Matthew 24:36-44
December 2, 2001
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
December is the month when all the country is thinking about getting ready. We buy or make or order the presents we are to give. We get the pretty paper and ribbon and expensive cards for wrapping them. Safely packed away last year, we get our houses ready for the season by digging through closets and boxes for wreaths and ornaments and nativity sets. We bake and plan and polish. Even on this year when terrorism unimaginable before September 11th has shattered our sense of security and US men and women are fighting a ground battle and the economy is officially in recession, most of us still went shopping on Black Friday after Thanksgiving Day. December is a month to get ready.
Each year when December comes around we begin to get ready in the same way that we have in the past. There’s a “predictability” in Christmas that we like to have and have come to preserve. For someone from New England, I confess that I like traditions and predictability.
In our house, when all the presents are wrapped in green and red tied with bright ribbons, we always waited until Christmas morning to open them. One year, our kids told us that their friends were allowed to open one present on Christmas Eve, we balked at the idea. In Boston and then in Pennsylvania, our pastors always had Open Houses and we sang Christmas carols and the Hallelujah Chorus. So you can see, why we are doing some of these activities at FCBC. It’s traditional! And I and hopefully you would like to preserve them year after year. We don’t want anyone to come and steal these expected traditions from us.
Security Systems
For the Christmas before moving to San Francisco, Joy and I gave each other The Club for our cars. In the suburbs of Pennsylvania, it’s pretty safe to leave your car unlocked. But coming to California and to the big city, we thought about securing our cars so that our lives won’t be disrupted.
When we remodeled our home, we installed a burglary alarm system that hot-wired potential areas when a thief might break in. We have stickers that warn possible intruders that this property is protected (not fakes) and a phone call will immediately be made to the police. And if we don’t disarm the security system by punching in —-, we would set off the alarm.
And our church has a very sophisticated security entrance system too. When Wendy or any of us are in the church alone by our selves, we can secure the front door and see on a monitor upstairs who is at the door. We live our lives each day eating our breakfasts,
going to work, picking up the kids, going shopping, wrapping gifts, decorating the tree, and singing Christmas carols every December. We don’t want especially a thief to intrude in the predictability of life.
It was something like this for all the people around Noah. They were living life as usual, eating and drinking, marrying and partying—having people over for backyard barbecues—while their crazy neighbor was building a boat right next door—building a huge ark hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean. Noah’s neighbors continued to live a life of predictability—going on with life as usual.
Waiting Time
Today’s Scripture lesson from Matthew 24 is at the end of Jesus’ ministry but it’s also fitting for the beginning of the new church year. We are challenged to “Take heed. Be on guard. Watch.”
Jesus had told us, “I’ll be back shortly.” But one day passed into another and another, and still Jesus had not returned. People waited. The first generation of Christians gradually passed from the scene. People became disappointed by the long wait so they returned to living predictable lives. They became impatient in waiting.
When you think about it, a time of disappointed waiting is in a sense the only time the church has ever known. If they got impatient waiting for Jesus for 50 or 60 years, by the time Matthew’s gospel was written, how much greater ought our impatience be with waiting for over two thousand years!
To those who had become despairing and disillusioned in waiting, today’s gospel said, “Be patient. Hold on. Stay alert. After all, God may come among you like a thief in the night.”
Almost two years ago, we passed the turn of the second millennium. When we changed into a new century, you read newspaper accounts of various Christian groups convinced that the change in the millennium would bring about the return of Christ. This is nothing new. Over the centuries, at various times Christians have become convinced that Christ’s second advent was at hand. Many times, they seem to come most convinced during years that have two zeroes in the date. In the year 1000, millions of Christians were filled with fear or eager anticipation. A great mass was held by the Pope in Rome and it was expected that before the midnight mass ended and the calendars changed to the year 1001, Christ would return.
Again, in 1900, Christians, many of them in America, became convinced that the advent was coming. It became known as “The Great Disappointment.” Some religious leaders today are seeing the conflict in Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East as signs that Armageddon will happen when Syria destroys Israel.
But today’s Scripture warns against such speculation. We don’t know the hour or the time. Down through the centuries in these past disappointments, we should know that even with our heightened awareness, our wishful thinking, or even our need, we just
can’t predict when Christ will return.
But if we can’t know the hour and the day, our Scripture text tells us to know this. All of this will happen “Like a thief in the night.” God slips up on us like a thief.
In Losing We Gain
There’s a story of a woman who called her church one-day crying so hard that the pastor could hardly understand her. Eventually, he made out her tragic words, “I have been robbed! Someone has come in and stolen all of my family heirlooms! The silver! The china! All the things that my mother accumulated and gave to me, gone!”
The pastor rushed over to her house, to find someone overcome with grief. He knew how much these things meant to her, how she treasured them, was proud of them, lovingly recalled them as an inheritance from her parents.
“This thing could kill her,” said one of the people in the congregation who knew her. The pastor was worried about her future.
About six months later, the woman and the pastor were talking and he was shocked to hear her say, “On one sense, the burglary was one of the best things that has happened to me. I didn’t realize it, but I had become tied down to those things. I was afraid to leave the house for fear this might happen. I spent half my day polishing that silver, keeping up all that old china. That was really stupid when you think of it. Life ought to be more. I thought I would die after the burglary. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I may be better off without all that stuff.”
No one wants a thief to come into our home and steal from us. But perhaps this story of this woman is a parable about how a thief may rip off just that aspect of ourselves that needs ripping off? We cling so tightly to so much stuff. We make sure that when we leave the house that all the pretty wrapped presents under the tree are out of sight from the windows. Sometimes, we think of ourselves as collecting things, when the reality is our things are busy controlling us. When things get torn away from us, perhaps it may be possible for us to think of our lives as having improved. We haven’t so much lost our possessions as regained our lives!
Strange Thief who Gives
Jesus is the strange thief who comes not to rip us off, but to give us what we need. Sometimes things are taken from us—that cherished possession to which we so tightly cling, in order that we might be freed to live more fully with Christ. But sometimes, just when we least expect it, this divine “thief” steals in among us and surprises us with gifts we did not know we wanted or needed.
The point of this passage is that God is free, sovereign, free to come and go as God pleases. All the planning that we may do to anticipate Christ’s return whether it’s when our calendars have two zeroes or no zeroes, God comes among us is bound to be a surprise! Regardless of how predictable and traditional we try to make our lives to become, God’s comings and goings among us are God’s work and not ours.
When God comes into our lives, we are impressed by the way that God gives us deep reassurance, or hope, or strength, even when we didn’t ask for any of these gifts.
In Oscar Hujelo’s novel, Mr. Ives’ Christmas, we meet a wonderful, quiet man who loves God, whose Christian faith is dear to him, and yet a man who experienced a terrible, undeserved tragedy. His beloved son, who was studying for the ministry, was senselessly gunned down one night near Christmas on the street not far from their home.
Mr. Ives was heartbroken, filled with grief for his son, and despite his efforts, filled with hatred for the killer. In the next years, he prayed to God for the grace to forgive, for the strength to get on with his life as best as he can without his son. It was hard for him, very hard.
One day, near Christmas, he was in an office building in Manhatten, and he emerged from an elevator. A clock across the hall seemed to glow with a soft blue light. He stared at it for the longest time as the clock seemed to radiate a soft glow. He felt a warm embrace summoned by the vision of the softly glowing clock. He finally turned toward the elevator when the door opened. His face was aglow with a smile. He was humming a Christmas carol to himself. A woman on the elevator commented, “Well, you certainly seem to be full of the spirit of the season!”
He never told anybody about the vision. In that visitation, none of his problems were immediately solved. His grief was still there and the challenges of his life were still difficult. Yet he kept that moment in his heart. He pondered it from time to time. Looking back, he remembers it as an undeniable gift of God, a sense that God was with him.
This is Advent
This is advent, the season of visions, and visitations, and the coming of Christ among us.
We would rather have predictable and orderly lives when we can do Christmas just like the way we have done it in the past. We have become impatient waiting for over 2000 years for Christ’s return. No wonder we have gotten into a protected and established lifestyle. And God, especially this year when our lives have become terrorized with fear and dying, we pray that our Christmas can just be filled with the traditions that we have come to expect.
But Jesus said, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Like a thief in the night, the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
Christ loves to come among us in ways we don’t expect, in times that we haven’t planned. Not like any common thief, this divine thief comes to steal away our lives in order to bless it and gives us what we neither deserve or sometimes realize we need. This divine thief slips into our lives and rearranges and reorganizes our lives from that same predictability to become new again—prepared to do his will. This divine thief who breaks in at night when we are not awake, brings spiritual gifts wrapped for us to open and use for the goodwill of all men and women.
No locks or security systems will keep this divine thief from breaking in because God is sovereign and free to come and go as he pleases. Our lives are not safe from his intrusion. This divine thief is the Christ who has died, the Christ who has risen, the Christ who will come again. This divine thief is the Christ who comes not to take from us the life we have, but to give us more than the life for which we dreamed.
Keep awake. Christ is coming to save the world!
Let us pray.
Gracious God, giver of life and savior of all, prepare us for the unexpected surprise of Jesus Christ in our lives. We pray that Jesus will steal away our sins and give us new gifts of faith, hope, and love. Fill us with the miracles of Christmas as we stay awake for the coming of the Lord. Amen.