Someone said to me at the church Christmas Fayre this morning, ‘You haven’t been on the computer much this week.’ She hadn’t noticed any blog updates (apart from the couple of links I’ve posted), nor had I updated my Facebook profile since Sunday night. A combination of family illness, urgent pastoral visits and so on have kept me from writing anything thoughtful.
So no comments so far (and maybe it will be too late by the time I do) on Adrian Warnock‘s disabling of comments on his blog – in which case, is it still really a blog? And nothing yet on a fascinating blog discussion started over a fortnight ago by Drew Ditzel on the pros and cons of paid ministry in the light of emerging church insights. (I’ve got some Ben Witherington to bring into that topic some time.) I’d love to get back to the fray soon.
I have, however, edited and revised my April post on Digital Faith for publication as an article in Ministry Today. You may get a sneak preview on the ‘Preview’ page of the site. I’ve also reviewed two books for them: ‘A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming‘ by Michael Northcott, and ‘Earth And Word: Classic Sermons on Saving the Planet‘, edited by David Rhoads.
In the meantime, here is tomorrow’s sermon. Even that is a revised repeat of one I preached three years ago when this Gospel passage featured in the Lectionary.
Matthew 24:36-44
Introduction
Today may be Advent Sunday, but the official countdown to Christmas in our household began yesterday. Rather than buying the conventional Advent calendars, Debbie had bought two (one for each of our children) into which you could place the chocolate or gift of your choice. (We had also bought a fair trade calendar from Traidcraft.) Rebekah had spied one of these calendars hanging up the other day, but had somehow resisted the temptation to raid it. However, she has been on Christmas countdown since July – slightly earlier than the shops. Mark, on the other hand, didn’t even want to unwrap his chocolate coin. When he did, he informed us that it wanted to go to sleep, and he delicately placed it under a dirty handkerchief.
Preparing for Christmas is quite simple for small children – even if frustrating. It involves counting down. For the rest of us, the preparation time is more frantic (although I have a wife who aims to have bought all her presents each year by the end of November).>
But being prepared in the Christian sense is about more than buying and wrapping the presents, sending the cards and hoping that bird flu won’t prevent you getting a turkey. Furthermore, we are not preparing for the first coming of Christ, but his second. In our Gospel reading, Jesus warns us about the nature of people who are unprepared for his return.
1. Counterfeit Faith<
When we lived in Medway, our manse was near the major general hospital. Parking was a nightmare, and we had to buy residents’ parking permits, both for ourselves and our visitors. One day, a friend came to visit Debbie. When Jackie was about to leave, we realised that she had not asked for our visitor’s parking permit to place on the dashboard of her car in order to ward off evil spirits and traffic wardens. I accompanied Jackie to her car, but they had not been doing their rounds and she was safe. The traffic wardens hadn’t been, either. But we never knew when they were on duty. We had no access to their duty roster.
Jesus said,
“No-one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (verse 36)
Anyone who claims they know when Jesus will return is claiming knowledge that even Jesus himself doesn’t have. Of many examples from history, take just this one:
In 1992, a South Korean church leader named Lee Jang Rim persuaded 20,000 followers that the Rapture would occur on 28th October that year. To prepare for the Lord’s coming, people abandoned their jobs and their education, sold their homes, divorced their spouses and deserted the army. Some women even reportedly had abortions so that they wouldn’t be too heavy to be lifted up to heaven. In all, these gullible followers gave over $4 million to Lee and his church.
As the midnight deadline approached, the South Korean government sent 1,500 riot police to Lee’s ‘Mission for the Coming Days’, and placed the fire and ambulance services on alert. The deadline passed uneventfully, and next day forty-six-year-old Lee apologised to his followers for misleading them, and dissolved his church. The authorities were unimpressed, however, and sentenced the prophet to two years’ imprisonment for fraud and illegal possession of US currency. The prosecution successfully argued that if Lee truly believed what he preached, what was he doing holding bank bonds, which would only mature in May 1993?[1]
When you claim to know details of the Second Coming that even Jesus himself says he doesn’t know, what are you doing? You are claiming an intimacy with Almighty God that simply doesn’t exist.
Now as far as I know no-one in this church has predicted a date for Christ’s return. But the danger of false intimacy, of a counterfeit faith where we try to be spiritual show-offs claiming some kind of hotline to the will of God that others don’t have – well, that’s a far more common temptation than we’d like to admit.
It breaches the commandments, taking the Lord’s name in vain. There is more to blasphemy than using the name of God or Jesus as a swearword. When we make idle claims that “The Lord has spoken to me” when he hasn’t, surely that is taking his name in vain, too.
Not only does it breach the commandments, it denies the Gospel. Essentially this false faith is a form of boasting, a superiority complex. Hence it flies in the face of our need for grace. The Gospel shows our need for humility, because we depend on the mercy of God. You have to wonder sometimes whether a person who spends their time boasting of their spiritual knowledge has spent enough time kneeling at the Cross seeking forgiveness.
“Keep watch,” says Jesus (verse 42, “Be ready” (verse 44). One way of being ready is to keep watch over our lives in this sense: do we know as much today as when faith first became real for us that we rely entirely on the grace of God? Or have we become a spiritual fraud, full of outwardly impressive signs but inwardly shallow and proud, playing religious games as a way of impressing or having power over others?
2. Shallow Lives
It’s a typical conversation when you visit a family in preparation for a funeral. “Fred wasn’t a religious man, but he lived a Christian life.” They describe the life of a supposed saint who certainly loved his family but had no time for God. You grit your teeth or edit out of the eulogyl the references to the gambling, smoking and foul temper. But he was a Christian man, remember.
>It’s interesting to think of those conversations in the light of Jesus’ comparison with the days of Noah.
“As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.”
(verses 37 to 41)
Here are people just getting on with the ordinary routine things of life (‘eating and drinking’, working in a field or ‘grinding with a hand mill’), going through the conventional staging posts of life’s journey (‘marrying and giving in marriage’), without any real sense that the journey is going anywhere. It is the tragedy of being consumed with the mundane without realising that we were made for more than this. It’s the body and maybe the soul but not the spirit. It’s all earthbound when we were made for friendship with God. There is more to life than food, work and family. It’s about empty lives that were meant to be full.
Jesus said,
“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
(John 10:10)
I say this not to make us feel smug, superior and condescending to others. No. We need to think about ourselves, and our relationship with those who have not met Jesus.
For one thing, it means that we need to re-evaluate the whole way we conduct ourselves as church. It’s easier to value maintenance over mission, when we are called to mission first and then only do the maintenance to support the mission.
If we are to be more outward-looking we need to drop some baggage. We need to be a living testimony to the abundant life. Might it be that many people lead shallow lives without an awareness of Christ and his coming because so many Christians are also shallow?
3. Spiritually Asleep
In John’s Gospel Jesus gives a whole variety of attractive descriptions of himself. He is the Bread of Life; he is the Light of the World; he is the Good Shepherd; he is the Resurrection and the Life; he is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and so on. They are all appealing images. An advertising agency couldn’t beat them for slogans – thankfully.
But here in Matthew 24 we have a less appealing image of Jesus:
“If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into.”
(verse 43)
Jesus likens himself to a thief. Does that make you want to follow him?
Of course, the image isn’t meant to be pushed too far. It indicates that his coming will be sudden and unexpected. Thus Jesus goes on to say,
“So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”
(verse 44)
Now you can’t be physically awake and ready twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If you tried, you would not be ready for anything, least of all Jesus!
Jesus warns us we need to be spiritually awake and ready. What does that mean? One commentator says it means that
‘disciples should be acting as disciples are supposed to act.’[2]
He goes on to quote a scholar by the name of Lövestam, who said it means the living of life
‘in communion with the Lord and in faithfulness to him’.[3]
Do you want to be ready for the coming of Jesus? You can’t install an alarm system to keep him out; you’ll still be taken by surprise when he comes; but you can be ready. The basic disciplines of the disciple are the key: communion with the Lord and faithfulness to him.
Steve Chalke calls this ‘Intimacy and Involvement’. In terms of intimacy or communion we practise those things that draw us into a close relationship with our God: prayer, Scripture reading, worship, fellowship, fasting, a holy lifestyle and so on. But alongside comes the faithfulness and involvement: we get our hands dirty in the world by being his witnesses in word and deed. As the Father sent Jesus into the world, so he sends us.
Don’t we often find, though, that many Christians prefer one or the other of these two? Some prefer the intimacy, that is, the praise, worship and prayer. Three years ago a Scotswoman called Catherine Brown founded a movement called ‘A Million Hours Of Praise’[4]. She said at the time,
‘God has given me a vision to mobilise the church and the nations of the earth to worship Jesus for one million hours, and we at million hours of praise believe that this worship will carry on past many millions of hours. You may ask why? Because Jesus is worth it!’
There are some Christians who would wrongly read her call as meaning that all we are meant to do is engage in some ongoing bless-up and everything will be fine. That would mean favouring communion over faithfulness, intimacy over involvement.
But some go to the opposite extreme. So consumed are they – and often rightly – with the needs of the world and those who are missing from the family of Jesus that the relationship with God is neglected. It’s like failing to tend a plant: they wither. They privilege faithfulness over communion and involvement over intimacy. They are like Martha without Mary.
Yet we need these two wings of the Christian life. A bird with one wing cannot fly, and neither can we. Spiritual wakefulness requires a combination of the two. The communion with the Lord fuels the faithfulness, else it is self-indulgence; the faithfulness requires the communion, else it is running on empty.
But have the two wings together and we shall not have counterfeit faith and nor will we live a shallow life. We shall be spiritually alive, and ready for our Lord.
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