Both Al Gore and George Bush have said that all they really want is a fair and accurate count.  Who wins, so they say, isn’t as important as knowing for certain that the man who stands to take the oath of office is the one who was actually chosen to do so by the American people.  So, all they really want is a fair and accurate count.  There’s only one very major problem.  We can’t all agree on exactly what fair and accurate is.  Perhaps this will serve as a humble reminder that, when it comes to morality, our current President isn’t the only one who struggles with knowing what is is.  Jesus made it clear that God doesn’t have that problem.

The Bible reveals that God is the standard by which every other standard is ultimately judged.  As creator of all that is, he is the gravitational center not just of the physical universe but of the moral universe as well.  Jesus came to reveal to us the righteousness of God.  To demonstrate, to live out among us, who God is and, therefore, what is ultimately good.  And though we have all fallen short of living up to what is ultimately good, that good hasn’t been altered one iota by our failure to live up to it.  What is ultimately good is not the real question.  Jesus has shown us that.  The real question is how each and every one of us measures up to it. 

We spend a great deal of time and energy celebrating the first coming of Jesus, as well we should.  Every Christmas, we reaffirm our belief in what the angel told Joseph, “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us.’”  (Matthew 1:20-23)  In the text we have read this morning, Jesus took things a step further by revealing that his first coming would not be his last.  In his own words, he said he would be coming again “in a cloud with great power and glory.”  Now, that’s good news.  It’s also sobering news.

Jesus said, “‘when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.’”  That’s very good news.  We don’t use the word “redemption” much in our daily conversation.  But, it’s not a difficult thing to understand.  When I was a little boy, grocery stores gave their customers S&H green stamps with their purchase.  Every dollar worth of groceries would get so many stamps and every stamp had so many cents worth of value.  When you had collected enough of them, you could trade them in for all kinds of merchandise.  I can still remember my mother coming home from the grocery store and licking those stamps and putting them in little books.  But, the real fun came when we got to go with her to the place where she traded them in for stuff.  And, the place we took our S&H green stamps to trade them in for stuff was called the S&H redemption center. 

When Jesus used the word redemption he was telling us that our lives are headed somewhere hopeful.  That’s what the word redemption ultimately means.  It means that there is hope for you and me beyond our miserable inability to live up to God’s standard of goodness.  Because, when Jesus came the first time to die on the cross, he traded his life for ours.  When he comes again, he will complete his redemption of our lives from this broken and fallen world.  That’s very good news.

But, Jesus’ made it quite clear that his second coming is also sobering news.  About that day he said that we should “be on guard” and “be alert at all times” and that we should be “praying that” we “may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.’”  So, how is it that what is good news can also be sobering news that has us on guard and alert and praying for strength? 

Well, again, the good news is that this is all headed somewhere.  Think about it.  What gives life much of its meaning is the knowledge that it is going to end.  The fact that we know time is running out seasons our days with an intensity of significance they otherwise would not have.  The student who started school in August was able to endure this semester, in part, because she knew it was going to end just before Christmas.  But, if she was wise, she paid attention to how she spent her time during the semester because she knew that, when it ended, she would give account for what she did with her time. 

Jesus’ promise of his second coming gives us hope that this is all headed somewhere.  It should also sober us to thoughtful living because he said that, where this is all headed is a rendezvous with God.  An encounter with God, indeed, in which a final, fair and accurate account will be given.  Jesus referred to this more than once in his teachings.  In the parable of the sheep and the goats, for example, he said that all of humanity would be gathered before him in judgment and that the specific thing that would distinguish the just from the unjust would be how they treated their fellowman, especially those who were on the down and out side of life.  (Matthew 25:31-46)  The apostle Paul went so far as to say that, “we make it our aim to please (God).  For all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.”  (2 Corinthians 5:9-10) 

The second coming of Jesus will bring with it a final account in which any questions about what is fair and just and good will be settled forever.  Justice will finally and forever be served.  That’s good news.  Anyway you look at it, that’s also sobering news.  Because it must mean that, when it comes to injustice and unfairness in this world, none of us are exactly innocent bystanders.  When justice is finally served, each of us will get a portion. 

The other day my eleven-year-old son and I were riding along through a nice neighborhood not far from ours.  It was a beautiful day.  The multi-colored leaves were just spectacular.  I said, “Cameron, look at all those beautiful trees.”  And, he said, “yea, and all those beautiful houses, too.”  He went on to say, yet again, how much he wishes we had one of those bigger houses.  And, I’m kind of baffled by all of that, to be honest.  By a long way, ours is not the biggest or most expensive house in town.  But, it’s the nicest house in which I’ve ever lived.  And, I’ve been trying to find ways of saying to my son that, right now, I’m living in about all the house my conscience can afford even if my budget could afford more.  I mean, how much stuff do we have to have and why do we think we have to have it?  It’s a question well worth pondering.

Jesus said, that, with regard to the day when we’ll give account, we should “Be on guard so that (our) hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, (so) that day does not catch (us) like a trap.”  We know what drunkenness is, some too well.  What is interesting is that Jesus put dissipation, an obsession with physical or material pleasure, on the same moral level as abusing chemicals to avoid facing reality.  Jesus is saying that it isn’t just the stupor of abused alcohol than can distract us from thoughtful living but also the stupor of materialistic abuse that can as well.  Sorry to ruin all of your Christmas shopping!  But, maybe we ought to think about what it is we’re doing in order to get and have all this stuff.  God is.

A few weeks ago I wrote in my weekly pastor’s column about my late mentor Glen Edwards and how he would occasionally go to the local charity hospital and just sit in the emergency room.  He said it was good for his soul.  Glen died before we got to finish that conversation.  So, I never got to hear him define exactly how thoughtfully observing the suffering of others nourished his soul.  I then asked the reader, “What do you think?”  To my surprise, I got several responses.  One of them, from one of our members, speculated that Glen sat in the emergency room because “it made him realize that a completely different world exists, below the surface of new cars, good jobs, presents at Christmas and superficiality.” 

Again, what do you think?  And, more specifically, is there anything about the way you think that makes you think about the completely different world that exists beneath the superficial one in which we are trading the precious moments of our lives, like so many stamps, for stuff that doesn’t matter? 

Jesus said that the most dangerous living is superficial living.  Living that never stops to think about consequences or deeper values or eternal substance.  We are either living with a sense of expectancy about his coming again because we know it brings our redemption or we are living superficially and will find ourselves caught by it, “unexpectedly, like a trap.”  Either way, it’s coming.  When it is coming is not as significant as whether we are alert to it, as Jesus said, “at all times.” 

My sister and brother-in-law live on the outskirts of Alamogordo, New Mexico, out in the desert.  Once, when we were visiting them, the boys called me out to see a big ditch they’d found in the desert.  It was big, sure enough.  About fifteen or twenty feet deep and just as wide or more in places.  We climbed and explored and had a great time.  That is, until we got home and told my sister what we’d been up to.  That’s when we found out that we had not been playing in a ditch, but an arroyo.  Arroyos are gulches in the desert.  Dry most of the time.  But, dangerously misleading.

The mountains that border the desert near their home are several miles away.  The odd thing is that it can be raining up in the mountains and someone can be standing in the desert under clear skies.  When it rains in the mountains and the water runs down to the desert it travels through the arroyos.  That is one of the ways the desert gets what little water it does.  It’s just that, by the time it reaches the desert floor, the runoff turns into a raging torrent several feet high sweeping away everything in its path.  Nearly every year someone gets killed playing in an arroyo because they don’t know the water was coming until it was too late.  You just have to assume that there is never a good time to be down in an arroyo.  Eventually, it will rain in the mountains and the water will come.  That’s not the question.  And, whether an arroyo carries a river into the desert to bring life to what is desolate or a river of destruction that carries your life away to desolation has everything to do with where you are standing when it comes. 

God will take a fair and accurate account.  That’s not the question.  When he’ll do it is not ours to know.  We just know its coming.  And, whether the second coming of Jesus is a river of justice that sweeps us away to desolation or a river of life that sweeps us up to ultimate joy will have everything to do with where we are standing when it comes.  Jesus said, “pray that you may have the strength to . . . stand before the Son of Man.” 

People get all worked up over trying to figure out when this is all going to happen.  Preachers predict and draw their charts and write books about it and pocket multi-million dollar profits because playing on people’s fears has always been an easy way to make both a name and money.  The truth is, every generation since Jesus first came has had legitimate reason to believe that he was coming again in theirs.  Yet, when Jesus was here the first time, he said that even he didn’t know the appointed time of his return.  (Matthew 24:36)  And, all Jesus said that we really need to know is that we are living thoughtful lives and that we are clear about where we stand with him.  Because the one who is coming back is the one who traded his life for each and every one of us. 

As long as we are standing with Jesus, when that day of fair and accurate accounting comes, we’ll get the best God has to give.  We’ll even discover that, in only the way God can make it happen, even his justice will come to us as his redemption.