228 How To Be Prepared

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text “How To Be Prepared”, originally shared on August 3, 2022. It was the 228^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   “Be Prepared” is the motto of the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts and the advice of every parent in every time and everywhere. How do we stay prepared for the biggest event of all human history? Today, we’re going to find out.

   A wildly popular book called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey was published in 1971. The book stated that the Bible’s prophecy of the end times was lining up with current events and that the end of the world as we knew it was imminent. It didn’t happen, but it scared people who didn’t want to be unprepared. He reportedly wrote new books every three years or so afterward making the same claims, and that the world would end in about five years. None of those predictions came true, but his books kept selling well. Publishers Weekly reported that his profits were spent on long term investments in California real estate.

   Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose publication is “The Watchtower”, predicted that Christ would return in 1874, and again in 1914. Now they only say that he is coming soon.

   I was at a Christmas Day service at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Jerusalem when I was in college when a man stood up in the middle of the pastor’s sermon and announced that Jesus had been reincarnated as a boy in India and was being revealed to the world. Someone else stood up and countered that the Bible says that no one knows when Jesus will return. (NOTE: this kind of thing does not generally happen in a Lutheran worship service. 😊)

   Order was finally restored, but it was a reminder that there are always people among us who believe that they have the inside track on God.

   Jesus speaks of this and tells us how to be ready for the time that Jesus actually does return in Luke 12:32-40. He turns all our popular ideas about his return on their heads. He begins by telling us not to be afraid, and he ends by telling us that he will come at an unexpected hour.  

   He begins, in verse 32,

³²“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

   I’ve read that the words, “Do not be afraid,” or “Don’t Be Afraid” or “Fear not”, or another equivalent appear 365 times in the Bible, one for every day of the year. I’ve never counted them, but it seems about right. 😊

   Whenever the Kingdom comes in its fulness, it will come when Christ comes to judge the living and the dead. There is no reason for Christians to be afraid. The Kingdom of God, or God’s Reign, is already here. It is not something we can earn with our goodness or achieve by being better than others. We can’t achieve it, and we don’t have to. We can only receive it.

   This isn’t a pay-to-play situation. We have been made children of God by our baptism and in the gift of faith. Our eternity has already begun.

   So far, every single person who has predicted a date for the end of the world has been wrong. But someday someone will be right. How can we be rightly prepared? Jesus continues in verse 33,

 ³³Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. ³⁴For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

   Giving alms is what we do to help the poor. It comes after our tithes and after our offerings of everything we have and everything we are.

   But I think that it’s the part about, “sell your possessions” that is what makes most of us nervous. Does God really want us to have a yard sale right now?

   I think that Jesus is warning us not to allow our possessions to own us, but instead to invest our money in what endures forever. Pastor Rick Warren once encouraged people to not ask God to bless what they are doing but to ask God that they would do what God is blessing.

   Most of us would agree with the writer and poet, Richard Armour, who taught at the Claremont Colleges:

“That money talks,

I’ll not deny,

I heard it once:

It said, ‘Goodbye’”.

   But what if we could hold onto our treasure forever. Jesus says that we can.

   I mentioned last time that Martin Luther, the 16^th century Church reformer, observed, “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God.”

   Our money and our possessions are means for ministry or they are our God.

   We have been made new. We are a new Creation. We are God’s people. We have been born again. How do we use our money and our possessions to communicate that to a broken world?

   One day, the reign of God will come, and it will come in its fullness. There will be a new heaven. And a new earth.

   How does Jesus model that preparation for us?

   Jesus continues in verse 35,

 ³⁵“Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; ³⁶be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. ³⁷Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. ³⁸If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.

   Wedding parties in Israel at the time of Jesus could go on for days, even weeks! The party goer could return at any time, day or night. Those charged with the master’s welfare had one primary job! Be prepared.

   Jesus did not endorse slavery. He just used that part of life that most people took for granted to make a point. I sometimes wonder what aspects of our lives that we take for granted that future generations will condemn about us? Personal transportation? Unsustainable consumerism? Materialism? Widespread homelessness?

   I remember seeing a cartoon that showed a character asking God, “Lord, there is so much suffering in the world. Why don’t you do something about it?” And the last frame has a cartoon bubble coming from above saying, “That’s funny. I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

   We prepare for Jesus’ coming by being the people that we have been called, equipped and sent to be.

   We have already seen the love that is in Jesus on the night that we call Maundy Thursday, when Jesus gave us a new commandment, to love one another as He has first loved us, called us his friends, and showed his service to us by washing his disciples’ feet.

   Like many of us, Sally and I have earthquake supplies in our home and in our cars. We don’t know when the next one will come, but we want to be prepared when it does.

   When are we to be prepared for the coming of Jesus? Jesus tells us, beginning with verse 39,

 ³⁹“But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. ⁴⁰You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

   I once lived in a neighborhood where my house was broken into so many times that I lost track at around 13 times. I was only at home to sleep when I wasn’t at church on the other end of town, or in the community. In the end, it was costing me more to replace the broken window than to replace what had been stolen. I had nearly no possessions to sell. 😊

   After the first one, when I still did have some possessions, I prepared some fliers and took them around the neighborhood, inviting people to come to my house to organize a Neighborhood Watch group. It didn’t help.

   The front of the vacant lot on one side of my house was overgrown and provided cover whenever burglars wanted to get into my house. The only time someone was caught was when some kids going by on their skateboards heard the glass break and reported it to the police.

   Sally moved into that house when we were married, but not until I had bars put on all the windows. Then, we were prepared.

   Just as in Jesus’ return for the Judgement, we see the meaning of this text at its end.

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

   Why do we do this? Because the kingdom of God, God’s perfect reign, has already been given to us, God’s imperfect people and we want to share that gift with the world.

   We know who our real God is and we live it.

   We know what is the real source of our life is and we give it. We know where the source of our lives is, in the rivers of living water, the Holy Spirit.

   We don’t know when Jesus will return to put all things right, but He shows us in Luke 12:32-40, how to be prepared:

1. Make the reign of God your focus, not this world
2. Receive that reign with joy and live in it
3. Proclaim that reign to the world and manifest it in every place you can: your true self, your family, your community, your world, and do it with God’s Church.
4. Make your money your means for ministry; invest it to produce eternal benefits for yourself and for all people.

   When I was just starting in my first parish, Christ Lutheran Church in Compton, I was feeling overwhelmed. One day, during that time, I read an article in the Christian Century magazine written by a pediatrician.

   He wrote about how his first job out of medical school was opening a new free clinic on the South Side of Chicago. His supervisor, another doctor, came by with a file folder under his arm and a book. He laid the file folder on the new doctor’s desk, opened it, and said, “These are the people I want you to hire for the clinic.”

   The new doctor looked through the papers and said, “These people aren’t qualified, and I know we can do better.” “Maybe,” said the supervising doctor, “but I owe people favors, and you will hire them, and you can train them. That’s how it works in this neighborhood.”

   The new doctor countered that he would not be hiring them, that he would be interviewing and selecting his own staff, and he knew he could do that because he knew the law.

    The supervising doctor took the book he brought with him, laid it on the new doctor’s desk, and opened it. The book had been hollowed out and a .45 automatic pistol was nested inside. He said, “Doctor, in this neighborhood, this is the law. Now hire these people.”

   The new doctor wrote that he became discouraged in his work, believing that the good he was doing was being overcome by the evil in the system itself.

   One day, someone gave him a book on the monastic hours of prayer. He read it and began to observe the hours, stopping to pray five times a day.

   He wrote that it didn’t happen right away, but that he began to feel that he was connected to something larger than himself. That he was like a thread in a tapestry, the individual meaning of which would not be apparent in his lifetime, but that someday God would weave it together with lots of other threads into a beautiful tapestry, whose meaning would be clear for all to see.

   We don’t know what the future will hold. But we do know Who holds the future. God calls us and equips us in the Holy Spirit and that’s how we can Be Prepared.