Barbara Brown Taylor - Home by Another Way

Home By Another Way

COWLEY PUBLICATIONS is a ministry of the brothers of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, a monastic order in the Episcopal Church. Our mission is to provide books and resources for those seeking spiritual and theological formation. COWLEY PUBLICATIONS is committed to developing a new generation of writers and teachers who will encourage people to think and pray in new ways about spirituality, reconciliation, and the future.

BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

A Cowley Publications Book

Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com

Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom

Distributed by National Book Network

Copyright 1999 by Barbara Brown Taylor

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taylor, Barbara. Brown.

Home by another way / Barbara Brown Taylor

p. cm.

ISBN-10: 1-56101-167-3 ISBN-13: 978-1-56101-167-4

1. Sermons, AmericanWomen authors. 2. Episcopal Church Sermons. 3. Church year sermons. 4. Anglican Communion Sermons. I. Title.

BX5937.T28H65 1999

252'.6dc21

99-29239

The Unnatural Truth first appeared in the Christian Century, March 2027, 1996. Lenten Discipline first appeared as Settling for Less in the Christian Century, February 18, 1998. Life-Giving Fear first appeared in the Christian Century, March 4, 1998. Three Hands Clapping was previously published in The Living Pulpit. All are reprinted by permission.

Cover design: Brad Norr Design

Interior design: Wendy Holdman

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Harry Pritchett

who gave me room to grow

Advent and Christmas

MATTHEW 24:3744

Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

FOR THOSE WHO ARE COUNTING, THE NEXT MILLENnium is now thirteen months and one day away. If this is a normal crowd, then some of you could care less while others are genuinely spooked by the idea, and the rest of you are somewhere in betweena little anxious, maybe, but mostly curious about whatif anythingwill happen when the worlds odometer turns over.

As millennial fervor increases, some of us may try to distance ourselves from it, but we cannot escape altogether. The most basic formulations of the Christian faith all include the expectation of Christs return. You can hear it when we celebrate communion: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. You can hear it when we say the creed: He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. You can hear it in this mornings gospel lesson, which sets the tone for the new church year: Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.

There is no getting away from it, but there may be no reason for losing sleep over it either. Christ has been coming back for so long that plenty of people have given up on him. Before he died, he told his followers he would be right back. Believing him, they did not make long range plans. They put all their energy into preparing for the end. All of Pauls letters were written with the second coming in plain view. Then a decade passed, then another. The people who had actually known Jesus began to die off. Pretty soon the stories about him were being told by people who had known people who had known Jesus. The only reason we have gospels at all is that someone finally worked up the nerve to say, You know, there arent all that many eyewitnesses left. We really ought to get this stuff down on paper.

According to anyones best guess, Matthews gospel was the second or third one written, about forty years after Jesus death. Jesus mother Mary was almost certainly dead by that time, along with the apostles Peter and Paul (both martyred in Rome). Jerusalem had been destroyed by Titus while putting down the Jewish rebellion. The promised land was a province of the Empire. The temple lay in ruins, and the chosen people seemed to have been chosen chiefly to suffer.

All of which is to say that Matthew had a lot of explaining to do. While the main purpose of his gospel was to tell the story of Jesus the Christ, he had to do more than that. He had to tell it to people who were frightened and tired of waitingpeople who desperately wanted to know whether Jesus delay was part of the master plan or whether he was missing in action. Was he really coming back to pull them from the edge of the abyss or were they just going to hang there until their fingers gave out and they fell onto the mounting pile of bodies at the bottom?

Matthews twenty-fourth chapter is his answer to them, a section of his gospel known as the little apocalypse, in which he recorded Jesus sayings about the end time along with a few emphases of his own. Right before we tuned in, he set up the paradox that continues to perplex. First Jesus said, Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Then he said, But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

That was absolutely the best Matthew could do, to put those two contradictory statements right there together where they have continued to chafe against each other for almost two thousand years now. Im coming right back, but only God knows when. Matthew could not resolve the tension without putting words in Jesus mouth, so what he did instead was to focus on Jesus own advice about how to live with it: Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.

Not knowing has never kept us from guessing, however. Over the years there have been hundreds of wrong guesses about when the Lord would come, some of them based on mathematical readings of the Bible and others on the predictions of self-appointed prophets. On the whole, these forecasts of the end time seem to multiply whenever the present times get grim, and especially when there are two or more zeros in the date.