It wasn’t the end of the world, September 11; it was the end of our naiveté about time being on our side, about our having all the time in the world to have the time of our lives. It got us thinking about time. We hugged our children a little tighter, held on to our stuff a little lighter, opened our eyes a little wider to the world as it is instead of the world as we want it to be. We were all affected by the attacks, but those who were spiritually prepared were shaken, not stirred. When your outlook on life is shaped by Jesus’ words, you aren’t taken completely off guard by the disorienting things that come.

But was September 11 a sign of the end times? Let me answer that with a definite, resounding, unequivocal … I don’t know. I wish I could tell you for sure, yes or no, but if I could, and if you or I could know for sure, what would be the point of faith? Lots of people look to the Bible for all the answers, but for all the answers we get, sometimes we get questions instead. Like in our text today, Jesus turns our attention from when the end will come to what we are going to do with our lives in the meantime. Jesus doesn’t deny the end will come, but he wants us to live in the meantime in light of the end time.

The images he offers are different from the catalog of wars and earthquakes and famines and not what we usually think of in end-time thinking. Here Jesus wants us to know that things are just as likely to be downright boringly normal. As in the days of Noah before the flood, so it will be in the end time: people will be eating and drinking and falling in love and having kids and going to soccer games and burying old Beatles. You just can’t wait to read the signs of the times to get your life in order. Two people will be working side by side in the World Trade Center; one will be taken and the other left behind. You board a plane like so many times before, but this time you never get off. Who saw that coming?

Now, Jesus isn’t saying we ought to quit doing normal things in light of the end. He isn’t saying we ought to become so preoccupied with the end time that we alter all human activities now in order to be ready for heaven. Some people live so much in the end time they fail to live meaningfully in the meantime.

David Koresh and his Waco group were guilty of this. Their imaginations were so fired with the fire of judgment to come that they holed up in a Texas compound with Bible in one hand and automatic weapons in the other, waiting for the forces of evil to attack. They were sure they knew the when of Christ’s return, though Jesus himself says in this passage that even he doesn’t know when. We see what came of them.

So quit buying all those books and listening to those TV preachers who fill you with ideas of when the end will come. The point is not when but that. That the end is coming is Jesus’ one sure word. That we should be ready is our one sure work–whether it’s our time that is up, or time itself.

How do you do that? There’s a delightful passage in the first Harry Potter book that comes to life in the movie. Harry scoots into an unused room of the Hogwarts castle, wearing his invisibility cloak to escape the notice of Professor Snape. In this room he stumbles upon a large claw-footed mirror. When he looks into it, he sees the most wondrous thing: he sees not only his own reflection but also a whole crowd of people behind him. Among the crowd he sees the moving images of his dead parents, smiling at him, reaching to touch him with pride, being right there with him. He brings his friend Ron Weasley to see his dead parents in the mirror, but instead Ron sees something else. He sees himself a little older, captain of the Quidditch team, holding the winners’ cup. Harry is later made the wiser about it all by the headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore. The mirror is called Erised–that is, desire spelled backwards, the way a mirror might read it. The mirror shows nothing more or less than the deepest desires of the heart. Harry longed for a past he was denied, Ron for a future he doubted he could have. Professor Dumbledore explains that the happiest person is the one who can look in the Mirror of Erised and see nothing but himself. It does no good to dwell on dreams and forget to live, he says. [J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, Scholastic Press, 1997, p. 214]

Some of us dwell on dreams of the past or dreams of the future and forget to live in the present. And yet it is true that true Christian thinking is weighted more toward the future than the past. We are given reason to hope for more to come than we could ever imagine. We are told that the kingdom of heaven is where we will want to live, because in it life will be what God always intended it to be. And so, yes, we are to live with a sense of expectancy about the end time. But we don’t live for the end time; we live in the meantime in the light of the end time. We are transformed in the present by the consciousness of what is to come.

Isn’t that the way it is when you are in that stage of romance that you hope to see the one you love at any time but you never know when? You make sure you look your best before you leave your dorm room or go to the office, just in case you meet that person. You don’t want to be caught unprepared in a moment of grace. You still go to class, go to work, eat, play, whatever, but your mind is never far from the one you love.

This is what Jesus is saying, I think. Be ready now, not by changing everything about your routines but by being changed yourself in your routines. Don’t let yourself get so caught up in what you are doing that those things take over your soul.

The quiet Beatle, George Harrison, died this week. Overshadowed by Lennon and McCartney most of the time, George was always more interested in the music than the hype. Being a Beatle wore on him, made him feel like he was living in a cage. Forget Yoko. George broke up the Beatles as surely as she. He had to declare some soul freedom from all the Beatlemania. Toward the end, his guitar gently wept, don’t you know?! He still wanted to make music, but he had to grow in other directions. He explored LSD and Indian religion, trying to gain some sense of what we are here for. The answers he found are not the ones Jesus offers, but the cause of the soul is the same.

We have to be alert to the ways the world comes to own us and hold us. We have to be ready to break free from those things in order to be truly ourselves without illusions and regrets, fully ready for the judgment of Christ’s coming.

A woman called her pastor one day, hysterical. She could hardly get the words out amid the sobs, but he finally caught that she had been robbed. Someone had stolen all the family heirlooms; the silver, the china, everything Mother had passed on to her. She was crushed. She felt her very identity had been stolen from her. Her friends worried about her future, but about six months later they saw a new person emerge. She told her pastor, In one sense, the burglary was one of the best things that has happened to me. I had become tied down to those things. I was afraid to leave the house for what might happen to them. I would spend half my day polishing… [which] was really stupid when you think of it. Life ought to be more. I thought I would die after the burglary. But I’ve come to the conclusion I might be better off without all that stuff. [William Willimon, in Pulpit Resource 29.4: 37]

There you have it. Some of you have felt the same after a divorce or after your last drink or after the death of a spouse or child. You thought you would die. You may not say you are better off without whatever it was you lost, depending on what it was, but you have learned to live in the present with a sense of the future instead of being fearful and frozen. You have learned to perform what Walter Brueggemann calls "an emotional act of civil disobedience." You will not be bound by the expectations of yourself or others. You will live with your eyes on the end time and let it free you for the meantime.

Look at the end this way. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second, the one constant in the universe. Because of the distance between the sun and the earth, the light we see comes to us about 8 minutes and 20 seconds after it leaves the sun. We can never outrace the light to get to its source; we are always living in its shining.

In the same way, Christ is the Light ahead of us, always coming toward us, calling to us to walk after him, in his shining way.

He calls us out of sleep and into wakefulness.

He calls us out of the night and into the day.

He calls us out of bondage and into freedom.

He calls us out of fear and into faith. He calls us out of loneliness and into love.

He calls us out of despair and into hope.

So let me ask: how ready are you for the coming of the Lord? Are you making spiritual progress, or are you getting more stuck and losing your sense of what is important? When you look into the Mirror of Erised, do you see only the you, you want Christ to see? You come to church to hear the truth about your soul’s condition. Have you done anything about it lately? Today is as good as any to begin the making ready. Offer your heart anew to God. Tell someone about Christ. Let go of your money. Tell someone you love that you do. Sober up to life. Beat your swords into ploughshares. Make peace. Grant forgiveness. Do it all … now!

The impressionist painter and sculptor Edgar Degas was fascinated with ballerinas. He did some of his most beautiful and graceful work celebrating their art. His painting The Dance Foyer at the Opera on the Rue le Peletier hangs in Paris’s Museé d’Orsay. The ballet master commands the attention of his ballerina. Other dancers are all standing round stretching and talking and looking on as the one ballerina takes his instructions. She is the picture of focused alertness, her right leg poised, her toes pointed, her every sinew at the ready for the music.

How is it with you? Are you standing round going through the motions spiritually or are you poised tiptoed, ready for the music of the kingdom of God that is breaking forth even now from the Lord of the dance?

Because there’s no time like the end time, there’s no time like the present time to be ready. Amen.