Friends, are you prepared for the end? Not our end. Some of us began preparing for that in my funeral planning seminar last week. But are you prepared for The End? The end of the age, the end of all things.
It’s not something we usually talk about much in The Episcopal Church. And maybe you’re already wondering where the curate is going with this. I promise you, it’s not going to be too weird. And hopefully, useful.
We’ve largely ceded talk of the end times to Christians who seem to focus solely on that. And instead we tend to focus on the now: following in the way of Christ and doing our best to live good, moral lives.
But The End is something that we profess. In the words of the Nicene Creed: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” We have a collect for the prayers of the people: “Hasten, O Father, the coming of your kingdom.” In the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come.” We have these prayers and petitions that all this will pass away and God’s rule, God’s kingdom, will be established here on earth as it is in heaven.
So in this season, between All Saints last week and Christ the King in a few weeks our readings get a bit apocalyptic. They get us in that mindset: all this is going to pass away. Christ will come again, be our judge, and establish God’s eternal kingdom. Today’s readings from 1 Thessalonians and Matthew, are no exception.
In 1 Thessalonians, Paul paints the scene of The End with Christ descending from the heavens with a call of angelic trumpets. The dead will be raised and those of us still living will join them and go up in the air to meet him. If that sounds a little bit like the rapture well, this is what Christians who believe in the rapture look to as their proof text. But “Rapture Theology” , the belief that the righteous will be gathered up into the air and taken away and others will be “left behind” is less than 200 years old and based on a dubious reading of the text.
So, what’s actually going on? Well, Paul is using the image of the arrival of an emperor. When the emperor was visiting town, and he was a couple of miles out, the trumpets would blare, and people would rush out to line the road and welcome the emperor into the city. And so Paul’s vision is of us rushing up into the clouds to welcome Christ as he comes down to earth. Because that is the promise: not that we get taken away to go up there, but that Christ will come here. Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
Why is Paul writing this? Paul is trying to make sense of death. First Thessalonians is the earliest existing part of the New Testament, written probably 15 years after the resurrection, to a group of Christians who expected Christ to return imminently. So what about those who died in the meantime? If Christ has conquered death, why are we still dying? And Paul says, even though people have died in this interim period, their ultimate end is to be raised when Christ comes again.
The same expectation of an imminent return is the animating force behind a lot of the parables we hear in Matthew’s Gospel. And to be sure, Matthew gives people a lot of anxiety. There are a lot of stories of people being ill-prepared for the coming of the kingdom of God, and being excluded when God’s kingdom arrives on earth: wedding guests in the wrong clothes, or, the King who will separate the sheep from the goats. Matthew and his community think Christ is coming back really soon, and these stories are meant to put the fear of God into people to be prepared.
That’s true of today’s Gospel lesson: Ten bridesmaids are waiting for the bridegroom to arrive. Five are wise and five are foolish. All ten have lamps, but only the wise five brought extra oil. The bridegroom is late, really late, and they all doze off. Then at midnight the cry goes up: he’s here! The foolish ones realize their lamps are running dry and ask the wise ones to share. The wise ones say no, go buy your own. And while the foolish ones are out shopping, the bridegroom arrives, the doors close, and they’re locked out. They were ill-prepared. In Bible study this week this reading was characterized as “You snooze, you lose” and by the Boy Scout motto “Be prepared.”
And here’s the rub for us. Preparation for something like that sounds a lot easier if we expect it to happen imminently. If I know my mother-in-law is visiting next week, I’m going to be prepared and try my darndest to keep the house tidy. But if I were waiting for her to arrive for 2,000 years, the house might get into a bit of disarray.
And indeed, to the best of my knowledge, it’s been nearly 2,000 years and Christ hasn’t returned. So how can we be prepared in this undefined period of waiting? How do we stay on our toes? If I’ve lost you with all the end times talk, here’s the bit to pay attention to.
I think it comes down to how we pattern our lives. I have a dear friend and former coworker called Phil, and Phil is a marathon runner. I don’t mean Phil has run a marathon, but Phil is a marathon runner. Phil set himself the goal to run 50 marathons, one in each state before he turned 50 – a goal he achieved. And he still regularly runs long distances – he’s one of the pace setters for the New York marathon. Phil doesn’t train for a specific marathon. Phil is always in marathon condition. If you asked Phil this morning, hey, get up and run 26.2 miles he could, because he’s not training for a specific event. He patterns his life in a way that he can always be counted on to run a marathon. He always has that gas in the tank, or rather, that oil for his lamp.
Another example and another person dear to me is Dr. Lisa Kimball, a recently-retired professor at my alma mater Virginia Theological Seminary. At seminary we had daily chapel Monday to Friday, and attendance at chapel was mixed. There was a certain subset of both students and faculty you could rely on to regularly attend chapel and Lisa was one of them. And at her retirement party, this Spring, Lisa’s spouse spoke about her chapel attendance and said this: “Lisa was always in chapel because she knew it was easier to make the decision once to go to chapel every day than to wake up every day and decide whether or not to go to chapel.”
Being prepared is not about waiting in anxiety like Matthew’s community or the church in Thessalonians. Being prepared for the coming of Christ is not about looking over our shoulder. And it’s not about big flashy, one off acts of generosity and kindness (however wonderful those are!)
It’s about patterning our lives. Patterning our lives so that if Christ does return in our lifetime, we’re good to go, like Phil is good to go and run a marathon and keep that steady pace for others. We’ve made the decision like Lisa to live a life with rhythm of prayer and preparation once, rather than wake up and make that decision each morning.
It’s living our lives, finding those easy to repeat spiritual practices each day, building up that muscle memory, building up those oil stores of love and generosity and kindness. So that when those trumpets blare, and the clouds part, and Christ comes in his glory, whether we’re still here or on the other side of the grave. We will be prepared.
Amen