Watching
 Matthew 25:1-13

I don’t know if you know this, but all three of our hymns today come from an American hymnal.  And the first song, of course, came out of Civil War, and the last two are spirituals.  And they are all dealing with the issue of the coming of Christ.  Now the last one that we were singing, you are very familiar with, but the other ones you’re probably not so familiar with.  I want to explain something, because we are going to have a little bit of fun with this.  Back in the day and age when people could not necessarily read and write a lot of songs were mimed.  In other words, the leader would say something, and then the congregation would repeat it, or the leader would sing the parts, like the verses, and then all the congregation would have to do is sing the familiar parts.  This song is written on page 722 of your hymnal.  When it says refrain, the entire congregation sings, and there are parts of it that the leader sings.  Some parts say all are to sing.  So now, what we are going to do with this is, first of all, have a practice run. The choir and Carole are going to sing the first verse so that you can hear it, and it will catch on so you can sing it and not be scared you’re going to mess up.  And then we are going to back and start it all over again; and when Carole raises her hand up, that means you sing.  If her hand is down, it means you don’t sing.  I hope you enjoy this; the words in here are incredible, and I hope it becomes one of your favorite hymns.

 (Music starts)

Good job. I want to do a little side comment before I begin my sermon. Have you ever moved into a new house?  We all have, haven’t we?  Is everything just like the first day or week after you’ve settled in?  Can you imagine what it’s like for a family of 800 people to move into a new home?  What I want to tell you is that we have heard concerns about sound, about temperature, about—I don’t know—even about the fact that the pastor has no hair.  What I want you know is that there are a lot of people on staff and volunteers who are working on these things.  We discovered last week that our speakers are mounted in a place that the architect hadn’t recommended, and this week they are going to be mounted in another place. That’s going to help some with our sound. What I want to remind you of is that settling into a new church is like moving into a new home.  It takes awhile to settle in.  So I just want to ask for your patience as we do that.  The other piece of that is that sometimes, when things are new to us, we react in fear.  And certainly the sound in this room is very different from the sound in the old sanctuary. And I want to tell you the positive thing about that.  Even with all the activity in this room, the hymns sound incredible.  So we are going to think positive, and we are going to work this out.  Above all, we are going to be extremely patient with one another.

I’m going to move on to my sermon and stop commenting on other things.  One of the interesting issues of life is how well prepared we are for things. We modern people live in a very, very rushed world.  Every one of us has schedules stacked to the ceiling.  We’re pushed so hard that we often fail to plan or think ahead.  We know that we should do that, but we always seem to be in such a rush.  The next thing you know is that we find ourselves wondering what the heck is going on.  I can tell you that because I have dealt, in the last twenty years as a pastor, in counseling.  One of the really interesting things for me is that the vast majority of problems that people bring to my office go back to what I will call poor planning.  You know what poor planning is—not thinking things through and not planning ahead.  Just so that you don’t feel embarrassed if you need to come and talk to me about that issue, the biggest problems in my life have come because I haven’t thought ahead or planned ahead.  So it’s not just the lay people, but preachers do the same thing.  There are always those times of our lives when we are caught unexpectedly, and we find ourselves embarrassed because of that.  I’m not going to tell you the name of the person, because we all might descent upon her house.  I remember a couple of weeks after I got here I went to see a member of this congregation.  She asked me if I wanted a piece of pie.  And I said, “Yeah!  How is it that you have fresh pie?”  She answered, “I always have something fresh made in case I have company.”  I’m not going tell you her name or we might show up at her house, and she might be overloaded.  I had to restrain myself from thinking of reasons that I might want to show up again after that visit.  Now that’s what I call thinking ahead—someone planning on having guests.  And always to be ready and prepared for them!  But as we all know, we find ourselves often caught off guard and not ready for certain things.  I remember when our children were young (and all of you who’ve had children can remember this in some form or fashion). We had four children under age five, and when we got up in the mornings, it was like a circus.  Figuring out how to put the children’s clothes on and how to get them fed often made it difficult for Pam and me to figure out when we were going to get dressed.  It just so happened that one of those mornings (and our kitchen door opened up to the carport with a big window) that I was running around the house in my underwear.  I was trying to somehow grab a kid when two very regular church members showed up and looked through the window and said, “Well, good morning Tim.”  I thought, “Oh no!”  So I said, Good morning!” as I flew into the bedroom to grab a pair of pants.  Now I certainly wasn’t prepared for company that time.

As we look back at the text in Matthew’s Gospel, we always see the tension between Jesus and the generation that wrote the Gospels.  We see the tension of those things, which were happening in the lives of the early church people as they tried to remember what Jesus had told them.  And somehow what He had told them was to help them sustain the faith that they needed.  Remember it was in 70 AD that the temple was destroyed, and those living in the Holy Land were scattered off to some unknown land with people they didn’t know.  Whatever business a person had spent many generations building up was gone.  Life was pretty rough.  As we hear the Gospel of Matthew, we can understand that sense of chaos this early community of Matthew was living in.  We can understand somehow that they were wondering when it was that Jesus was coming back.  Those people had the same feelings that the people who wrote the hymns that we sang this morning.  Both the early church and the hymn writers were looking ahead to the triumphal time when those who had tried to follow Jesus could finally know peace in the world.  But also there is that tension that the coming of Christ also brings the possibility of judgment—and we might not be ready for that.  So as we hear in this parable that Jesus told and then though the early church experience, we try to understand something in our own faith journey as well.  Since September 11^th just over a year ago, we as Americans have begun to think much differently.  We lived in a very secure world, didn’t we?  We knew that there were problems in other places of the world.  We knew that there were people who lived in fear.   Somehow death and destruction may come to them at any moment in the chaos.  There was some smug sense in our own lives of being safe and secure.  Whatever illusion we lived with about that is gone.  We didn’t just lose the people who died in the World Trade Center, Pennsylvania field, and Pentagon that day.  In many ways we, as Americans, lost an innocence that we will probably never regain.  I can appreciate, I think, the anxiety that those early Christians must have felt.  We feel the cracks of the world that we live in suddenly not seem as tiny as they had seemed at one time.  We can all think about that, particularly on Veterans’ Day weekend.  We think about other wars, and we remember that they were always the wars to end all wars.  We find ourselves today being reminded that human nature never changes.  Our nature leads to consequences in life that remind us of how fragile we are.

I want to make a few comments—a couple of preachy comments—and you will just have to take them for what they are.  Sometimes there is an arrogance that we have as modern people.  We tend to think that we’ve got control over our world.  We tend to think that we can mastermind and control everything.  In the end we can make things happen the way they ought to happen.  We are not unlike those people who tried to build the Tower of Babel to get up to God.  We are not unlike Adam and Eve who bit into the forbidden fruit because they too were trying to be like God.  The gift of uncertain times is that we are reminded of one thing. There is only one God.  There is only one Creator and Sustainer of the universe.  And unless we come to understand that and our fragile relationship with God, then we can’t ever be prepared for whatever may come into our lives.

I’m reminded during every sermon that I preach how my words come out of my head and out of my own faith journey.  However, as you all sit there and hear my sermon, you respond to it depending upon where you are in life.  And as you sit there this morning, some of you are probably like me.  Life is going along fairly well.  You are experiencing no major ripples.  You are feeling pretty good about your life, and you understand that your day-to-day struggles are part of life.  But there may be others sitting there that have also known the chaos that can come into life so unexpectedly.  We know that experience of being unprepared.  Maybe you are struggling in a very personal way with that sense of “Oh Lord, when will you come?”

Jesus’ parable reminds us today that we must be vigilant in our watching.  We must be vigilant for seeing God when He come into our lives.  We must be vigilant in our watch for those times when calamity comes so unexpectedly.  We must be prepared.  How do we do that?  Now, I have three things that I’m going to suggest, and I suggest that you go home and think of some more.  One of my favorite phrases in the Bible, which you’ve heard from me before, comes from Psalms.  This phrase is repeated over and over in the Psalms: God’s steadfast love and faithfulness endure forever.  This is true even in a world that is always changing and never predictable.  Even when our lives, which somehow seem to be on a good trajectory, suddenly turn and go another direction, we must still remember that the only thing that is constant in life is God.  God is a never-changing God.  And God’s love and faithfulness will remain with us in good times as well as in bad.  The Christian faith has never meant to be lived individually or alone.  A centerpiece of that early church experience was community.  No matter how good or bad their lives got, they knew that those regular gatherings of the body of Christ and communal prayers were what they needed in their journeys.  We must practice regular gathering of the people of God.  It’s what I like to call a build-up of faith.  Over time regular worship strengthens our faith and strengthens our sense of God’s steadfast love in our life.  This is a necessary part of the Christian walk.  Gathering together helps us, so when the rough times come, we will be prepared.  We also need time on our own each day as we continue our faith journey.  During that time we pray and read the Bible.  During this time we struggle not as a community, but as individuals, about where God is calling us.  We try to discern what it is that God has called us to.  I told you there were three ways, but there are actually four.  The fourth one is to draw people whom we know that we can trust and know as true friends to us.  They keep us honest on our faith journey, and they help us move day to day.  Jesus reminds us that we need to be prepared and ready for His coming into our lives. We need to be ready for the times when life turns into chaos.  When the storms of life come—whether global, individual, or to families, we can make it though the stormy sea to the other side.  We remember that God is God, and He will continue to fill our life even as we search for our place in God’s house.  Let’s bow our heads for a word of prayer.