The Promise of Messiah; a sermon for the First Sunday of Advent

Matthew 24:36-44

36 “But nobody knows when that day or hour will come, not the heavenly angels and not the Son. Only the Father knows. 37 As it was in the time of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Human One. 38 In those days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark. 39 They didn’t know what was happening until the flood came and swept them all away. The coming of the Human One will be like that. 40 At that time there will be two men in the field. One will be taken and the other left. 41 Two women will be grinding at the mill. One will be taken and the other left. 42 Therefore, stay alert! You don’t know what day the Lord is coming. 43 But you understand that if the head of the house knew at what time the thief would come, he would keep alert and wouldn’t allow the thief to break into his house. 44 Therefore, you also should be prepared, because the Human One will come at a time you don’t know.

Let the words of my mouth
    and the meditations of my heart
    be pleasing to you,
    Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

A people at war think that God’s will is to make them victorious warriors. A people victorious think that God has given them the victory. A people defeated write the kind of hymn that we hear from Isaiah today:

² In the days to come
    the mountain of the Lord’s house
    will be the highest of the mountains.
    It will be lifted above the hills;
        peoples will stream to it.
³ Many nations will go and say,
“Come, let’s go up to the Lord’s mountain,
    to the house of Jacob’s God
        so that he may teach us his ways
        and we may walk in God’s paths.”
Instruction will come from Zion;
    the Lord’s word from Jerusalem.
⁴ God will judge between the nations,
    and settle disputes of mighty nations.
Then they will beat their swords into iron plows
    and their spears into pruning tools.
Nation will not take up sword against nation;
    they will no longer learn how to make war.

The expectation of Messiah in ancient Israel has as much to do with their political context as it does with anything else.

Because here’s a little secret about prophecy that most of our evangelical Church doesn’t want to hear: Prophecy has more to do with proclaiming God’s presence in the current situation than it has to do with predicting future events. Biblical prophets aren’t writing to us. They’re writing to their contemporary audience.

Our job is to understand the context of that audience and glean an appropriate truth from our ancient writings.

Well, our job is to follow Jesus. Comprehending prophetic texts is secondary. It’s not unimportant, of course, but it’s not the primary task.

I hope that I spend most of my effort encouraging you to the primary task. I hope I spend most of my time urging you to follow Jesus.

But this morning, because of the words Jesus has to offer us through Matthew’s evangel, I think that addressing one of our secondary tasks is appropriate.

This morning, we are wandering into Advent. We’ve had our Thanksgiving feasts and our extraordinary Thanksgiving snow. Now, four Sundays before Christmas, we wander into a season of preparation.

This afternoon, Nickelsville will jump past all four weeks of preparation and proclaim Christmas already come with parade and face painting and our Americanized Saint Nicholas, and put us all in the mood for the great commercialization that began on Black Friday Eve this year. We get impatient. We rush this season, and we neglect the hope and the promise that Advent has to offer. That we’ve lost Jesus in Christmas isn’t the fault of the media or of flashy merchants. It’s our own fault for neglecting the time to look forward to Jesus coming.

If we want to have Christmas parties, let’s have them during the twelve days of Christmas, not during the four weeks preceding them.

We need to make room for walking through the time of preparation. It is good for our souls, for our families, for our communities.

Because preparation is something that’s important to God. God doesn’t typically just throw things at us. God prepares us for the things God has in store.

And not just by telling us about them. God prepares our hearts, our bodies, our souls, our minds if we will let God’s grace shape us.

So this morning, as the spinning Earth once more brings us into the season of Advent, let us commit to allowing God to prepare us.

Because this is God’s spinning Earth, defining our days. This is God’s moon, defining our rough monthly cycles. This is God’s solar system, wherein we cycle through our years. This is God’s time, so let us set aside the time God has given us to prepare ourselves.

Because even while God gives us this beautiful regularity, this ongoing cycle of days and years and lifetimes, God still gives us beautiful surprises, as well.

And part of being prepared for those surprises is falling into God’s preparation.

Jesus’s message to us today isn’t, “Here is a surprise from God smacking you in the face!” That’s not the way God is.

I know it feels like that sometimes, and believe me, I’ve had my own moments of being caught unawares by God. But that’s my fault, not God’s. God has always prepared me for what’s in store.

Jesus’s message to us today is, “Be ready. Be on guard. Be prepared.”

And that preparation isn’t something we do. It’s something God does.

Of course we don’t know God’s timing. That’s because it’s God’s timing, not our timing. God has an eye on the larger shape of history, and God is working through all us messy people to make that history happen. That’s a lot of free agents to depend on. That’s a lot of volunteers God is recruiting, and if you’ve never recruited and managed volunteers, trust me, that’s a task that requires a lot of patience and a lot of flexibility.

It’s no wonder that the coming of the Human One is going to be such a surprise.

I suspect that we’d be a lot better off leaving the big picture to God. Let’s not assume that we know what and when and where or how to understand the words of our ancient prophets in the very different world in which we live today.

Let’s just do our job. Let’s be ready. Let’s follow Jesus.

It is, after all, only in preparing ourselves that we can make room for God to work. If I’m distracted by my own opinions and ideology, I won’t leave any space for God’s grace to work in me. I need to leave room for God to shape me and make me ready for Messiah. I need to leave room for God to shape me into the preparer that God needs me to be.

Jesus reminds us that there’s a lot that gets in our way. He compares those being prepared for the coming of the Human One to Noah’s contemporaries:

In those days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark. They didn’t know what was happening until the flood came and swept them all away.

And Paul addresses his Roman audience with a like warning:

The night is almost over, and the day is near. So let’s get rid of the actions that belong to the darkness and put on the weapons of light. Let’s behave appropriately as people who live in the day, not in partying and getting drunk, not in sleeping around and obscene behavior, not in fighting and obsession. Instead, dress yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ, and don’t plan to indulge your selfish desires.

But here’s the thing: We have heard all that personal holiness stuff so often that we’ve either fixed our personal issues or we’ve stubbornly justified them beyond any hope of human reconciliation.

If you’ve done the latter, I hope God is working on you, because nobody else will be able to.

Either way, I don’t see any need wasting my breath on that. I’m either preaching to the choir or preaching to the wall.

I want to encourage us in a different direction.

When Jesus comes, things change. When Jesus first came, people weren’t ready. They were so unready that they nailed him to a cross like so many other Roman insurrectionists.

But when Jesus comes into our lives today, are we rejecting him like the crowds who cried for Barabbas, or are we welcoming Jesus into our hearts, into our homes, into our consumption, into our conversations, into our leading, into our following, into our families, into our friendships? Are we allowing Jesus to reshape all of us, or are we telling Jesus, “I’ll do A, B, and C for you, but don’t you dare touch my X, Y, or Z.”

We expect Jesus to be a certain way. In order to hold on to our lifestyles, we need Jesus to maintain our status quo, but Jesus isn’t ever, ever someone who lets us keep things the way things are.

Look back at what Isaiah has to share with us today.

⁴ God will judge between the nations,
    and settle disputes of mighty nations.
Then they will beat their swords into iron plows
    and their spears into pruning tools.
Nation will not take up sword against nation;
    they will no longer learn how to make war.

Isaiah doesn’t say that the king will judge between the nations. He doesn’t say that the public or the press will settle disputes of mighty nations.

God is going to do that.

Then they will beat their swords into iron plows
    and their spears into pruning tools.

That is our job. Our job is not to proclaim war. Our job is not to decide who’s right and wrong. Our job is not to go fight.

Our job is to take our weapons of war and crush and mutilate them into implements of production, of peace, of fruitfulness.

Now, most of us don’t want to hear that. But we need to hear it, because it is one of our greatest sins as a society and as a church that we proclaim our nation above our God. The two are not the same, and we must learn which comes first.

But we also need to hear this because we are a people called to love and ministry with our neighbor.

And that means the neighbor just down the street we’d rather not associate with because they’re that kind of person as well as our neighbor halfway around the world we don’t want to associate with because, what, they don’t speak the same language; they don’t believe what we believe; they are clearly sinners unworthy of our concern.

And we, clearly, are worthy of God’s concern, sinless as we are.

I don’t want to invite you to change some stupid selfish little sin in your life that you’ve spent a lifetime justifying. I want to invite you to change something much bigger, something that will redefine and reshape your conversations and your media appetite.

I want to invite you, this Advent, to reshape the way you see the world. When you watch the news, whatever you hear the reporter or commentator saying, see every person as a beloved child of God. Because they are. God has created every one of them, infant and insurrectionist, armed and unarmed, powerful and powerless, wealthy or starving, and God loves them.

Prepare yourself this Advent for not just Christmas, but for the coming of Christ. Because Christ is coming, and the world, whether we like it or not, is going to change.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.