An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Ready, Coming or Not

A sermon on 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 & Matthew 25:1-13 by Nathan Nettleton

Some of you may have noticed that, even though Advent is still three weeks away, our Bible readings tonight were beginning to sound a lot like Advent with its themes of the long anticipated coming of the Lord and our readiness for everything to change. You weren’t wrong. Once upon a time, Advent was longer the present four weeks, and you can still see traces of the older longer Advent in the selection of readings in the lectionary. So tonight we heard the first of a set of three so-called judgement parables from Matthew’s gospel, the one about the five bridesmaids who were ready and waiting and the five who were caught napping and unprepared. And also we heard an extract from Paul’s correspondence with the Thessalonians in which he uses some imagery that has become a favourite of those who like to pre-construct the vision of exactly what the end of time and the coming of the Lord will look like. The Apostle speaks of “the dead in Christ being raised first” and then “we who are alive being caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.”

I want to suggest to you tonight that these readings and their dramatic imagery shed at least as much light on some things that are taking place in our congregation right now as they do on any kind of sneak preview of the logistics of the end of time.

In order to get to that point though, I need to first detour via a couple of the questions about the imagery that the Apostle Paul uses. This stuff about being caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the middle of the air has been so sensationalised by those who are fanatical about mapping out the end of the world that it is difficult for us to hear it any other way than their way. But I’m pretty sure that the Apostle did not have twenty first century apocalypse fanatics in mind as his target audience when he wrote. The main question he was addressing in this passage was not “what will happen to us?”, but “what has happened to believers who have already died?” This letter is probably the first to have been written of all the New Testament writings, and Christian understandings were still very much in their early development. The believers knew that Jesus was all about life. He had risen from the dead and promised that all of us would have life that death was powerless to extinguish. But it wasn’t long before the reality that believers still died and were buried became obvious and raised the obvious questions about what these promises meant. Did it mean that perhaps these departed loved ones had not been saved by God after all? Did it mean that they were actually like the foolish and unprepared bridesmaids who thought they were ready but were not? Were they lost forever? So Paul is saying, “this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.” So first and foremost, Paul is writing a message of comfort. Those who have died in Christ are not lost, and nor are they in any way disadvantaged when it comes to inclusion in the coming life of God. They will be raised first, reunited with us, and together we will enjoy God and one another forever. So, although it is normal to grieve being parted from them for now, the Apostle is reassuring us that there is no need to lose heart or lose our faith. All will be well.

But in the midst of that, he does use this image that has caused so much wild speculation: “we will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air.” People have conflated this with a reference that Jesus made to people being snatched away, and developed a whole crazy theory of a rapture in which the chosen ones suddenly go shooting off into the air to be safely with God while the rest of the world self-destructs. And that is totally not what the Apostle was intending us to hear. Part of the problem of course is that we are not hearing it through the ears of those who are familiar with the usual symbolism of the first century middle eastern world. In the ancient Middle East, if a king was making a visit to one of the towns he ruled, it would have been the height of rudeness for the townsfolk not to go out to meet him. You can’t expect him to ride into town without an enthusiastic escort. So as soon as his approach was known, a crowd of townsfolk would rush out to meet him half way and escort him triumphantly into their town, which was of course greatly honoured by his visit. So when Paul talks of us going up to meet the coming Lord, that is the picture he is drawing on. And of course, that makes a huge difference, because we are not shooting away from here to escape all this and be safely with God somewhere else. Instead we are going out to meet him and to return with him as he comes to be present and active among us in our world. It is not about us going elsewhere to be with God, but God coming here to be with us. This is a welcoming party, not the great escape.

So perhaps you are already getting a hint of why I say that these readings speak to things happening among us right now, rather than to the flight plan for some future end. What we are on about here is recognising and welcoming and cooperating with what God is coming to do among us, in our world. And the question for us, as it was for the bridesmaids in the parable, is are we expecting something to happen and are we ready to join in when it does? Are we ready to jump up and welcome the coming Christ and get on board with what he is doing, or are we asleep at the wheel, not really expecting that anything is going to change and not too sure that we would want it to anyway?

This year we have had some consultants from the Baptist Union come in and help us conduct a review of our mission as a congregation. We sought to uncover the answers to some questions about how mission is understood among us, and what people here think our church is doing that contributes to God’s work in the world beyond our walls, and whether there are new things that people believe God is calling us to engage in. In some ways the review and its final report were a bit of a non-event. Most of us could have easily predicted most of its findings, and it didn’t uncover any startling ideas about new missional ventures that numerous people were dreaming of if only they could find each other. But it certainly wasn’t a waste of time because what it has already done is provide a reference point that helps us to see where we have been and where we are going. You see, the report showed that at the time when we did the survey, there was not much sense of new directions, and the consultants made some suggestions for how we might foster some new creative thinking about how we engage with the world. But by the time the report landed, it was already looking out of date because a number of new things have started to bubble up among us, and the report helps us to recognise the significance of that. There are presently several good creative conversations underway. There is one about forming a Reconciliation Action Plan around connecting with the indigenous people of our area. There is another about ways of opening up our garden space as a gift to the local community. There is another about redeveloping our website and social media presence. And there is another about engaging with Muslim people at a time when they are being treated with suspicion and hostility. And while all of these conversations are very much in their infancy, they are a sign of something new going on among us, something that suggests that the Lord is on the move and that we are eagerly going out to meet him and welcome him into our community.

So what does the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids have to say to us in this emerging situation? You see, it was the task of all ten to await the approach of the bridegroom, and to go out and welcome him when he arrived, but only half of them proved themselves ready. Don’t try to over-read this parable. It is a parable, not an allegory. Although you can make some useful points by trying to give a meaning to everything, speculating about whether the oil stands for faith or hope and things like that, parables are not really supposed to be read on that everything-equals-something kind of level. The point Jesus is making is about readiness, expectancy. Some of the bridesmaids really expected something to happen, and so when it did, they were ready to get on board. Others didn’t really seem to think anything was going to happen. They probably didn’t even realise that they had stopped believing. There are lots of people in our churches who see themselves as passionately committed to embracing the new things that God is doing, but who fiercely resist any and every actual change in the life and ministry of their churches. They believe in change, so long as it only affects other people. And so when God approaches and the Holy Spirit begins to move as a wind of change and renewal, they are out of oil and quite unable to rise up to enthusiastically welcome the Lord into their church and their community.

The truth, of course, is that God is always drawing near and looking for those who are ready to jump on board and welcome God’s culture into new places in new ways. And so perhaps it is true that there is a close relationship between our expectant hope and the reality of God’s presence. Perhaps it is actually our readiness, our anticipation of God’s presence and action among us that enables God’s presence and action to be recognised and experienced. Perhaps if we are not ready to go out and welcome the Lord, the Lord just moves on past in search of a community that has its lamps lit and its celebration raring to go. Perhaps the same is true as we gather here around this table. If we are expecting nothing but the same-old same-old, then that is probably all we will get. But if we gather here expectantly, eagerly anticipating that the Lord will meet us here and breathe new life into us and feed us with the bread and wine of ever-living love and mercy, transforming us in the image of God, then truly anything is possible. That is the kind of welcome that will enable us to joyously bring our risen Lord into our community, into the paces where we live and work and play. The promise of meeting the coming Lord in the middle of the air is a promise for here and now, for tonight, in this air, right here around the Lord’s word and table, that we might meet him in joyous hope and welcome him in to bring new life to us and through us, for the salvation of all.

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