All Scriptures quoted are from The New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise quoted.

For one of two reasons, most Christians usually ignore the text for the morning. Maybe they don’t understand or it seems to have no relevance whatsoever to their understanding of the gospel or the way things have turned out in their world or their lives. In other words, they’ve found ways of getting by without getting into God’s word on a daily basis and things seem to be working quite fine, thank you very much. The other reason Christians usually ignore this text is because it is complicated and simply scares them to death. We all tend to do that with things that frighten us. We tend to avoid them rather than explore them.

That may well be the reason most people never read the Bible at all. Either they don’t understand it or they are growing to see the Bible as an ancient text that has no relevance whatsoever to their understanding of the way things have turned out. Or, again, it simply scares them to death.

If we can take even the simplest steps toward a remedy for both of those reasons with this particular passage, this morning’s worship will be very well invested. Hopefully, you will even be able to take something home with you that strengthens your days with hope.

Jesus had just told the disciples two things. One was that the Jerusalem that looked so strong would someday crash like a house of cards in the wind. What he has shown them of Jerusalem’s future from the vantage point of the Mount of Olives would be tantamount to Jesus taking us to one of the Trinity River levies that circles Dallas’s west side and telling us the same thing about all these downtown skyscrapers that are popping up like so many tinker toys overnight. It’s a frightening proposition. Just as Jesus had prophesied, Jerusalem was, in fact, destroyed in 70 A.D. when Jerusalem was, yet again, conquered by a foreign nation.

The second thing Jesus told his disciples was that a day was coming when God would break in on human history and bring it to his purposeful conclusion. In other words, the Jesus who had come once in the manger was saying that he would be returning again someday and that his coming would herald the end of the world as we know it and God’s final judgment of mankind. Does that frighten you? Or, does it give you hope? Here is the worst part. Of that day, we will have no knowledge and over that day we will have no control. It will just happen while people are going about their daily routines.

The first thing we ought to wonder is what all of this has to do with Advent, or the celebration of Jesus’ birth or Christmas as it is more commonly known. Why talk about the second coming of Christ before we’ve adequately discussed the first? If you were asked to pick the text for this morning’s service, would have you chosen this one? It sounds more like gloom and doom than angels-we-have-heard-on-high singing sweetly. Yet, it is Jesus’ way of telling us that his first coming, the one we are celebrating this month, only has true meaning because the work God started in the baby Jesus, the first Advent, he will bring to a conclusion in the second Advent.

Isn’t it true that the thing that quickens our hearts and our minds about life is the knowledge that life will come to an end? Watching the Dallas Cowboys play the Green Bay Packers the other night for the first 11-1 winning streak in franchise history, did you notice how your emotions changed as the time drew nearer and nearer, knowing that the end you wanted was fast approaching? Every single play was given special meaning because it was a play that used time on the clock that could not be recovered.

Or, perhaps, as you were dutifully shopping for Christmas with your wife this past week, each passing moment only encouraged you to remember that the end you wanted was fast approaching. The knowledge of an end gives any moment you are in meaning it wouldn’t have otherwise.

In the text for the morning there are many points of departure for us to get confused and stay lost. I know Christians who look at this text and see only the dramatic, the one left to work and the one taken away. The Left Behind series of books played heavily off of that drama. Others interpret it all differently. They see those as taken away as the unfortunate ones, the ones taken away to judgment, with the ones left behind being blessed with more time to do the Lord’s work. Almost certainly, no matter how many opinions we solicited this morning, we’d never come to a common understanding along those lines. Could we agree on this? We can’t prepare ourselves to celebrate Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem unless we see against the backdrop of God’s grander scheme of things. What if we can back up and take a look at what is clearer?

Jesus was saying that just as in the days of Noah, a history the Jews all knew and held in common, God’s second coming to his world would come at a time people least expect it. They will be busy going about their daily routine, which they should be. Try calling in raptured tomorrow and see how far that gets you with your boss. Jesus did not say taking care of business now was evil. Evil is born in our choice, while taking care of business, to take one eye off of the eternal. Jesus was just pointing out God’s incredible capacity to surprise us in ways we could not imagine.

Has God ever surprised you, broken into your life with a blessing, an opportunity or healing that you didn’t anticipate? This summer, both my illness and my healing were surprises. When did God last surprise you? When you expected it of him or demanded it of him? Or, did he just surprise you? This is very hopeful information for all of us. We have not been abandoned to lives of meaningless routine. Talking with a Christian the other day, he was commenting on how he is not optimistic for America’s future. Because of moral corruption, he believes, America will go the way of all super powers, of Rome, Greece and Great Britain. We don’t know. What we do know is that, in the end, the God who created will again surprise his creation with his presence.

The only other thing Jesus really said in this passage was, “be ready.” So, are you ready? Are you ready for God’s surprise visit into your life? What does ready look like? How do you get ready?

People still ask me if I had any spiritual visions this summer, much like some people report in near-death experiences. I did not. What did experience was this. Though the raw edge of the experience is beginning to wear dull as I busy myself in my daily routine, I came closer than I ever have in my life to fully appreciating the fact that life is fragile and control is nothing but an illusion. Isn’t that why we are warned in scripture about planning for tomorrow as though we can assume tomorrow? (See James 4:13-17.)

As another person put it this week, we are just skating on the edge every day and there’s nothing we can do about it. Except one. Be ready for that day when, however, whenever, you and God have the personal encounter scripture foretells.

If being ready means having made your peace with God through Christ, are you ready? If being ready means extending to someone else the same forgiveness God, in Christ, has extended to you, are you ready? If being ready means devoting your life to the calling that is clearly yours instead of surrendering to a higher paying career but one of a lesser calling, are you ready? Have you come to worship this morning, even to take this Supper, with known sin in your life? How, when and where God will interrupt history as we know it and bring to his purposeful conclusion that which he started, we are not given to know.

That he will do so is as certain as the sun rising in the east and spraying the western sky with gold paint in the shade of evening. The only question we can and must answer is, are we ready?

Jesus has come. Jesus is coming.

Are you ready?