'Jesus said to the disciples, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”'
--Matthew 24: 36-44
Here we go again. Another season – Advent – and the start of another church year – what we call Year A. I find great beauty and comfort in it, the rhythms and the routines of our liturgical cycle. As our secular calendar prepares to turn over, the Church gets something of a head start, moving into a mindset of preparedness for what is to come. It’s an old dance, but I’m always happy to join it again and again and again.
Still, the readings for the First Sunday of Advent always take me by surprise. I expect the gospel to be the opening lines of Matthew, which give us Jesus’ lineage and genealogy going back to Abraham, or at the very least I figure it’s going to be Matthew’s backstory of Jesus’ birth, which mostly focuses on Joseph. It throws me for a loop that our first Gospel for Advent in Year A features Jesus preaching about that day of many names: the Second Advent, Second Coming, the Eschaton, the Day of Resurrection, the Day of the Lord, the End Times, the End of the Age, take your pick.
When I hear this passage I think of a sermon preached by the Rev. Cleophus James at the Triple Rock Baptist Church in Calumet City, IL. Rev. Cleophus said in that sermon, “don’t be lost when your time comes; for the day of the Lord is coming as a thief in the night!” The congregation followed up with a singing of Old Landmark and dancing up and down the aisle.
Reverend Cleophus James preaches to the flock at the Triple Rock Baptist Church.
I wish I could say I heard that sermon in-person, but I didn’t because Triple Rock Baptist Church doesn’t exist, and the Rev. Cleophus James was a character played by the late-Godfather of Soul, James Brown, and the sermon and song-and-dance routine are from an early scene in my favorite live-action movie, The Blues Brothers. That film will preach, y'all! There’s good news in Reverend Cleophus’ sermon; good news that Jesus imparts in his own sermon to our ancestors and to us even still; though it might not seem so at first glance.
The thought of Jesus sneaking up on us at some unknown hour doesn’t exactly sound like the good kind of news, am I right? Considering the stress that we are already under – like, all the time – now we have to guard against a surprise visit from Jesus? To borrow a line from Seinfeld: I hate the pop-in (and I bet many of y’all do too)! To constantly be at red alert, under threat of intrusion, even by Jesus, whom we profess to love, sounds utterly exhausting. Can’t he at least send a text first?
Realistically, though, does it seem likely to any of us that Jesus actually wants to scare us into readiness? He’s not some cartoonish evil engineer, stepping off the train as it races forward at top speed, leaving us to steer the thing, then threating punishment if it gets off-track. He’s the same Jesus who will say at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Maybe this dire warning of his – and the many more we will hear in this Gospel throughout the year – are not merely about a future day that we affirm in our Creed will eventually come; maybe warnings such as this one are about all of our days.
To be on guard against some spectacular, sky-breaking day, whose date is unknown can leave us feeling even more anxious and unprepared. To know that Jesus comes unexpectedly EVERY DAY, though, changes our lives and hour whole perspective. Now each situation, each place, each person is where Jesus is apt to appear. Life becomes less of a threat and more of an adventure. Jesus showing up again – and again and again – maybe even today(!) - becomes the expectation that he will, no doubt show up soon and very soon. We become like the congregation of early Christians in Rome to whom Paul reminded, “Keep awake!” Or, in our more modern parlance: stay woke!
I asked our Bible Study group last week: how many Second Comings have y’all survived? Passages like this Gospel text today may evoke thoughts of our more evangelical siblings and their penchant for trying to predict when Jesus is coming again to judge the quick and the dead. I wonder what kinds of fears and anxieties are at work in the hearts, as they feel it so necessary to get that date right. Perhaps there is grief over what is going on in their lives at the present moment – I’m sure we can all understand that – and they try to almost will Jesus to come on back and take them away from all of the pain and suffering they see. It’s that bargaining phase of grief, an effort to make sense of what we is being experienced. If we can fine-tune when he’s going to get here, we can be ready; it’s a form of maintaining control. Yet Jesus himself says that it is not our place, nor is it even his place, to know when such a moment will occur. That privilege belongs only to God. So maybe it isn’t about being anxious or fearful of the future. Maybe it is in the present moment – all of our present moments, from now until that day – that we are called to practice making room in ourselves for his arrival, or noticing him when he already shows up in our neighbor. In our churches we engage in spiritual practices of prayer, study, and mindfulness; we meet him at the Table, and we see him in one another, as we pass the Peace, we welcome the stranger, and we break bread together after worship. Yet if Sunday morning is merely the dress rehearsal for the rest of our lives – as one colleague of mine is prone to say – then what could it mean for us, as we head back out into the world, to have that kind of mindful preparedness, to anticipate Jesus’ arrival wherever and with whomever we go? At the gas station, the grocery store, or the Target: what if we prepared to see Jesus there?
The opportunities for Jesus to surprise us are there every day. From the moment our open our physical eyes up to the moment they close, there is the possibility that they the eyes of our hearts can be open to some sort of heavenly breakthrough. Maybe that’s our prayer this Advent: to have those eyes to see, to have the curiosity so as to be surprised, to prepare with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind, for Jesus’ arrival.
Noah, Jesus reminds us, prepared for what was to come, even during the sunny days. Though his neighbors scoffed at him, though he could have tried predicting when the rains would start to fall, he prepared each day as if that could be the moment. Advent is the time for us to make such preparation. The more we prepare, the less anxious we become, and the more ready we are for Jesus’ Second Advent, whenever that may be.
German theologian Karl Barth said that we live between Creation and Re-Creation. It’s a liminal space, this life of ours. Ferris Bueller said that life comes at us fast, and if we don’t slow down, we might miss it. We dare not miss those moments, sisters and brothers. We dare not be numb to the world around us so much that we miss the opportunity each moment presents for Jesus to show up again…and again…and again.