Matthew 24:33-46

“But about that day and hour, no one knows, neither the angels in 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 the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, and they knew nothing about what was to come until Noah entered the ark and 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 which day your Lord will come. But know this, if the owner of the house had known at what time the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake, and he 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.”

There’s a family of pranksters that shows up in my social media feeds pretty regularly. I guess that means I waste my time watching their ridiculous TikToks and reels often enough that the mysterious algorithms of the online universe keep pushing them in my direction. Anyway, here’s a clip of how they live:

Other than wondering how they can laugh and smile about that every. single. time. they get scared or surprised by a confetti gun, a balloon full of shaving cream, an explosion of colored powder – or all three – I wonder about what a pain in the butt it would be to clean that mess up every time. And I wonder, too, what it’s like to live knowing someone is ALWAYS trying to surprise you, scare you, and capture it on video for all the world to see.

And, maybe it’s a stretch, but it made me think about Jesus and this morning’s Gospel, too, and all of that talk about being ready; keeping awake; not knowing the day or the hour; and living like the unexpected is coming at any moment … all of the time. (And all of that made me think of the many billboards and Burma Shave signs you see between central Indiana and Northwest Ohio on Thanksgiving weekend warning you – in not so many words – to get right with God or get ready for your eternal damnation.)

Despite what some Christians do with passages like this, I don’t imagine it was Jesus’ intention to provoke our anxiety, to make us lose sleep, or to simply scare us away from Hell and into Heaven. I also don’t think we’re supposed to make predictions about how or when the world – or our lives in it – will end, as too many others do. I trust the fact that Jesus said neither he nor the angels knew when that would be. So I think that lets me off of that hook and anyone who suggests they know otherwise, is pretending they know more than they can or should or possibly could know – according to Jesus, himself.

Instead, I like to think a loving, compassionate Jesus could see people going through the motions of their lives in the world on auto-pilot; living unconsciously or unaware of or in denial about what was going on in the world around them. And I imagine Jesus wanted the people of his day – and you and me, too – to wake up and pay a different, more faithful kind of attention to how we live … to what surrounds us in this life … and to God’s place in the midst of it all.

See, the people Jesus refers to this morning weren’t necessarily doing anything WRONG or SINFUL when everything changed around them. The people of Noah’s day, at least according to Jesus, were just living their lives – eating, drinking, making merry and getting married. And the people in Jesus’ day would, presumably, be doing the same – just working – in the fields and in the kitchen; or getting a good night’s sleep, even, when the end of it all comes to pass.

So what if the invitation for us today isn’t to live with anxiety or fear or superstition or a sad kind of resignation, either, about how or when or that the end will come? (Like someone’s waiting around every corner or behind every door with some kind of cosmic surprise or prank or opportunity to finish us off.) What if the invitation for us today is to live, instead, with a holy kind of joy and vigilance, a faithful kind of hope and expectation about it all – and about how we might live differently, in the meantime?

What if, instead of running from or wringing our hands over whatever scares us most – we acknowledge that those fears exist and we trust God to be bigger and stronger than any of those fears could ever be?

What if, instead of rushing through our lives – keeping so busy and staying so distracted – we slowed down, stopped working … stopped grinding more often, stopped keeping up with the Joneses, stopped pleasing all of the people all of the time – and let God stop and surprise us more often?

What if, instead of being so bold and so brave in the face of our struggles… What if, instead of reaching for our bootstraps and demanding that others find theirs too, we let ourselves and each other be vulnerable? What if we shared the Truth and fullness of what burdens us? And what if we shared the load of it all together more often?

I have a hunch that the unexpected thing about the coming of the Son of Man, isn’t just going to be the day or the hour of the END of it all. I have a hunch that, no matter how much we preach and teach and try to practice the grace we proclaim as followers of Jesus, that the fullness of that grace … the complete, pure, utter, richness of God’s love … is what will still manage to catch us off-guard, unaware, unprepared, and thoroughly by surprise in the end. But I also think God wants us to keep our eyes and our hearts and our lives open to experiencing it, in the meantime, right where we live, too.

Because the promise and blessing and hope of Christmas is that God comes and joins us for every bit of our lives in this world – not just the ending, or on the other side of Heaven. Jesus is born. Heaven comes to earth. God, in Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, walks before and beside and behind us every step of the way – on this side of eternity, not just the next.

So, what if being ready for Jesus to show up wasn’t just about the end of time or even just the coming of another Christmas? What if waiting for Jesus – keeping awake, being prepared and making things ready for God to live and move and breathe among us – wasn’t just a special occasion, reserved for Advent and the 12 days of Christmas? What if all of this candle-lighting, gift giving, generous-living … what if all of this repenting and praying and hope-filled expectation was a way of life for us?

What if we lived - something like that family full of pranksters - as though God could surprise us with love and mercy and forgiveness at every turn? And what if we worked to surprise others with that kind of love and grace and mercy? And what if all of that was no joke?

Every day would be more faithful and righteous and filled with grace. Every day would include more love, joy and laughter. Every day would be filled with a greater peace of mind and might just lead to the kind of peace we pray for. And every day would be filled with the new life that was and is and is to come, in Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Amen

Luke 3:7-18

John said to the crowds who came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say about yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor.’ For I tell you that from these stones God could raise up children to Abraham. Even now the axe is lying at the root of the tree. And every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”

The crowds asked him, “Then what shall we do?” In reply, John said to them, “If anyone among you has two coats, you should give one away to someone who has none. If any among you has food, you should do likewise.” Even some tax collectors came to be baptized and they said to him, “What should we do?” John said to them, “Do not collect more than has been prescribed for you.” Some soldiers also came and asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats for false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”

While the crowds were filled with expectation and wondering in their hearts if John was the Messiah, he answered them all saying, “I baptized you with water. There is one who is more powerful than I coming after me. I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal. He will baptize with the holy spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

With these and many other exhortations, John proclaimed the good news to all the people.

I heard from a few of you, after last week’s sermon, that I seemed angry while I was preaching. I was a little surprised and self-conscious about that … concerned about how it might come off to people who don’t know me well. So I was glad to see that we got some more from John the Baptist this week – and that he was calling people names, yelling about the wrath to come, railing about threshing floors and unquenchable fire. I feel like that makes whatever I was up to seem justified, and tame, by comparison.

And, on top of that, after calling the crowd coming to be baptized a “brood of vipers,” after threats of being cut down and burned up like trees, after talk of being baptized by the holy spirit and with fire, and after announcing that Jesus, wielding his winnowing fork, was about to “clear his threshing floor” and “separate the wheat from the chaff,” we’re supposed to believe people heard all of it as good news?!

It doesn’t sound like good news to me. John, the Baptist, seems angry. And, on the Third Sunday of Advent it certainly doesn’t feel like Christmas.

But the truth is, John didn’t have Christmas on the brain and wasn’t feeling the holiday spirit in those days by the river, when he was baptizing people and waiting for Jesus to meet him out there in the wilderness. It’s important to remember, what we just heard takes place years after Jesus was born in Bethlehem. These were days just before the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, when he was already grown, about to show the world that the kingdom of God had come near and that he was the Way and the Truth and the Life of it all.

And John the Baptist was tired of waiting. Again, not waiting for Christmas to come, like so many of us may feel right about now. And not just waiting for Jesus, really, either.

No, John seems to be tired of waiting on the people – all those people, coming to be baptized – all those men and women and children, presumably. All those tax collectors, soldiers and strangers, too, who made their way into the wilderness hungry for a different kind of teaching, longing for a deeper spirituality, searching for a new way of being in the world that John’s baptism and this Messiah they were hoping for promised them. And John seems tired of waiting for them to get it, to grasp it, and to be changed by this promise he was offering … and that Jesus came to deliver.

Have you ever waited for someone to change something in their own life, for their own good? Like an alcoholic who can’t get sober… Like a drug addict who can’t kick the habit… Like a loved-one with an eating disorder, maybe… Like a friend who won’t leave a bad or even abusive relationship… Or, like a kid who just won’t do what they could or should do to get their grades up or try something new or make better choices…

I imagine that’s how John felt, down by the river. Not as furious as he was frustrated; Not so much mad as he was discouraged; Not as angry as he was exasperated; Not so much pissed-off as he was pleading with God’s people to do something new, and better, and different for a change.

Because that’s what “repentance” means, remember: to turn, to change, to be changed. John wanted people to stop making excuses. To stop denying responsibilities. To grab hold of what a journey of faith could mean – not just for those who engaged it – but for the world they were meant to engage because of it. Which is why I think John still has something to say to you and me.

Because, what gets my attention about this passage every time is when John tells the people, “from these stones God could raise up children to Abraham.” What John knows is that some of the Jews in his day were resting on their laurels as descendants of all those Old Testament Jews we know about. They seemed to have been under the impression that, since they had Abraham in their family tree, that this faith-walking, repentance and life-changing stuff, didn’t really apply to them. That maybe they had an “in” with God because of who they were as a people.

So, when John says, “from these stones, God could raise up children to Abraham,” he’s basically saying, “get over yourselves and get busy.” “If God just wanted descendants of Abraham; if God just wanted religious people by name or ethnicity or heritage, God could bring them back from the dead or just mix up a batch of new ones from the stones at your feet.”

“From these stones God could raise up children to Abraham.”

But, just like those crowds of tax collectors and soldiers and curious souls of every stripe, being baptized by John way back when, we are descendants of Abraham, you and I. And we have work to do, you and I, not because we HAVE TO, but because WE GET TO. And like the saying goes, I think John is saying to us – just as he was saying to the crowds way back when – “we are the ones we are waiting for.”

We forget it sometimes – when we rest on our laurels or when our despair gets the best of us or when the world convinces us we can’t, or shouldn’t, or that it’s not our place – but we are the ones we are waiting for to make a change in and for the sake of this world, precisely because we are descendants of Abraham and children of God; blessed in so many ways to be a blessing in so many ways.

We are the ones we are waiting for, to do something about gun violence in this country.

We are the ones we are waiting for to do something about this pandemic, whenever and wherever and however we are able.

We are the ones we are waiting for to do something about everything I mentioned last week – racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty, too.

We are the ones we are waiting for, you and I, to give thanks for the grace that belongs to us because we belong to God – and we’re the ones called to share that same grace with the world however we’re able.

And I think sometimes it takes a child to remind us of that – a child, in a manger, wrapped in swaddling clothes and headed for Calvary. A child who looks like the crowds gathered at the riverside with John… a child who looks like us, still waiting for so much to change… a child who looks like the “we” we’ve been waiting for.

So, let’s be changed, you and I, by the kind of repentance John calls us to and the kind of repentance God desires; the kind of repentance that matters; the kind of repentance that would make God smile.

Let’s ask different questions and seek better answers and let’s keep longing for a better way. And let’s let this child who comes, in Jesus, turn us around in real, meaningful, evident ways that haven’t happened yet – but that can and will happen, when we let the grace of God, at Christmas, have its way with us every moment of every day that we’re blessed to live and move and breathe in and for the sake of this world.

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

Tik Tok Pranksters and Life in the Meantime

The Ones We're Waiting For