Text: 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 (Matthew 24:3-14)                                          W 25^th Sunday after Pentecost

Sons of the Day

            In the name of him who died for us that we may live forever with him, dear friends in Christ:  The shorter days, colder nights, trees in spectacular fall display, and brown, bare fields are all certain signs that the present year is drawing to its close. They tell us that the cold dead of winter will soon be upon us.  And all of these signs are, in fact, part a sermon message that God has programmed into nature itself to remind us each year that everything we know on this earth is destined to pass away.  The life, the pleasures, the achievements we strive for and in which we glory for a while – none of these things can last.  All must eventually give way, decay, and die.

            And so with nature itself broadcasting the message, we too in the church have come to that time of the year in which we direct our attention to the last things, that is, those events the Scriptures tell us are yet to come such as the end of the world, the second coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the judgment, and the life eternal in heaven or in hell.  It’s good for us to review these topics regularly because, well, if for no other reason, because they’re part of God’s revelation to us – an important part, because they remind us to keep this life with all its trials in proper perspective and to look forward to the fulfillment of all our Lord’s great promises to us.  But beyond that, I think it’s especially vital that we review these subjects regularly because there is in our day so much misinformation and confusion out there about them.  Many have discovered that the quickest way to riches in the Christian publishing business is to declare yourself an expert in biblical prophecy and the end times and then write a book about some new wild theory about when and how the end will come. The best (or worst, depending on your point of view) know that the way to do this is to string together obscure passages drawn from all over the Bible (passages that usually have nothing to do with the topic at hand) and explain how they fit exactly what’s going on in today’s news.  Some unscrupulous (or maybe just misguided) fellows have made entire careers of milking that cow, cranking out a new book every four or five years to update their prophetic discoveries and correlate them with current events.  And the trouble is that Christian people keep buying these books and believing them because they are “written by the experts”. Readers can tell this because there’s no way they could ever have drawn the same conclusions as the experts by looking at the passages they cite.  I think there’s another reason for that, namely that there is no correlation between what the self proclaimed experts say and the Bible; but nevertheless, all of this confusion adds to the popular idea that the Bible is dark and hard to understand, that it’s not clear about the things that pertain to the end, and that you need a prophecy expert to guide you.

            Not so.  The Scriptures shed a great deal of pure and simple light on the truths that pertain to the end – and since we are, as St. Paul says, “sons of the day”, we’re going to spend the next several weeks walking in that light as it addresses the things that are to come.  We begin today with some questions about end itself.  When will it come?  What signs should we expect?  And what should we be doing to remain faithful while we wait for what the Scriptures call the Day of the Lord?

            We begin with the question of “when”.  It’s the big one everyone wants to know.  The disciples too, because it’s the first one they ask Jesus when he raises the subject in the passages that immediately precede today’s Gospel lesson.  Hearing him talk about the end they ask, “Lord, when are these things going to happen?” And you’ll note that Jesus does not give them a precise answer.  He describes general conditions, but no specific dates.  Elsewhere Jesus said that no one knows hour or day.  It’s a divine secret that simply hasn’t been revealed – and that isn’t going to be revealed.  We hear Paul saying as much to the Thessalonians in today’s Epistle:  “I don’t need to write to you about times and dates because you already know the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night”, that is to say, by surprise.  Burglars don’t come on your schedule – if they did, they wouldn’t be very successful.  So one thing you can say for sure is that anyone who comes along saying he knows when the end will come is wrong.

            In fact, we read that not only can we not know when, but that when the end does come it will be completely unexpected.  Paul says that people will be saying “Peace and safety” when the Day of the Lord comes. The idea is that they will have a general feeling of security – everything is status quo – and they will be caught totally off guard.  One of the things we often hear from the prophecy experts is that there will be this massive build up in catastrophes immediately before the end comes – sort of like a drum roll of destruction that heralds Christ’s return.  And with this in mind, they plot the relative frequency of droughts, famines, earthquakes, and hurricanes, and point out that there are more of them recorded in recent years.  They conclude that the end is in sight.  Never mind that the reason for the increase is not that more of these events are occurring, it’s just that there are a lot more people living on the earth and thus more people are affected by them; that, and we do a better job of recording such events that we did in the past.  But again, Paul tells us that it’s not going to be the middle of some worldwide crisis, but rather when the world believes that all is safe and secure that the end will come.  It will be when it’s business as usual … which means pretty much any time.

            Jesus makes that clear in today’s Gospel.  When the disciples ask for the signs that will mark the end of the age, Jesus gives them a long list:  deceivers leading people astray, wars, threats of war, famines, earthquakes, and so on.  The point is that he describes conditions exactly as they existed when he spoke, that exist now, and that have existed ever since mankind’s fall into sin. There’s nothing new here.  But such things are indeed signs to us, not so much of when; but rather that the end is surely coming and what it will be.  Both Jesus and Paul describe catastrophic events as labor pains.  They are the contractions of disaster that remind us that everything is coming to an end, giving way to something wonderful that is yet to come.  They are the events that are sent to shake us out of our lethargy and apathy to wake up, pay attention to what’s important, and be sure that when the day comes, we will not be caught unprepared.

            So, how do we do that?  Well, all this talk of earthquakes and labor pains reminds me of an episode in my family’s life that may help shed some light on this.  It was October 17^th, 1989 – which happens to be my younger daughter’s birth date.  It also happens to be the date of the biggest earthquake to hit California in recorded history.  Depending on the source, the quake weighed in at 7.9 or 8.0 on the Richter scale.  For point of comparison, the big one in 1906 that leveled San Francisco was only a 7.8.  That tenth or two of a point may not seem like much unless you know that the Richter scale is logarithmic – which means that an increase of one full point on the scale signifies an increase in ten times the magnitude and thirty-one times the energy released in a quake.  Maybe some of you remember that earthquake.  Millions of people watched it live on TV because it struck right in the middle of one of the World Series games then being played in Candlestick Park in San Francisco.  You may also remember seeing on the news how the upper deck of a two level bridge collapsed in Oakland, flattening cars – and unfortunately the people in them – under tons of concrete and steel.

            Well, just so you get a sense of it, it happens that Candlestick Park and Oakland were some eighty or ninety miles from the epicenter of that earthquake.  My wife and I – and our daughter who was about a half hour away from her grand entrance into the world – were in a hospital in Salinas, some fifteen or twenty miles from the center.  So you’ve got to picture this:  we’re in the delivery room, my wife is on the table in the height of labor, and I’m standing there holding her hand and doing that Lamaze coaching thing (you know, “Breathe dear:  whooh whooh whooh”).  Why they call it “coaching”, I’ll never know.  Like I’m going to be giving her expert advice on how to have a baby? Anyway, that’s when the earthquake hits.

I don’t know how many of you have ever experienced a really big quake, but what happens is that the surface of the earth moves back and forth laterally (imagine being a salt shaker on a table with loose legs, and someone keeps pounding on the edge of the table).  Generally speaking, it happens that buildings, especially massive concrete ones, like hospitals, say, aren’t very good at moving like that.  So try to picture the mayhem:  this violent shaking suddenly begins, the power goes out and the emergency lights in the hall kick on, stuff is falling off shelves, and because everything in a hospital that’s not nailed down is mounted on wheels, equipment starts spasmodically wandering around the floor.  For the first few seconds everyone is frozen in fear – but then there’s people yelling, nurses running up and down the hall waving their arms in panic.  It’s pandemonium.  And it only gets worse, because then the building begins this crazy swaying in addition to the shaking.  It’s like an upside down pendulum, swinging this way and that and back again.  People are terrified, convinced the whole building is about to fall over and collapse on us.

But not me.  You may remember that I studied civil engineering in college.  Turns out that one of the courses I took had a section on designing buildings in seismically active areas.  And so, like I said, buildings don’t do so well moving back and forth like this, therefore the trick is to keep them from doing that when an earthquake comes.  There are several ways to do it.  One is to mount them on giant ball bearings so that when the ground moves the buildings stay more or less put.  Another way, as was the case in our hospital, is to make the first floor especially flexible and springy so that when the ground’s moving like this, the supports in the first floor are bending back and forth with it.  This allows the resting inertia of the building to keep it comparatively motionless.  Mind you, it’s still shaking, but not nearly as bad as it would be – but a side effect is that you pick up the swaying motion that I described.

So listen:  as soon as I feel this swaying, it dawns on me that we’re in an earthquake proof building. I know that despite what it feels like, we’re pretty safe right where we are – and that all this crazy motion that was terrifying people was actually a good thing.  Well, it could make you sea sick, I suppose; but the building wasn’t about to come crashing down.  Knowing this enabled me to be calm in the middle of the crisis.  My inside information, as it were, helped me see that despite how things appeared, everything was going to turn out alright – for us in safety of the hospital anyway.  And more than that, since I wasn’t panicking, I could use what I knew to try to comfort others.  I actually remember telling my wife – who, as you might have guessed, had other things on her mind and probably wasn’t prepared to hear a physics lesson – how cool it was the way the building was responding.  Okay, so maybe the message didn’t bring her much comfort under the circumstances – but I do believe that my relative calmness did.

So what’s my point?  It’s this: we in the Christian church are in an earthquake proof building.  The crises and catastrophes are going to come.  And every time they do, they remind us that the end is on the way.  It may come for us all at once on the Great Day of the Lord when Christ calls us all home together, or it may come for us as individuals, for at death each of us faces our own Day of the Lord.  Either way, we are in a safe place if we are holding to our faith in Christ Jesus who died for us.  Believing that, no real harm can ever come to us.  But there are a lot of people with us in the building – and sometimes it’s we ourselves – that let the shaking and swaying of the building send them into a panic.  We forget exactly where we are, in whose protection we stand, and in whose Gospel we are guaranteed salvation, and we let the events that shake the building also shake our faith in Christ.  This is all the more a danger because Jesus warns us that there will be false christs leading people astray, using the events and worries of the world to tear people’s trust away from our true Lord and Savior.  These are like people running up and down the halls spreading panic and telling us to evacuate the building.

To defend ourselves, St. Paul warns us to be alert and to keep on the breastplate of faith and love.  He means that we need to know and hold fast to the truths that Christ has taught us – not just the truths about the end times, but the whole Christian message because that’s what our faith is about.  From this faith we have in Christ come the acts of love that mark us as children of our heavenly Father – and the purer and more complete the faith we have, the greater our love for him and one another will be.  But holes in the breastplate of faith, wherever they are, are spots where we are vulnerable to attack and deception because we don’t really know what Christ has taught about something.  It’s at those places that the enemy can target a spiritually fatal blow and lead us astray.  That’s why we need to keep reinforcing the whole truth of our Christian faith.  Paul also enjoins us to keep on our heads the helmet of the hope of salvation.  He means that we should surround our minds with thoughts of what is to come, the glorious things that the Lord Jesus has promised to those who wait for him, for focusing on them allows us to keep the present with all of its problems in proper perspective.

Paul calls the Christians at Thessalonica “sons of the day” – and that’s what he encourages us to be as well:  people who live at all times, day and night, in the light of the Lord Jesus and his truth.  In this light we will always live in the Day of the Lord.  And it’s no coincidence that the Scriptures call Sunday the Lord’s Day, because it has always been on this day that the church celebrates the coming of the Lord to teach us with his Word so that we have the whole light of his truth.  It is on the Lord’s Day too that he comes to give us himself and the assurance of our salvation in the Sacrament of his body and blood sacrificed and raised again for us. So each and every Lord’s Day is, then, a preview and enactment in miniature of the Day of the Lord that our Savior uses to make and keep us sons of the Day.  Knowing this, let us be drawn to the light of his Day, and, as Paul exhorts us, continue to encourage one another and build each other up while we look with expectation for our Lord’s glorious reappearing.  In his holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!