"Be Prepared."
It's the Boy Scout motto.
It's also what we tell ourselves as wild winter weather approaches. Local television stations compete with one another to be known as the storm center for their region: the greatest, most up-to-the-minute source of information, weather watches, emergency reports, and eye-in-the-sky overviews.
The only problem with all this preparedness, with all this reliance upon emergency broadcast systems, is that once an ice storm, flood, hurricane or windstorm hits with its inevitable power outage, we're out of the broadcast loop.
It's completely predictable. Those in the middle of the worst weather, those with the most critical need to know, are those the information can't reach. Yet whenever the power really does go out we continue to be surprised at the fact that we're really cut off, we're unprepared for the isolation, the helplessness, the not-just-electrical-powerlessness of our situation.
Some emergencies, some crisis situations, truly spring upon us with little or no warning. When Mt. St. Helen's exploded back in 1980, not one vulcanologist expected the monstrous, nuclear-type blast that flattened the mountainside, the landscape, and the entire ecosystem inside the blast-zone. The scientists were waiting for, even eagerly anticipating, an eruption. They anticipated something powerful and dangerous, but expected a plottable trajectory, a comprehensible movement and growth. When instead the mountain exploded with unimagined force of fire and rush of wind, no one was prepared for the devastation.
Not all disasters are so unpredictable. In their best-selling book Predictable Surprises (Boston Mass: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), authors Max H. Bazerman and Michael D. Watkins declare that the more recent disasters - the terrorist attack on 9-11, the economic collapse of Enron, and the scandal/debacle at the auditing giant known as Arthur Anderson - were all predictable surprises. These Harvard strategists insist that there were plenty of hints available at the highest levels to suggest the extreme likelihood, the almost inevitable predictability, of these disasters.
Watkins and Bazerman suggest that one of the largest logs-in-the eye of leaders, of people we trust to be watching-out for us personally, professionally, globally, is the tendency to focus on a single cause (p. 69) for the problems we face. If just one possible scenario, one single individual, is targeted as the cause of our problems, the potential for an ugly, bad surprise escalates exponentially.
But perhaps most tellingly, these Harvard watchdogs counsel that "A prerequisite for surprise preventions is the personal involvement of the organization's leaders in providing focus, energizing the organization, exercising judgment, and having the courage to take unpopular stands." They stress further that "The organization itself must be made more responsive and resilient" (p. 155).
In other words to avoid predictable surprises we must have strong leaders and informed, responsive organizations.
In today's gospel text we hear Jesus' own words about predictable surprises. Moreover, we're reading the story from the perspective of the Matthean community. These were first-century Christians struggling to establish their identity and learning about faithfulness as the years since Jesus' crucifixion continued to slip by.
Apocalypticism can be defined as the learning and lore of sages and scholars concerning the consummation of time, the coming Day of the Lord, the return of the Son of Man. Apocalypticism wasn't new to first-century religious communities. But expecting the eschaton had also become a pitfall and a pratfall for some of the most fervently faithful. Enthusiastic exegetes would carefully calculate the precise day when the Lord would return, only to have the world go on with alarming normalcy when that great day dawned. Faith was crushed. Whole faith communities disbanded in disarray when predicted end days became simply another day.
End-time fixations were not exclusive manifestations of ancient communities. On October 23, 1844 thousands of Christians sold their earthly possessions, dressed in white robes, climbed to the tops of the highest mountains they could find, climbed to the tippy-tops of trees to get even higher, and waited for Jesus to return. They had been told this was the date by William Miller, a farmer from western New York who dabbled in apocalypticism which led him to declare this as the date of Jesus' return based on his exegesis of the Scriptures. When no one went anywhere but down the mountain, he announced a calculation error. The real date was six months later, which also came and went as his followers now went . . . away . . . for good. Jim Jones was another apocalyptic leader. In the 1970s he moved his People's Temple Full Gospel Church from San Francisco to Guyana, where he could wait for the end-times by creating a community that would live as if the end-times had already occurred. On November 18, 1978, Jim Jones and 911 of his followers ended their end-times waiting by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Other apocalyptic communities, from Mother Ann Lee's Shakers to John Humphrey Noyes' Oneida Community, sublimated their end-times energies into crafting Shaker furniture and Oneida silverware.
Jesus' words to his disciples this morning warns us against such idle speculations. Jesus is trying to steer those in whom he entrusted the care of the first generation of believers away from obsessing out over the exact day, the precise moment, when he would return as the triumphant Son of Man to claim his kingdom.
That's not the role, not the mindset, not the heart-set that Jesus wants his followers to claim. Instead Jesus insists that no one, not one human being, not the angels in heaven, not even the Son, is privy to the divine timetable for the coming eschaton. Only the one who determined when the clock would start knows when the clock will stop. Only the Father knows the moment when the days of this world will cease.
Jesus knew that if the budding faith community bound itself to some fixed timetable, it was doomed to failure - a failure in fact, a failure in faith. It was to faith in the word of God, it was to faith in the Father's providence and grace, that Jesus called his disciples. It was to eternal watchfulness, to a life dedicated and directed towards the predictable surprise of his return, of God's any moment entrance into our lives, that Jesus called his disciples.
It may seem strange that the first Sunday of Advent is directed toward a conversation on end times, end things. Isn't this a season of new beginnings? But in today's gospel text Jesus is directing his disciple's attention away from endings and towards a whole new way of thinking about the divine hold upon time that theology calls eschatology. Eschatology isn't the study of end times for Jesus. Eschatology is the beginning of a lifetime of faithfulness, a lifetime dedicated to trusting that God is in charge, the world is in good hands because it's in God's hands, and that the human role isn't that of a mathematician figuring out when the last day will occur.
Our role is that of a perennial alarm-clock, announcing that at any moment the divine may enter into our lives, and transform them beyond our imagining.
It's the greatest prediction I can make this morning: God will surprise your life when you least expect it. Are you ready to be surprised? Will you open up your life to surprises this Advent season? Will you let your life be ambushed by the Spirit?