Sermon for 11/30/25

Sermon 11-30-25 1st Sunday in Advent “A” Mt. 24:36-44

When I was in eighth grade at Selmaville Grade School our English teacher was Mrs. Mary Stienman. She was just like a US Marine Corps drill sergeant. If you didn't know your English grammar by the time you finished her class that year, she would back you up against a brick wall and shoot you through the heart.

She was also all about public speaking. We spent a lot of time doing speeches. We would practice in class over and over again, then she would take us out into the public.

I read a lot of books as a kid, still do. At that time I owned a copy of Bill Cosby's autobiography. In that book was a section where he did a skit about God telling Noah to build an ark. I used that skit in maybe my first attempt at public speaking.

You can look it up on YouTube now. There are three parts. I only used the first part. My guess is she had never heard him do the skit, because as I was doing it in front of the class she laughed so hard I thought she was going to wet herself.

That very day I became her golden child.

Our reading from Matthew today starts out with “Jesus said to His disciples”. That part is not in the Gospel of Matthew, it is put into the lectionary because Jesus has been speaking privately to the disciples on the Mount of Olives since verse three of this chapter.

The disciples have been questioning Him about His predictions concerning the fall of the Temple and the end of the world for thirty-three verses.

The typical American of today has no problem with considering the future. We save for a rainy day, college for our kids, we know exactly when our mortgage will be paid off, we have insurance policies for future auto accidents, home fires, health issues and death.

The ancient Middle-easterner had no concept of anything future oriented. He was concerned only with today or maybe tomorrow. Here again we are reminded with the Lord's Prayer: “Give us today our daily bread”.

The people of Jesus' time and place figured only God knew what was in the future, therefore the future should be left up to Him. Some even felt considering the future would have been blasphemy.

Jesus has just spent thirty-three verses talking about future events and signs of their coming. He has made predictions of things to come, yet here He says “only God knows when”.

The terms He uses for the daily lives of Noah's generation are not in condemnation, He is only saying that they were living their lives ordinarily. But, in living their lives they were not living them with God in mind.

Bible scholars point out that Jesus, though a devout Jew, who lived a life not too different of the average person of that time and place, often proposed behavior alternative to those favored in His culture. This is a good example.

Jesus not only lived not too differently from the average Jew of that time and place, He couldn't have looked much differently either. Otherwise the average person would have not trusted Him.

There is a painting by a man named Warner Sallman from 1940 called the “Head of Christ” or sometimes “The Sallman Head”. It's very popular. It sold over half a billion copies by the end of the twentieth century. You have all seen it. Trust me, that is not what Jesus looked like. If He had looked that much different than the average Israeli Jew of the time no one would have trusted Him, let alone listened to what He had to say.

One of my college roommates owns half an island in Ontario, Canada, way up north. His dad won it in a poker game in 1920. Just inside the cabin door, there is one of those Sallman pictures. I started using it as a guide to the shelves in the cabin. I would say, “Those jigs are on the shelf just to the right of the autographed picture of Jesus”.

Matthew's Gospel was written some 50 years after the crucifixion, His Christian followers were getting pretty anxious about there not having been a second coming.

This passage, by Matthew, was meant to calm their fears and to get them to do something that was unfamiliar to them, live their ordinary lives, but look forward and be prepared for what was coming.

No distinction is made between those who are taken and those who are left. The women who are grinding would have been slaves, the expected work of servants. Even slaves are able to be taken into heaven.

“What day your Lord is coming”. Your Lord is a Christian title and would probably not have been used by Jesus Himself.

“If the owner of the house had known”.

Always one to use common occurrences as a teaching tool, Jesus could very well be talking about a real life crime that the whole community had heard of when He talks about the thief in the house. Notice the past tense of the verb: had known.

There is something about being old that comes in handy once in a while. You've been there, you've done that, you bought the T-shirt. Keep in mind Jesus was there before God made heaven and earth. He may look like He is thirty years old, ask Warner Sallman, but He is old, really old. He has the T-shirt.

When God told Noah to build an ark, “I'm going to make it rain”. Noah, said, “riiiiiight, what's an ark?” But, he got ready. Noah did something unaccustomed to his culture. He looked to the future.

Jesus is trying His best to teach the disciples to do something that is beyond their frame of reference, look to the future. And be patient.

God's time is not our time. He has no past or future, only present. Therefore we must all be ready. For the Son of Man, the Son of God, is coming at an unexpected hour.

Amen.