"What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" - Advent 1A

Isaiah 2:1-5
 Saint Matthew 24:36-44 

May I be the first to wish you a “Happy New Year!”
 

You may think I have really put a rush on the season but the first Sunday of Advent is New Year’s Day for the church.  It is just another one of those things that makes the church such a counter-cultural movement.  

We start a new year before anybody else does and wait to start celebrating Christmas until we are almost on top of the appointed date.  It’s like we programmed Dick Clark’s “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” before the Hallmark Channel Christmas movie marathon.  And, to make matters worse, instead of thinking about a pregnant Mary and a puzzled Joseph today’s New Year’s Day text places us right in the middle of Armageddon.
 

To add to the confusion we didn’t start reading Matthew’s gospel at chapter 1 but toward the end at chapter 24?  Who does that?  Certainly none of us who like mysteries would deprive ourselves of the plot development by reading the “who done it” part before we even found out what was done.
 

It’s New Year’s before Christmas and destruction before redemption. 
 

And to make matters even worse today’s gospel is the conclusion of the gospel we had before us two Sunday’s ago except that was Saint  Luke’s and this is Saint Matthew’s.  (For some of us two weeks ago seems like a very long time!)
 

You might remember that we talked about Jack Van Impe and that he was faithfully predicting that Christ was coming soon for the better part of forty years.  You need not remember the whole sermon (even I can’t do that) but you might want to remember what  his website said about his mission.
 Van Impe’s goal as being to alert  “Millions  . . .  to the fact that Jesus is coming soon-perhaps today! We all need to be ready.” Further it points out that he has been at this “since 1948 and continues to be a leading voice in declaring the soon return of the Savior.”

Strangely enough the late comedian John Pinette was spot-on theologically when he was talking about spending Thanksgiving with some members of his family who were always preparing for the end of the world.  “Doomsday preppers” he called them.
 

“As far as the end of the world goes, I believe you’re prepped.  There is nothing you can do.”
 

“If I wake up, look out my window and say, ‘Oh, it’s doomsday.’  I turn off the light and I go back to bed.  There is nothing to be done.”
 

“But my relatives, they say things like ‘We got about six months of water, some ramen noodles, and we got a lot of firearms.’
 

And I think to myself, ‘It’s a good thing you got those guns because after six months of nothing but ramen noodles and water, you’re going to want to use them.”

 “And, they think their cellar is in a different universe.
 

They say, ‘You know we got a two foot thick door.’  And I look at them and think, ‘Well, I’m sure that  will stop the 30 megaton nuclear blast.  I’m sure nothing will happen to you.  You’ll be safe.  You won’t be doomed like the rest of us poor suckers  . . .  scraping for a tomato.’”
 

The sad part Pinette’s comedy is that I have read about and maybe even know people who are anxious preparing for the end of the world.  
 

But Panetta was right, and strangely enough Jesus seems to be in complete agreement with this 21st century stand-up comedian.
 

Jesus could not have been clearer on the subject.  “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”1
 

We don’t like the idea of not knowing. It makes us anxious.  We want to know what is going to happen to us.  We want to know not only what tomorrow may bring but the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that. 
 

We want our lives to be neatly planned out so that we will know what to do.  We want to know how many bags of ramen noodles we should buy thinking that if we have a six months supply of those things in our cupboard we will be less anxious.  But we won’t be. 
 

Even if we somehow knew with absolute certainty that the end of the world would come three weeks from next Thursday we wouldn’t be less anxious.  If anything, we would be more anxious. 
 “Should I make the rounds of visiting my relatives or take the trip to New Zealand I always wanted to take?  Gee, I feel guilty if I didn’t go see the relatives one last time but, gosh, I always wanted to see New Zealand.”  What to do?  Anxiety.
 

Listen! You know the exact day when Christmas day and New Year’s Day is coming, don’t you?  Are you any less anxious about all the stuff you have to do between now and then?
 

Continue reading the words of Jesus, not those who want to add to those words with their predictions, and you’ll discover what you need to be doing. 
 

He describes some pretty mundane stuff.  People who are eating dinner and perhaps having a glass of wine afterwards. Couples  preparing to get married. Men and women working at home or in their business.  Jesus is talking about people who wait for his coming not by building bomb shelters but living out their lives.
 

And here is where the next images Jesus uses which seem scary and cause even greater anxiety.   
 Two men in the field and suddenly one is gone and the other is left behind.  Two women grinding at the mill, one is gone and the other is left.  And we think this is some kind of disappearing act.  One moment one person is there. The next moment, poof! Gone!
 

A friend of mine was raised in a fine, faithful family Whose pastor often spoke about the rapture.  It is believed to be that moment when Christ came back to take all the faithful home to be with him while the unfaithful would be left behind.
 

He remembers coming home from first grade, walking up the driveway of his family’s farm and not finding anyone, anywhere. 
 

His mother was always home in the afternoon making dinner for the family but today she was gone. 

His dad could usually be seen somewhere within eye sight working on the farm but it appeared to the young man’s eyes that he was missing too.  None of his sisters or brothers were there either and so - believing that God had come and taken them while he was left behind - he plopped himself on the front stoop and sobbed.  He was crying his eyes out wondering why Jesus took his entire family but not him when his mother’s car roared up the driveway. 
 

She had just gone to the store and it had taken her longer than usual.  His dad had merely been in a far off field.  He didn’t much care where his brothers and sisters were because he knew that Jesus’ didn’t love them more than he loved him. 
 

The word rapture isn’t in Scripture but as it sure can cause anxiety in the mind of children and adults.
 I almost never do this to you but I have to share with you the original Greek word that appears in this text.  That word for “taken” is paralambanomai  and it doesn’t mean “to go up” or “to meet” but “to go along with.”  Same root as our word perambulate which simply means “to walk.”
 

The people who are with Jesus in the end are those who have decided to follow him now.  They are the ones who, like his disciples, decided to “go along with” him.  They are the ones who are walking with him.

Here is a message that serves to engender hope rather than fear among the faithful. We can work and strive in hope because we know that our actions are not the only actions, that God is faithful, and that God will bring all things to completion. Therein is our hope. Though we are not given a timeline for the future, we are given the ultimate end, the purpose, the goal of the future. Our future is with God who comes to us, in God’s own good time, even though we don’t have the means to come to God.

God is coming. Though time again we have shown our incompetence in moving toward God, don’t worry. God is moving toward us.2

 Christ is breaking into our lives repeatedly.  Not just at some unexpected moment but repeatedly, every hour, every minute, every second, every nanosecond, and our job is only to keep watching for those moments so we don’t miss them.

In his collection of Advent and Christmas Sermons called, Shepherds in Bathrobes, Dr. Tom Long tells the story of a Christmas pageant that took place when his was the interim Pastor at the First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta.
 
You know how those combination pageants and worship services go. 
 
The place was packed with parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, neighbors and friends and when whatever age group had finished their presentation there was a mad dash back to their parents and families in the pews.  Like puppies they crawled over strangers to get back to their relatives.
 
The Session (read: Church Council) decided at their November meeting that the commotion in that worship was getting out of hand and so, being good Presbyterians, they devised a plan.  The children would wait on the front stairs of the chancel until one designated parent would come forth to get them.
 
As luck would have it one little girl’s father was the head usher that day and was way in the back of the huge church when her part of the program ended. 
 
He looked around discovered  he was stuck.  Hundreds of people separated him from his daughter. 
 
As he was trying to make his way to the front the other parents had retrieved their children and were already back at their seats.  Soon his daughter was there alone.
 
And as Dr.  Long reported, “Just as her lower lip was beginning to quiver and tears where welling up in her eyes her dad appeared.  It was then she preached the greatest Advent sermon ever.  She threw herself at her dad, wrapped her arms around his legs, looked up in his face and said, ‘I just knew you’d come.”3

When we rest secure in the knowledge that Christ will come its Advent, Christmas and New Year’s wrapped all in one.  So, Happy New Year!  
__________

1.  Jvim.com

2.  William H. Willimon,“What's God Up to Now.” Pulpit Resource. Ministry Matters™ | Christian Resources for Church Leaders. Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/9827/december-1-2019-whats-god-up-to-now.

3.  Thomas G. Long, Shepherds and Bathrobes: Sermons for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. (Sundays in Ordinary Time): Cycle B Gospel Texts. Lima, OH: C.S.S. Pub. Co., 1987.