The End of the World

November 11, 2008 by djackson.

Getting Ready for the End of the World: A Sermon for Sunday, November 16, 2008
Matthew 25.14-30

Introduction

It’s the end of the year. It’s also the end of the world. You might not have known that.

If you didn’t know, it’s probably because you regulate your life, including your church life, by the calendar of empire. We got our calendar from the Roman empire, and that’s how most of us in the free church mark time: New Year’s on January 1, all of that. Ironic that we calibrate ourselves according to the world system that once sought to destroy us, the arguable heavy of the book of Revelation, that great mystical melodrama that closes the curtain of our canon. In these latter days, empire has reasserted itself through the commercial calendar (made-for-Hallmark holidays like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day and the annual auto-de-fe of Christmas shopping), the political calendar (Fourth of July, Memorial Day), the educational calendar (Spring Break, summer holiday), and the financial calendar (the fiscal year begins in October; so do church budget cycles and stewardship campaigns). So we think the year ends on December 31. As to the world ending, well, we don’t really believe it will. We may talk about it but our computers - supplied, by the way, courtesy of the empire - come equipped with calendars that run far into a very calculable calendar. Wall Street and Madison Avenue hang their neon rainbows in the night time skyline to proclaim the promise, “While the industrial/military complex remains, investment and dividend, bear and bull markets, summer vacation and winter vacation, day-shift and night-shift shall not cease.”

But in ancient times, the church rebelled against empire’s calendar. In the third and fourth centuries persecuted believers developed their own way of marking time, one that set its sextant according to the magi’s star and the blazing light of Easter’s empty tomb. According to that calendar, the year begins four weeks before Christmas in a season called Advent. In Advent, the church, a trifle battered by a long sojourn among the tents of Kedar, reorients herself along the twin poles of the past and the future. She remembers a time before Christ came, and enters again the yearning of captive Israel who yearns for Immanuel’s arrival. She also gazes to a time when Christ shall come again and gather all things to himself. From there, we’re off! At Christmas, we rejoice in Jesus’ birth. At Epiphany we kneel with the magi and recognize the world-wide nature of his kingdom. Through Lent we train in the ascesis of the desert because we know the cross is coming and that the flesh is weak. On Good Friday we gaze at the cross; Jesus takes our medicine without a spoonful of sugar and we watch without an anesthetic. On Holy Saturday we rest in benumbed bewilderment in the ache of an unanswered question. Easter bursts forth from the tomb and for fifty days we walk with our Lord in white. On Pentecost Sunday the fire falls. The Comforter cries havoc and lets slip the dogs of spiritual warfare. The church moves forward to win the world with weapons of love, looking every day for her Lord’s return: “Even so, Lord Jesus, come.”

And then, well, and then we’re looking at six months of what the liturgical calendar calls “Ordinary Time,” plain old time when we just have to be the church until Jesus comes. Then comes today, this Sunday, the final Sunday in Ordinary before next week starts the whole thing over. And you know what? Jesus hasn’t come. Again. For roughly the two thousandth time. It’s the end of the year and we’re out of time and no trumpet call splits the eastern sky. It’s the end of the world and we’re running ninety miles an hour into the concrete embankment of history with no time to put on the brakes.

So what do we do today, this Sunday, at the end of the year and the end of the world?

The Text

Jesus, of course, saw this one coming. In Matthew 24 he sits with his disciples on a hill outside Jerusalem and has a chat with them about what lies ahead. The whole scene has an eerie, Jonah-ish feel to it. Like that draftee prophet, Jesus belches out a one-liner sermon of judgment before he blows town to sit at his ease on a hill-side seat, a luxury skybox from which to watch the fireworks begin. Of course there are differences: Jonah would gladly roast weenies on the flaming wreckage of Nineveh while Jesus returns to ground zero to face in his own flesh the righteous rounds of the Father’s firing squad. Jonah would gladly pull the trigger. Jesus volunteers to be the bullet sponge. Jonah sparks repentance he wishes hadn’t happened. Jesus repents for sin he knows he didn’t commit. Jonah reached Nineveh after being shanghaied in the belly of a whale. Jesus entered our world from the womb of a woman. Still, the parallels intrigue me.

At any rate, Jesus lets loose with a wild, windmilling sermon about the ultimate end. He gives us false Christs and the Antichrist, televangelists and refugees. He likens the Second Coming to a killing field where the buzzard-count reveals the body-count, an appearance so powerful you could no more hide it than cover up the stench a ripe corpse on a hot day.

And then he tells five stories, parables that only Matthew records, though all three synoptic gospels contain the sermon itself. In the rest of chapter twenty-four and on through the end of twenty-five, we have the parable of the Home Security System, the parable of the Drunken Butler, the parable of the Wedding Crashers, the parable of the Venture Capitalist, and the parable of the Last Round-Up. None of them, interestingly enough, provides any sort of logarithm for calculating when the Lord will return. Not one chart for decoding the tea-leaves in your Lord’s Supper cup, not a single schematic of the Zion Zodiac to plot the horoscope of the eschaton.

That’s a little disappointing to most of us, so we press the text pretty hard. I’ve read arguments against torture as a means of interrogation because, the thinking goes, at some point a prisoner starts making stuff up, giving information he doesn’t actually possess, just to bring an end to the pain. This truth escapes the Guantanamo Bay school of hermeneutics that has, for a couple of millennia now, waterboarded Jesus’ words in order to force him to tell us what he said in the first place that he doesn’t know (Mt 24.36). Since the incarnation is not play-acting and Philippians Two is true, Jesus voluntarily entered our own limitations and told us from the inside how to live a life where we know the end is coming but don’t know when. The key, he says, is to focus less on how long we have to live, and more on how we live.

In the first story, the Parable of the Home Security System (Mt 24.42-44), Jesus offers the rather simple observation that it doesn’t do much good to put in a burglar alarm after you’ve already been robbed. In the Parable of the Last Round Up, he reminds us that behavior is a better barometer of belief than creeds or confessions. But I want to focus on those middle three stories, which I believe form an intentional trilogy. Jesus gives basically the same message but modifies and expands it each time. It is variations on a theme, slowly building to the finale.

The theme is clear enough: since you won’t have time to get ready, you need to stay ready. But the Lord offers us three groups of folks who fail in different ways. The Drunken Butler makes the mistake of thinking that a Second Coming delayed is a Second Coming denied. “My master is not coming for a long time.” The verb comes from the Greek chronos, as in chronloogy; we get it again in 25.5. It contrasts with the word kairos which refers to seasons or moments of time. This guy basically falls back on the conception of time shared by pagans and scientists - a closed system inevitably on its way to nowhere. He squanders his resources by ignoring time.

The Wedding Crashers make the mistake of assuming that a Second Coming is a Coming Soon. In an initial burst of enthusiasm they literally burn out, torching the oil of their spiritual fervor as a night-light for a late-night nap. When the groom finally shows at midnight (possibly he’d been delayed long enough to creep the house in the first of the parables), they find no fuel to strike even a spark of welcome. These women find themselves scurrying the streets in the dark, hampered by those ridiculous bridesmaids dresses, the puffy sleeves catching on display racks at the convenience store, the Scarlet O’Hara skirts stained black with grease from the parking lot. By the time they return their hair has collapsed into their faces and their makeup run like the Dutchmen at Chancellorsville until the bridegroom (they weren’t his friends in the first place; bunch of sorority sisters his future wife trucked in from out of town) didn’t recognize them; their own mothers probably couldn’t have given a positive ID. They exhaust their resources by trying to calculate time.

But then there’s the last parable in the trilogy, the one that gets the most press and the most preaching. And the problem here is one of trying to hang onto resources that should be invested. All three servants avoid the errors of the two previous parables: they never doubt the master will return, and they never try to guess how soon that will be. They know two things: they need a strategy for squaring the books when the boss calls for an accounting, and they need a strategy sufficiently long-term to allow for market fluctuations.

The first couple of junior execs go for maximum ROI. They sink their money into the marketplace. (Homiletics speculates that they sank their bundle into the oil market, selling marked-up lamp fuel to late-night bridesmaids!) They probably have to ride out a few bear markets, spend a few uncomfortable weeks waiting for the federal bailout, but they stay in for the long haul and come out way ahead. The third-stringer, of course, takes a different tack. His Depression-era parents taught him not to trust the market. He hides his cash in a hole and his head in the sand and fails even to keep up with the rate of inflation.

But what’s the real problem here? I mean, the boss promotes the first two - corner offices, stock options and a company car. He fires the second guy, and with extreme prejudice: casts him into the outer darkness of eternal unemployment with a promise that he’ll never work again. We might have expected something less harsh: withhold his Christmas bonus, maybe, or bust him down to the mailroom. But the problem here is not financial; it’s theological.

The two responses reveal two truths about the boss. Or rather, the first set of responses reveals two, while the second reveals only one. The guy is a tough CEO, no doubt about it. Even his successful employees are careful to act “immediately” (v.16), a clear sign that they know this dude means business. His response to the slacker shows that they didn’t get it wrong by much. Shoot, even the boss himself doesn’t try to deny his VP’s character sketch: “You knew I reap where I did not sow and gather where I scattered no seed.” Fear is a rational (and highly motivating) response to such a man. Both the good and the bad workers got this part of the picture right.

But the first two underlings realized something else. They saw the other side of the chief’s personality. Maybe he did reap where he didn’t sow, but in this case he’s sowing to the tune of some pretty big bucks. He may on occasion gather without scattering, but here we find him scattering like a madman. As David Ashley White’s hymn reminds us,

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
like the wideness of the sea;
there’s a kindness in his justice,
which is more than liberty.

These guys find their fires fueled by the twin sources of fear and favor, expectation and extravagance. The second slave sees only half the truth. In theology, a half-truth is known as a heresy. As Homiletics phrases it, the first two servants love the master while fearing him, while the second fears without loving.

G. K. Chesterton points to this very practical aspect of Christianity. “Courage,” he wrote,

is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

Perhaps we see the ultimate example in the cross of Our Lord; perhaps even in the water and wine that gush from the gash of the brutal post-mortem of a Roman crime-scene investigator. He taught us to drink death in the wine that portrays his blood in order that we might quench our thirst for the living water.

The Lesson

So what does this parable say to the saints who stand once again at the end of the year and at the end of the world? Rather, let me take them in reverse order.

To return to where I began, we stand at the end of the world. We’ve relived the story one more time. We anticipated Jesus almost twelve months ago; we received him a month after that and waited for the wise men to wise up and worship alongside us. We watched and prayed as he won for us in the desert, then waited in agony as he went from that tune-up fight to the tri-mountain championship match: round one in the grotto of Gethsemane, round two at the Hill called Calvary, round three in a graveyard on the Mount of Olives. We walked with him for a season until his backward-cast fire fell at Pentecost. Then we went to work and waited as we worked and looked each day for his return.

And it hasn’t happened.

Sure, the world could end today, but what if it doesn’t? Sure, the Lord could return before this sermon ends, but what if that doesn’t happen?

Well, then - we gear up for the next go-round. We start it all over, we live another year, not trapped in a ceaseless cycle of certain doom, but shot forth into another opportunity to know God better. We live large on the largess of a lavish Lord who cares enough about winning to risk losing it all. We embrace a fear that is only the flip-side of love. We sit with Jesus for a breathing moment on the side of Olivet and gaze at a city doomed to fall. If it hasn’t fallen yet, we do not despair that our master won’t make good, but instead rejoice that we have more time to reap rewards from the reckless investments of his grace.

“The mass of men” (Chesterton again) “always look backwards . . . .the only corner where they in any sense look forwards is the little continent where Christ has His Church.” We look forwards because we have something - Someone - to look forward to. We look forward to his return and, if he doesn’t return, we look forward to his coming, birth, suffering, death, resurrection, ascension, sending of the Spirit - all over again.

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