1 Thessalonians 5
Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. 2For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. 3When they say, ‘There is peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape! 4But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; 5for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness.

6 So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober; 7for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at night. 8But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. 9For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, 10who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.

11 Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.


The Holy Spirit does not often conform to the print deadline for the bulletin. Thus, you will see a rather generic title this week. Here’s a little secret: when you see a generic title in the bulletin for me, it’s probably a sign that I’m still playing hide and seek with the sermon. I’ve counted to ten and said, “Ready or not, here I come” and am searching all the nooks and crannies for the sermon, and right in the middle of the game, in comes our office manager with the marked-up bulletin in hand, looking expectant. I have to tell her something so I say, “Mmm, I think I’m going to find the sermon hiding here” and then resume the game. This week my guess was off.

Part of the challenge this week is that there are so many rich images in the text. Light and darkness! Breastplates and helmets! Sobriety and drunkenness! Thieves in the night! And of course, the image that I wanted to avoid for a variety of reasons: the sudden and inescapable pains of childbirth! I didn’t want to go there because it’s so obvious. But of course, God often uses what we’re trying to ignore or gloss over to speak to us most profoundly.

“Destruction will come as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape!” writes Paul.

And so the sermon has a new title:
The Anesthesiologist Is Out to Lunch: or,
No Spiritual Epidural for You!

There’s no escaping from the reality of Christ’s return. There’s no anesthetizing ourselves from it. Rev. B said it last week—Christ’s return seems like a non-sequitur to our modern minds, but it’s not. We can try to retreat into our heads and drone the words “from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead” and not pay it much attention at all, but the reality is that a significant portion of the New Testament writers were expecting and preparing for Christ’s imminent return and a cosmic battle between good and evil. And so rather than say, “Well it didn’t happen quite like they thought… Whew! Dodged that cataclysm! We don’t have to think about that unpleasantness in Revelation anymore,” we need to deal with the fact that ours is a faith that looks to the coming of Christ in which all things will be made new. Our faith story has a whole chapter still to be written.

And actually, labor is often used as a metaphor to describe the journey toward that new heaven and new earth. Elsewhere, Paul talks about the whole creation groaning in labor pains, and that the people of God are laboring as well, waiting for the full redemption that is still to come. (Romans 8:22) And in Galatians Paul writes that he himself is in the pain of childbirth until Christ is fully formed in the people there in Galatia. (Galatians 4:19) Jesus himself forecasts the end that is to come, when “nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birthpangs,” he says. (Mark 13:8)

On one level this laboring business is easy to get our heads around as industrious, hard working Presbyterians. We can identify with the image of labor—after all, we are laboring for peace and justice in the world, are we not? And in a week of rioting in France, suicide bombs in Jordan, continued hardship for earthquake survivors in Kashmir as rescue workers try to work against time and the coming winter, 2,062 military deaths in Iraq (not to mention the civilian death toll), we realize that wow, the world needs that peace and justice. But remember, labor does end! And it ends with a birth. We aren’t just laboring forever, world without end amen. At some point our labors will cease and the new kingdom will come. This is an article of faith for us, whether we understand the particulars of it or not.

What I have realized, however, is that these labor metaphors have their limitations. When I was pregnant with C, a friend of mine reminded me of John 16.21, in which Jesus says, “When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world… So you have pain now; but I will see you again.”

She said, “Y’know, with all due respect to, well, our Lord and Savior and all… clearly he never gave birth. Because you don’t forget. In fact, you shouldn’t forget. Labor is profound and powerful. The experience marks your soul. Never forget that.” And that was true for me. It doesn’t dampen the joy of the birth; in fact it heightens it, because one remembers how much hard work went into it. Likewise when the kingdom comes I don’t think God’s going to wipe our memories clean. The new heaven and the new earth will be all the sweeter for our remembering the hard times.

And I think that here in I Thessalonians, Paul’s metaphor for labor is limited as well. He says that the day of the Lord will be sudden and unstoppable, like labor, but that’s really not true of labor, much of the time. It’s not like Hollywood, like a TV sitcom: the woman suddenly doubles over with pain and starts panting, the man panics and runs around in hysterics, hilarity ensues. Ask most pregnant women and they will tell you that contractions can start occurring weeks before labor officially begins. Even near the end, labor can begin and then stop. We call this “false labor” when in fact it’s not really false at all. There is progress in these early contractions. It’s the body getting ready for the main event. It’s preparation.

In the same way we are preparing for God’s new heaven and new earth in fits and starts. I want to quibble with Paul a bit because it’s almost like he’s got the Hollywood version in his head. It’s not going to come suddenly, Wham!, it is coming even now in small, sacred ways. I think we see heaven breaking into our world all the time.

Last Saturday at the women’s retreat, we asked women to share someone who had shared hospitality with them. A pretty ho-hum getting-to-know-you question, but what was not ho-hum was the tears, as people shared about family and friends who had shown true hospitality, not simply with food or a place to sleep, but with deep care and spiritual “shelter.” These stories touched something very profound in many people. Then at worship for All Saints’ Day we gathered around the table for the Lord’s Supper, our faces illuminated by all the candles representing those who have gone before—the communion of saints. We were literally “children of light,” to use Paul’s phrase. Tears are holy. Communion is holy—a tiny sliver of heaven breaking through.

I have many friends in Houston who wrote to me about the response to Hurricane Katrina, and one of loveliest images for me was the way the religious community came together to feed the people in the Astrodome. Faith traditions that are not normally on the same page theologically came together—Southern Baptist and Hindu, Pentecostal and Muslim, Presbyterian, Bah’ai, Jewish and Catholic, cooperated in a massive mission effort.

Now, we can dismiss all that as false labor—a spiritual placeholder, just something to do until the real heavenly banquet begins—or we can see our relationships with one another in the glow of God’s love and feel ourselves being prepared for a new creation still to come. Those are glimpses of the beloved community that God is creating us to be.

Where do you see God’s new heaven and new earth breaking through?

Where do you feel yourself being prepared for the new creation?

Donald Miller has written a memoir called Blue Like Jazz that chronicles his journey growing up in an evangelical church and moving beyond that. He tells of going to Reed College, one of the most secular schools in the country. There were about eight students in his Christian fellowship while he was there, and Christianity was frowned upon, to say the least, by most of the student body and faculty. It wasn’t uncommon to see bumper stickers like “Too bad we can’t feed the Christians to the lions anymore.” Every year Reed has an event called Ren Fayre in which most of the student body gets drunk and stoned in a weekend-long party. One year, a few weeks before Ren Fayre, Don was joking with a friend that the Christian group should set up a booth in the middle of the campus with a sign that said, “Confess Your Sins.” His friend Tony looked at him, his face lit up, and said, “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

The next day Tony presented the idea to the group: “Don has an idea!”

Don responded, “No I don’t! It was a joke!”

Tony went on, undeterred: “We’re going to set up a confession booth in the middle of Ren Fayre…

“Only we’re going to be the ones confessing.

“We will apologize—apologize for the Crusades, for televangelists, for any and all ways the church has fallen short of the teachings of Jesus. We will confess our neglect for the poor, our own self-righteousness, our own failure to love the world as Jesus did. And we will ask forgiveness.”

And Don was thinking, “This is even worse than my idea.”

The fact is, people on campus had been openly hostile and even brutal to those who were Christian, and the Christians were going to apologize? Nonetheless, the group decided to go for it. They built a huge shack in the middle of the quad and posted a sign: Confession Booth. On the night of Ren Fayre, it was decided that Don would man the booth first. A guy named Jake strolled by and said, “So what, you want to hear all the juicy gossip of what I did from Ren Fayre?”

And Don said, “No, actually I want to confess to you; see, I’m a Christian, and throughout time Christians have hurt and even killed others in the name of their faith.”

Jake answered with a laugh, “Aw man, I’m sure you didn’t have anything to do with all that.”

But Don went on, talking about what Jesus called the church to do and to be and the ways we’d fallen short. And Jake started to see that he was serious. And Jake started to take it seriously. He said, “You know, I don’t want to be a Christian or anything, but who was this Jesus guy?” And Don told him the story of Jesus, who he was and what he taught. And as he left, Jake’s eyes were watering a little and he said, “This is cool, man. This is important. I’m going to tell other people what you’re doing and to come here.”

Now if this were a Hollywood movie, I could report that dozens of Reed College students dedicated their lives to Christ that night. This is not a Hollywood movie. But I can tell you that many, many more people came by the booth that night. Many left in tears. Many left embracing one another. It wasn’t a Hollywood ending, but in the midst of a weekend-long campus party, here was something real and authentic, and people felt it. Everyone who came was “grateful and gracious.” And Don was changed too; he said, “I went in to the booth with doubts, and came out believing so strongly in Jesus I was ready to die and be with him.”

That is a piece of the new heaven and the new earth right here and now.

It comes, in fits and starts, all the time. God is preparing us for a future we cannot envision.

Paul tells us to put on our breastplate and our helmet. On this weekend after Veteran’s Day, with its assemblies and observances with people in uniform, it’s worth remembering that these military accessories—breastplates, helmets (Paul adds shields and swords elsewhere)—they aren’t just about protection, these things identify us, mark us as well. Don was marked by the experience in the confession booth. We are marked when we partake of communion, when we gather around the table as members of one another, we are marked when we serve side-by-side with one another.

And we are prepared by these experiences, for the new heaven and the new earth that is still to come, and yet, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear—already is here, in fits and starts, even now.