First Sunday of Advent
“Stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.” Mt. 24: 42
Fasten your seat belts!!
This is the full alert message of the Rapture Ready Index. You can read it for yourself online.
The Index is provided for those Christians who are anxiously awaiting the second coming of Christ – an event they believe will begin with the “rapture” of all “righteous believers” from the face of the earth.
“Fasten your seat belts” is the ultimate category on this index, just above “high prophetic activity.” According to the Index, we are presently scoring well above the 160-point mark, which is the threshold for when Christians need to “fasten your seat belt” because of all the apocalyptic “signs” present in the world today: wars, famine, disaster, immorality, and false prophets.
What I’ve also discovered is that the Rapture Ready Index is just one of hundreds of sites available offering more information about exactly when Jesus is coming again. Evidently there are some 300,000 books and movies that relate somehow to Christ’s imminent return to bring an end to the world and to begin the “day of Judgment.”
300,000! Evidently this is a matter of grave concern to millions of people!
The writer of Matthew’s Gospel is not one of those.
His Gospel certainly chides us to “Stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.” But Matthew has a different take on staying awake.
Unfortunately, there have been many people who have used today’s gospel text to hype multitudes into a frenzy of fear. Many of you will remember the extremely popular Left Behind series. Or, more recently, you may recall Harold Camping, an 89-year-old California evangelist and radio broadcaster who whipped people into an ecstatic state of anxiety with his prediction that May 21, 2013 would be the date of the actual Rapture. In fact, many people were so convinced of this likelihood that they sold their possessions and liquidated their pension funds to be ready for the Great Event in the sky.
In contrast to all this anxiety and confusion, however, the intention of the Gospel of Matthew is just the opposite. It tells us clearly that “at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” Beyond that, Matthew assures us, it’s not even important that we know.
We are people of hope. We know that human history is safely in God’s hands. We know the real power in the world ultimately is not brute force, but the goodness of Christ. We know, Matthew tells us, as do all the gospels, that our God is not about fear, but love; not about judgment, but mercy.
And we know all this because of one thing:
Christmas!
Christmas is the story of a God who is so madly in love with each of us that He decided to participate in every dimension of our lives. And so, He in effect fell from heaven and “pitched his tent among us,” as one translation puts it.
Advent, a word meaning “arrival,” is that special time of the year set apart to remind us once again of what the Christmas event really means.
Advent is an “on-call” time of year when we become fully alert, not to a potential “rapture” event, but to the need for the preparation of our hearts, the inner “anticipation” of something profoundly dramatic and life changing, the inner re-assessing of our priorities.
“Stay awake!” Matthew tells us.
That’s what Advent is for: a dedicated time for stillness amid all our worries and anxieties; a time to be quiet amid so many clamors and commotions; a time to be silent and reflect.
And among all the things we can reflect upon, perhaps the most important is this: Where is the “manger” that holds Jesus in the world we live in today?
Today’s Gospel tells us Jesus is not to be found in a manger in Bethlehem anymore. Instead, the “manger” is now in the very place Jesus told us to look: right in front of us – hidden in plain sight among the powerless and the nobodies.
But to do that kind of “seeing,” we need stillness. We need reflection. We need the time to be quiet before our God so we can come to the full realization that we aren’t called to a rapturous exit from this world, but a courageous immersion in it.
That’s what the Gospel today means when it says: “Stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”
When we do this, when we really stay awake, the true “rapture” will begin.
Ted Wolgamot
11809194.1
11/21/16
