"Taken"
I.
The season of Advent has to do with the coming of the Lord. Jesus insists that no one knows or can know “about that day and hour.” He says he doesn’t even know. And he suggests that to waste our energy and time in trying to figure it out is pointless. The only way to approach this question is by staying vigilant, all the time. “Stay alert, “ he urges us, “for you don’t know what day your Lord is coming.”
The first example he gives is about people at the time of Noah’s Great Flood. The implication here is that people should have paid attention and got themselves on the ark. But they had no idea what was coming. They assumed that every day would be basically the same as the other days they had already experienced. So they went through their daily existence like every other day: “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.”
They continued their unconscious routine of consumption, and their usual system of relationships in which women were property, with men taking them and giving them away to each other like cattle. In other words, they kept their attitudes and practices of objectification, exploitation, commodification, and domination. They continued to treat the planet and other people like inanimate resources to be tapped, extracted, squandered, and exhausted.
In fact, the Lord’s description of the human situation at the time of Noah is greatly understated. According to Genesis, humanity had fallen into a regime of extreme selfishness and violence. It was so bad that the Creator decided to basically cash the whole place in and start over. Then, God makes the point of saving the innocent animals, but only six humans. God saves the spotted owls and snail darters; while leaving the greedy, consuming people to drown in their own affluence. The integrity and wholeness of the creation is clearly far more important to the Creator, than is the survival of most humans, who are making all their decisions based on their own narrow self-interest.
So by all means keep building those oil pipelines, keep clearcutting the rainforest, keep blowing the tops off mountains for coal, keep fracking, and keep exploiting human labor, maintaining systems of wide inequality. Keep trafficking in people. Keep consuming. Keep investing in death. But the day of the Lord, will come when we least expect it.
At no time of year are we more unconscious of this than December. Just when Jesus is warning us about the dangers of business-as-usual, eating and drinking, we enthusiastically dive into prodigious… eating and drinking.
Instead, Jesus says, “Stay woke! Stay conscious! Keep alert! Cultivate awareness! Be mindful! Pay attention.”
II.
The second little example Jesus gives has to do with two cases of pairs of people working at their jobs when one of them is mysteriously taken away. “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.”
It seems very arbitrary. One is taken away and the other is left behind. We don’t know what or who took them. Jesus doesn’t say which is better, to be taken or to be left. Being “taken” is usually the more frightening thing. Especially in situations of oppression, with imperial storm troopers or vigilante death squads or lynch mobs roaming around. Being taken is terrible.
But such an experience, where you’re working with someone one day, or even one minute, and the next they are gone, taken, does concentrate your attention. Kind of like passing a gruesome accident on the Parkway, when everyone slows down… even if it’s just for maybe a mile.
The profound insecurity we feel at such a time, knowing that we could be next to be taken, knowing that life is incredibly fragile and tenuous, even random, can force us to reconsider things. We can’t normally just keep doing what we are doing, as if nothing is happening, as if people aren’t disappearing or dying right next to us. We have to stop and consider what we are doing and what the liabilities are of our behavior. We have to wonder about whether we are living the way we want to live, because our life could be taken away suddenly at any moment.
When cancer or heart disease takes someone from us, we might look at our own lives and change our lifestyle. When we see how alcohol can take someone, we might think twice the next time we feel like having a drink. A friend’s divorce might make us cherish and care for our own marriage more. When someone we know dies because they weren’t wearing their seat-belt, we are all the more careful to wear ours.
It is this confrontation with death that can bring us to a deeper sense of the value and preciousness of life. It jolts us into the moment, the present, the vital now. It turns the monotonous passage of time into a shining opportunity to make a difference and change our direction.
Jesus wants us to live in this now, this present, this immediacy and awareness. Live like you could be taken at any time. Live like this is your last minute on Earth. When your time comes, the Lord isn’t going to care what was on your to-do list but you were endlessly procrastinating about. We have to be about discipleship now, at every moment, because he could show up at any time.
III.
This is a choice we all have to make, especially every December. We can’t spend the month so busy and consumed with “getting ready for Christmas” that we never got ready for the coming of Christ. The two things are very, very different. One is a commercial exercise, wrapped in sentimentality and nostalgia, expressed in the mindless busy-ness of shopping and spending; the other has to do with preparing and opening our hearts to the coming of Jesus by the power of the Spirit. One is unconscious; the other is to be profoundly awake to new possibilities.
In the last of these three examples, Jesus talks about a property owner. Somehow he knows that his house is going to be robbed, so he stays up on watch, thinking to scare away the thief who is expecting everyone to be asleep.
Jesus says that if this is what a property owner does, and all he has to lose are some material possessions, how much more ought the disciples to be ready for the coming of the very Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world? If a property owner can focus his attention on preventing theft, why can’t we be at least as mindful and present and aware when our own salvation and eternal life are at stake?
The point is not the specific day or hour; it is the readiness. Jesus says the Kingdom is always at hand, it is already here within and among us. It could break in and occur to us at any time with no notice. If may show itself when we least expect it. So we have to be ready all the time.
This readiness means cultivation of disciplines and practices of awareness, mindfulness, presence, consciousness, attentiveness, wakefulness, and focus. It means not letting ourselves drift off into distractions like anger, fear, memories, fantasies, hopes, dreams, or anxieties. We cannot afford to fall into entertainments or narcosis or any other “escape” from life.
All these examples — the Flood, seeing someone taken, or the vigilance of the property owner — they all have to do with paying attention to what’s really happening. They are about being jolted into awareness so we are not in some distracted, preoccupied state when the special time comes for our own deliverance. Like the property owner staying up and alertly listening for every suspicious sound, and watching for every shadow in the darkness, we too have to listen and look in our own lives for every piece of evidence, no matter how circumstantial, of Christ’s presence.
IV.
Where are the signs of healing? Where are the indications of peace? Where do we see justice beginning to happen? Where does forgiveness occur? Where is reconciliation blooming? Is someone not reflexively returning evil for evil? Is there humility, and generosity, and repentance taking place?
Wherever these things are happening, that’s where Christ is coming. That’s where his influence is showing itself. And then, beyond just listening for it, we need to see how he leads us to become part of it. How do we start welcoming others to Christ, who is the ark of deliverance for all? How do we recognize ourselves to be taken by the Spirit and released from the daily grind in our chosen field, to a life of discipleship that doesn’t even compute to most other folks? How do we surprise people with forgiveness and acceptance, when they are armed to confront a thief?
Maybe we have to be the signs of life and love, appearing in people’s lives. We have to be the counter-narrative against the fear, rage, blindness, and paralysis that keeps them distracted. We are Christ’s Body, we have to be the change he brings into the world. We have to witness to the kindness compassion, healing, and knowledge of God’s love in Jesus.
This is how we will show that we are ready for the Son of Man who comes at an unexpected hour. Maybe when we by our discipleship resonate to his wavelength, is when he begins to appear in our own lives, and through us, comes into the world.
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