"I'll tell you what keeps me coming to this church." The man who spoke was punching the air with his finger, pronouncing every word with force, and the dozen or so other people in the room turned to listen. The group called themselves the "Searchers Class," and had done so since the time, more than ten years before, when, as young adults, they had formed an alternative church school class. As the "Searchers" crept into middle age, the act of searching itself seemed to take more and more energy. Indeed, the whole business of being a part of the church at all felt, at times, like a burdensome weight, and on this Sunday morning that weight had tugged the conversation toward the question: Why stay in the church?
"I'll tell you," he said, "what keeps me coming to this church," and every head turned in his direction. The sudden rush of interest made him hesitate, uncertain of his own thought, but he pushed on. "It's strange, I know, but I get the feeling here, like nowhere else, that something is about to happen."
The feeling that something is about to happen. A strange notion, and yet, the earliest Christians would have recognized it instantly as one of the truest marks of the church. They were convinced they stood on the precipice of history, and that something, indeed, was about to happen. For the world, time lumbered on, day after wearisome day, moving toward who knows what, but, for the early Christian community, something was about to happen. As time crept forward, a great, though yet unseen, future had stirred and gathered itself, and now was sweeping toward time itself on a course of inevitable collision. Something was about to happen.
What was about to happen? Their attempts to describe it strained the boundaries of their language as surely as they strain our contemporary imaginations. "The kingdom of God is at hand ... The stars will fall from heaven ... The night is far gone ... They will see the Son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory ... This age is passing away ... Come, Lord, Jesus." The church lived on tiptoe, straining their eyes toward the horizon. Something was about to happen.
Because something was about to happen, every word they uttered, every deed they did, every prayer they prayed was shaped by this coming event. Like an actor in a play whose role seems insignificant until the denouement discloses that his lines held the key to the truth all along, the early Christians risked the shame of the world, confidently awaiting the final act.
We have all known, in small ways, the energy an eagerly anticipated future can give to our actions in the present. The expectant parents who find joy in what would otherwise be toil: assembling the crib, painting the nursery, practicing the pushing and the breathing. The residents of a town who mow the lawns, sweep the sidewalks, repair the cracked windows at city hall, and stretch colorful bunting across the store fronts as they ready themselves for the visit of a dignitary. Christmas itself has this kind of power. People brave crowds at the mall and edgy clerks; gifts are carefully chosen, packages wrapped, and ceramic nativity scenes dusted and set, piece by piece, on the mantle. Every action has meaning, because something is about to happen.
But we have also known the sense of loss and disappointment over a hoped-for future which does not come, when nothing, nothing really, happens. The husband and wife who try to conceive a child, in vain. Or again, plans are changed; the dignitary travels by another route, bypassing the town, leaving the once-festive bunting to droop in the rain. Even Christmas day has its own measure of disappointment. The packages are opened, the gifts admired and put away. The tree comes down; the shepherds and angels are stored for another year, and the long-awaited day passes with a sense that nothing, nothing really, has happened.
In a far more profound way, the church has always struggled with its pain over a future which fails to come. "Come, Lord Jesus," they prayed, but it was Roman soldiers who came. "This world is passing away," they sang, but the world remained. One can live on tiptoe just so long, before the muscles grow tired and the eyes grow weary of looking for the light of a day which never dawns. If the church is standing at the threshold of God's future kingdom of justice, then the church can dare to touch the wounds of lepers and freely pour out its resources for the poor. If this world is surely in the throes of death, and the new age of healing and mercy is close at hand, then the church can cheerfully bear rejection, endure suffering, and faithfully sing its alleluias. But if there is no God-shaped future at hand, if nothing, nothing really, is about to happen, then there is only one more day to be endured in an endless string of days, a bottomless pit of human need, and a ceaseless line of the poor, who are always with us. All there is left for the church to be is another well-meaning institution, and all there is left for the church to do is to whistle its liturgy in the dark, collect the pledge cards and keep the copy machines humming. Because nothing is about to happen.
Even the second generation of Christians, the ones to whom the New Testament was originally addressed, were not immune to this loss of faith in the coming kingdom of God. In the beginning a passionate hope kept the line taut between their present experience and God's future, but as the days wore on and the suffering became intense, and the living memories of Jesus faded, and the world rolled on as before, the tension in the line slackened. The apostle Paul once captured the vibrant anticipation of those early days when he said, "The appointed time has grown very short." But, as one New Testament scholar observed, gradually the time grew "very long."
It was not despite this, but, to the contrary, because of this that the church preserved and repeated the urgency of Jesus' warning, "Take heed, watch; for you do not know when the time will come" (Mark 13:33). No one warns the night watchman to "stay awake!" unless he appears to be getting drowsy. Just so, the church kept Jesus' call to watchfulness alive in their memory and in their worship, not because they had no problem with hope, but precisely because they did have difficulty hoping.
But even a warning from the lips of Jesus cannot keep us vigilant, expectant, and hopeful forever. To be blunt, we cannot "take heed and watch," no matter who told us to do it, when nothing ever happens. The writer of Mark undoubtedly knew this, and that is why, when he wrote these words, he recorded two other words of Jesus as well.
The first is simply this: "Of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (Mark 13:32). What this means, starkly put, is that God's future will not arrive when we want it, plan it, or even think we need it. It will come, not according to our timetable, but in its own good time, in God's own good time. The coming kingdom is a promise, and, Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth notwithstanding, it cannot be turned into a set of predictions, which we can then manipulate. The coming kingdom is a promise from God, and it cannot be domesticated into a political agenda or reduced to the doctrine of progress. God does not provide happy endings for the futures we are engineering. God provides a future beyond our knowledge and control, and not even the angels in heaven know the hour of its coming.
But even with this caution against wanting to know too much, we are still left with too little. We still have the question of how to hope in the meantime, when nothing ever happens. And that is why the writer of Mark remembered the other word which Jesus said. This word was a story, a parable actually, about a man who went on a trip and left his servants to manage the house while he was gone. That, of course, is a description of the situation of the church, left in charge of the house while the Master is absent. What Jesus said about the servants is true also of the church: They need constantly to be on the lookout. The house can never be in disarray, because, as Jesus stated it, "You do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning -- lest he come suddenly and find you asleep" (Mark 13:35-36).
Now, at first glance, Jesus seems merely to be saying again, in story form, "Of that day or hour no one knows," but the author of Mark hears something different, something more, in this word. The master could come "in the evening," and, in the very next chapter, he tells us that "when it was evening" Jesus ate his last meal with the disciples, and tells them, "One of you will betray me."
Or the master could come "at midnight," and Mark records that, later that night, the disciples went with Jesus to Gethsemane. While Jesus prayed his cry of anguish, the disciples, no doubt weary of waiting, slept. "Could you not watch one hour?" he said to them.
Perhaps the master will come "at cockcrow," and Peter turned to the accusing maid with a curse and a denial, "I do not know this man." The cock crowed. Maybe the coming of the master will be "in the morning," and "as soon as it was morning," Jesus was bound and led away to his trial and to his death.
What the author of Mark has heard in Jesus' story, and has woven into the fabric of his gospel, is that every moment of the passing day is already alive with the promise of God's future. As the Church strains its sight toward the horizon of the coming kingdom, it also hears the ticking of the clock on the wall, and knows that each passing minute is filled with the potential for faith or denial, decision or tragedy, hope or despair. Those who trust in the promise of God's coming kingdom are also able to see advance signs of its coming all around them. Those who believe that, in God's good time, something is about to happen, also know that, even now, something is happening. The passing minutes of every day are, like iron filings drawn and aligned toward an unseen magnet, already shaped by God's future and filled with its force.
"I get the feeling here, like nowhere else," mused the man in the Searchers Class, "that something is about to happen." He said, perhaps, more than he knew. We sometimes lose sight of the fact that every moment of the church's life is formed by the expectation that something is about to happen, and this something has to do with God's coming in power to the world. Every time Christians recite the old phrase in the creed, "He will come to judge the quick and the dead," we disclose our hope that frail human justice, the kind one can get with a good lawyer and a full checkbook, is not all the justice life holds. Come, Lord Jesus. Every time some congregation creates a clothing closet or a food pantry for those in need, they do so not because they are so naive as to think that a few used garments and a shelf of soup and cereal are going to end human need. They do so because they live today in the light of God's tomorrow, when all will be clothed in garments of light and the banquet table of the kingdom will hold a feast. Come, Lord Jesus. Every time Christian people speak words of forgiveness in circumstances of bitterness, words of love in situations of hatred, they are speaking in the future present tense. That is, they are using in the present a language which the whole creation will learn to speak in God's tomorrow. Come, Lord Jesus. Every time worshippers struggle to their feet to sing, "Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus, Born To Set Thy People Free," they are praying for, expecting, something to happen, some one to happen. Come Lord Jesus.
Prayer, too, is grounded in the hope that something is about to happen. There is a Hasidic story about a devout man who worked in a slaughterhouse. His work required him to utter a prayer for mercy before killing each beast. Every morning he said a tearful farewell to his family before leaving for the slaughterhouse, because he was persuaded that his ritual prayer led him into great danger. He feared that, after he called upon God, God might forcefully and devastatingly come to him before he could finish the prayer with, "Have mercy."1 A harsh truth, but a truth nonetheless. All prayer is based on the confident hope that something is about to happen.
I once taught a confirmation class to a very small group. In fact, there were only three young girls in the class. In one session, I was instructing them about the festivals and seasons of the Christian year, and when we came to the discussion of Pentecost, I asked them if they knew what Pentecost was. Since none of them knew, I proceeded to inform them that Pentecost was "when the church was sitting in a group and the Holy Spirit landed on them like tongues of fire on their heads. Then they spoke the gospel in all the languages of the world." Two of the girls took this information in stride, but the third looked astonished, her eyes wide. I looked back at her, and finally she said, "Gosh, Reverend Long, we must have been absent that Sunday." The beauty of that moment was not that she misunderstood about Pentecost, but that she understood about the Church. In her mind, there was the possibility that the event of Pentecost could have happened, even in our Sunday service. "I get the feeling here, like nowhere else, that something is about to happen." Come, Lord Jesus.
And it was the Lord, himself, who said, "What I say to you I say to all. Watch" (Mark 13:37).
1. A version of this story appears in Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk, (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 41.