls and our Christmas expectations can’t come fast enough!
But on this First Sunday of Advent, our Scripture lesson is at odds with our Christmas expectations because it takes us to another day altogether. The Jesus in Matthews seems to be not as interested as we may be about Christmas, but instead is focusing us on an apocalyptic day in the unknown future, when the Son of Man will suddenly return and lives will suddenly and surprisingly change.
Christians have long debated when and how this day of judgment will take place. Combining our Matthew passage for today with texts from apocalyptic passages from the Hebrew Bible we know as the Old Testament and the New Testament, some people have worked up a timeline of events that perhaps are already in place for that event to happen.
In the 1970s, we had Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth and more recently, we have Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkin’s Left Behind novels. Like other fundamentalists, these authors anticipate a day on which God’s elect will be raptured—that is, lifted up in their physical bodies to the Lord—while the phrase, “left behind” to incur God’s wrath. They say, we must get ready, because these things may take place yet in our lifetime.
I don’t know what you might think about these books and movies, but I don’t find them either truthful or entertaining. The theologian John P. Burgess, once said, “God’s judgment never contradicts or overrides God’s grace.”
In the first verse of our passage for today, Jesus said, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” I rather believe in Jesus than Hal Lindsey or Tim LaHaye!
Noah
Matthew offers us three examples of what we can do today. For Noah, it wasn’t about how righteous Noah was but how prepare, how ready he was. When the flood came, people were just doing their everyday normal activities—having their daily meals, getting engaged and married to perhaps have a family. While these things were happening, the flood came unexpectedly.
In the next two examples, two men were working in the field and two women were working at the mill. Doing business as usual, people were assuming that there would be a future, a time to work in the field again or a time to mill grains again, a time for another generation to be born. But all of this came crashing down and they were swept away.
People who wish to interpret these passages to mean that when one is taken up and the other left behind to mean the two-sided nature of judgment, namely to say that some are saved and others are not, this is not what this passage is saying. In these normal, everyday activities, when the men are in a field bent over close to the ground, and the women are in the courtyard shared by several houses using a common grinding wheel, it means that we are called to “watchful living.”
Abraham in Sausalito
We can take Jesus’s words in the first verse literally, but in these following verses, we can understand Jesus’ words better symbolically. The point is not to speculate about the day of judgment sometime in the future, whether at the end of all humanity or at the death of each individual, but rather to confront us with God’s radical claims on us here and now.
Each day is a day of judgment, so we should always be asking ourselves, “Am I living in the way of Christ? Am I trusting in Christ alone? Have I allowed myself to become distracted with my own personal desires?
Am I living in a way that I am watching for signs that God is here?
A week ago, I was on my early morning walk and stopped by the local bakery in Sausalito as I usually do to greet my neighborly friends. A young man appeared at the entrance of the bakery and asked for the use of a phone. The 5 of us all sitting around a table all had our cell phones but we didn’t offer to help this young man. He left but in a couple of minutes, he returned.
I asked him who he wanted to call. When he said a friend to pick him up and that he wanted to get back to San Francisco, I got up and told him that I would walk him to the ferry ticket kiosk to buy him a ticket back to the city. On the way to the kiosk, I asked what was his name. He said, Abraham. When we got there, a woman stationed there on behalf of the ferry company said the ferries were not running on this Monday morning and said they are running free busses to get into the city. This was an unexpected miracle.
I accompanied him to the bus stop and continued on with my morning walk. But upon my return, I saw Abraham again! I asked him why he didn’t get on the bus that just left. He asked if I would call a friend but when I tried to get a number from him, he hesitated. He then asked if I would call his father.
I dialed this number and a man on the phone answered. I introduced myself as someone he didn’t know but that his son Abraham is with me. He asked where he was, I said Sausalito. He was surprised Abraham was in Sausalito. I asked him, does he want to speak to Abraham, he didn’t. I told him that Abraham will be taking the next bus to the ferry building and would he be there to pick him up. He told me he will.
I don’t know what is the fate of Abraham and his father. It may be our “prodigal son and loving father” story. What I do know is that my “watchful living” commitment pulled me out of that cozy coffee shop with my morning friends to live the way of Jesus.
Always, our first instinct is for our personal safety, our fear of being victimized by others, or our suspicion of someone’s honesty because we have been taken advantaged many times than we can remember. But on that early morning before sunrise, I asked myself, “Am I living in the way of Christ?”
Parousia
Some people think that when we focus on Jesus’ return, the Parousia, meaning appearing, to be much to do with nothing. They might say when it happens, it will happen. While some other people search the Bible and newspaper for signs of the end times, to see if those signs are yet to view. The former would tempt us to fall into a state of perpetual apathy. The latter in the form of perpetual anxiety.
Our faith in God encourages faith rather than apathy and hope rather than anxiety.
Today’s passage helps us to look forward without apathy or anxiety because we are not afraid to look back. When we look back at the time of Noah, we are not looking at the judgment and the power of God, but as a helpful reminder that what God has done, we have the confidence in what God will do, in God’s own time.
The power of this passage and Scripture together is that it provides the stories that tell us what God is doing in our own time and will do in the days to come. As a church community, we can look back together at the moments in our past where God has challenged us and blessed us. And in these recollections, we find there is indeed hope for the future.
I can look back to that morning when I was faithful enough, perhaps brave enough to see this young man who didn’t have a cell phone to return home. I was watching this young man and in return, I am living a faithful life.
Inasmuch as we have hope in Christ in our future, how do we see in the history of Lakeshore Avenue church, there is hope for the future? What events can you remember that our church moved toward a future with no apathy or anxiety?
In this season of Advent, we are expecting the birth of our Lord because it is bad faith to come to these Advent services as if we had no idea that God has come to us in Jesus Christ. We wait in hope because we have the memory and the history that God has been with our church for a long time. In this Advent hope, we have hope for our church in the future.
Between Times
So, what should we do in these in-between times; living in uncertain times. Some people are puzzled about the incarnation that extends all the way to the angels and even to Christ himself.
Most of us here know that we are perplexed and confused. But we also know that we want to be a people of faith. This is the reason why most people celebrate and believe more in Santa Claus and Christmas shopping than they believe that God is with us in the incarnation.
Some of us are baffled about what we are expecting to believe and even feel guilty when ourfaith is weak and flawed. We think we may not be as faithful as we see in someone else.
The good news for today is that Christ does not expect us to know everything. While we are not expected to know everything, we are expected to do something. Jesus in these verses of our passage calls us to a life of work in the spirit of watchfulness. Our work is activity here and now.
When we as a church distributed over 50 turkeys and Thanksgiving dinners last week because of your generosity and compassion, is living a life of watchful living.
Our faith in Jesus is not so concerned with other-worldly matters about what may happen in the future, but to keep attention, focused on the present day and the needs of the hour. We find this when Jesus directs people in the field, the mill, the daily grind, the ordinary places of where we find ourselves where life is lived.
In the mundaneness of everyday life, knowing that in our faith, we don’t know everything, is here that we are called to do something here and now. Whatever and wherever Christians may be, we are a workforce in the world.
Watchful Living
When we do this work, it is accompanied in a spirit of watchfulness. The key element for Jesus is not the world, important as it is. The indispensable part of faithful work is the awareness that Jesus names as watchfulness.
Jesus doesn’t define this watchfulness or wakefulness which leads us to more uncertainty. We know that work is not all there is. Work will not do everything and cannot do everything. But hope will come not from our work but from somewhere outside and beyond it. Our hope comes from God in Christ.
When we are at home, doing our ordinary daily work, Christ tells us to be watchful because we won’t know when he will return like if a thief unexpectedly come.
Watchful living means that our faith is not rooted in apathy or our hope in anxiety. It is rooted in Jesus teaching us that even he doesn’t know “About that day and hour, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son himself, but only the Father.”
“Therefore, we must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” Let us have faith and not apathy. Let us have hope and not anxiety. Let us work every day like I did with this young man in my neighborhood who wanted a way to go home; like you did with the Thanksgiving dinners.
Let us go through life in the hope of “watchful living” for we neither know the day or the hour when Christ will return.
Let us pray.
O God, reassure us to have faith and hope in you when this world creates apathy in us when the problems are so great or anxiety in us when we are afraid of what tomorrow may bring. Awaken in us to offer peace and love to everyone we meet in this season of Advent hope. Instill in us the courage and commitment to watch out for our neighbors and in so doing, we become ambassadors of you in words and deeds. In Christ, we pray. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
God of peace, whose ways are not our own and whose coming among us cannot be predicted, we dare to welcome your surprises, seeking to be awaken and alert to fully embrace the unexpected, that we might be changed by your appearing and transformed into a peaceful, loving community, for the sake of your beloved community.
We confess for the times when we didn’t help someone when we could of. We seek your mercies when we unjustly judge others and overlook our own actions that caused harm. And in this season when heaven and earth are so close that the Son of God becomes the Son of Man, we seek for that belief that you are truly present among us today.
For those who especially are seeking for the power of healing of body and soul, for those looking for the kindness of giving and receiving friendship, and for those who are anticipating the confidence to believe that Jesus is born, we pray for your Spirit to be with us.
We pray for Pastor Allison who is delayed in Chicago as the result of a snowstorm. Keep her safe as well as many others who are less fortunate to have shelter, heat to keep warm, food to eat, and a loving community to belong.
Lord, we seek to live in the light of Christ. We want to be ready when Christ comes. In his name, we pray. Amen.