Like a Thief in the Night

Luke 12:32-40
Pentecost 12C
August 11, 2013
First and Harmony Presbyterian Churches

The Rev. Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

Just three years before he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Irish poet William Butler Yeats surveyed the carnage of post-war Europe and penned what would be a masterpiece of modernist poetry.  Called the war to end all wars, for many WWI or the Great War looked as if it was the war that would end all humanity.  The aftermath of the war brought with it a deepening sense of despair and hopelessness about the future.  The very foundations of what had once been understood to stand at the heart of stability- empire, church, the traditional class system- were shattered.  

It was in the midst of that season confusion and failure of confidence that Yeats penned his famous words in the poem “The Second Coming.”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed up upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.  

The imagery of the poem is stark, frightening, and unapologetically pessimistic about the state of world affairs.  Perhaps the most incredible thing about the poem and its imagery of a world decaying and rotting from the inside out is the fact that though written over nine decades ago, it could have been written yesterday.  Yeats’s description of his own world is not that different from a reasonable description of our own.  The characters might have changed, but much of our reality is the same.  

Yeats changed the title of the poem several times before it was finally published.  The title he settled on, “The Second Coming,” refers to the promised second coming into the world of Christ.  For generations beginning as early as the days of the gospel writers, the church hung its hopes on the promised return of the Messiah.  No matter how bad things might get, the days of Jesus’s promised return; the days of the kingdom of God are right around the corner.

In post-War Europe, it looked as if Jesus would never return and God had just forgotten about the world.  Echoing the growing doubts of a generation, Yeats pulls no punches in his writing.  The very notion of Christ’s return is turned on its head in the last few lines of the poem where Yeats writes,

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

After 20 centuries of waiting and waiting and waiting, the sentimental vision of the new born baby and the gentle entry into the world has been replaced by the hour for the coming of a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.  

It is difficult not to read this text from Luke through Yeats’s despairing eyes.  

This text demonstrates what I find to two of Jesus’s most annoying habits; declaring that he will return and taking his time about actually doing it. 

Part of why I find it so difficult to treat Yeats too harshly is that I know what it is to be in that place.  To feel as though Jesus has forgotten to return and God has forgotten us all together.  

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

As many of you know, I was in Louisville, KY a couple of weeks ago for a Presbyterian Church event called “The Big Tent.” Big Tent was started when the church chose to have the General Assembly meet every other year rather than every year.  In off years, all of the major church gatherings; the Theology and Worship Conference, the Peacemaking Conference, the Multi-Cultural Fellowship and half a dozen others meet together in the same place for four days of fellowship, worship and learning.

My experience was wonderful in many ways.  I got to meet new friends in ministry, share stories of two churches I am deeply proud to serve and learn some new ideas from other church leaders.  If I learned anything, it is that the PC(USA) really is a big tent with room for all of God’s children to live, grow and worship God together.

As with all church gatherings, there were some uncomfortable parts.  It became more evident how we, along with our brothers and sisters in the other Mainline Protestant churches, have gotten so used to talking about all the changes in the church; harping on the challenges of the church; each generation pointing to another and laying blame, placing hopes or simply saying run away!  When we gather as a larger church, we spend an awful lot of time looking inside and not a whole lot looking outside.  Now, don’t mistake me.  There is plenty of good mission and ministry happening around the church, but sometimes it feels like the navel gazing has been raised to an art form.  All of our inwardness distracts us from the larger calling of the church to love and serve the world as we love and serve God.  

We lose track of that sometimes.  In the chaos of the moment, it is so easy to lose sight of the long view.

As Yeats says, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

I suppose it is no wonder though.  Our reality is pretty radically changed from the church many of us knew.

  Many churches were built for 500 worshipers and on a good Sunday you may count 60.

Some were founded because they were geographically isolated, but Mr. Ford and his assembly line helped take care of that.

Budgets continue to shrink just as expenses soar.

More congregations are closing than are opening and the 4 million members of the 1960s has become less than 2 million today.  

It is almost like post-war Europe was not the only thing Jesus forgoes or God forgets.

But Jesus says, “you must be ready because the Lord is coming when you least expect it.”

Part of us thinks the surprise will come if he returns not when.  There has been plenty of reason to doubt in the years since Yeats saw such despair in the world.   There is reason to doubt as we watch the old church we once knew transform around us and, yes, in some ways die.

4 million to 2 million in less than 50 years?

Maybe Yeats was right. 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed up upon the world,

Anarchy rules the day.  Why do we bother?

You are crazy if you think preachers do not ask themselves that question pretty often.  “Why bother?” “Why keep preaching Jesus will return when all evidence to the contrary surrounds us every day?” 

Preacher or parishioner, that is likely not an unfamiliar question and based on the world in which we live, it is not a wholly unreasonable one.  The evidence around us tells us day after day that putting our hope in the coming of Jesus, putting our hope in a Second Coming of messiah is nothing but a dead letter.

So why bother?

The answer to that is pretty simple.

Why bother?

Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ.  That is all that needs to be said.  Jesus Christ is God’s hope summed up.  He is the promise of God made flesh.  Jesus Christ is the word of God and Jesus promises to return.

There is a reason that everything around us fails to point us to the fulfillment of God’s promise in the return of Jesus Christ; that is not the world’s job.  

The world and all that is in it sing praises to God, but we must not mistake the world, its life or its history for God.

No, the world does not fulfill the promise of Christ because it cannot fill his shoes.  Only Christ can keep the promise to return and make all things whole and new and shalom.

Only Christ can keep the promise.

And it is Christ who made the promise.

Christ, who never promised to return this day or that year but only that He will return.  In fact according to the text, he is returning.  That is what the Greek here means.  The way Jesus makes his promise, the words are in the present progressive tense- when Jesus made his promise to the disciples, the promise was already being kept and it is being kept today.  It is a promise made and unfolding through history.

  The world gives us all kinds of reasons to give up.

To give up on the church.

To give up on our neighbors.

To give up on our world.

The reasons to give up are legion and the reason to stay alert- to be prepared- to wait and work with faithful anticipation is just one.  Because Jesus Christ said so.

That is the only reason we have to believe and the only one we need.  

Christ has promised to be faithful to his promise so we are freed to be faithful to Christ.  

That is the only reason we need to dig in and put our faith and our energy into doing the work of God in this place; to face a changing world and a changing church with an unflinching hope in the God glorify, the Spirit that sustains us and the Christ who is with us even now as he fulfills his promise to return.  

So, be ready.

Jesus will return- he promised us he would.

He didn’t say when and he didn’t say where, but he promised to return.

And whose word can you take if not the word of the Word of God?

Amen.