I.N.I.

A sermon to be preached on the Sunday in Advent (27 November) 2005 at Advent Lutheran Church, Forest Hills, MD, and based on the Gospel for the Day, St. Mark 13:33-37

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus our Lord,

Dear Friends in Christ,

“Watch out!” is often a cry of sudden danger. It’s an alert to someone that they’re about to be hit by something coming from an unexpected direction. You’ve heard it. You’ve probably said it. “Watch out!” Yet it can be used to designate a longer term concern. It can be used to warn you of something that may not happen soon at all.

Our text this morning comes from Mark’s record of the events of Holy Week. At the beginning of the chapter, Jesus took his disciples from the Temple to a spot on the Mount of Olives opposite the Temple, where it could serve as a kind of focal point for their discussion. And Jesus then spends the entire chapter talking to them about the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the coming end of the age. The verses chosen as today’s Gospel come right at the end of the chapter, right before we hear in the next chapter that the chief priests and scribes were looking for a way to have Jesus arrested and killed.

So when Jesus tells his disciples to “Keep awake” or “Watch out” you could almost feel like there are a couple layers to what he was saying. Mark may have been able to think in retrospect that the disciples should have kept a better eye out with regard to Jesus and his safety at the end of Holy Week. But you and I are certainly being called to watch out for the end of the age, the second coming of our Lord.

Jesus gives us an image to model ourselves after: servants whose master has gone on a journey, leaving us to run the household in his absence. We may also think of the Son of Man coming as a thief in the night (one of the other images he left us with), but here it’s the homeowner, the householder, the master of the estate, who is going to return, we know not when. Can you put yourself into that image very easily? Maybe not as a servant. But maybe as a child whose parents have left and said ‘We’re just going to run some errands. We’ll be back soon.’ Or perhaps as a married person whose spouse is going out for a bit, but will be back “soon.” Or you’re at the mall, shopping with friends or family, and your companion says “oh, wait just a minute, let me duck in here to get something. I’ll be right back.”

And then you wait. Is there going to be enough time for the child to get a cookie before parents come home? Enough time to work on a crossword before spouse gets home? Enough time for the shopper to go get a soda at the food court? Just what do they mean by “I’ll be back soon”?

More importantly, what did Jesus mean when he said he would be back soon? And how watchful should we be in his absence? Isn’t it going to be hard to maintain watchfulness over the long haul? As time stretches out, isn’t it going to be harder and harder for us to be in a state of readiness for his return? Well yes. But we’re here this Sunday morning working on it.

Our goal is to keep ourselves as ready and in as alert a state of watchfulness as those servants whose master left them running things while he was off on a journey. But it’s hard to do, isn’t it? Jesus has been delaying his return. For a long time. Time for a lot of cookies, crosswords, and sodas. Time for many lifetimes. Generations and generations of waiting servants. Makes it hard to continue waiting. But that’s our charge. That’s our assignment. We’re a people who have been told to wait.

The problem, of course, is our impatience. It’s been soooo long. Our hearts fill with so many questions and fears: what if Jesus forgot about coming back? What then? Or what if something happened to him? Or what if he wasn’t really planning on coming back at all? Or maybe the people who transmitted the message to us got it wrong. Or maybe we misunderstood it. What if, instead of “Watch out!” our assignment was really something else? We can, in other words, overwhelm ourselves with doubt. We can, very easily, look at how long the time has been and get very, very impatient.

What can be done about that?

The first thing, perhaps, is to take a lesson from the other examples we have of the people of God waiting for him to act. We can go all the way back to the Garden of Eden, if we want. Or rather, shortly after Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden for their sinful rebellion. The Lord had promised Eve that while there would be conflict between her and the serpent, she would have a descendant who would strike the serpent on the head and deal him a deadly blow. So Eve waited. Eventually she became pregnant and bore sons who excited in her the memory of the Lord’s promise. For generations thereafter, mothers hoped that their son would be the promised one. Eve was not to see the coming of the Messiah, but she did persevere in the faith, hoping and praying that each of her children would be the one.

Others have waited. Think of the children of Israel in slavery in Egypt. It had started out as a good thing. It had started out as a way to avoid starvation. And Joseph had been the ruler, second only to Pharaoh. But a temporary arrangement became a permanent one. Over the years, as the children of Israel became more settled in the land, they also became more subservient to the Egyptians. Eventually there was a pharaoh who did not know anything about Joseph, and the Israelites were completely enslaved. It took years for this to come about. And that included years of waiting. At first it would have been an eagerness to ‘get back home’ and to ‘stop living out of suitcases.’ Then there was a certain nostalgia for life back in the promised land. Generations passed. And then it became more mythological among them: a place they only heard about in late night tales after a long day’s work. And they prayed for a release. They prayed for a return to a place they had never known. And eventually, finally, at last, the Lord sent Moses to extract them from their slavery and return them to the promised land where they could be a free people. It took years of waiting and watching. It took immense amounts of faith.

And still they waited for the Messiah who had been promised first to Eve at the gate of the garden.

The people of Israel, first as a migrant people, then as conquering Immigrants, then as a nation, a people under a king, as two nations under two kings, as people in captivity far from their homeland again, as a remnant returned but under foreign domination, and ever after as a group of people ruled by outsiders … the people of Israel waited for their Messiah. It was a long wait. Through wars and droughts, through political intrigues and periods without even their Temple, it took centuries more before the Lord broke through the skies to give them the Messiah they had waited for: the one who was named Jesus, for he would save his people from their sins. This was the one promised to Eve back near the dawn of time. Finally he was here.

In comparison to these extended waits, our wait for his return hasn’t been all that long, has it? You and I are only the current holders of the promise that stretches back through the years. It was held before us by our parents probably, by saints and martyrs over the years, by heroes and heroines of the faith, and by many more unsung and anonymous believers. And the promise has been passed down to each of us as a precious treasure. We cherish it. We celebrate it. We hold on to it, hoping it will be fulfilled soon, but being willing also to pass it on to those after us if we don’t see its fulfillment.

These faithful believers from Eve, to the Israelites in Egypt, to the generations back in the promised land listening to the prophets, to the disciples who sat with Jesus on the Mount of Olives, to those waves of believers in the 2,000 years since, these faithful believers sustained the promise of Christ’s Second Coming and handed it on to us. These faithful believers also serve us as examples when we get impatient for the fulfillment. They show us how to act when we start to doubt. Their lives and words show us that it is not necessarily easy, but that with the Lord’s guidance and inspiration we can persevere, we can stick with it.

What we’re doing right now is one of the ways this happens. We have gathered together, you and I, to read about, to talk about, to sing about, to hear about the promise of the Lord’s return. At some times of the year, we focus on other aspects of our faith, but at this time, this Advent season, we’re re-enacting the waiting of Eve and the captive Israelites, of the Jewish nation and the faithful believers through the ages. We tell the old stories. We re-read the ancient promises. We sing about the waiting done years ago. And with every word, we’re binding ourselves more closely to the promise. With every word we are identifying more closely with those who have waited before us.

Our task at the moment is really fairly simple: we are to remain faithful. Well, maybe that’s not quite as simple as it sounds when it’s stated like that. We have those many examples to model ourselves after, though. And, what’s of even more benefit to us right now, we have the sacramental presence of our Lord with us to strengthen and encourage us.

Here before us in the bread and wine of Holy Communion, we each take our place in the long chain of those who remember, preserve, and pass on the promise of our Lord’s coming at Bethlehem and his eventual return. The first coming won places for us in Heaven, though we had not yet been born. The second coming will take us to those places, though it might not happen until after we die. In between, we live on this earth nourished and forgiven by the Lord’s body and blood.

And, nourished, we go about our appointed tasks. Paul writes in our epistle for today that we have among us every spiritual gift we need as we wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, we have tasks to occupy us, and the tools to accomplish them Let’s get about our business.

Let’s remember and copy the examples of faithful people through the ages. Let’s rehearse the promises of God. Let’s sing the songs, and read the words. Let’s pass the promise on if the Lord does not come in our lifetimes. Everyone should be looking for the return of our Lord. We should all be watching out for his coming, as we would watch out for the return of a master who left us in charge of his household while he was away on a journey. Watch out!

S.D.G.