Sermon for November 30, 2025
Readings:
The Reformation leader Martin Luther is reported to have once said that “the world is like a drunken peasant. If you lift him into the saddle on one side, he will fall off the other side.”
That image of a man who just cannot stay upright in the saddle but is just inclined to fall off his horse on one side or another was an inspiration to C. S. Lewis who saw it as the perfect symbol of humanity out of balance. We make an error by going too far in one direction, but then we respond or react to that by going too far in the other direction. Sometimes we fall off the horse on the left, sometimes we fall off on the right, but regardless of which side of the horse you fall off, you are still a drunken fool laying on the ground. Balance is the key to staying on top. Balance is the ability to correct without over-correcting. It requires you to be aware of the forces that are pulling on you from both sides and not to give in to one or the other.
This, Lewis says, is a problem not just with religion, but with everything. He said he distrusts reactions in everything and I have to say I am there with him. Humans don’t react to things, we overreact to them. We watch people make a mistake in one direction, and then we head off and make a mistake in the opposite direction. Lewis makes this observation in one of his essays about religion called “the World’s Last Night.” As an aside, if anything I say this morning interests or inspires you, then I would encourage you to read his essay yourself. I am stealing from him liberally and shamelessly this morning. Anyways, in this essay Lewis talks about the doctrine of the second coming of Christ, which is of course what Advent is really about, not just preparing for Christmas. “and he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.” It is right there in our creed. It is in our scriptures. You heard it just now. Jesus says that he will come again. How are we supposed to react to those words? That is a question Christians have grappled with over the centuries.
The problem, Lewis says, is that we humans are inclined to make one of two mistakes or overreactions. We either take Jesus at his word, and then start trying to figure out the precise moment in time he will come, becoming utterly consumed by expectation that then leads to crushing disappointment. Or, we dismiss Jesus’s words, and the idea that he will come again altogether. We write them off as ancient superstition and go on living our lives as if we and the world we live in will go on forever. We pay no attention to him. But these are both mistakes.
The first mistake of trying to figure out exactly when Jesus is coming has been done so many times at this point that it just boggles the mind that people keep doing it, but people keep doing it. We just can’t help ourselves. Some of you may remember a few years back that guy Harold Camping who had decided that it was going to be May 21st, 2011 when the world would end. When it didn’t happen, he said, ok, maybe October 21st. It is easy to make fun of him but Camping stands in a very long line of religious folks that have tried to figure out precisely the day and time of Christ’s return and failed. And they were destined to fail, because Jesus said they would fail. The same people who want to take seriously Jesus’s promise of his second coming, somehow fail to take seriously his admonition that no one can or will know when it will happen. If God says you’re not gonna know, you’re not gonna know, but for some reason people keep trying.
And these failed predictions and the people who make them, actually lead people into making the second mistake. So many times, people have been told that the end is nigh and Jesus is coming, and so many times he hasn’t shown up. It is no wonder then that so many people, even many Christians dismiss all this talk about a Second Coming as being antiquated and embarrassing. To put it simply, they don’t believe it is going to happen. But this is, of course, to fall off the other side of the horse.
The problem with both of those mistakes is that neither one of them takes all of Jesus’s words very seriously. They both want to conveniently omit something, and in doing so they miss the whole point of why Jesus told us that he would come again. Keep awake! Be ready! Jesus is talking in the present tense here, not the future. The Second Coming isn’t just about some future event. It is about the here and now. If we take Jesus’s words seriously, all of them, what I think we will find is a balanced view of the end of the world that has real power to affect the life we are living today. I think that is the point of all of this.
Jesus tells us that the world will someday certainly come to an end, AND then he tells us that we cannot and will not know when that time will be. It will be unexpected. Therefore, and this is the important part, THEREFORE we must always live our lives with a constant awareness that the future is in God’s hands, not our own. We never know how much time we have. We never know what the future holds. A wise and prudent person will make plans and provisions for the future, but a faithful person will remember in doing so that tomorrow is a gift, not a promise. Those big plans you have for the future, they might never happen. That thing that you are sitting here worrying about, it might never happen. This life that you have is a gift from God and at any moment you may be asked “what have you done with it?” That is what the Second Coming is about…not taking this life for granted. Being prepared for the end, not by living in fear of it, but by living with the knowledge that each day, each day is a gift from God. The end will come, someday, somehow, for each and every one of us. It may be a bus, it may be an embolism, or it may be our Lord descending from on high, but one way or another the end will come. To stay awake and to be prepared, is not to spend endless hours obsessing about the end itself and how and when it may come about. To stay awake and to be prepared is really about making sure that you are making the most of the time you have been given. It seems paradoxical, but the doctrine of the Second Coming really is more about what you are doing today, than it is about what God may be doing tomorrow.
Inwardly Digest 