Left Behind

We begin our journey through Advent today with a text from Matthew’s Gospel. At the very end of Matthew, Jesus’ tells his followers: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (28.19-20) So the purpose of the church, the community of Jesus’ followers, is to teach people to obey all that Jesus commanded.

What does Jesus command? In Matthew’s Gospel there are five major blocks of his teaching[1] and today’s text comes from near the end of the fifth block. Before we look at it, we need to remember how Jesus’ teaching ends. The fifth teaching block ends with the parable of the sheep and the goats. When Christ returns in glory, according to the parable, people will be judged either as sheep who enjoy God’s presence forever or goats who are excluded forever from God’s presence. But what’s surprising in the parable is that the goats are surprised that they are not saved and the sheep are surprised that they are saved. Both the sheep and the goats are surprised because the test is whether the hungry were fed or the thirsty given drink or the stranger welcomed or the naked clothed or the sick cared for or the prisoners visited. The test of salvation is what we’ve done to the least ones. That’s the whole point of Jesus’ teaching and, as we’ll see in a moment, that’s also the point of today’s text.

“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

You’ve heard me preach now most Sundays for a year and a half and even though I don’t mention it all that often, you have undoubtedly figured out that I am no fan of the “Left Behind” kind of teaching. Even though it’s extremely popular in many churches, including most of the so-called megachurches, and even though it sells millions of books and sustains a not-so-small publishing industry, it is false teaching. I was raised by a “left behind” kind of mother. When I was born in 1947 my dear mother, blessed saint though she may be, was absolutely certain that the Lord would return before I was an adult. She never said she was disappointed when I turned twenty-one but she may have been surprised. So I know “left behind” thinking from the inside and while I once followed it, I no longer do. It is false teaching, false to the scriptures, and false to Jesus Christ.

What Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, and Jerry Jenkins have done — and they are only some of the most recent and well-known names of many dispensational-type teachers over the last century — is take various pieces of the Bible, written in the apocalyptic genre, and force-fit them into a jigsaw puzzle that pictures Jesus returning in … and then you pick your year. 1948 or 49 with the founding of the modern state of Israel; didn’t happen. 1984; didn’t happen. During the first Gulf War; didn’t happen. Y2K; didn’t happen. Well, then, it must be 2005 or 2006, or whenever the latest most popular date is.

In other words, they’ve ripped pieces of scripture out of their context so that the passages couldn’t have had any real meaning for the people who wrote them or first read them. And they are saying that these texts are about Jesus coming back in the late twentieth century or early twenty-first century. This false teaching simply ignores that apocalyptic writing existed before Christ and even exists in traditions outside Jewish or Christian thought. To suggest that apocalyptic writings can only be about Jesus’ imminent return is simply untrue.

Of course, in response to my feeble preaching and thinking these false teachers, who are very polished and smart, would say, “Well, look, McIvor, ‘one will be taken and another left behind.’ That’s what the Bible says.” And my answer is, “Yes, that’s what the Bible says but that’s not what the Bible means.”

For the false teaching ignores even the plain sense of many verses similar to those we read in the text. “But about that day and hour no one knows … only the Father.” Or “The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” So if no one knows and if it is a surprise and if it is unexpected, clearly then we ought not to be thinking about it or worrying about it or trying to figure it. Instead of dwelling on “the end,” we are to watch. The false teaching says watch for the second coming. The true teaching is that we are to watch how we live.[2] Here’s why that’s true.

It has to do with time, the nature of time. There are two kinds of time in the Bible and first kind is what theologians and Bible scholars have come to call chronos. Chronos is linear time. Time moves in one direction only — even modern physics tells us that — and it never repeats. Yesterday was yesterday, today is today, and tomorrow will be tomorrow. Chronos means there is a past, a present, and a future. We may think this is obvious but there are many religious and philosophical systems that do not view time in this way. The Bible clearly does. So when the Bible thinks of time it thinks of it beginning with God, ending with God, and everything in between moving from creation to redemption.[3] In other words, chronos is clock time. Tick, tock, tick, tock is the sound of chronos.

This is exactly what the text was describing when it recalled the days of Noah. The text said in the time of Noah people “were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.” In other words, they were doing the ordinary things of day-to-day family and community life. Now that’s a different picture than the Noah story we find in Genesis which talks about how wicked everyone was. Genesis says that God brought the flood to destroy the corruption of the earth.[4] But Matthew doesn’t point at the wickedness of Noah’s time. Matthew points at its ordinariness.[5] They weren’t paying attention to bigger things. They weren’t watching. They were just going about ordinary life. Tick, tock, tick, tock, eat, drink, marry, tick, tock. Chronos. It’s how most people most of the time, including us, live.

Now chronos — tick tock time — isn’t wrong. We all live in it. But it’s not the only way to experience time and there is another kind of time in the Bible called Kairos.[6] We experience kairos in the midst of chronos for kairos is called “filled time” or “the right time.” There are moments or experiences that impress themselves upon our souls in ways that “ordinary” events do not. They are moments when we experience transcendence — the presence and liberating grace of God.[7] The point of kairos is that there is more to life the chronos.

Matthew says that the problem with eating and drinking and marriage in Noah’s time was that the routine became everything. The ordinary was all there was. They weren’t thinking about God. But the Bible says there’s more and we have to watch for it or we’ll miss. If we don’t watch, we’ll be left behind. We’ll miss God. We’ll miss those moments when, as it were, the tick tock stands still and we know we are in a holy place and God is with us. And when we miss that, we also won’t pay attention to the least ones, the very ones that Jesus says to watch for.

This is a challenge for all God’s people and even the Bible admits that it can appear that chronos is all there is. Remember those famous opening words of Ecclesiastes?

Tick tock. One ordinary thing after another. But Jesus says watch. Be ready for God. Only when you are can you live with hope.[8]

In a new book by Tom Long he tells about a remarkable woman named Mary Ann Bird who wrote a personal memoir called The Whisper Test. You see, Mary Ann Bird was born with multiple birth defects: a cleft palate, a disfigured face, a crooked nose, lopsided feet, and deafness in one ear. She suffered not only her physical impairments but the taunts of other children: “Mary Ann, what’s wrong with your lip?”

But the very worst thing, Mary Ann Bird said, was the annual hearing test at school. The teacher called each child forward and the child covered one ear, then the other, as the teacher whispered something like “the sky is blue” or “you have new shoes.” Mary Ann was deaf in one ear and she always cheated to avoid humiliation and failure. She hated the whisper test.

But one year her teacher was Miss Leonard. The day came for the dreaded hearing test and Mary Ann went forward and cupped her ear. Miss Leonard leaned forward. Mary Ann remembers: “I waited for those words which God must have put in her mouth, those seven words that changed my life. Miss Leonard did not say ‘the sky is blue’ or ‘you have new shoes.’ What she whispered was, ‘I wish you were my little girl.’”[9]

Jesus tells us to be ready. Watch for those moments when the ordinary routine of tick tock is interrupted by the extraordinary, surprising presence of God. For God does embrace the least ones. Sometimes the least ones are we. Sometimes the least ones are the persons next to us who are hurting. Always the least ones are the hungry and the poor, the lonely and the sick. Be ready to hear the whisper of God’s love and to whisper it to others, so no one is left behind, in Jesus’ name. Amen

[1] Matthew 5.1-7.27, 10.5-42, 13.1-52, 18.1-35, 24,3-25.46.

[2] Marion Soards, Thomas Dozeman, Kendall McCabe, Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year A Advent/Christmas/Epiphany (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992) 26. “The imagery of sudden separation of men in the field and women at the mill shows that God has standards that, when applied in judgment, make crucial distinctions between persons. In this prejudgment world, human actions count for something and will be assessed by God. From the statements in this text, however, we cannot distinguish one person from another, precisely because final judgment is totally God’s affair. Something other than the actions named — work in the fields and the mills — is the basis of God’s judgment. From the context, it can only be whether or not the persons are watching, that is, how they are living their lives in relation to God. Are they concerned with God or with themselves? Are they ‘watching’?”

[3] This seems to be the intent of 1 Corinthians 15.28: “When all things are subjected to [God], then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.”

[4] Genesis 6.5-7: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind 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 humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created — people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’” Genesis 6.11-12: “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth.”

[5] Fred B. Craddock, John H. Hayes, Carl R. Holladay, and Gene M. Tucker, Preaching the New Common Lectionary, Year A Advent, Christmas, Epiphany (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986) 21.

[6] For an extraordinarily powerful discussion of chronos and kairos see Douglas John Hall, Confessing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996) 473-482.

[7] Hall, 475. “The very existence of Israel and of the church is predicated upon such kairoi. For Israel, the kairotic event — the ‘root experience’ (Fackenheim) of all such kairoi — is the Exodus. For the Christian community the core event, the kairos that creates this community, is ‘the Christ event.’ In neither case does this mean that kairoi are limited to these two ‘moments’ of history. But as the foundational events, these tell us immediately something about what is involved in the kairos aspect of time.”

[8] Hall, 485. “When Israel affirms that hope is a legitimate historical category, applicable to time, applicable to individual life as well as the life of the creation as a whole, it does not do so naively but in the full knowledge that this can never be done easily. It is a matter of trust in God, not in processes naturally favorable to human welfare.… this skepticism about the applicability of hope to history is countered by what is after all the central affirmation of both the Gospels and the epistles — the Incarnation.”

[9] Thomas G. Long, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004) 85-86.