Don't Get Left Behind!

11-27-16 (Advent 1A)

Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44

Don’t Get Left Behind!

The first Sunday of Advent never fails to catch me by surprise, even after years of preaching and years before that of going to church and hearing sermons.  We go through those last few weeks of Ordinary Time in the lectionary and they tend to turn toward the apocalyptic - it’s Jesus telling the disciples what is to come, how the temple will be destroyed, all the things like that.  And then we have Christ the King Sunday, and it reminds us that the next week is Advent.  Here’s where I always get excited, too - we’ve got Thanksgiving, we get to start breaking out the Christmas decorations, we have our “hanging of the greens,” both at church and in a lot of our homes… and we’re ready.  We’re finally ready for the things that we’ve been seeing all around us since Halloween in the stores and in our communities.  We can finally listen to that Christmas music without feeling guilty - we can even hum along if the mood hits us just right.  And so we settle in, enjoy watching our Advent candles being lit, our nativity scenes and Christmas trees being put up, that little elf showing up on the shelf again for those families that make that a part of their tradition…

And of course, we look forward to those familiar scriptures that shape this season - the hopeful promises of Isaiah, the expectant writings of Paul to the Romans… and the continuing apocalyptic teachings of Jesus?  Again?!  Like I said, it never fails to surprise me.  We just can’t get away from it, can we?  Here we’re getting ready, waiting for the proclamations, the “prepare the way of the Lord,” the “My soul magnifies God,” the “And shepherds watched their flocks by night…” and we’re getting “Two workers will be in the field - one will be taken and the other left behind.”  And boy, doesn’t that just scream out Advent to you?

It’s tempting to just gloss over this whole thing, to focus on the more iconic imagery of swords and plowshares in Isaiah - but at the same time, when we really turn our attention to these apocalyptic writings, it turns out that there’s really a lot of Advent to be found in them after all.

At first glance at these passages, we come across a kind of theology and preaching that is, sadly, all too familiar to a lot of us - it’s the sort you find neatly summarized in tracts that get passed out door to door and left in public restrooms where people are likely to sit and idly read them.  Jesus’ words do make for some quite dramatic and provoking imagery - people suddenly vanishing at the appointed hour, the day of the Lord coming like a thief in the night… there’s something evocative about it, in a lot of ways.  Many of you may remember the popular book series that came out in the late ‘90s and early 2000’s - the Left Behind books were a big deal for me and for a lot of my friends when they came out.  I read them… well, religiously - when I was younger, and the story was intense and engaging.  If you missed out on the craze at the time, The Simpsons did a little riff on the film adaptation in the episode “Thank God it’s Doomsday.” 

While The Simpsons lampoons the films in this clip, these books and the ideas they proposed were incredibly compelling, especially for impressionable seeking youths who were just really starting to dig into the scriptures for themselves.  The warnings were clear - if you didn’t have faith in Christ, and if it wasn’t real faith in Christ, then you could find yourself left behind at any second, because we all know Jesus is coming back and you don’t want to find out you were wrong and have it be too late to do anything about it.  And of course, if you already had faith in Christ, you got to sit and read these things to remind yourself how much better you were going to have it than these poor saps who hadn’t figured it out soon enough for themselves.

Now I get a feeling that at this point, there may be a handful of you out there who are wondering what in the world any of this has to do with Advent.  There’s nothing all that Christmasy about the whole idea of the rapture, and the entire idea of the rapture itself really doesn’t have a lot of basis in anything that Jesus believed or what he taught his disciples in the first place.  The whole idea of people being “left behind” and all this apocalypse type stuff… there’s really nothing Holly or Jolly about it at all, is there?

And let me tell you - I’ll be the first one to apologize for even wasting a little bit of your time talking about all this rapture business.  But all the same, there was something I couldn’t quite get away from in all of the passages this week, and it was a sense that I hadn’t gotten since I had first been swept up in this whole rapture theology in the first place.  See, if there’s one good quality, one thing to take away from an otherwise flawed theology and approach to evangelism and the gospel… it’s that there’s a sense of true urgency to it.  People have flocked to this message - myself included for a time when I was a teenager - and megachurches have been built up seemingly overnight because of the intensity with which this idea is promoted.  You watch the people like Kirk Cameron who go on television and make their impassioned pleas to the masses for repentance and faith, or you take a moment to listen to the person handing you the tract on the streetcorner and hear them ask you that question: “do you know where you’re going?” and you have to admit - it makes you stop and think.  It makes you question and consider your situation earnestly, if even for just a second or two.  The people proclaiming this message to you, no matter how forceful it may be… they are deeply convicted of a reality and they genuinely want to see as many people saved from that eventual day as possible, and sometimes by whatever means necessary.

It’s this urgency that I realized is the very heart of what Advent is really about for each of us.  It permeates the readings for this week - Jesus telling his followers to “be alert,” for they will not know the day or the hour; Paul saying that now is the moment to wake from sleep, to be ready and alert, to don the armor of light - his anticipation as he says that “salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.”  We hear these things and we should feel goosebumps as we prickle in eagerness!  This is what Advent is all about!  I’m reminded of the scene in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when the Pevensie children first hear about the lion Aslan - he describes it that “each one of the children felt something jump in its inside” at the first mention of Aslan’s name.  That feeling of “something jumping up in your inside…” that should be what Advent 

feels like for each of us.

And so this year, this season, take a moment and think, and truly ask yourself: what would it look like for us as the church to live out this Advent season with that same kind of urgency?  It’s so easy for us to settle into our comforts and our routines, to stay asleep in Advent even as we wait expectantly for Christmas to come.  It’s easy to be tired in the same readings, the same traditions, the same songs and music - after all, we’ve already been hearing so much of it since before Thanksgiving…  And yet… what if we were to truly feel that sense of urgency this year?  What if this year, we truly heed the call to be awake and alert in Advent, to feel that sense that “salvation is nearer now than when we became believers?”  What possibilities might that open up for us as people of faith and as people of this community?  How might we feel driven this season to reach out, to share this message of urgency with someone else? What if we heard this message warning us about people being left behind and took it seriously - not in some rapture-centric scare tactic, but in the realization that the Spirit is moving in this place and if we don’t jump onto that train, we’ll be left behind and miss out on the incredible things that God is doing right here and now in this place?  What if, in lighting these Advent candles, we’re not just participating in a tradition because it’s “what we've always done” in this time of year, but because it reminds us of the urgency and the expectation that lie at the heart of our very faith - that lighting even just one candle in the midst of a world full of growing darkness is the epitome of the Christian way and one of the simplest, yet most powerful displays of Christian faith that we could possibly make?

Welcome to the season of Advent - may it fill you with excitement this year, and may we each be filled the urgency of the Gospel as we move toward Christmas together.  Don’t get left behind!  To God be the Glory.  Amen.