Readings – 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, Matthew 25:14-30
For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night=
Before I sat down to plan my sermon for this morning, I thought I would want to say something optimistic and cheerful at a time when we were locked down for a second time, and locked out of our church for a second time. Then I looked at the readings for the day and found I had to preach on texts about the Second Coming, and about a worthless slave being thrown into the outer darkness, where there is weeping, and gnashing of teeth. Oh dear, I thought to myself.
So I had a wee pray about it and I realised that I didn’t want to be cheerful and optimistic at all. I wanted to be hopeful in this new lockdown, which is something quite different. Hope is not optimism; it does not depend on taking a positive spin on the facts; nor is hope good cheer, for hope is the most powerful tool we have for carrying us through the times when we are at our bleakest. Real hope doesn’t come from talking about posies and fluffy bunny rabbits. One of the things that most often renews our hope is when we face the most difficult problems honestly and well. Real hope must be capable of enduring the worst that the world and humankind can throw at it, for the worst will inevitably be thrown at it at some point. Hope outlasts optimism and good cheer, global depressions and planetary pandemics; along with faith and love it will endure unto eternity. Hope will survive the end of the world.
We associate the Second Coming with the end of the world. We hear and read a lot about the end of the world a lot at the moment, or at least the end of the world we knew on New Year’s Day 2020. At moments we must all have lapsed into depression that this new abnormal will never end, that we will never again share the peace in church, that we’ll never again have a large group of friends round for a drink, that we’ll never lose the terror that we’ll wake up one morning not being able to smell the coffee, with a high temperature and a dry persistent cough. We lock down full of fear as the November days grow rapidly shorter and darker, and fear that the world has indeed ended, and we’re in a sort of hell. Then we learn the news about the vaccine trial and we wonder if we dare hope that there will again come a time when we sing hymns together and find ourselves chatting to a stranger in a pub who becomes a new friend and hug our loved ones without fear.
This morning’s reading from St Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, however, does not write about the end of the world, but the coming of the day of the Lord. This passage is often associated in the popular Christian imagination with the end times thanks to some very shaky theology from as recently as the 19th Century. Later there was a 1970s American film called A Thief in The Night, a second rate B-movie with a bit of Jesus thrown in, which was very influential in fundamentalist Protestant circles. In it, a lady wakes up to find that her husband and millions of other real Christians have been taken to heaven, leaving her and other fake Christians behind with the unbelievers under the jackboot of an oppressive world government run by the UN which wants to force her to have the Mark of the Beast on her forehead and damn her for all eternity! All of this got a high budget, Internet-era, makeover with the Left Behind series of books and films which were, if anything, even worse: a living reminder that while good taste can’t be bought, bad taste can.
