Matthew 24:36-44
On
Friday morning around 4:30am, 600 people were handed a special ticket. Inside the ticket was listed the prize that
each person had won after hours and hours of waiting outside of Cabela’s. Some of these folks had been waiting since
about seven or eight o’clock the night before…and most of them, including
Chris, walked away disappointed, having spent the night outside, freezing, only
to receive a $5 gift card. Sure, they
spent the evening swapping hunting stories and the like…sure, they walked away
with a story about almost being blown up by a propane container that caught
fire…but the promise of a great prize for the first 600 people in line at the
Cabela’s had been turned into disappointment as only 6 of the 600 won the big
prizes. As Chris said when he walked
into the house at 5:36 on Friday morning…I waited for nothing.
We
have become a nation and a people that have grown tired of waiting. With the advent of the computer, we no longer
need to wait a couple days for a piece of correspondence to get to its
recipient unless we choose to go take the time to write a letter, stick a stamp
on it and put it in the mail box.
Instead, we can have the correspondence and its response sent and
received within minutes. The advent of
digital cameras took the wait out of picture taking. The advent of the smart phone meant that we
no longer have to wait until we are home to check our e-mail, or the score of
the football game, it’s all right at our finger tips if we choose to be
connected in that way. Websites like
fandango mean that we don’t have to wait in line to get tickets to that movie
we’ve been anxious to see. And the past
few years have proven that we no longer have the patience to wait until 5am on
Friday morning to get our doorbuster deals.
For years we have been told that we shouldn’t have to wait for the best
deals of the season, and we’ve bought into it.
But
the church has a different message as we enter the season of Advent. Wait. Prepare.
As
the world rushes around us with gifts and ribbons a plenty, we are invited to
hurry up and wait. To be intentional and
patient in our preparations, to take our time as we take in the sights and the
sounds of the season. To practice what
it means to wait for Christ to come again.
The
people of Matthew’s time were also people who had to get used to the
waiting. Theirs was a time of
uncertainty. Two would go out into the
fields and only one of them would return, the other probably captured by the
Romans and either killed or forced into military service. Two women would leave the house in the
morning to go grind meal and only one of them would come home…taken into
slavery of some sort. There was no more
temple at the time that Matthew was writing his gospel and people were trying
to sort out what they were going to do now that the central location for their
faith lives had been demolished. And the
generation was dying out. A generation
that Jesus said one verse earlier would not pass away before he returned. If the whole generation passed away, what
would they do?
Now,
this text from Matthew has been used by the writers of the Left Behind series
of books, as well as others, to support a belief in the Rapture, that one day
the faithful will be gathered up into the heavens while the rest of us will be
left behind to face the great tribulation that will take place before the final
judgment.
But
the problem with this is that the text actually speaks of the fate of those
left behind being better than the fate of those who are taken. And I don’t really think that who is taken
and who is left behind is the gist of what Jesus has to say either. Rather, in this text, which is part of a
larger teaching on the end times, Jesus is getting at something which spoke to
the reality of life at that time. That
it was uncertain. The people of Noah’s
time had no idea that the flood waters were going to wash them all away. The people of Jesus’ time had no idea that
Rome was going to destroy the temple in Jerusalem and persecute the early
Christians. And in our time, we had no
idea that Japan was getting ready to bomb pearl harbor, or that Lee Harvey
Oswald was going to assassinate President Kennedy. We were caught off guard when the shuttle
Challenger exploded, when the planes hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
We
didn’t know that the cancer diagnosis was coming, or that the brain aneurysm
was going to rupture. And we couldn’t
prepare for the miscarriage, the heart attack, the stroke, the job loss, the
house fire. Life today is just as
uncertain as it was in Jesus’ time. And
we know this.
It’s
part of the reason that we don’t like to wait, because there is uncertainty
that comes with the waiting. Waiting for
the MRI results to come back, waiting for the call back after a job interview,
waiting for the whys and hows in the autopsy.
Waiting is scary.
And
when fear arises, we want to claim some semblance of control, so we do what we
can to keep ourselves busy while we wait in the hopes that, somehow, having control
over the things we can change will make not having control over the things that
we can’t change less scary.
But there is a promise in
the waiting that we do in Advent. A
promise that, in the midst of days that are getting darker, there is still light…a
light which is continually growing brighter and dispelling the darkness around
us. And it comes in the form of a child
born in a barn. The kind of waiting that
we do in Advent is the type of waiting that expectant parents do. It’s active waiting…there are preparations to
make, there are doctors examinations to attend.
And if all goes well, there is a birth to take part in.
In Spain, the term for
giving birth is “dar la luz”…to give light.
And that is the perfect description of what happened when Mary gave
birth to Christ. Light was brought into
the world, a light so brilliant that not even death itself could extinguish
it. And though life comes with a measure
of uncertainty, we can know that we were made for more than fear, because the
Christ child, whose birth we are waiting for, has promised that even in the
midst of the things that we most fear about the uncertainty of life, we don’t
have to face the fear alone. Christ is
going to walk with us through the fear and the doubt.
“Come hell or high water”
Jesus accompanies us through our journey in life, and though we know that this
will not make us immune from the unfortunate things that take place along the
way, we also know that walking with Jesus means that he will give us the
courage to face the unexpected and the uncertain and that he will remain with
us even through death, bringing us to new life with him.
So as we enter this advent
season, we do it as people who actively wait.
We wait for the celebration of the birth of Christ and we wait for his
coming again. And as we wait, we do so
not as people afraid of the uncertainties of life, but people who are confident
in the promises of the one who accompanies us all throughout this life, and
into the next life. So we do what the folks who waited outside of Cabelas did
Thursday night, we swap stories, we wind up with tales of life's adventures. And at the end of the wait,
we will receive our reward…but this one doesn't disappoint. Amen.
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