You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

I have noticed that the recent events in the world have caused a new flurry of “is this the end of the world?” conversations among some Christians.

And I guess that’s understandable, between the wars and rumors of wars and the earthquakes and tidal waves and oil on the water and molasses in the economy it would be easy to string some pieces of scripture together and say “Ah-ha! The end of the world must be upon us!”

It would also be, and I’ll say this as gently as I can, a remarkable way of demonstrating just how weak our faith can often be.

The whole area of Theology that deals with the end of time is called Eschatology, that it, the study of Last Things. And it is a topic that always seems to fascinate us as we wonder what will happen when this life of ours ends, what are the nuts and bolts of our translation from this world to the next.

And, while I have no doubt that there will be an end of life, both the life of this world and the end of my own personal life, I am always uncomfortable around people who want to pin that down to a specific moment, and I am always disturbed by people who want us to turn the promise of the resurrection into a cause for fear.

So let me tell you what I believe about the end of time. I believe that we are created to live fully in this world, until we are not. I believe that what lies ahead, what lies beyond the grave is not to be feared for whatever it is, it will be infinitely better than anything we have ever known. I believe that our worst moment in that life will be better than our best moment in this one and that’s pretty good. I believe that the same God who has been with us in this world, the one who has given us the beauty of nature, the love of family, the support of friends is the one who is waiting for us at the end of our time here and that God has given us all of the joy we have known, what makes us think that will change? I believe what Jesus said, and Jimmy Buffett sang about: “There’s a party at the end of the world!”

But, for now, we do live in this one and don’t need to worry about that one no matter what the headlines are. We are the spiritual descendants, in part, of Martin Luther who was asked what he would do if he knew that the world was going to end tomorrow and he responded, “I would plant an apple tree”.

You see we are always living with a tension of our expectations, a good and healthy tension, between our lives here as they are and our lives as they are going to be; a tension which the other Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, described so many years ago when he was presented with the Noble Peace Prize:

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him.

It is the tension of expectations.

Do we expect God to be faithful or not?

If not then there is no reason for us to be faithful.

But if God will be faithful, if you and I believe that, it changes everything.

We can refuse to accept the inevitability of pollution or of hatred or of greed, we can reject those false leaders who seek to divide us and polarize us as a people, because we know that God will not allow those things to stand as the last word in life. And because God will not allow them to stand as the last word, we cannot allow them to stand as the current word in life, because we just never know when God is going to show up, do we? Not only will the end of time be a surprise, but every entry into our lives by God comes as a surprise, doesn’t it?

You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

It’s the pattern of God’s heart to insert the divine, the last things, the things of pure holiness, into our lives unexpectedly in terms of time and circumstances and people. We act as if God is trapped by the same constraints of clock and calendar that we are, that’s just not true, I have never wanted to say much about the nature of heaven and hell, but I’m convinced that if – when I die – I arrive and someone hands me a calendar, I will know that I didn’t make heaven!

The question, you see, is not will God be there at the end of time, but the question is about us: will we recognize God – then or now – when the holiness surrounds us?

Abraham had started to doubt God in our OT lesson, he was getting old and wasn’t sure whether or not all of those promises of a great family, a great clan, would ever be fulfilled for him.

And God takes him outside and says “count the stars, they will be the number of your descendants.”

And then there is a remarkable verse: And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

He believed the Lord.

There are those who say that salvation by faith is a NT concept, a sign that God changes. But here it is in Abraham’s story, just as clearly as Paul proclaims it in the NT, we find it in the earliest of scriptures, the recognition that faith, not works – what we believe, not what we do - is the key to our salvation. Abraham would go on to do some great things, and some miserable things, but his faith fueled his expectations and he learned that God is there in all of life.

That’s why we need to be faithful in the little things, for there are no little things.

That’s why we need to be faithful when God seems absent, for God is never absent.

Our expectations belong with the stars and the future, however dark the moment we are in might be, we plant apple trees for future generations, for we know that God always stand nearby, even and especially when we feel most alone.

On writer put it this way: Faith lives as though we continually see him who is invisible, as if he is in a distant country and we have no way of knowing when he will return. So we live with faith and enthusiasm and perseverance and diligence, so that when he returns – at an unexpected hour - he will discover us doing exactly what we are meant to do.

Which is what Jesus was saying in the morning lesson: You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

That kind of expectant faith is built upon humility, hope and happiness.

Humility is the beginning of an expectant faith, because we all need to measure the vast gap between our “isness” and our “oughtness”. We need to surrender the self-importance that we carry with us a shield and weapon against the pain of the world. Again from Dr. King’s acceptance speech in Oslo: I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. That’s what humility is, not a false shirking of responsibility but an other-centeredness that cares for others and allows others to care for us.

Hope is the heart of expectant faith, because we know that God will come, unexpectedly, not on our schedules and our timetables, but on his. God doesn’t always appear when we want him, but when we need him, God is never late. The waters of Barnegat Bay are shallow and often you can boats caught on sandbars that they were unaware of when they dropped anchor and a lot of effort and time and damage can go into freeing them, or they can wait as the tide returns and they glide off. Many of us try to force things in our lives – relationships, decisions, ambitions - and we spend our effort and time and often do great damage, whereas if we waited for the tide, God’s time, it would have freed us.

And Happiness is the mark of expectant faith. Think of the people you have known who have been the people of great faith in your life, the ones who taught you to pray, the ones whose fingerprints are all over your soul and they were almost always – not perfectly nor unanimously because nothing ever is in this world of shadows and limits – but almost always they were people of a deep inner joy. They were people you wanted to be around, they were people you wanted to be like, for in the middle of the sorrows and cynicism and despair of this world, they glowed with an inner warmth, a calm assurance that God is God and it will be OK. They have and share a happy courage that comes from following a long road of faithfulness that provides an unshakable confidence in what God can and will do.

Humility, Hope and Happiness will lead us to a faith that expects and discovers nothing less that the presence of God, not only at the end of the world, not only at the end of our lives, but in so very many small and sacred moments and conversations and experiences.

I have always been fond of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s reflection upon the story of Moses and the Burning Bush:

Today is the day that we need to be ready for the coming of Christ, so is tomorrow and the day after and every day. Every day is the day, I don’t know if it is the first day or the last day of our lives, there’s truth to both of those old clichés, but I do know that today is the only day that we have.

We need to expect Christ today, with faith, and if we do we will discover the humility, hope and happiness that we need, we will discover the holy moment that God has for us, we will take off our shoes, we will reach out and build a bridge that will last.

If not we’ll just sit around and pluck blackberries, filled with fear about a false future that’s never going to happen.

You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.