“Getting Our Story Straight”

“Getting Our Story Straight”

Text: Matthew 24:36-44

© December 2, 2007 by C. Edward Bowen at Crafton United Presbyterian Church.

It’s been said that if you took all the people who have ever fallen asleep in church, and laid them end to end, they’d be a whole lot more comfortable! While that may indeed be true, here in this passage from the Bible that we just listened to, Jesus says to us, “Don’t fall asleep! Wake up! Be alert! Get ready! Because the message God is trying to get across to us is something that we can’t afford to miss.”

But so often in life, when someone is trying to communicate some message to us, we do fall asleep. Or if we don’t actually nod off, we at least don’t pay attention to them like we probably should. For instance, have you ever flown on an airplane? If you have, you know that right before take-off, a flight attendant holds a microphone in her hand and goes over the safety instructions. The flight attendant points out where the emergency exits are, where the life jackets are in case you crash in a lake or an ocean, where the oxygen masks are if the cabin of the plane suddenly loses air pressure.

But while the flight attendant is going over all that potentially life or death information, what are most of the people on the plane doing? They’re sleeping. Or if they’re not sleeping, they’re reading a magazine, they’re looking out the window, they’re playing a videogame. The passengers are doing just about everything except paying attention to what the flight attendant is trying to communicate to them.

But the passengers aren’t necessarily trying to be rude to the flight attendant. It’s just that most of the people on the plane figure, “Hey, I’ve flown before. I’ve heard this speech before. What you’re telling me, I already know. So I don’t need to listen.”

But you have to wonder, if there ended up being a real emergency on the flight, how many of those people would actually know what to do. My guess is: not too many. My guess is: if there ended up being a real emergency, just about everyone on the plane would be begging the flight attendant, “Hey, could you go over those safety instructions again? Because now we’re really ready to listen.”

Sometimes we don’t listen to the messages that are being communicated to us because we figure we’ve already heard that message. But what we often fail to realize is that many of the messages that we hear and accept as the truth aren’t actually true. I discovered that for myself just this past week.

I was driving home from the church after an evening meeting. It was about 8:30 or so, and of course it was dark. But as I was driving up Poplar Street, a car was coming the other way and he didn’t have his headlights on. And I was just about ready to flash my high beams at him as a way of telling him to turn his lights on, but at the last second I decided that I better not do that.

You see, just at that moment I remembered something someone had told me one time: that you shouldn’t flash your high beams at people driving with their lights off, because they might be gang members, and if you flash your high beams at them, they might shoot you. And over the years I had heard that same message from different sources that some gangs, as an initiation ritual, would send their new members out riding around at night with their headlights off, with orders to shoot at anyone who flashed their high beams at them. And so when that car came the other way on Poplar, I decided not to flash my headlights at him, because I figured it wasn’t worth the risk of possibly getting shot at.

But just a day or two later, I found out that that story about gang members riding around with their lights off is nothing but a hoax.[1] It’s just a made-up story, with no basis in reality, that has been circulating by word of mouth and on the Internet for years and years. But I have to admit, for the longest time it was a story that I just accepted as being true.

Or here is a little literature quiz. Who is known for saying, “Elementary, my dear Watson”? I imagine that most people here would immediately answer that those words were frequently uttered by the detective Sherlock Holmes to his assistant, Mr. Watson. But the truth is that in all of the Sherlock Holmes books that were ever written, not one single solitary time did Sherlock Holmes ever say, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”[2] But that’s a “fact” that most of us have heard time and time again and that we’ve just come to accept and believe.

And to a degree, we have that same kind of problem with it comes to God and the Bible. There are some things that we think we know about God and the Bible that actually aren’t true. For example, who in the Bible spoke these words: “God helps those who help themselves?” Was it Jesus, Paul, Peter, Moses? As it turns out, despite what many people think, “God helps those who help themselves” isn’t anywhere in the Bible. Instead, it’s a saying that was created by Benjamin Franklin.

Or it’s rather surprising how many people think that Noah’s wife was Joan of Arc. In case you don’t know, in the Bible, Noah’s wife isn’t named, and Joan of Arc was a Christian woman who lived in France during the 1400s. But apparently a large number of people think of Noah and the ark, and just naturally throw Joan of Arc into the same story.

But while some of the things that we know about the Bible are just plain wrong, there are many stories in the Bible that we know, and we know correctly – we know about Adam and Eve, and Moses and the burning bush, and Jesus walking on the water. If someone asked us to tell them some stories from the Bible, most of us here could do that without much of a problem. You see, the problem we have isn’t so much with the stories that we know – because many of us know quite a few stories from the Bible. The problem comes in with the stories in the Bible, the parts of the Bible, that we don’t know. Like we said, most of us are pretty familiar with parts of the Bible – and we tend to focus on what we know – but what about the parts of the Bible that we tend to skip over and don’t know?

For instance, if I were to ask you to get out a piece of paper right now and write down for me a brief summary of Jesus’ life, my guess is that most of us would probably put down something like this: Jesus was born in Bethlehem. His parents were Mary and Joseph. Around the age of 30, he went out to the Jordan River and was baptized by John the Baptist. Then Jesus started traveling around preaching to the people about God, and teaching people about the kind of lives that God wanted them to live. Jesus healed people, like the blind and the deaf and people who were demon-possessed. Along the way, Jesus performed a number of miracles, like turning water into wine, and taking a few pieces of bread and fish and feeding thousands of people.

But eventually some people grew to hate Jesus, and they arranged to have one of Jesus’ own disciples betray him. And after arresting him and putting him on trial, they took Jesus off to a hill outside of Jerusalem and nailed him to a cross. He died there, and some of his friends came and buried him in a tomb. But then, three days later, on the day we call Easter, some women and others went back to the tomb and discovered that Jesus wasn’t dead anymore, but that God had resurrected him – God had made him alive again.

And my guess is that for many people, that is where the story ends. But that’s not where the story of Jesus ends. Instead, about 40 days after Jesus was resurrected, Jesus ascended – he was then taken up into heaven. And before he left, Jesus said that one day – at the end of time – he would return and on that day everyone, in all the world, would be judged.

And in this passage that we listened to today from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is warning us to get ready for that day, because we don’t know when it will come – whether it might be 10,000 years from now or whether it might be tomorrow. And at its heart, that’s what this season of Advent is mainly about – getting ready for that day when Jesus is going to return.

I know that for most people, they think of Advent as the time to get ready for Christmas, to get ready for Jesus to be born in Bethlehem. But the simple fact is that Jesus has already been born in Bethlehem – it’s more 2,000 years too late to get ready for that. No, Advent is the special time of year when we’re especially encouraged to get ourselves ready for that day when Jesus will come again.

During this season of Advent, we spend a lot of time getting ready for Christmas. We get ready by decorating trees and hanging wreaths. We get ready by buying presents and addressing Christmas cards. We get ready by baking cookies and listening to carols. And those are all great and wonderful things.

But during this season of Advent, don’t just get ready for Christmas. Instead, remember the rest of the story. Remember that during his time of year, we’re not just thinking back to when Jesus was born in a manger, we’re also looking forward to the future, when the story of Jesus will really come to an end, that day when he’ll return and we’ll stand before him in judgment.

So during this season of Advent, let’s take a serious look at our lives and make the changes that need to be made. During this season of Advent, let’s take a look at our lives, and whatever we see there that’s wrong or selfish or falls short in any way of what God expects of us, with God’s help, let’s eliminate those things. During this season of Advent, let’s get ready – because even though we don’t when, we know that one day Jesus will return.