Jesus said: "Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms; provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

"Let your loins be girded and your lamps burning, and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the marriage feast, so that they’ may open to him at once when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes; truly, I say to you, he will gird himself and have them sit at table, and he will come and serve them. If he comes in the second watch, or in the third, and finds them so, blessed are those servants! But know this, that if the householder had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would have been awake and would not have left his house to be broken into. You also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect." (Luke 12:32-40)

Now it is Advent, and again, right in the middle of the Pentecost season: "You must also be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an unexpected hour." Isn’t this the message for the first Sunday of the year, the First Sunday in Advent? Why repeat that theme in the middle of Pentecost? The answer simply may be that there is a message here that is essential to the content of our worship every season, every Sunday of the year. That Jesus Christ, our crucified and risen Lord, will return and bring in the fullness of the kingdom at some unknown time is the part of the gospel yet to be completed. That we should expect and be ready for Christ’s coming is his message to the church. He will come back with glory and power at the appointed hour; we have his word on that.

But he can’t blame us for wondering not only when he is to return, but if he will ever come back to us as he promised. It has been such a long time, hasn’t it? And if we look for his second coming as a future event, we’re as badly off as those Jews who still await the coming of the Messiah, aren’t we? Nearly two thousand years have passed since he said he would come again, but he hasn’t been seen yet, has he? Time seems to have lulled us into a kind of spiritual sleep in which the second coming of Christ is simply a pleasant dream that might, or might not, come true - and increasing numbers of Christians wonder if Christ will ever fulfill his promise to his people.

We’re a little bit like the people living in California, who have been warned that some day another severe earthquake will occur with countless casualties and untold property damage. A couple of years ago, Lisa Levitt predicted, in a column (AP): "That big earthquake will come some day to San Francisco." She wrote: "There’s little room in the California dream for the nightmare of another great earthquake. Lost in a landscape of sunshine, hot tubs, avocados and panoramic views, the memory of the massive tremor that devastated this city seventy-five years ago April 18 has faded to a distant rumbling on the edge of San Francisco’s unconscious." Scientists have pointed out that "history could repeat itself at any moment," but warnings go unheeded by citizens and government alike. Over 11,000 buildings in the most populated part of San Francisco have not been reinforced, and she points out, people still build homes on the "fickle, ever-shifting San Andreas Fault." Despite the fact that the earth could open up like the "gaping jaws of a killer shark" and swallow up people and property, residents of the city are hardly any better prepared than they were for the earthquake that occurred at 5:12 a.m. on that April day in 1906. The people just don’t seem to think it can - or will - happen, but scientists say it is inevitable.

What chance has the gospel to be heard - that Jesus will come again - when people hardly hear the warnings of the scientific community predicting possible tragedy? Maybe that’s why we have to hear - and hear again - his promise, "the Son of man is coming at an unexpected hour." Maybe the message will register in our minds and hearts, and we will take it seriously just as we have finally realized that all life on earth is threatened by the possibility of nuclear war and the chance that nuclear power might be too dangerous to life to use. Newsweek’s headlines recently read: "A New Outcry Over Nukes." Several photos of protestors were published, including a shot of a sign that read "Give children dreams not nuclear nightmares." The text told of rallies being held and to be held in the future - as on Ground Zero Day the week of April 17 - pointing out that, in a recent survey, 61 percent of the people surveyed called for, or were in favor of, a freeze on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But more people than that were opposed to any unilateral action that would leave the Soviet Union with overwhelming superiority in nuclear missiles and warheads.

But protests have largely gone unheeded, haven’t they? In the middle sixties the people of Scotland raised a hue and cry over the nuclear submarines that the United States based and serviced in Holy Loch on the west coast of Scotland. It did little good. Nor have numerous other protests whether they were peaceful or violent by nature. Don Stuart wrote a short story about "Atomic Power" in 1934; it was dismissed as "science fiction," as was Robert Heinlein’s "Blowups Happen," a warning about catastrophic possibilities that surfaced four decades later in Three Mile Island. Cleve Carmill published a story about The Bomb in 1944 that was so realistic that "within a few days agents of the Military Intelligence approached the author and the office of the magazine (that published the story) demanding to know who on the Manhattan Project (that produced the first Bomb) had been talking. It was explained that the technical data was based upon principles published in technical papers in 1940." Carmill’s story was titled "Deadline," and speaks for itself. Warnings over these four decades to the contrary, it is only now that the threat is obvious to sufficient numbers of people around the world that mass protests are being staged so that The Bomb might be banned. What sort of chance, in the light of such a well-publicized threat to life on earth that has gone virtually unheeded for almost half a century, does Jesus’ promise have, "the Son of man is coming at an unexpected hour?"

In her article, "Aboard the Magic Carpet," (Temple University Alumni Review, Fall, 1980) Naomi Freedman interviewed various people and asked them to do an exercise in imagination, in pure fantasy. "If you could pick a time," she querried, "in which to live, what era would you select?" Then she asked them, "Why?" and "Where would you live?" and "What would you be?" People chose various periods of time, but most of them picked the future; they wanted to see what would happen and they wanted to be part of the future, not the past, and actually contribute to the making of the future. No one, interestingly, mentioned anything about wanting to be alive when Christ returned; the second coming was not in the picture of the future that these people had. They seemed to be hoping that life in the world would go on, get better, and develop in peaceful and positive ways as yet unimagined. For them, the future was totally open-ended.

But Jesus didn’t simply predict that the world would come to an end, time would stop, and this episode on earth would be concluded in failure or success, did he? Rather, he promised a kind of banquet for those servants who are ready for his return, and at which he would serve them in the kingdom. On many Sundays of the year in congregations using the Lutheran Book of Worship, a new hymn of praise is sung in place of the traditional "Create in me a clean heart, O God" as the Offertory:

Let the vineyards be fruitful, Lord, and fill to the brim our cup of blessing.
Gather a harvest from the seeds that were sown, that we may be fed with the bread of life.
Gather the hopes and dreams of all; unite them with the prayers we offer now
Grace our table with your presence, and give us a foretaste of the feast to come.

The Eucharist is indeed Christ’s "feast of victory" in which he is the host and comes to us as he will in bread and wine, but it is always the promise of the fulfillment of his promise to come again and to serve us at his table. The Holy Communion, you see - and whether or not we are aware of it - is one of the significant ways that we keep watch for the coming of the Lord. Truly, as Paul declared to the Church at Corinth, "As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes." To eat and drink without awareness of this basic dimension of the Lord’s Supper is to be participating in an unworthy manner, because it means that such people are not on watch for the return of Christ.

This is not to say that only at the Table of the Lord are we on the alert for the coming of Christ; it means that we live hopefully and profitably - for Christ and others - in the world. A decade ago, a story appeared about a woman who "Ready to die, ... faces life." Four years before her story broke, Jo Ann Smith had contracted cancer, had lost a breast, and after an interval of remission, now lost a second breast and was told that the cancer had spread to her liver. She was given a matter of months to live, at the most. When she returned to the hospital, she was ready to die: "I had made all the preparations with my family. I had made a loving peace with my family and friends ... It was a nice deal, but it really got wrecked." Her plans were "wrecked" by an unexpected survival of the operation she underwent and an equally unexpected recovery. Chemotherapy gave her some degree of normalcy - for someone who knew she was going to die. She said: "I feel like I’m in a free-fall from an airplane. It’s an other-world feeling. I don’t feel part of anything. I have no sense of vocation." As one of five women on the eighty-member Board of Educational Ministries of the American Baptist Church, she discovered that her causes no longer had the same meaning for her. "The issues I’ve been deeply involved with I now can do nothing about. It’s distressing me, but my world has become smaller and smaller ... Things like war and peace are not really issues for me now. They exist, but I’ve already done what I could." Then she began to turn her attention to death - and talking to others about how she felt and how she was facing death; speaking engagements "turned her on once more to life." She could face the sure and certain prospect of death because, she said, "I feel I have made some contribution. It’s a funny period for me, but I’m really turned on by it. It has given me the feeling that, maybe, this is my vocation."

Isn’t the business of the church - and individual Christians —-partly to tell the story of Christ’s death, resurrection, and his coming again? And isn’t this as fundamental a part of the mission Christ has given to the church as caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, working to rid the earth of oppression and injustice, and participating in the efforts to make the earth the place of peace and love that God intends it to be? Telling that story is the most important business of Christians in the world, isn’t it? Do you remember John Bunyan’s masterpiece, Pilgrims’ Progress? It is, in a way, everybody’s story - and everybody’s business if we call ourselves Christians. Early in life, Bunyan says that he had four sins: dancing, bell-ringing (in church towers), a game called "tipcat," and reading the life of the English martyr, St. Bevis. They are not very impressive sins by our standards, are they? But they were serious to him, and he gave them up when he was converted and concentrated on the business of the gospel. He once believed that he had "sold his soul to the devil" and in that had committed the unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit. But he began to preach the gospel, and he preached it so powerfully - and radically - that he was thrown into prison. It was there, in a twelve-year imprisonment, that he found a way to continue to tell The Story in the writing of Pilgrim’s Progress. His vivid images of "the narrow path straight as a rule could make it, running on, uphill and downhill, through city and wilderness, to the Black River (of death) and the Shining Gate" captured the minds and imaginations of unlearned and learned people alike; The Story came alive again in his writing, and in a manner that it would not have if he had never been imprisoned. That’s our business - to find imaginative and inspirational ways to tell the story - as Christians and members of the Body of Christ, the church. It is one of the ways that we are to keep watch.

The area where I live is about to get cable television and the company that has won the contract is engaged in a media blitz to acquaint potential customers with the blessings and benefits of their services. One publicity piece had a section entitled "Home Security - Emergency Preparedness: Cable Provides Peace of Mind." The article announced:

Cable technology has been refined in recent years to make home security through cable a reality. Residents of the ... area will be able to have home security systems installed and monitored by (us) ... 24 hours per day, seven days a week ...

When there is an intruder or a fire, a highpitched beep will sound in the home and simultaneously alert the cable security personnel. The security monitor will immediately telephone the home to verify the emergency and dispatch the appropriate help. Security subscribers will also have the ability to activate fire, medical and intrusion alerts by pushing a button on the alarm panel.

Subscribers to cable home security systems enjoy greater security and quicker response to emergencies than ever before ...

And this:

Emergency alert capability is also a part of (the) ... cable system. Civil defense officials could alert subscribers to pending emergencies by overriding the audio and/or video portions of all cakle channels.

The public safety applications of cable technology will increase in scope with changing needs.

That’s the promise attached to their service program, but it doesn’t cover one situation for which we must be prepared, does it, the promised return of Christ at "an unexpected time"?

And that’s why we need to hear the message of Advent - the Christ will come again, as he promised that he would - in the middle of Pentecost as well as every Sunday. And then we may learn and lift again the ancient prayer of alertness and preparation for the second coming:

Come, Lord Jesus! Come quickly. Amen.