Twenty-seventh Sunday After Pentecost Year A

27 Pentecost A 08

November 16, 2008

1 Thess 5:1-11 (NRSV)

1 Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. 2 For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. 3 When they say, "There is peace and security," then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape! 4 But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; 5 for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. 6 So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober; 7 for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at night. 8 But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. 9 For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, 10 who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. 11 Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.

While We’re Waiting

There was once a seminary professor, back in the days when only men could go to seminary, who preached to his all-male student body on the parable from Matthew about the wise and foolish virgins. You know the one. In those days, weddings were held at the bride’s home. But there was a sort of playful ritual involved: the groom decided the time. He would come when he wanted to, and he would try to get there without anyone noticing. The guests, particularly the bridesmaids, were to wait in their own homes and were forbidden to go to the bride’s home until they knew the groom was coming. So they’d set watches to catch the groom as he was entering the neighborhood. In the parable, you’ll remember, the groom decides to come at night. Well, the wise virgins had laid on extra oil for their lamps for just that eventuality, while the foolish virgins had not. The foolish virgins had to run to buy more oil and were therefore late to the wedding and were barred from coming in. They were left in the dark, gnashing their teeth and so on.

The old seminary professor ended his sermon with a stern question: “Now, tell me, gentlemen, would you rather be in the house with the wise bridesmaids, or out in the dark with the foolish virgins?”

The coming of the kingdom of God was apparently the most central and important teaching of the early church.

Paul speaks of God’s kingdom coming “like a thief in the night, a metaphor also used by Jesus in Matthew 24 and Luke 12, by Peter in 1 Peter 4 and 2 Peter 10, and by John in Revelation 3. If there’s anything a biblical Christian must acknowledge as true with a capital “T”, it’s that we cannot and will not know when the Lord is coming and when the transformation will be complete. Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ parable of the wise and foolish virgins is meant to remind us that we can never be too early, but we can surely be too late.

I’m reading a fascinating book by Jared M. Diamond called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. It’s a very well-researched and technical book and I have honestly found it rather difficult to read. But Mr. Diamond’s point is that groups of people, large and small, have again and again failed to see or react to conditions that threaten them.

One of the most haunting stories in the book is of Easter Island, the desert island among the Polynesians. All that’s left today are great statues apparently built by a once-numerous and well-organized civilization. It appears that kings on the island competed with each other to erect the most impressive statues. In order to do this, and to support the manpower to accomplish it, they needed lots of wood and wood products. This now-desert island, it has been discovered, was once copiously forested, mostly with palm trees. Apparently, in the process of trumpeting their own glory, the kings of Easter Island actually destroyed that forest. The question comes up in Diamond’s book from one of his students: “What was that last man thinking as he cut down the last palm tree?”

Diamond concludes that he probably wasn’t thinking very much. The last palm tree was probably not much more than a sapling in a field the man was clearing to farm. He probably didn’t know he was driving the last nail in the coffin of his people.
Paul would say, he was asleep. He was in the dark, sleepwalking through his own people’s demise. He was living in the night.

Night is the time of rest, recreation, taking it easy, and letting go of all worries. Most social groups organize toward creating conditions to make it possible for at least a portion of the society to enjoy just those things. The life of ease is what most of us work for. Being comfortable, well-fed, emotionally secure, clean, healthy and relaxed is the object of most of the work everyone does. The upper classes in most societies are envied and longed-for because they are free to spend their time pleasantly playing with their expensive toys. There was a time when the American dream was the happiness of shaping one’s own destiny. I think it has now become the pursuit of, and maybe even the entitlement to, material wealth and ease.
There’s a saying in the twelve-step fellowships, “If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you always got.” It seems that many societies, no matter how powerful or how tiny, find ways to simply go to sleep. They find ways to tell themselves that somehow things will just change on their own and everything will work out, as long as they keep doing what they always did. So that even when what they are doing results in disaster, they just clean up the devastation and go back to their same old ways.

In the Old Testament, we read that people ate and drank and married and were given in marriage and ate and drank and married and then, boom, the flood. They just kept doing what they always did, despite old Noah there hastily building his big ark in the middle of a desert. Surely Noah was crazy. Everything will just stay the way it’s always been.

The night Paul is talking about is not the darkness of tribulation, but one of the sleepy complacency of God’s people. Complacency is a powerful force. Powerful groups depend on complacency to remain in power. When things suddenly change, they are threatened. And so they make sure that we are fed many opiates, they make sure we sleepwalk through our lives, predictably doing only what benefits them, without thought of any alternative possibility.

But we who know Christ have been equipped with a vision and a hope, a strange idea of a kingdom that has never existed before and has not yet come into being, a kingdom in which no human ruler rules, no hierarchy exists, no one has more than anyone else and no one has less, and God is all in all, the heavenly Jerusalem, streets paved with gold, where there is no night, and no need of sun, for God is the light that shines there, where death is no more, and the children of God rejoice in an endless feast of celebration.

Paul uses military imagery also to describe our missionary purpose, but the breastplate and helmet are not to defend us against reality. Rather they defend us from those forces that mean to harden our hearts with the lie of despair and they are to guard our minds against the lie that God is absent or vengeful.

If we expect God to set things right, and if deep inside we can see how much the world needs to be right, then even though we live in a dark time, we are equipped with a great gift, the light of hope. If we live with such an expectation, then it is impossible for us to be as those who live in the darkness without that light. If this world, with all its danger and despair, is all there is, then our best course is to get through it any way we can. All we can or should really do is to make sure that our own lot is as comfortable and secure as we can make it, and if we cannot escape the problems of the world, then our next best course is to anesthetize ourselves as best we can.

The best thing to do in darkness is to sleep, wrapped in blankets and hidden in a locked fortress, and if we must be awake, the best thing is to fill ourselves with whatever will desensitize us to our situation, food or drugs or alcohol or mountains of material goodies.

Paul is urging us to resist the powerful forces that seek to desensitize, dehumanize and anesthetize us. Our hearts and minds are their targets. They seek to harden our hearts to the suffering of others, they seek to confuse our minds with fear and selfish concerns. They want us to stop caring. They want us to stop thinking. They want us to forget the promises of God and to despair of his coming.

We have a mission to accomplish as we wait for the coming of the kingdom. This is the reason for the time of waiting. The powers of the world want very badly to put us to sleep. To stay awake therefore and keep working is a great challenge.

For the work we have to do as God’s church is a destabilizing work, an agitating work. In the parable of the talents, Jesus tells the story of three servants given substantial sums to invest by their master while he is gone. Exactly how much they develop their gifts is apparently of no concern to the master, only that they use them to accomplish growth. But the third servant buries his talents in the ground and doesn’t use them at all, and even though he gives back all the talents he was given, he is nevertheless cast out as worthless.

Our work as the people of God in this place is to call forth the children of God hidden among our neighbors and our community, to awaken them and train them for the coming of the kingdom. We must not become complacent and think that this is not going to happen, just because it hasn’t happened yet. We must not set the treasure God has given each one of us and set it on a shelf, saying , “there’s plenty of time for that later.”

We must not reduce a gospel of revolutionary transformation of the world to a gospel of community niceness and congeniality. We must not reduce a global and communal spirituality to a private and personal piety. God wants to change the world and he has called us to prepare the way.

He is coming, and he is coming soon.

Amen.