Matthew 24:36-44
November 28, 2004
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Since last Sunday, Thanksgiving Day has passed and the frenetic Christmas shopping season has begun! How many of you went shopping this weekend? How many are planning to shop in Union Square today?
Conditioned by the media and traditions, we are getting all of the decorations up, making a long list of gifts to buy, dreaming about the presents we would like to get, and cutting out and baking Christmas cookies. When you walk into Safeway these days, right next to the front door are stacks and stacks of 5 lbs. sacks of flour and sugar to bake those sugar cookies. We are running here and there to get everything done! The busy holiday season often makes us feel that we are out of control!
Here’s a plug—this year for my extended family, I am giving them one of our Sidewalk Tea cookbooks for $23! No need to shop online or running around in the mall this year.
The primary reason why we approach the Christmas holidays with in trepidation is that we find ourselves out of control. More people on the guest list, more gifts to buy, more charges on the credit cards, and we want more hours in the day to do it all.
Through our science and expanding technology of the way the world works, we have learned to work the world, so it seems. So we have population control, birth control, ant control, climate control, fuel emission control, nuclear proliferation control and Houston has mission control. Having been so successful, controlling so much of the world, we just quite naturally tend to think that, given enough research, enough effort, we should be able to be in control of everything.
So when September 11 struck, our world was rocked off its foundation. We sent ships out to sea and put planes in the air to appear that we were still in control. Before that awful day, we thought we had a perfect nation, with perfect defenses, and perfect securities, then, suddenly, we were not in control. We felt that as if some thief had sneaked in and stolen the safe, secure world in which we thought we lived.
Security people always tell us that during the holiday season when most homes have purchased new expensive gifts to be particularly on the look-out for possible thieves. We control our home security system by pushing some buttons with our password to arm the alarm. We have insurance policies against disaster. But then there is that “in the middle of the night phone call” to disturb your sleep or the bulletin interrupting “our regularly scheduled programming” to bring you breaking news. We realized that all of a sudden what we thought we had control over; we are now in a crisis. We are out of control.
Israel’s Exile
In the history of Israel, we see that about half of all the books in the Old Testament were written during Israel’s exile. For a time, Israel had it made. It was in control. When Solomon was king, they had a strong army and great security. Then from the north came the Babylonians and the Assyrians and left Israel’s cities in waste, killed many, and carted everyone else off as slaves in exile. We were not the only one who have experienced September 11.
We desperately want to believe that we have found some way to insulate ourselves from change, crisis, and chaos. That’s the reason why so many people were upset that Congress couldn’t find a way to pass the 9/11 Commission’s intelligence bill. We want to be in control but the truth to tell is that we are not.
In Isaiah 2:12-5, the prophet proclaims that while Israel was in exile, in the rubble of a dashed world, that he dares to see a new world being born, a world re-created by God to resemble the world God wants. Listen to Isaiah for a moment,
In the days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house
Shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
And it shall be raised above the hills;
All the nations shall stream to it.
Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks;
Nations shall not lift up sword against nations; neither shall they learn war anymore.
Here we see a large, powerful God who moves, creates, in control everything and makes everything new. Most of us subconsciously see God as mostly empathetic, pastoral and largely ineffective in our modern world. When we allegedly believe that we are in control of everything, we don’t want too much of a God. And for most of us, therefore, we don’t get much of a God in return.
Advent Good News
The Good News about Advent is that Christ Jesus will return. There may be all these signs to look for but in the end, only God knows when all of these things will take place. Some people claim that they know how to interpret these signs when the skies turn dark and the earth heaves and the nations are confused by the roaring of the sea because they want to be in control of God.
In Matthew 24, Jesus says that the day and hour when the Son of Man returns, no one knows, not even the angels and not even Jesus himself knows, only God knows.
It’s like when Noah was building the ark and there was not even a cloud in the sky, no one knew when the flood would come. It’s like two people working out in the field or two women grinding meal together would not know who will be saved and who would not. The point of this Advent passage is not as much about the rapture as it is about us thinking that we have control about what is happening in the world and in our lives.
Then Jesus shares a more shocking illustration of a thief who comes at night to break in. We have a home security system that instantly connects to the Sausalito police station. We have dead-bolts on our door, a wooden bar on a sliding glass doors, and motion-sensing lights around the house. But Jesus says that the day that the Lord returns, he may come like a thief in the night and so we need to be alert for all the locks and security systems that we install will not control Jesus’ coming to your house!
When Jesus comes again, he’s not interested in your recently purchased Christmas presents. He’s not here to cause your security system to go off. What’s being ripped off is our delusion, our illusion that we are, that we were ever, in control. The “thief in the night” robs us of our lies that we are in control.
Be Awake!
Jesus tells us to be awake, to wake up, lest this “thief in the night” catches us sleeping. Advent is an invitation to wake up, to open our eyes to our insecurity to see who our true security is.
Some people spend too much attention arguing over about the “rapture” when two are taken, two are left behind.” We would do better to focus on evangelism. Two women are spending a great deal of time together grinding meal. Two men are out in the field for long hours harvesting crops. When you are working side by side, no doubt they were chatting about all kinds of things. But why has the subject of faith never comes up? Why didn’t the subject of whom this Jesus the Messiah is comes up?
We live in a society that makes us wary of saying to anyone about our faith. We are more than happy to suggest a good restaurant or the best doctors, and where the best sales are to our friends, neighbors, and coworkers. But we shy away from inviting someone to a Sunday service or a fellowship event. We have a hard time telling our friends that Sunday is not a good day to get together because we attend church!
In the Isaiah 2 passage for today, we see a vision of what God’s people will do in the world. It’s easier for people to stay down at the foothills of God’s mountain where there’s least resistance. But God’s people would be going against the current. They desire so much to be with God that they are willing to scramble and clamber their way up to Him. And not only that, but they believe so much of this new way of life that they will persuade others to come with them. This is evangelism at its finest.
As we begin the season of Advent, we need to remind ourselves that this season is really more about our expectant hope of the Second Advent than it is about the baby Jesus. We like to focus on the innocent, tiny, cute baby born on Christmas Day.
But when we celebrate Christmas, we are celebrating the fact that Jesus has come as the Messiah and will come again. We have no control of when that will be. When we give up our need for control of our lives and our world, we recognize that it has always been that God was and is in control all along.
Let us stay awake and keep alert. Let us continue to share the Good News of Jesus with others because we do not know when the Son of Man will come again.
Let us pray.
Lord, our world is more uncertain than we like to admit. Teach us to live our lives aware of our limits, realistic about our finitude so that we might trust only in your love; that we might secure ourselves only in your gracious power. We pray in this season of Advent that you might come for your kingdom. Amen.