Fairhaven Sermon 11-30-2025

Happy New Year! And Advent, it's a time of year with a double meaning. The first meaning, of course, is that Jesus is coming. We're heading into Christmas and we're getting ready to celebrate Jesus' birthday. And the second meaning of Advent is that Jesus is coming back.

And we'll take a look at each of those meanings today. So starting with Jesus' birthday, we celebrate the coming of the Son of God into our world, and yet at the same time we are surrounded by a secular holiday that has very little to do with God and much more to do with making sure that we all do our part to keep the economy going. Now, I don't mean to sound like a Grinch. It seems to me, though, more this year than usual that all this stuff just kind of feels hollow.

Christmas is about God giving us the greatest gift we've ever received. And it's about us being open to receiving that gift, receiving Jesus in our hearts. And then at Christmastime, we give because God gave, and we're going to give us a little God came to the earth as one of us to teach us how we can be God's people and to open the door of heaven to everyone who loves God and trusts Jesus. And God includes everyone in that invitation, no exceptions.

So that's the first meeting of Advent. The second meaning about Jesus coming back is what our scripture readings for today were focused on. Our scriptures will be looking at the birth of Jesus in more detail in the coming weeks, but this week the focus is really on Jesus' return, on Jesus' second coming. And that's the part of the Christmas story that the world's holiday celebrations tend to miss.

I mean, we see the baby Jesus everywhere, but how often do we see King Jesus coming as King of Kings and Lord of Lords? And I mention this as an aside at Calvary United Methodist. When we sing Messiah, we will be singing about the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. I hope you all can come to that in a couple of weeks. But that's our focus for today on the return of the King, the return of the Lord, and, Both our reading from Isaiah and from Matthew talk about this second advent.

And Isaiah talks about a time in the future when all the nations of the earth will come to the holy mountain of Zion, that is to Jerusalem, and God's perfect justice will be known, and people will destroy their instruments of war and and use them to create tools for growing food and feeding people. That's the first part of the good news of Advent, that the things that used to bring us death will now bring us life. And in our reading from Matthew, we listen as Jesus explains to the disciples what to expect in the future. This conversation takes place after Jesus' death and resurrection, And Jesus is explaining that he will soon return to God the Father, but that he will be back.

And that's the second part of the good news of Advent, that Jesus is returning. The disciples asked Jesus, when will you be back? And how will we know? And in the reading from Matthew, we hear Jesus' answer. So let's start with Isaiah. It comes first chronologically.

In order to understand this reading from Isaiah that we just heard a moment ago from chapter 2, we need to back up and hear what Isaiah said in chapter 1. Now in chapter 1, Isaiah wrote in part, How the faithful city, that is Jerusalem, has become a prostitute. She that was full of justice, righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers. Your silver has become dross.

Your wine is mixed with water. Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow's cause does not come before them.

That's from Isaiah chapter 1. So Isaiah shares God's concern that justice and righteousness have gone missing. and that resources, things like silver and like wine, have become cheapened, and that the nation's princes, their leaders, have rebelled against God and have become people who steal and receive bribes while ignoring the needs of orphans and widows. Isaiah wrote this prophecy to the people of the southern kingdom, Judah and Jerusalem, as a strong warning from God to change course, to change direction, See, Isaiah was a prophet during troubled times in Israel.

and, The Assyrians to the north had decided that they wanted to be the next country to try their hand at world domination. And so they're ready to take over the entire region. And at this point in time, the northern kingdom of Israel had not yet fallen, but it would. And the southern kingdom.

.. didn't fall for a while because a civil war started in Assyria that forced Assyria's army to go home and take care of the civil war. Aware of all of this, Isaiah's prophecy in chapter 2 talks about a time in the future when the nations, like Assyria, who were known for war and violence, would come flocking to Israel to the Temple Mount in order to learn God's ways of peace.

And Isaiah talks about a time when God's word, the Torah, the Bible, would replace humanity's Amen. books on wars and killing. And Isaiah talks about a time when God will judge between the nations, and as a result, all the people of all the nations will hammer their weapons into farming tools. People will learn to grow food rather than take life.

Now, God's words here are not difficult to understand. However, it's not easy to figure out how they're going to become reality. And, But since we know what God's future holds, it seems to make sense that we work towards peace and well-being rather than indulging in violence and greed and war. We want to work towards the future that God has shown us.

And Isaiah tells God's people, Walk in the light, trust in God, not in power. Listen to God. Commit ourselves to God's truth. And in saying these things, of course, this implies that there is a God and that God speaks the truth.

And because God speaks the truth, truth can be known. In God's kingdom, truth is never a relative term. God's truth does not change with the times or with people's opinions. To know Jesus is to know truth because Jesus is truth.

But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here. We need to turn now to Matthew and speak, listen to Jesus. When Jesus tells the disciples that he's going back home to his father, but that he will return, the disciples ask, When will you be back? How will we know to look for you? These are reasonable questions. I mean, the world is a big place, and how will the disciples know where and when to find Jesus? And Jesus answers that only God the Father knows when this will be, but that there will be signs to watch for.

Jesus says the time of his return will be like the days of Noah, that people will be eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage, in other words, just living life as usual, unaware that there are changes coming down the pike. Now, this passage does not mean that there's anything wrong with eating or drinking or getting married. Amen. I just wanted to be very clear on that because a lot of people read that passage that way.

The problem was not that people were eating, drinking, and marrying. The problem was that people were not aware that while they were doing these things, their lives were in danger. that there was trouble brewing all around them. God describes the times of Noah in the book of Genesis this way.

God says, 'The Lord saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually, and the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth.' And it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, So it's not the eating and drinking. It was the fact that folks were not even paying attention to God at all.

Genesis describes the people of those times as corrupt and filled with violence. So God told Noah to build the ark, which Noah did. It's not the fact that folks were not even paying attention to God at all. And so for months, Noah's neighbors saw what Noah was doing.

He was building this massive boat, collecting all kinds of animals, putting them in the boat, along with food for the animals. And the neighbors never even stopped to ask why. Meanwhile, Noah was probably wondering how much more evil the world could become. And even today, people I know who love Jesus sometimes wonder how much more evil the world can become.

Why? In my parents' generation, People looked at Hitler and the Nazis and thought that they were seeing the greatest evil the earth had ever seen. And many people were convinced that we were near the end back in those days, that Jesus was coming back soon. And I have no doubts that the Nazi regime is what evil looks like in the flesh. But we also need to know that every generation produces leaders who are evil, who ignore the words of God, and every generation produces leaders who think they're doing God a favor when they thin out the human heart.

Just to name a few in the past century— Mao Zedong of China killed over 38 million. Stalin in the USSR killed over 43 million. Pol Pot of Cambodia over 2 million. Al-Assad of Syria over 200,000 of his own people, which is what started the refugee crisis here in the United States a couple decades ago because a lot of the people in Syria came running here for safety.

And the saints of God cry out, 'How long, O Lord? How long?' The people of God have been asking that question, 'How long?' for a long time. In our reading from Matthew, when Jesus told the disciples that he was going to heaven but would return, the question is, 'When?' 'When are you coming back?' And when has been the question ever since. And how many people have we heard of who have tried to answer the question of when will Jesus be back, and they've come up with really interesting ways of interpreting history and interpreting the book of Revelation that lead us far from the facts and deep into speculation. Jesus has only two answers to the question of when: be ready and keep watch.

And as our culture becomes more secular, more free of religion than it ever has been, as churches shrink in size and many of them close, while at the same time the culture around us becomes more faithless, we as people of God, we need to stay awake We need to be keeping eyes and hearts and minds focused on Jesus, watching for Jesus, living under the lordship of Jesus and following his lead. Our first and highest calling is to believe in Jesus and trust him. And the second follows on that we are called to live for Jesus. And this includes things like praying every day, doing the work that brings honor to God, both by what we do and by how we do it.

The old song says, 'They'll know we are Christians by our love.' And more than ever, this needs to be true of us. More than ever, our world needs to see Christians doing what God says to do because God's word is so countercultural. Jesus says his return will happen during a time like the days of Noah when people are corrupt and violent and evil, and his command to us is be ready and keep watch.

When Jesus returns, it will be completely unexpected, except for the people who've been keeping watch. And in a way, it kind of reminds me of those dry riverbeds called wadis in the Holy Land. The riverbeds can be dry for months, even years. And it's tempting to go hiking in them or to have a picnic in them because they're very pleasant places.

But the problem is the Wadi can turn back into a river again. Even if rain falls like 100 miles away, But, the water comes on so fast that anyone in the Wadi who isn't paying attention doesn't stand a chance. And the closest parallel I can think to this that we'd be familiar with would be the Johnstown flood. You remember that one minute the city was there and the next minute the dam broke upstream and the town was underwater.

That's what a wadi is like, and that's why sensible people don't hang out in a wadi. Okay. The people of Noah's day were basically living in a spiritual wadi, and in a flash the flood came and the people were gone, except for Noah and his family who God saved. For us today, we don't know when Jesus is coming back, but we know that Jesus is coming back.

And as believers in Jesus, our job is to give people a heads up. We are living in evil times, and we need to be keeping our eyes on God, not living like the people in Noah's time, living life like we always have and thinking there's nothing wrong with the world. If we value what God values— The world might think we're a little bit weird, but a person who loves Jesus will value generosity and justice and kindness. And if that's weird, we can be weird.

Jesus continues his conversation with the disciples by saying that there will come a time... When two people are in a field and one is taken and the other left, or two people will be baking bread and one is taken and the other is left.

And I need to be clear on something here. This is not a teaching about the rapture. In fact, the word rapture does not exist in the Bible. Over this past century, Jesus' words have been interpreted as being in support of something called rapture theology.

You may have heard of the Left Behind series a few years ago. Rapture theology tries to plot out where we are in proximity to the end times, which is exactly what Jesus tells his disciples not to do. The Bible says in the end, we will be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, and that when we see Jesus, we will be like him. The Bible says nothing about people disappearing into the sky.

Okay. The important thing to remember and to do is that Jesus says, Be ready. And this means to continue being ready, not getting ready once and then say, Okay, I'm ready. This is the kind of readiness where we have to do something.

We don't have to do something. Rather, we just keep watch. So watchfulness, watching for God's action in the world. We need to be asking, what is God doing right now in my life, in the life of our family, in the lives of our friends, in our neighborhoods, in our nation, in our world? What is God doing? Where do we see God moving? And I'd like to give an example of what I'm talking about here.

Our Facebook prayer group, KnowWalls, has been praying for a while for a pastor who was put in prison by ICE a few months ago, and praise God he was released and returned to his family this past week. After he got home, he shared that while he was in prison, he was blessed to become pastor to the other men in prison. and now that he's out, he asks people of faith to pray for these men, including those who've Amen. been separated from their families, to pray for their families.

He asks us to honor God by standing with and praying for those who are waiting for freedom and not forgetting them. That's what it means to be watchful and waiting, watching for what Jesus is doing. Another pastor has said the calling of today's followers of Jesus is to be watching for signs of God's presence, especially as God is healing the sick, or standing with the broken and suffering, or bringing sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf. This is where we see God working.

As followers of Jesus, we are called to be watching and to be ready, not in fear, but in expectation, because we know that God is moving, so we watch in faith and we watch in faith. for those places where God is moving. We also remember the vows we took when we were baptized or confirmed, and I love that we retake these vows every year. I appreciate that so much.

How can we go about fulfilling our vows by bringing God's truth and God's love into the world? while we wait for Jesus to return, we are called to stay close to the Word of God. Stay close to Jesus. Keep watch. And as Shakespeare said in the words of Hamlet, the readiness is all.

Keep watch and be ready. Amen.