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

Matthew 14:25-33

And early in the morning he came walking towards them on the lake. But when the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’ And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’

Peter answered him, ‘Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.’ He said, ‘Come.’ So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came towards Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind,* he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’ Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’ When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshipped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’

I changed a light bulb in my bedroom closet last week and it didn’t go as planned. I replaced a dead bulb with a faulty, energy efficient bulb, and when I flipped the switch the thing flashed like a seizure-inducing strobe light at a rave.

It took me a few days to get around to changing it again, but that faulty light bulb reminded me of something.

I can’t remember the teacher, but I know I was in First or Second grade. And I remember where I was sitting and in which Sunday School classroom at Providence Lutheran Church, in Holland, Ohio, at the time. And I remember that my Sunday School teacher taught us about faith by using the example of lights and electricity. She asked us to think about how often we go into a dark room and flip the switch on the wall and expect the light to come on and fill the room. “That’s faith,” she said.

And that’s not bad, really. Using her example, trust and expectation do, perhaps, equal faith – especially to a classroom full of elementary school kids. But my Sunday School teacher hadn’t been to or considered my bedroom closet on Redbird Trail and how easily my faith would be challenged – and lost – if it was as easy as flipping a switch.

This is a tough one – lamenting the loss of faith, I mean. I saved this lament for last in our series because it seemed like a good way to wrap up all that we’ve been lamenting over these last several weeks – war, greed, illness and grief. I saved this one for last because, it seems to me, all the rest of our laments – and there are so many more than just the war, greed, illness and grief, we’ve spent time with – all the reasons we have to lament are often also reasons we have for losing our faith, or at least struggling mightily with it, when the bad stuff hits the fan. Or, maybe when the light switch is flipped, but things don’t go as planned.

And loss of faith is quite a thing these days. It’s almost a movement, really, the way so many people are being drawn away or pushed and pulled away from engagement with faith – or with faith communities and congregations, at least – as most of us have come to understand them. There’s a whole category of people who identify themselves as “ex-vangelicals” often because of the experiences they’ve had in what they generically refer to as “white evangelical Christian” churches.

Some of these experiences are horrifying examples of physical, sexual, emotional abuse, of course. All of that destroys the faith of God’s people who suffer from it.

Some of these experiences stem from theology that’s simply incompatible with how people view and experience the world anymore – women still not allowed to preach, preside, teach, or lead; too much mischaracterization of sexuality as sinful; too much fear-mongering and proselytizing that pretends to be faithful evangelism and outreach. That stuff challenges the faith of the thoughtful and curious.

Some of the experiences that threaten our faith may be the result of simply being unable to ask hard questions about any of this – hard questions of the Church, hard questions of its leaders, and hard questions of the God we preach, teach about and worship. Lamenting, like we’ve been doing these last several weeks isn’t always encouraged or practiced or welcome in some circles.

And some of the experiences that drive people away from their faith are nothing new under the sun – the same things that have always shaken the faith of God’s people – war, pandemics, disease, loss of a loved one, unanswered prayers, the evil and ugliness of the world around us...

And some of all of this is that there just aren’t answers – easy or otherwise – to explain many of the experiences or to answer some of the questions that burden us as people on the planet.

But the reason I lament our “loss of faith” when it comes, isn’t because it shouldn’t happen. It’s more, for me, about the shame and guilt and pressure we inflict upon ourselves and each other when it does. The truth simply is that faith can be hard to find, hard to keep, hard to hold onto at times – and it’s always been that way.

The point of Adam and Eve’s story, way back in Genesis, is that they lost their faith in God’s promise to provide for and sustain them and so they took things into their own hands.

The Israelites did the same. They lost faith in God’s willingness or ability to care for them as they saw fit, and according to their timeline, so they created and lived by their own devices and their own vices, instead.

The disciples and other followers of Jesus did it, too. They misused and misunderstood so much of what Jesus was trying to offer them. When he encouraged them to follow they refused. When their friends died they blamed him. When he died they despaired. When he was raised, even, they refused to believe it.

And people! Jesus, in utter solidarity with all of that lost faith – and with yours and mine, too – lost faith, himself, at least once. In that moment on the cross, after all of his suffering, in the midst of his greatest despair, I believe his faith was lost … gone … decimated … destroyed when he cried out “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?!”

So, I want our invitation to lament our loss of faith or our struggle with faith or our hard, holy questions about faith to be – in and of themselves – strangely enough, expressions of the faith we can be so uncertain about, so unconvinced by, so unmoved by some of the time.

This may sound harsh – and hard to hear or believe, coming from your Pastor – and I may very well be wrong … but I kind of think that if you haven’t found faith hard to come by at certain times in your life – if you haven’t lost or left or felt lost or left by your faith or by our God at some point – then maybe you’re just better than the rest of us – but it may also be that you’re not doing it right.

Because the truth is – no matter how great your expectation, no matter how deep your trust – if it hasn’t happened to you yet, I’m here to promise you it will. The light switch won’t work. Sometimes the bulb of your faith is faulty or burned out altogether. Sometimes the power is just out. Sometimes darkness is all there is and feels like all there ever will be.

And sometimes darkness is exactly how, where, and when God shows up for us. In the emptiness. In the void. In the doubt and fear and uncertainty we’re running from or feel so self-righteously indignant about in those moments when we’ve given up, chucked it all, thrown in the towel.

And that’s worth lamenting because it’s sad and scary. Not because it’s sinful, mind you. But sad and scary, for sure.

But tonight we’re called to acknowledge it. To give it a voice. To lament it. And to be as patient as we are able letting hope hold us when our faith can’t, until faith – however great or small – finds us by the light of God’s grace.

Amen

Tik Tok Pranksters and Life in the Meantime

Midweek Lenten Lament for Loss of Faith