Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44
The Rev. Candice B. Frazer
I grew up Roman Catholic, so I understand Jesus guilt. That’s the kind of guilt where you are never enough—where your relationship with Jesus always seems to be missing something. Instead of reveling in Jesus’ love for you, you obsess over how much sin you’re committing or what you lack that might keep you out of Heaven. At some point in my childhood, the sole basis of my belief in God wasn’t God’s love, but my fear of going to Hell. And when I began to doubt whether God even existed, it was that fear I doubled down on, hoping that clinging to it counted as faith—faith that might be enough to get me into Heaven.
Starting points matter. As a child growing up in the Roman Catholic Church, my starting point was as a sinner in need of redemption. My relationship with God was not grounded in love, but in fear. I sang Jesus Loves Me as a child, but I didn’t really believe it. Instead, I believed God to be a demanding God, an angry God, one that could not be satisfied no matter how hard I tried.
That angry, demanding God still exists for many people. A lot of them have left the church. We have names for them now: the “Nones” and the “Dones.” The Nones are those who have never been part of a church—never attended, never experienced it—they didn’t grow up in church-going homes. The Dones grew up in church and have chosen to walk away. Their reasons vary, but it’s not uncommon for a Done to describe some spiritual harm: being told, explicitly or implicitly, that they weren’t good enough, that they lacked value, that God’s love was conditional. And they didn’t receive that message solely from pastors and priests. It was also delivered by people in the pews. I wonder if beginning the Christian story with “you are a sinner” rather than “you are loved” has contributed to that harm.
I’m not sure it’s fair to simply blame churches—though we certainly need to do a better job proclaiming God’s love. But that can be difficult, especially with a Gospel like the one we read this morning. Jesus’ words to his disciples can feel threatening to say the least—the randomness and unexpectedness of devastating events sounds threatening. Harking back to the days of Noah when the whole world was swept away and warning that two might be together and one is taken and the other is left have contributed to entire theologies of destruction and doom. The evangelical church world refers to this as premillennial dispensationalism or “left behind.” Hollywood likes to call it the apocalypse. Scriptures like this are called apocalyptic literature—writing that speaks to the end times.
The way we read apocalyptic literature often feels judgmental, especially if our starting point is “sinner in need of redemption.” We hear these words from a place of fear and anxiety and our current state of world affairs does nothing to assuage that fear. We live in anxious times that are compounded by systems that are brittle and easily fail where cause no longer seems to determine effect. We may still be holding on to some basic belief structures, but if those are also grounded in fear, they may not be helpful in living from a place of hope. When the church is complicit in that, instead of bringing Good News, we tend to fear-monger using control and manipulation instead of love.
Don’t get me wrong: the passage from Matthew is apocalyptic. It speaks of end times—not only the second coming of Christ, which cannot be predicted, but also the real circumstances of Judea under Roman occupation. Disappearances were not uncommon in those days.
When we travelled to the Holy Land in 2022, we visited the Bet She’an National Park—an archaeological site of a Roman city that existed in Biblical days. While there, we heard the story of young Jewish girls kidnapped by Roman soldiers and sold into slavery. Many of the girls were taken from the fields of Galilee. One girl, uniquely, was rescued when her father paid the price to free her and bring her home. Hers is the only story known of being saved. “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left.”
A year after our trip to the Holy Land, Hamas terrorists attacked, murdered, and kidnapped approximately 1500 Israeli citizens. In his book, Hostage, Eli Sharabi describes the awful events of the morning of October 7, 2023. He and his family were enjoying a quiet morning when the warning sirens went off. They went to their safe room where Hamas terrorists would discover them and take Sharabi as a hostage. He told his wife and daughters that he would be back for them as he was being dragged away—and this promise kept him alive for the next 491 days. What he wouldn’t know until he returned was that his wife and teenage daughters were shot after he was taken. His brother, Yossi, who lived next door, was later murdered by Hamas while in captivity. “One will be taken and one will be left.”
There seemed almost a randomness to the violence committed by Hamas in who was taken and was killed. Several young Israelis were at a music festival and when they hid in shelters, Hamas fighters stormed them—killing some and kidnapping others. It felt random, because in many ways it was random. No one was targeted for any other reason than being on Israeli land. Even one young Senegalese man who had the misfortune of hiking near a kibbutz that morning was taken. “One will be taken and one will be left.”
That sense of randomness rings through this gospel:
One is taken, one is left.
If the owner of the house would have known when the thief was coming….
The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.
Eli Sharabi lived this gospel in a sense. Not only the randomness of it, but the deeper truth Jesus is pointing too. This gospel is not about premillennial dispensationalism or being left behind, nor is it some Hollywood epic apocalypticism. It’s apocalyptic only in the sense that it is meant to wake us up—to grab our attention and remind us to live as if the kingdom of God is already here. When the end times come, it will not reveal a God who judges us because we are not good enough. Instead, it will reveal a God whose goodness is even greater than we imagined. A God who offers us even more hope, more possibility, more salvation and desire to live in accordance to God’s pleasure.
When Eli Sharabi returned from captivity and learned that his wife and daughters and brother had all died, he did not give up hope. Instead, he remained positive about life. When asked how he could remain positive in the face of so much loss, his response was, “I can’t do anything, anything that bring back Lianne [his wife], Noyla, Yahel [his daughters], Yossi [his brother]. And so, the best thing I can do for their memories is to be optimistic and to be strong and to rebuild my life.”
Eli Sharabi understands that our focus is not on what happens after we die or even that we need to await some coming event in order to truly live. Life happens in the here and now. Our starting point with God is not that we are sinners in need of redemption who might one day get to enjoy the heavenly grace. Our starting point is beloved child of God. Our call is to revel in God’s love and to offer that love to every single human being we meet. Holding on to love is what helped Eli Sharabi survive 491 days of captivity. Holding on to love is what offers us the opportunity to live in hope, not fear.
This morning, we remember the hope of God’s love as we baptize Jackson. In so doing, we will proclaim to him, and ourselves, that our starting point with God is not “sinner in need of redemption” but “beloved child of God.” It is an important reminder and definition of who we are. It does not mean that, at times, we won’t fall short. We will. We will sin, and we all need God’s redemption. But it does mean that no matter how often we fall, God still loves us and welcomes us back into his redemptive grace and power.
And when we live from that truth—from belovedness—we don’t merely survive in this anxious, brittle world. We thrive. We live with courage. We live with hope. Because there is no need to fear what is coming when we are already choosing to live in the kingdom of God’s love today.
Amen.