Advent 3C - "Sing With Mary"

Saint Luke 1:46b-55

Almost everybody becomes a singer at Christmas time.  Even those people who don’t believe that they can carry a tune in a bucket have a hard time not chiming in.

Lutheran congregations make it easier for the musically shy because more often than not Christmas Eve Worship is preceded by Christmas Eve parties in which more than a few glasses of glug are consumed.  Downing a couple of those can make even the timidest among us think they were Luciano Pavarotti and reach for high notes that would make Ariana Grande jealous.

It always amazes me that we foolishly hand lighted candles to these very same people to hold while they sway and sing.  It is a wonder to me that there are any Lutheran churches standing in all of Christendom after such hijinks. 

Sometimes others, aided by the voices of those around them, find at such moments, that everything they had been told as a child was not true and they really could sing.

I was with two friends at a Lessons and Carols worship more than a few years ago where one of them who had been told by his music teacher in grade school that he didn’t have a good voice and really ought not to try and sing, found his voice.  

He was seated between his partner who had been in several musicals in college and professionally around town and me.  

I’m not sure my voice was ever the greatest and become less so as I’ve aged but still that hasn’t stopped me.  

As a child my uncles described my singing as being “good and loud.”  They said, “Sometimes he’s good and sometimes he’s loud.  Now if we could just get those two together.”

So, there we were.  The non-singer between the music major and me singing our lungs out.  In one of the classic hymns I stopped and listened.  The afraid to sing friend was singing.  In a quite lovely baritone he was finding his voice.  I’d like to think his attempt was buoyed up not only by his buddies on either side but by the 800 or so other people forming the chorus in the church that night.

Sometimes we just need others to sing to and sing with and that maybe why Mary went to see her cousin Elizabeth.  

Someone in a bible study I was in asked why Mary left her home at all.  “She was pregnant,” I remember the person saying.  “Why didn’t she just stay home.”  I wonder if she didn’t go to regain her confidence to sing.  Mary may have needed somebody to sing to and sing with.  

I know that when I feel saddened and downcast the best thing I can do is listen to music and maybe even sing along. Perhaps that is the case for you too.  Music can be healing when life has had more than its fair share of surprises and nobody, but nobody, has had a bigger surprise in her life than Mary.

Some translations of The Good Book tell us that Mary “hurried to the highlands of Judea to the town where Zacharias lived, to visit Elizabeth.”1

When she arrived, Cousin Elizabeth was moved to speak words that have become a part of one of the most often recited prayers in Christendom.  Along with Gabriel’s greeting that has been reduced to a simple “Hail Mary” Elizabeth’s response to Mary’s arrival moved her to blurt out, still recited from the old King James Version, “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”2 

It was just the greeting and affirmation that may have caused Mary to sing.

Do you ever wonder what her voice may have been like? 

I can’t imagine it was a big, booming voice like a Wagnerian Soprano.  And I hope for Jesus and Joseph’s sake that she didn’t sound like Ethel Merman. I have always thought of it as more Bel Canto, beautiful singing better suited to Mozart or the lighter, “champaign” operas by Italian composers. 

Yet it has also suggested that Mary’s Song might have sounded like our modern-day blues. 

She would have had a great deal to sing the blues about when she made her visit to her cousin Elizabeth.  She is not “Mary-with-a-halo” but rather a young girl who “lived in Nazareth, a small, backwater village of no account, population in the dozens, her family and neighbors eking out a hardscrabble existence. We would say that she married young – but so did most women back then.”3

That is why bible scholar Dr. Lynn Japinga thinks in “most of the paintings, she is looking down at her folded hands, her face a mask of prim piety.

She does not smile. She does not look happy, even when she is holds the baby Jesus. She looks as if she is carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, instead of the Saviour of the world in her arms.4

The late Dr. Richard Jensen wrote once. “The entire Gospel of Luke is a commentary on this song!”5 She sang in faithfulness ... shaped by courage and love in equal measure: love for her child of promise and her courageous belief in the seemingly unbelievable promises of the angel.  So, she sang the story of these promises, out loud, to Elizabeth, to us.

I can’t believe she only sang it once, to an audience of one, and never sang it again.  I think Mary’s song made it  to Saint Luke because, in good times and bad she sang it. She sang it to Jesus and Joseph. She sang it to her neighbors; she’s singing it to us.

I like to think she sang it softly to her baby boy as she was cradling him off to sleep.  I like to think that she sang it to herself as she looked out back and watched Joseph at his workbench.  I like to think she sang it when she watched that boy become an adolescent.  I bet she sang it a lot as he was going through those teenage years.  I bet she sang it even more as she watched his ministry unfold and saw the mortal danger what he was saying and doing put him in.

Now she is singing it to us and inviting us to join in.

Mary’s {song} is an invitation never to give up the dream and hope of a warring world at peace and never to give up the dream of a divided society at one; never to give up the dream of excluded, discriminated-against, marginalized people embraced and affirmed and welcomed and included and all barriers of race, social class, gender, and, yes, sexual orientation gone, welcomed ...

Mary, outsider, marginalized, is an invitation never to give up the dream of every child of God welcomed, loved, celebrated. Mary’s {song} is an invitation to you never to give up the dream.6

I’d like to think that Mary sang her song to remind herself, her friends, and us that God is in the mess, this life, with all of us.

This child she is carrying was born and lived in “the messes. In the hard places. In the dark and desperate places. In the lonely and lost places. In the places and with the people who seem too far gone. Jesus is born into exactly those kinds of places, and he spends his life with the most vulnerable ... and brokenhearted of people.”7

To all those people, in all those places Mary sings.  And she helps us sing too as we hold on to hope in the child who will be named Jesus, Emmanuel, is with us.

He comes to a world that is overcome with darkness, separation, loss, grief  to bring truth and grace in his light and life that will forever shine. He comes to a world of clanging discord and worried voices and invites us to sing a melody of peace.  He comes as a testament to the quiet ways God goes about redeeming God’s creation.  

He comes in the song of his mother and all who have joined in the chorus and had their lives illumined by the light of God’s love revealed in the love song of this birth. 

Love came down at Christmas,

love all lovely, Love divine;

Love was born at Christmas;

star and angels gave the sign.8

 It’s a song that everybody can sing.  It’s a song of hope that everybody can hold onto as they find their voice to sing again.

________________

1. St. Luke 1:39–40.  (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible]

2. St. Luke 1:42. (KJV) [KJV=The King James Version]

3. James D Howell, “Weekly Preaching Notions,” Weekly Preaching Notions (blog. (Myers Park United Methodist Church, July 1, 2020), http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.

4. Lynn Japinga, “Saint Luke 1:26-38. Commentary 2: Connecting the Reading with the World,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship 1 (Louisville, KY: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2020): pp. 66-67.

5. Richard A. Jensen, Preaching Luke’s Gospel: A Narrative Approach (Lima, Ohio: CSS Pub, 1997), 25.

6. John M. Buchanan, “Where is God in This Mess.” Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. December 21, 2008.

7. Courtney Allen Crump, “Where Is God in This Mess?,” A Sermon for Every Sunday (asermonforeverysunday.com, December 15, 2020), https://asermonforeverysunday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Courtney-Allen-Crump-Advent-4B-2020.pdf

8. Christina Georgina Rossetti, “Love Came Down at Christmas.”

 

Advent 2A - "How Are the Roads?"

 Saint Matthew 3:1-12

Since last Saturday the question that has been on most people’s lips is: “How Are The Roads?”

People in the south or warmer climates whose roads are not plagued with potholes from the severe expansion and contraction of winter freezes and summer’s scorching heat don’t ask those kinds of questions.  

I was bumping along with a friend from Virginia one time over pothole scared pavement with traffic doing the usual slalom run to avoid major suspension damage to the car when he said to me: “If a road was this bad back home, it would be closed.”   

I just stared at him while I continued to drive on bravely turning the steering wheel this way and that like they do in the movies.

But we all know he is right because we have heard the dreaded reports that the roads are “snow packed and hazardous” and if we were foolish enough to venture out anyway, we have arrived at our destination with our hands permanently cramped from clutching the wheel in a vicelike grip and our eyes as big as our face. 

I could go on with what we mean when we ask, how are the roads.  Are the plows out? Have they been salted? Are they icy? What about black ice?  Sleet? Freezing rain? Fog? Any reports of those?  The terrors are almost too numerous to consider.

But living in Chicago, how are the roads, is a question applicable to any season.  How much traffic is there with the construction?  Did they ever finish the bridge that was demolished two years ago and has yet to be rebuilt? 

There is a reason that every news station has a traffic helicopter and several traffic reporters to answer the question, how are the roads, before we’ve even downed our first cup of coffee.

About this time of year there is a human speed bump on our road to Christmas.  His name is John the Baptist and try as we might there is pretty much no way to get around him.  All we can do is slam on the breaks and wait for the couple of Sunday’s that he shows up in our readings to pass.

How is the road this morning?  Well, to tell you the truth, there is some wild guy standing in the middle and, as baffling as it seems, John’s detour is the only way we have to the swaddling clothes, angel's wings, and fleecy lambs we hold dear each December.  As baffling as it may seem, the holy drama of the season depends on the disheveled baptizer’s opening act.

Truth be told, I tend to avoid guys like John.  

People who introduce themselves as bearing a message from God do not commend themselves to us easily. If we do turn an ear to them out of curiosity, or perhaps out of an amused and sometimes horrified fascination, they tend to wear out their welcome quickly.1

 Yet we are told.  “People from Jerusalem and from all over the Jordan Valley, and, in fact, from every section of Judea went out to the wilderness to hear him preach.”2

As Dr. Fred Craddock said of him once in a sermon

Crowds came from everywhere ... they came from the towns and from Jerusalem.  Plows were left in the furrows, bread was left in the oven, shops were left unattended, school was let out early because the crowds were moving out into the desert to hear this extraordinary preacher.

I’m sure that many people who went were just curious, curious about the way he looked and the way he talked.3

 There must have been some kind of beauty to John the Baptist.  “I think a lot about his tone of voice.  I have always pictured him with a gravelly, loud voice, like one of those street preachers.”4

He is an unavoidable bump on our road to Christmas. 

And, as Dr. Tom Are, noted when he was the interim pastor at Fourth Presbyterian.  John the Baptist “comes with some anger issues.”

Dr. Are pointed out that in Matthew’s gospel the first words out of his mouth are, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?”5

 Both Dr. Are and I can’t remember in all our years of preaching ever starting a sermon by calling our congregations a brood of vipers. We’ve thought about it but thinking and doing are two different matters.6

Anybody who has ever served as an interim can see a lot of our mission in John. Our job is to prepare the way for the one who is coming after us.  Our job is not to be a roadblock in his or her path but make the road less rough and the path straight. We have a lot in common with good old John the Baptist without, of course, we hope, the beheading part. Though that is always a risk when you remind people that their past is their past. 

It is a great deal like the disclaimer that all the television stock experts couch their predictions with. “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”  

John was less gentle.  He said in a paraphase:

It’s your life that must change, not your skin! And don’t think you can pull rank by claiming Abraham as father. Being a descendant of Abraham is neither here nor there. Descendants of Abraham are a dime a dozen. What counts is your life. Is it green and flourishing? Because if it’s deadwood, it goes on the fire.7

We’re not crazy about hearing that we really do need to change.  When someone talks about change or tries to bring about change, we don’t want to hear it.  Change makes us defensive.  

But, if we are open to it, a call to change can also help us say to ourselves. “Maybe I did do that wrong?”  “Maybe I have been listening to the wrong voices or maybe only just my own voice instead of those who might just know better?” Change can lead to growth and sometimes, if we are willing to change, it can lead to big growth.

John had a word for it and the word was repent!  This is more than just a bump in the road that has to be avoided.  This is even more than Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”.  We all remember the closing lines: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.” But we forget how Frost framed the options: “I stood ... And looked down one as far as I could ... Then took the other, just as fair.”8 Two equal options.  One road just as good as the other.

That is not the repentance neither John nor Jesus was talking about.  They are talking about a change so radical that we don’t even have a word for it in English.

Scholars, which means those who have better language skills than I do, tell us: “John is calling on the religious and political elite from Judea and Jerusalem to repent. The Greek word {for repent} metanoia literally means taking on a new mindset. It has the connotation of making an about-turn and changing course.”9

Looks like the road John and Jesus are on doesn’t contain just a speed bump but a big brick roadblock that is not asking, but demanding, that if we are to follow Jesus, we are going to have to completely change course.

It means that when we treat others we don’t do so as we may have done so in the past.  Once we’ve met Jesus and sincerely sought to follow him, we just can’t say with a shrug “not everybody is going to be happy at all times”, so what. While they may not be happy Jesus and John remind us that we are ever and always to treat others with respect.

That’s the only way we live out the Gospel.  That is the only we will ever be able to live into the peaceable world Isaiah was dreaming about.  Turning from the threadbare ways of business and the world and acting the way Jesus would have us act is not just taking another road but taking the right road.  

It’s the road that tells us, in another one of my life commandments, that people are more important than things.  That the lives and feelings of others are more important than getting the job done.  That it is not bulldozing over other people to get what we want to get accomplished, accomplished, but remembering that other people’s lives may be affected by what we are trying to do.

I don’t think that it is any accident that the Oxford University Press picked “rage-bate” as 2025's word of the year.  

The Oxford University Press defines "rage bait" as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.”

Before, the internet was focused on grabbing our attention by sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we’ve seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our emotions, and how we respond.  The phrase is shorthand for online content that is intentionally meant to elicit anger. The term has tripled in usage over the last year, according to Oxford.10

It could be said of John the Baptist that he was pure rage bate.  “Brood of Vipers.” “Ax at the root of the tree” I’m sure his listeners heart rates increased when John thundered out this kind of stuff.

Again, as Dr. Craddock said of him, “He was no politician trying to make yes sound like no and no sound like yes. He said, ‘The judge is coming, and I’m here to serve subpoenas.’”11

But he didn’t leave us, like the cable tv pundits, to stew in our rage in order that we’ll come back the next day for more.  Why anybody would do that, I’ll never know.

He pointed us to Jesus who, if I understand him correctly, not only told us but showed us how life could be not just a little different but really different. 

We repent not as an indictment but so that we can clear our minds and imaginations to see the possibilities that have been put before us.

We repent in the belief that in Jesus we don’t have to be who we have always been.

We repent so that we can be the ones who stand tall in a world of smallness.

Maybe John is more than a speed bump or a snowstorm on our road to Bethlehem.  Maybe John isn’t even a detour offering us another road which is just the same as any other.

Maybe John is offering us a completely new direction for our lives, in the babe of Bethlehem, to be sure, but in the man of Galilee who, when he grew up showed us a new way, a better way.

How are the roads?  With Jesus they’ll be different and they may even be better.

________________

1. “Opening Act,” The Christian Century, November 29, 2003, https://www.christiancentury.org/opening-act?

2. St. Matthew 3:5. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible {Carol Stream:Tyndale House Publishers, 1971}]

3. Fred B. Craddock, Richard F. Ward, and Mike Graves, Craddock Stories (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001). 109-115.

4. James C. Howell, “What Can We Say Come December 7? Advent 2,” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, January 1, 2025, https://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.

5. St. Matthew 3:7b. (NRSVue) [NRSVus=The New Revised Standard Version updated edition]

6. Tom Are, “The Metanoia Man.”  Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. 10 December 2023

7. St. Matthew 3:7–10.  (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE:Eugene H. Peterson, The Message {Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004}]

8.    Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken,” The Poetry Foundation, accessed December 5, 2025, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken.

9. Daniel Smith Christopher, “Matthew 3:1-12. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year A, 1 (Louisville: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2019): 31–33.

10. Melina Khan, “‘Rage Bait’ Is Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2025. What It Means.,” USA Today, December 1, 2025, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/12/01/rage-bait-oxford-word-of-the-year/87547277007/.

11.     Craddock, loc.cit.

Advent 1A - "Mainstream 'Peppers'"

Saint Matthew 24:36-44

Last October The Week magazine introduced its readers to a whole new, unexpected group of people who are stocking up on non-perishables in preparation for the end of the world.

Traditionally, “preppers”, as these folks are known, have been defined as people “who could survive independently for 30 days” and are usually “white, rural, conservative, male ... survivalists with basements full of firearms, Spam, and canned beans.” 

One prepper told a pastor I know that “when the end times come, I will need to have only two things ready to go: a motorcycle and a lot of cash!”1

The magazine reported that modern day preppers seem to need more that that. 

“Preppers are snapping up water filtration systems, hand-cranked radios, manually powered grain mills, and pepper spray and other self-defense tools. Costco sells the $100 Readywise Emergency Food Supply, a “curated” 150-serving bucket of freeze-dried and dehydrated foods.”2

That is nickel-and-dime stuff compared to what the new group of preppers are spending.  They are urban liberals who “cite climate change as their main driver and the fear that the government will be unable or unwilling to help, others worry that the U.S. could be engulfed by political violence. People understand “that the world as we knew it and counted on it is beginning to cease to be,” said Eric Shonkwiler, who writes the left-wing Prepper newsletter “When/If.”

Some people are spending big time.

California-based Vivos Group is leasing space in what it calls the world’s “largest survival shelter community,” 575 empty ex-Army concrete bunkers on South Dakota grasslands. In Kansas sits the Survival Condo, a former missile silo converted into a 15-story survival habitat with a movie theater, bar, swimming pool, rock-climbing wall, and units that start at $1.2 million. Then there’s Fortitude Ranch, a collection of eight compounds around the country founded by a retired U.S. Air Force colonel. Over 1,000 members have paid from about $2,000 (which gets you “shared bunk spaces”) to $41,000 to become members, plus annual dues up to $1,550. The compounds are stocked with solar panels, food and medicine, farm animals, and guard dogs. “It’s like the old saying goes,” said a retired CIA officer who has bought in: “When trouble is on the horizon, a wise man takes precautions.”3

But I think an even wiser man was the late comedian John Pinette who said of his relatives who were preppers:

“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.’”

Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “All this talk in the Bible about the end-time is intellectually difficult and pastorally problematic.” The apocalyptic texts are ultimately supposed to be messages of hope, but if you focus on the long list of terrifying things — wars, earthquakes, famines, plagues, and the like — then it is hard to hear the hope.4

 For Saint Matthew’s original readers hope would have been hard to hear.  Reading his words in the last quarter of the first century thing looked pretty bleak for them. Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us:

Things had never been worse in Palestine. The chosen people were scattered, the Temple was destroyed, the promised land was a province of Rome, and there was no relief in sight. “Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things take place,” Jesus said, but something had obviously gone wrong. Most of the generation that heard him say that had passed away, and the ones who were still alive had beards down to their knees. God’s alarm clock must not have gone off. Or had God forgotten?

With questions like that in mind, Matthew made sure to include Jesus’ disclaimer that even he did not know when the end would come. “No one knows,” Jesus said, “not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only”5

We don’t like the idea of not knowing. “This is a hard pill for us to swallow in an era of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and long-range forecasting.”  Not knowing what’s going to happen to us makes us anxious. 

I can’t begin to tell you how anxious Lowell and I were on Wednesday and Thursday while we were looking at the forecasts and trying to decide whether I should cut vacation short by a day so that I could be sure to be here on Sunday or take my chances that the snow would be light, flights would be unaffected, and I could stay through Saturday.   Clearly, we chose correctly.

We not only want to know flight schedules in iffy weather, 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. That anxiety is especially present when we seem to have lost control of our lives to a universe that appears hostile or even to other people when plans they have made concerning our lives are unknown to us.

We want our lives to be neatly planned out so that we will know what to do.  We want to be able to make plans for our own futures. At the least 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 wondering what we should be doing between now and then.

However, as we continue on reading the words of Jesus, we’ll hear him tell us what we should be doing, and it is pretty mundane stuff. 

He describes 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 can 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!

But it is not a matter of disappearing off the face of the earth and being caught up in the clouds — that was Jesus’ act not ours.  It is a matter of following Jesus and him only.

We owe our modern beliefs about something called “the rapture” for which some of those preppers  who are stocking up their shelves and loading up their guns in preparation for to “a renegade Anglican priest from Ireland named John Nelson Darby, who spent a large part of the 19th century preaching about that moment in time when Christ will return “the wicked will be destroyed in the final battle of Armageddon, and Christ will begin a 1,000-year reign on earth.”6

 You’ve heard this stuff from TV preachers. You may have seen or heard of the “Left Behind” series of books and movies.  You have probably even seen the bumper stickers: “I Break for the Rapture.” “Warning: In case of the rapture, the driver of this car will disappear.” 

Whenever I see one of those bumper stickers I can’t help but think of an opening scene from the classic program “Six feet Under” where a woman whose car is sporting one of those stickers is listening to a radio program where the host and hostess are telling her that she should be submissive to her husband no matter what is driving along and nodding her head.

Not far from her, two probably “high-as-a-kite” wise guys are driving a truck loaded with helium filled inflatable mannequins.  Laughing and not paying attention they almost hit a skateboarder.  Slamming on the breaks the netting holding the dolls in the back of the truck begins to come loose and the dolls begin to float skyward.

Seeing the dolls rising up through the air the woman mistakes them for people being raptured, angels being taken up into the sky.  She stops her car and, with eyes closed and arms outstretched, she wanders out into traffic where she is immediately run over. 

In one of their classic “fade to black” moments the next screen reads simply: Dorothy Sheedy. 1954–2003.

I have always been one of those cynics who wanted a bumper sticker that read: “When the rapture comes, can I have your car?”

That’s because what little Greek I have mastered tells me that word for “taken” here doesn’t mean “to go up” or “to meet” but “to go along with.”  It comes from the 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” Jesus. 

Think of it like what happened when they were called. Remember?

 Jesus saw two brothers: Simon (later called Peter) and Andrew. They were fishing, throwing their nets into the lake. It was their regular work. Jesus said to them, “Come with me. I’ll make a new kind of fisherman out of you. I’ll show you how to catch men and women instead of perch and bass.”7

 “Immediately, they left their boat and their father and followed him.”8

Do you see it now?  They were taken as they decided to follow Jesus and their father, through no fault of his own, was left behind in the boat.  Some taken, the other left.

If we’re walking with Jesus we’re prepped.

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.

The truth of today is something we all know. “That Christ comes again, and again, and again.” The truth we all know is that Christ “has placed no limit on coming to the world but is always on the way to us here and now. The only thing we are required to do is notice – to watch, to keep our eyes peeled.”9

So, put away your baseball bat protecting your house from being broken into when Christ comes “like a thief in the night.”  The good news is he’s already in not only your house but your heart, and mind, and soul.

Boil up all those Raman noodles that you have been stocking up on there are lots of good recipes on the internet that won’t remind of those dark days in college when you really thought the end of the world was coming because you were fresh out of cash.

Drink all that stored up water.  A healthy, active adult is supposed to be drinking 8 to 12 glasses a day anyway.

And, for the love of God, don’t run out into traffic thinking the end has come because, if you do, I say most assuredly that if you’re lucky and it doesn’t come for you at that very moment it will scare the life out of the panicked driver breaking frantically to avoid hitting you.

Christ is coming into our lives every day.  Watch.  We’re prepped. We’re ready because our lives, our time, is ultimately in Christ who comes to us at Advent, at Christmas, at Easter, and Pentecost and every day in between. 

________________

1. Camille Cooke Howe, Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, November 16, 2025.

2.  The Week US, “Ready for the Apocalypse,” The Week, October 21, 2025, https://theweek.com/culture-life/apocalypse-preppers-survivalist-movement.

3. The Week, loc.cit.

4.    Cook Howe,  loc.cit.

5. 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?

6.    ibid.

7. St. Matthew 4:18–20. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE: Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004)]

8. St. Matthew 4:22. (NRSVue) [NRSVue=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

9. Taylor, loc.cit.