Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 16, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We’ve all heard it. “Jesus is coming!” “The end is near!” As I heard someone put it once: “Jesus is coming, and boy is he angry.” Only the way I heard it didn’t use the word angry; but it might be offensive to some if I used the real word up here, so I cleaned it up. Or as I heard someone else put it: “Jesus is coming. Look busy.” Christians have been talking about the second coming of Jesus ever since the first coming of Jesus. The New Testament is full of verses about a second coming of Jesus. They’re in the Gospels. They’re in the Epistles. And they’re in Revelation. Christians seem to have had a sense from the very beginning that Jesus was going to return. And that his second coming wouldn’t be anything like his first coming. The classical Christian understanding of the second coming is that this time Jesus would come in power and glory to defeat the powers of evil, put an end to history as we know it, and establish the Kingdom of God on earth, through force if necessary.

We heard one of the New Testament passages about Jesus coming again in our reading from Revelation this morning. There Jesus says “See, I am coming soon.” And we see the notion that the second coming isn’t going to be much like the first coming. This Jesus of Revelation says “my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work.” That may be a bit obscure, but generally when scripture says that we’re going to be repaid according to our work, that is not good news. The second coming here is seen as a coming judgment upon people, and I think we all realize that we wouldn’t fare very well in such a judgment. Revelation has Jesus coming to usher in the Kingdom of God to be sure. It has some beautiful passages about what that kingdom will be like; but Revelation also has a lot of judgment and tribulation coming before that beautiful, peaceful kingdom arrives.

Belief in the second coming of Christ sometimes gets a bit ridiculous and even dangerous. In American history, for example, in the 1840s, there was something called the Millerite movement, when a Baptist preacher named William Miller proclaimed that the Second Coming would take place on October 22, 1844, at a place in upstate New York. Lots of his followers sold everything they had and went to that place to welcome Jesus. Of course it didn’t happen, and this event is now known as “the Great Disappointment.” Oddly, the Great Disappointment didn’t put an end to the Millerite movement. One strand of it morphed into the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which continued to predict the end of the world on specific dates into the 1920s. And then there’s current popular nonsense about “the Rapture,” when Jesus will come on a cloud, snatch a small number of true believers up into heaven, with the rest of us “left behind” so suffer whatever fate God has in store for us sinners. I really do want to get a license plate surround like one I saw once that said “In case of rapture, can I have your car?”

As you can probably tell, I don’t put much stock in the second coming. So let me say something here before I continue. I’m giving you my take on the second coming. If the second coming is important to you, OK. You have a lot of support in the Christian tradition. Please feel free to disagree with me, although I hope you will hear me out, then make up your mind. As for me, I just don’t believe in the second coming of Christ. At the very least I think we have to say that a second coming is entirely up to God. We can’t do anything to bring it about or to prevent it. Beyond that, it hasn’t happened in the last two thousand years, so let’s not worry about it. And although that way of putting it may make belief in a second coming sound innocuous if a little silly, I actually am convinced that belief in the second coming isn’t harmless. It has significant negative consequences for Christian faith and for how Christians live in the world. Let me explain.

The wisest thing that I have ever heard about the second coming is by the scholar John Dominic Crossan. He describes belief in the second coming as the great denial of the first coming. I agree. What I hear all the talk about a second coming saying is: “OK, God. We know you came to us once in Jesus, but that didn’t really work, did it. Things are still pretty much a mess here on earth. You tried it your way, the Jesus way. Now we want you to do it our way. We want you to do it with power, with violence even. We want a display of divine glory on earth. We want fireworks. We want the evil ones, as we define the evil ones of course, struck down and the righteous ones like us exalted. We want you to do it the way we would do it. That Jesus bit just didn’t do the trick. Nice try, God. We like Jesus and all, but now try it again, our way.” Belief in the second coming is indeed the great denial of the first coming. And the truth is that the first coming, God’s coming to us in the person of Jesus, is enough. It is God’s way, which is all we really need to know about it; and it gives us everything that we need. Everything that we need to straighten things out on earth. Everything that we need to live in this life and to have hope beyond this life.

And what surprised me when I read our text from Revelation this morning was that there is a hint in that text that points to the sufficiency of the first coming despite all of Revelation’s stress on a second coming. Maybe you caught it. It’s the line that says ”Let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.” The water of life is a strong image in Revelation. A few verses before the ones we heard this morning we read that in the New Jerusalem, that is, in the Kingdom of God, there is “the river of the water of life.” Rev. 22:1 Our text repeats that image.

When I read it I was immediately reminded of the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well from the Gospel of John. So we heard that story, or part of it, this morning as well. In that story Jesus—during his first coming, not during some hypothetical second coming—says that he gives “living water,” that is, the water of life, “gushing up to eternal life.” He says that whoever drinks of that living water that he gives will never be thirsty. He means “thirsty” metaphorically, of course. He means that in him—during his first coming, not in some hypothetical second coming—we have all that we need.

And that really is the message of the Gospels, isn’t it? God came to us in the person of Jesus. God came to us in the way God wanted to come to us, not necessarily in the way that we want God to come to us. In the person of Jesus God gave us what God wanted to give us. The great Christian confession is that God came to us in the person of Jesus. Who are we, indeed who were the authors of the New Testament texts, to say to God: “You got it wrong. Now come back and do it right? Now come back and do it our way.”

And that attitude really matters. Focusing on the second coming diverts our attention both from the first coming and from the world as it really is. It diverts our attention from what the world really needs and what Christians have to offer to meet those needs. Focusing on the second coming is a good way to shirk our responsibility for the way the world is today. It says: We don’t have worry about injustice, poverty, and illness in the world today because Jesus is going to come and put an end to all that. And he’s going to do it any day now. Indeed, Christians who read the “Left Behind” books and look forward to the rapture, who read books like The Late Great Planet Earth, actually don’t do a lot of work on poverty and injustice. They don’t much support the environmental movement. For them, the world is both worthless and hopeless. There’s nothing we can do but wait for Jesus to come again and do it right this time, do it our way this time.

My faith is different. I am convinced that in the first coming of Jesus God has indeed given us living water. God has indeed given us everything we need. The problem isn’t that the first coming was insufficient. The problem is that we don’t make real in the world and in our lives what God gave us in the first coming. We have before us living water, and we cry that we are dying of thirst. We have before us the clearest demonstration of God’s ways that our limited human minds are capable of receiving, and we say it’s not enough. We have Jesus, God Incarnate, saying follow me in my way of love and peace, and we say we’d rather follow the human way of judgment and power; and we want God to follow it too.

So let us not fall into the trap of the Great Denial. Let us not commit the mistake of telling God “You did it wrong. Come back and do it right.” Let us rather drink the living water that God offers us through the first coming of Christ. Let us wallow in it. Let us soak it up through every pore in our bodies. Then let us take it into the world to do its transforming, redeeming work. It is of God, and it is enough. Amen.