“Daydream Believer”
Matthew
24:36-44
First
Presbyterian
The Reverend
Thomas A. Sweet
November 28,
2010
Advent 1
God
and a man are walking down the road. The
man asks God, “What is the world like?”
God
replies, “I cannot talk when I am thirsty.
If you could get me a drink of cool water, we could discuss what the
world is like. There is a village
nearby. Go and get me a drink.”
The
man goes into the village and knocks at the door of the first house.
A pretty young woman opens the door.
His jaw drops at the sight of her, but he manages to say, “I need a
glass of cool water.”
“Of
course,” she says, smiling, “but it is midday.
Would you care to stay for some food?”
“I
am hungry,” he says, looking over
his shoulder. “And your offer of
food is a great kindness.”
So
he goes in and the door closes behind him.
Thirty
years go by. The man who wanted to
know what the world is like and the woman who offered him food have married and
raised five children. He is a
respected merchant in his town and she is an honored member of the community.
One day a terrible storm comes in off the ocean and threatens their
lives. The merchant cries out,
“Help me, God.”
A
voice from the midst of the storms replies, “Where is my cup of cold water?”
What
is the world like? That would be an
interesting question for “man on the street” or “woman on the street”
interviews, wouldn’t it? I suspect
the answers might depend on the social location, the life experiences, and the
make up of the one answering the question. From
the point of view of the story I just told, the world is a place holding many
options and offers, attractions and distractions, a place of forgetfulness, a
place where it is easy to lose the sense of God’s presence.
Matthew’s
text tells us that the world is a place of eating and drinking, of marrying and
giving in marriage, of working in the field, grinding at the mill and a whole
host of other activities that occupy our time and our minds. We
are pulled in many directions. Our
lives are full of responsibilities and things to do and sometimes, like the man
in our story and in the words of an anthem our choir has sung across the years,
“We wander far away from God.” Sometimes
we do not realize it until “a terrible storm” blows into our lives and we
are in sudden need of divine aid or solace.
Sometimes we are not aware of it until one day we realize that even
though things are going well enough on the outside of our lives, we feel
strangely vacant on the inside.
That
is why we need the alarm that Advent sounds.
It is a wake up call lest we get lost in the world or in our lives like
the man in our opening story, the man who was having a conversation with God but
got waylaid and sidetracked until calamity came and then, suddenly, he
frantically wanted God again. Advent
long has been my favorite liturgical season because it calls me back to a life
cognizant of God.
We
know that if we are to grow up physically, we need to eat nutritiously and get
adequate sleep and sufficient exercise. We
know that if we are going to mature intellectually, we need to read, to study,
to cultivate curiosity, to listen to those who know about what we want to learn.
We know that if we are going to be socially well-adjusted we need to
learn the manners and morés of our culture and generally accepted social
customs. But many of us seem to
think that spiritual growth and understanding should “just happen,” that the
spiritual dimension of life is not something we need to develop.
Many
of us become what I call (with thanks to The
Monkees) “daydream believers.” We
get busy and involved in things in our lives that seem more immediate,
important, and imperative and do not pay God and gospel much mind.
Our attention is elsewhere. Then,
when something happens to us in our lives for which we need the spiritual wisdom
that God has been trying to give us, it eludes us.
It is like the student who all semester long fails to do his homework and
then, on the night before the final exam, thinks he can cram and make up for his
indolence, but it doesn’t work that way (not that I have any personal
knowledge about that!) It doesn’t
work that way with God and the spiritual dimension of our lives, either.
In
the gospel according to John, Jesus tells his disciples that after he is gone,
after his death, “…the Holy Spirit,
whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you
of all that I have said to you” (John 14:26).
Advent reminds us that our lives are pregnant with God, with Christ’s
coming, with teachable moments.
“Come”
is a gospel verb. It is used
repeatedly. It is the dominant theme
of the incarnation. It is the
central message of Christmas. Our
God comes to us. It is in our text
today. “Keep
awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”
Again: “…be
ready, for the Son of Man comes at unexpected hours.”
Eugene
Peterson writes that the distinctive biblical and Christian message is not that
God is but that God comes.
And that God is going to come again and again, because that is the nature
of God – to come.
The
gospel message is not that God exists. Little
good that would do us if God created the world and then essentially left it,
disappeared from it, had no interest in it or us.
The gospel message is that God comes to us repeatedly.
“Behold, I stand at your door and knock.”
We often look for God’s coming in things grand and grandiose but
God’s preference seems to be to come in the midst of the dailiness of our
lives – in our pain, in our doubt, in our joy, in our sorrow, in our
neighbors, in our work, in our working out of what confuses, confounds, or costs
us.
I
love the story of the great prophet Elijah in the Old Testament and the way it
affirms that God mostly comes in ordinary, quiet ways.
Elijah was crossing the vast desert of the Negeb, on his way to Sinai,
the
So
Elijah got up and ate and started again through the desert, underneath the
burning sun. He walked for forty
days and forty nights, until finally he reached
Well,
the first thing Elijah saw was a hurricane.
It was blowing so hard that the sand covered the sun by day and the moon
lost its glow at night and all the lights in the sky, big stars and small stars,
disappeared in the fury of the storm. Elijah
said, “My God, my God, finally I know
you. You are the rumbling storm and
the violent hurricane.” But
Elijah did not receive an answer, because God was not in the thunder or the
gusty winds.
Then
the earth began to shudder. The
earthquake was so strong that the pillars of the world shook, the mountains
heaved and cracked, the rocks split into a thousand pieces.
And Elijah said, “Finally, my God, I know you! You
are the trembling of the earthquake!” But
no answer came because God was not in the shaking of the earth.
Then
there appeared a big fire. A
crackling conflagration rose up from the bowels of the earth, burning everything
to the ground, leaving nothing but dust and ashes.
“Now I know you, God; you are a
consuming fire!” But the fire
remained silent since God was not in the burning flame.
Finally,
Elijah felt the soft caress of a gentle breeze and Elijah understood that God
had come in the still, small voice of that quiet wind, that breath, that
spirit-like presence.
That
is a significant teaching because we tend in our lives to pay more attention to
the sensational than to the seemingly simple.
People read today’s text from Matthew and want to read into it a
dramatic second coming of Jesus, an end-of-the-world apocalypse.
But why? The text does not
demand a reading that makes it sound as if the reason for a return is to judge
whether we have been naughty or nice. That
does not do justice to the nature and character of God or to God’s grace
toward us.
The
better understanding? Here is what I
think Matthew was getting at. Our
“worlds” as we experience them now are all the time coming to an end and new
ones arise. Our children grow up and
leave home, so we enter a new world of empty nesting.
We receive a difficult diagnosis from the doctor and suddenly our world
changes. The job we have held for
twenty years is eliminated and that world ends for us.
Love comes into our life as never before and the foundations of what we
thought was a settled world for us shake and shift and newness comes. Our
spouse dies and the world we shared together comes to a close.
We come to understand something we long have believed in a new light and
it opens a new world to us.
The
people to whom Matthew originally wrote just had suffered the devastating loss
of their
What
Matthew says to us is that God in Christ continues to come to us in the midst of
all the changes in our lives, in the midst of our changing worlds.
So be vigilant. Wake up.
Do not be a daydream believer in which you pay attention and consider
everything except God. Do not think
that God has nothing to say to you in the midst of the changes and challenges in
your life. Do not think you are
bereft of divine aid and companionship. Do
not be a daydream believer in which you get lost in your life and do not see
daily the myriad ways God comes to you. I
like this little verse by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in this regard:
All of earth is crammed with
heaven, and every
bush aflame with God; but only those who see take off
their shoes…
It
seems to me that those who interpret our text as a warning of some dramatic
second coming sometime in the future, we know not when, are saying that we are
on our own in the meantime, that we have to fend for ourselves until such a time
as Jesus comes again. But the
bedrock principle of biblical interpretation is that scripture is the best
interpreter of scripture. That means
that any single part or passage of scripture cannot be interpreted apart from
the whole sweep of scripture. And
the whole sweep of scripture says that God is Emmanuel – God with us – and
that God comes to us again and again and again.
God
comes to us in Christ all the time sharing with us the same mind that was in
Jesus, the same Spirit that was in Jesus. If
we put our theological eggs in the second-coming-at-the-end-of-the-world basket,
we are going to miss the ways that God comes to us and to our world today.
Therefore,
Advent Christians: be alert, pay attention, wake up, live expectantly.
For, as Phillips Brooks said in his Christmas carol:
How silently, how silently, The
wondrous gift is given!
(For) God imparts to human hearts The blessings of his heaven.
No ear may hear his coming, But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him, still the dear Christ enters in.
So,
dear friends, Matthew says to us: wake up and prepare Him room.
Prepare Him room.
Amen.