Be Prepared! Or Expectant? (Matthew 24.36- Isaiah 2.1-5)

 

How are your preparations for Christmas going? Perhaps some of you are inwardly or outwardly rolling your eyes at the mention of it, but are you prepared? Have you got the Christmas tree? Have you ordered the figgy pudding? If you’re getting presents have you got them yet?

In life we prepare for things all the time, meetings, seeing people, travelling places, what we’re going to eat, when are we going to do the laundry, or the gardening if we have one. We’re very fortunate to have Rob here at St Augustine’s who does so much planning for us, he gets the fruit, makes the coffee and even mows our lawns.

We’re very fortunate to have our musicians, who think about what we’re going to sing, practice and enhance our worship. We’re very fortunate to have Carrie and Judy, who help in the setting up of this service, and we’re very fortunate to have all the rest of you here, who most likely planned to be here and are all wonderful!

But here’s another question, are you prepared for the kingdom of God?

I don’t know about you, but I am a classic overthinker, and sometimes that leads to me being over prepared, and sometimes under prepared for example…

I was outside the old church looking at my watch. My breath visible, but the sky clear.  I’d gone to great pains to make sure I was there on time, that I had everything I needed. For some reason a wave anxiety hit me, what if they don’t turn up? Will I have to clean the church? What happens then? Then it occurred to me, I’d forgotten my phone, the one time I needed it, and I’d left it charging in the house, so I couldn’t contact the cleaners to see where they were, as they were already fifteen mins late. I was over prepared, but also under prepared.

Today’s passages are about preparation. Be prepared! Scar sings in the Lion King, in quite threatening way, but I want us today to look at this passage not as a threat, but as an encouragement. Think less Scar, and more boy scouts, be prepared.

So we enter into Advent! And the four main themes of Advent are? Heaven, Hell, Judgement, Death! Be prepared! All of those things seem quite threatening don’t they, they might send a chill down our back, but I’d like us to think about them differently, because for Christians we should take these things as encouragement.

At the beginning of the church year, we look at the end of all things, because for us the beginning is all tied up in the end. The beginning with the birth of Jesus, is the end of so much. I don’t think it’s something to be afraid of.

Someone told me, and I can’t remember who, so apologies if it was one of you, but someone told me that the Gospel reading we had today terrified them as a child!

They were so worried that their parents would just be gone, and the people they loved would disappear, be taken by God, that they couldn’t sleep.

I’m not sure that Jesus was talking literally here, I think he’s making a bigger point and Jesus did often use exaggeration to make his points, or story in a way any good storyteller does. And he was an excellent storyteller.

What do you expect to happen? There are things that we just take for granted. The sun will rise tomorrow, the planet will keep turning. Sometimes as humans we get caught in a kind of lethargy. Unresponsive to the world around us. That’s just the way it is. We slip into comfortableness.

Nobody expected the pandemic, or did they? I know that all of us became amateur epidemiologists when Covid hit; but scientists and epidemiologists had been warning for years that something like Covid was going to happen and happen soon.

I think many of us were guilty at the beginning of not taking it seriously. We have so many of these things that the media whip up like remember how Avian Flu was going to kill us all? I remember lots of pandemics before Covid, but none of them really made an impact.

The World Health Organisation sounded the alarm about Covid, but they were ignored.

This is kind of the attitude that Jesus is talking about in the Gospel. A spiritual lethargy. We’re all guilty of it. We don’t expect God to show up. Yet God does and will. We know faithful and keeps His promises.

Jesus lists a bunch of everyday things eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, two men in a field, two women griding with a hand mill. It can happen any time. It will be unexpected.

What Jesus is challenging us to do is live life with expectancy and preparedness. In this season of advent, as we wait expectantly for God’s appearing as Jesus in the incarnation, so we too need to wait expectantly on the Lord. Expecting the signs of God’s kingdom. Just as sure as the sunrise, so is God’s appearing. Just before the Gospel, quite literally the line before Jesus says “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. ³⁵ Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” That generation are long gone to us here and now, but one of the points of Advent, and being prepared, waiting for God is that our relationship with God, our discovering of Her isn’t just confined to now and this life, it’s eternal and goes on.

I see the second coming as exciting, and perhaps a little frightening, but I firmly believe that God’s the kind of God that wants to heal, and to make it all okay, not berate and destroy.

No one knows the day when everything will be revealed. We cannot predict when or where it will happen, but we know we won’t pass away, because Jesus guarantees it.

We cannot be alert all of the time, that’s just not the way human beings are made, we’d burn out. But it’s important that we expect God to turn up. And what we should do is summed up in the verses following this gospel;

Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom the master has put in charge of the servants in his household to give them their food at the proper time? ⁴⁶ It will be good for that servant whose master finds him doing so when he returns. ⁴⁷ Truly I tell you, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. ⁴⁸ But suppose that servant is wicked and says to himself, ‘My master is staying away a long time,’ ⁴⁹ and he then begins to beat his fellow servants and to eat and drink with drunkards. ⁵⁰ The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. ⁵¹ He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

To be a faithful and wise servant we treat others with justice and fairness. Just because Jesus is going to come back doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be fighting for a more just world, a more fair place, a planet on which all God’s creatures can live in harmony and respect.

We expect God to turn up, but sometimes God turns up in us. Sometimes that glimpse of the kingdom breaks through. When we are prepared. When we can reveal something of the mountain of God amongst us, here and now.

There is a place for all on God’s holy mountain. This passage from Isaiah sets out the reason we don’t need to be afraid, because God is a reconciling God. A God of justice who will settle all the disputes once and for all.

But for now we wait…