In a short story published a long time ago James Thurber told about a character in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
He was an unkempt fellow with a ramshakled car known only as the “Get Ready Man” because “he used to go about shouting at people through a megaphone to prepare for the end of the world. ‘Get ready! Get read-y!’ he would bellow. ‘The world is coming End!’ His starling exhortations would come up, like summer thunder, at the most unexpected times in the most surprising places."
Thurber remembered that once the “Get Ready Man” interrupted a production of “King Lear” at the local theatre.
“The theatre was in absolute darkness and there were rumblings of thunder and flashes of lightening offstage” when “the Get Ready Man added his bawlings to the ranting of the King and the mouthing of the Fool. Right in the middle of the play from the balcony there came the shouts “Get Ready! Get Ready! The World is coming to an end!”
“They found him finally, and ejected him, still shouting. Neither father nor I,” Thurber wrote, “completely got over the scene... The theatre in our time,” he speculated, has known few such moments.” 1
Thurber’s essay is contained in the book My Life and Hard Times, which was published in 1933 and, as our presence here this day proves, almost 90 years later, the world has not yet come to an end.
We’ve come close a few times and all of those times came without warning.
The official 9|11 Commission Report begins with these words: “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. Millions of men and women readied themselves for work.”2 There was no warning. We were not ready for how our lives would be affected that day or for days and years to come.
There are those who today are crowding into basements in the Ukraine looking for shelter from the relentless bombing and shelling.” Their world may really look like it is coming to an end.
There is the continual shootings in our schools and on our streets” and in nightclubs, temples, synagogues, churches and mosques that may make us wonder if the world isn’t coming to an end.
There’s one natural disaster after another formed by a climate that is groaning from abuse.3
This is something that over time really may make the world come to an end.
And our society is coping as best it can with so much polarization, not just in the electorate but in the churches, schools, in every corner.”
Sometimes, there are some days, when it looks like we really should be ready for the world as we know it to come to an end.
These real warnings are drowned out by those of the “Get Ready Men and Women” who have claimed to predict the when, where, and how the world will be coming to an end.
History is replete with those who have confidently conjured up the exact year if not the exact date that the world would be coming to an end. The fact that you and I are sitting here should be proof enough that these predictions have always been wrong.
Still, they try and, in my opinion one of the most trying of the triers was a fellow named Jack Van Impe.
His ministry dated back to its beginning in radio and then peaked in the early days of cable televangelists who could be found almost everywhere. They usually broadcast from huge mega-churches with big choirs and even larger production numbers that would rival any variety show.
Slowly, one by one, financial or sexual scandals ended their programs. Some were taken by the angel of death and their ministries collapsed soon after.
Jack Van Impe and his wife Rexella were survivors even through their weekly presentation was among the strangest of the bunch.
It was just the two of them sitting at what could be a news set at any television station. Rexella read a carefully selected news story and then Jack, using what he claims to be his encyclopaedical knowledge of scripture, came up with just the right Bible verse to show how, according to their website: “Current international events reflect exactly the conditions and happenings predicted throughout the Bible for the last days of this age.”
Watching the program, I must confess that I raised my eyebrows and scratched my chin more than a few times when the story Rexella was reading and the scripture Jack was quoting didn’t seem to match. Never-the-less, I watched in amazement and sometimes amusement as he repeated again and again that the rest of his listeners and I should get ready for the world was soon coming to an end.
His website proclaimed his goal was 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 {until his death continued} to be a leading voice in declaring the soon {sic} return of the Savior.”4
The juxtaposition of the word “soon” and the year “1948" makes the whole premise more than a little bit surreal to me.
Let me put it this way, if you started waiting for a bus on Belmont Avenue in 1948 and told me yesterday that you were sure it was coming “soon” I would certainly take you into the office for a warm cup of coffee perhaps spiked with a little whiskey and call an Uber for you because clearly the bus wasn’t coming.
Yet people have been looking for signs of the end of the age since the beginning of time ignoring Jesus’ crystal-clear warning. “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”5
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 on that occasion when the get ready man is right. If we knew exactly when that would be, we tell ourselves, we will be less anxious. But we won’t.
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’d 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 by 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!
My partner, Lowell, 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 eyesight 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.”6
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 now. They are the ones who are walking with him now.
“Here is a message that serves to engender real 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.”7
So, we need not be anxious about the how, when and where God will ultimately finish God’s new creation because, as Episcopal Priest Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us: “If Jesus doesn’t know when, then you sure don’t know when, so why don’t you stop obsessing about when and pay attention to what is happening around you right now?”
Jesus was trying to impress those whose eye were only fixed on his return “that there were widows and orphans in the community going hungry because nobody was signing up for the soup kitchen, or that there were still some people in jail who needed visiting, as well as some sick people at home who still needed looking after.”8
When he comes again, whenever that may be, let’s hope he finds us tending to them rather than just staring at our Bibles, and our calendars, and our calculators trying to figure out the day and hour of the Saviour’s return.
Our future is with God who will come to us in God’s own good time. God is coming. And while we may not be able to figure out where or when don’t worry because God is always coming to us.
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.
Christ may come at times and places we could never expect or imagine like maybe even reading the paper.
One of my favorite columnists was Michael Gerson who died ten days ago suffering from a host of illnesses that would rival the book of Job. A heart attack in 2004, depression, which he spoke openly about even from the pulpit of the National Cathedral when he was a guest preacher. Then, in his waning years, Parkinson’s and finally cancer which took him at 68.
Gerson studied theology at Wheaton College before he became a speech writer ultimately for for President George W. Bush where he was influential in getting the President to support the PEPFAR program to bring a global response to HIV/AIDS.
In his lifetime he was a senior editor for U.S. News and World Report, a columnist for The Washington Post, and a contributor to “The PBS NewsHour.” “Through it all he kept true to his principals and most of all his faith.”9
As the close of his life, he told a friend, that “some of the most powerful moments for him was when somebody would read something he wrote, and decide that they were going to give this Jesus guy another chance.”10
Whenever something happens that causes someone to “give this Jesus guy another chance,” I predict with absolute confidence that they’ll discover, ready or not, that while their world may not come to an end, it will be changed.
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1. James Thurber, “The Car We Had to Push,” in My Life and Hard Times (Harper Collins, 1999), pp. 13-14.
2. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States: Official Government Edition, (2004), 1.
3. M. Craig Barnes, “Weekly Chapel,” Weekly Chapel of Princeton Theological Seminary. (November 17, 2022).
4. Jvim.com
5. St. Matthew 24:36. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
6. Brian Stoffregen, “Matthew 24.36-44 1st Sunday of Advent - Year A” accessed November 25, 2022, http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/matt24x36.htm.
7. 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
8. Barbara Brown Taylor, “Don't Say When: Expecting the Second Coming,” The Christian Century, September 21, 2004, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2004-09/dont-say-when.
9. Brian Murphy, “Michael Gerson, Post Columnist and Bush Speechwriter on 9/11, Dies at 58,” The Washington Post (WP Company, November 21, 2022), https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/11/17/michael-gerson-speechwriter-post-dies/.
10. David Brooks, “Michael Gerson, Longtime Newshour Commentator, Dies at 58,” PBS (Public Broadcasting Service, November 17, 2022), https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/michael-gerson-longtime-newshour-commentator-dies-at-58.
Evangelical Lutheran Church of Saint Luke
27 November 2022
