Advent Lutheran Church

"The End Is Near!"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            One of my favorite cartoonists is Gary Larson, the creator of the Far Side series.  And my favorite Far Side cartoon is the one depicting a young man at the Midvale School for the Gifted.  Have you seen it?  He’s standing at the top of the stairs, a book under one arm, the other arm extended out with his hand pushing against the door, trying to get in.  He’s straining against the door, pushing with all his might, and the sign just above his hand clearly says, “Pull.”

            I chuckle every time I see that cartoon, because I’ve been there.  I’ve occasionally found myself pushing against a door that says “pull” and pulling on a door that says “push.”  Judging from your reaction, I see that I’m not alone in this experience.  We’re not really very good at reading signs.  We certainly were not back in Jesus’ day.

            The word “sign” is a very loaded word in the Bible.  A sign was a way of authenticating one’s identity, and of proving one’s word.  People would routinely demand that Jesus perform some sign to prove that he was of divine origin, as he said.  But Jesus would no sooner heal someone or perform some other miracle that clearly was evidence of the presence of the Kingdom of God than they would demand another, more convincing proof.  It’s interesting that Jesus never complied with those demands; he simply went about the work of his Father’s kingdom knowing full well that those works would be seen and interpreted for what they were only through the eyes of faith.

            Part of the journey of discipleship involves developing the ability to pick up and interpret God-given signs.  That’s part of what Jesus is trying to get across to his disciples in our Gospel lesson.  They’re standing in the temple in Jerusalem, the very heart of Israel’s identity as a nation and a chosen people.  The disciples are absolutely taken with the splendor of the structure.  They’re captivated by the majesty of the masonry and the gold work, the massive stones that have been assembled as the walls, the very permanence of the place.

            Jesus is impressed by none of it.  “Take a good look,” he tells them.  “All that you see, all that you think is so permanent: there is coming a day – and soon – when this will all be dust.”  The disciples want to know when this is going to happen, and how will they know it’s all just around the corner.  But Jesus says that none of the signs will be ambiguous or hidden; they won’t be pleasant, he says, but they’ll be clear: wars, earthquakes, famine, outbreaks of disease, persecution of the faithful.

And as Jesus makes his checklist, we’re tempted to check the headlines: War – Afghanistan; Earthquakes – Haiti and South America; Famine – Africa; Disease – Haiti; persecution of the faithful – China, Afghanistan, parts of Central America.  These signs are now!  In fact, these signs of the coming of God into our world are always now!  There hasn’t been a time in human history when these signs that Jesus talks about haven’t been occurring somewhere on the planet!  The time for the preparation for the end is always urgent, and it is always now!

But what are we preparing for, exactly?  That’s the good news, and it comes to us not only in the Gospel lesson but also from the Old Testament reading from Malachi. Malachi was a prophet who lived about 500 years before Christ, and his message was the same: God is coming into our hearts and into our world, and that’s good news!  But Malachi also pulls no punches: he says that the coming of God will a time of purifying, of refining.

A great temptation is to think of this refining and purifying as being reserved for the “arrogant and evildoers,” and that for us, who revere God’s name, it will be a time only of great goodness and joy. But the truth is: that line of distinction runs not between “us” the righteous and “them” the evildoers, but that that line of distinction runs right down the middle of you, and right down the middle of me.  Luther had it exactly right when he characterized us as both saint and sinner at the same time.  The coming of God will be a time of purifying, when God will strip away all of our impurities to prepare us for the healing that will draw us into the Kingdom of God.

In Flannery O’Connor’s brilliant short story, “Revelation,” we meet the central character, Mr. Turpin.  At first impression, Mrs. Turpin is a nice, mild-mannered, respectable white woman living in the American South in the early years of the 1900s.  In fact, though, she is smug, self-righteous, quietly arrogant.  She looks down her nose at everyone around her.  She has developed a classification for people, one that is based on ownership and race.  She is firmly entrenched on top.  Since she and her husband, Claud, own their own home which sits on a small plot of ground on which they raise pigs, she is obviously superior to those people who only own their home.  And since she is white, she is obviously superior to black people, no matter what they might own. 

She and Claud are in the doctor’s waiting room.  Claud has some medical issue that he wants to see the doctor about, so there they sit with everyone else, packed into a small room, waiting.  Mrs. Turpin strikes up a conversation with the woman sitting next to her, a stranger.  Turns out that she has a daughter, also in the waiting room, a girl named Mary Grace.  She’s sitting clear across the waiting room, reading a book titled “Human Development.”  Mrs. Turpin takes a quick look at the girl and decides instantly that she’s an ugly, surly girl. Mary Grace looks up from her book and shoots a scowl at Mrs. Turpin, then goes back to her reading.

Mrs. Turpin, though, takes that scowl as an occasion to reflect on her own good fortune, and the wonderful fact that she’s not like other folks.  So she breaks into a declaration of praise and says: “If it's one thing I am, it's grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, I just feel like shouting, 'Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!' It could have been different! ... Oh thank you, Jesus, thank you!"

Mary Grace has had enough.  She launches her book from across the waiting room and hits Mrs. Turpin right smack in the middle of the forehead, and in an instant Mary Grace is straddling Mrs. Turpin on the floor, trying to strangle her.  Finally, people pull Mary Grace off of Mrs. Turpin, who sits there, gasping for air, trying to understand what has happened to her.  And Mary Grace looks down at her and calls her a “warthog from hell.”  Later that afternoon, Mrs. Turpin has a conversation with God about all of this; in fact, she’s indignant that God would allow words that gross to be said to someone as good as she: “How,” she asks God, “am I a hog and me both?  How am I saved and from hell too?”

She gets her answer later that day.  Standing in her backyard, she looks up into the late-afternoon sky and has a vision, a revelation from God: She sees a vast river of souls all flowing up to heaven and passing through a field of living fire.  Everyone she has ever known is in that river: white people, black people, crazy people, sane people, young, old; and people she had never met.  And bringing up the rear were she and her husband, Claud.  “They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away” as they flowed heavenward, shouting Hallelujah.

“Even their virtues were being burned away.”  The human virtues that we cultivate are indispensable to living out the Christian life here on earth.  But, important as they are, they won’t buy our way into the Kingdom of God; our salvation is given to us only as a gift that comes from the sacrifice of Christ on our behalf.

Yes, the day that Malachi prophesied is coming, and it will be a day of freedom when God will come and remove once and for all time that barrier of brokenness that separates us from God and from our neighbor, that barrier that keeps from being all that we were meant to be, all that we want to be, always yearning for something more. 

That day is coming, Jesus and Malachi say, and it is coming soon.  The Bible neglects to define “soon,” though, so it could be tomorrow, a couple of weeks or a year or 10,000 years.  But just as part of the journey of discipleship is learning to read the signs of the kingdom, another part of that journey is the willingness to be the signs of that kingdom.  That’s what Jesus is encouraging us to do, to become signs or previews of that kingdom right here and now.

We’ve all been to the movies, sitting there, waiting for the moving to start, when we have to sit though a number of previews of coming attractions.  Once in a while I’ll turn to Susan and say, “You know, I think we just saw the best of that moving right there in the preview.”  Then again, sometimes I’ll watch a preview and say, “Whoa!  I have got to see that movie!”

God calls us and equips us to live as signs of his kingdom as it comes among us.  He wants us to live lives of freedom and grace and forgiveness and peace so that others will look at us sand say, “I have got to be a part of that!”  May God grant you courage and joy, and his own Spirit to guide you, as you become living previews of his kingdom.

            Amen.