Pentecost B Proper 29: Last Sunday of the Church Year/Sunday of the Fulfillment: The Gift of Hope

One of the most beloved characters in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia is a marsh-wiggle by the name of Puddleglum, who appears in the Narnia chronicle titled The Silver Chair.

Marsh-wiggles are manlike creatures who like privacy. They live—you guessed it—in a marsh. And they are not known for their optimism. If you’ve ever read about that dismal old gray donkey Eeyore in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, you’ve read about someone very like a marsh-wiggle. While lovable and secretly good-hearted, Eeyore is usually gloomy and negative, always expecting the worst. Puddleglum is the same.

Think about the name Puddleglum. Puddle—a wet spot on the sidewalk on a cold, cloudy day, a place to slip, an accident waiting to happen. Glum—another word for “gloomy, morose, depressed, sullen, sad.” Put those two words together, and you have Puddleglum. Two children, Jill Pole and Eustace Scrubb, approached the marsh-wiggle early in the morning after meeting him the night before. His “good morning” greeting was accompanied by assurances that it might rain or snow and that he was sure they didn’t sleep well.

When they told him that they really did sleep well, he was certain that they were simply making the best of a bad situation. Finally, he told them his name, Puddleglum, and said that it didn’t matter if they forgot his name because he could tell them again. One suspects that C. S. Lewis was quite familiar with the Winnie-the-Pooh stories and subconsciously modeled Puddleglum after Eeyore, although he tells us that he really modeled the character after his gardener Fred Paxford, who was the quintessential pessimist.

Puddleglum and Eeyore are the opposite of what we find in Scripture. Jesus tells us about a situation where optimism rules the day. Furthermore, in the midst of that situation, he gives us a prescription for hope. The dictionary defines hope as “expectation of fulfillment or success” (Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “hope,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hope [accessed February 27, 2024]). Puddleglum expected failure, but people of God expect success. We know success now in the assurance that God loves us and forgives our sins because of Jesus’ death on the cross, and we expect fulfillment in the future because we know Jesus will one day come again and set everything right.

Today we remember as the Sunday of the Fulfillment. Christ, the Creator of the universe, is also the Savior of the world. Though at times we face pain and suffering, we know that Jesus Christ will one day return and bring his creation to the fulfillment he always intended. We, therefore, have a sure hope, both now and for-ever. As we approach the Advent season, the season of remembering the first coming of the Savior, we also hold up the second coming as the time of fulfillment of all our hopes and dreams. We have the gift of hope because of the second coming. Thus

We Hope for the Second Coming of Christ, Whose Return Will Bring About the Fulfillment of All Things.

“But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come” (Mk 13:32–33).

In 1818, while reading his Bible, a Vermont farmer, William Miller, made what he believed to be an astounding discovery. He believed he had discovered the exact date of Christ’s second coming. In 1831, Miller began to lecture and is said to have gained at least fifty thousand followers from various Protestant denominations. Between 1840 and 1843, he organized meetings across the country, and thousands began preparing for the end of the world: March 21, 1843.

On the evening of March 20, a crowd gathered in Low Hampton, New York, to await Christ’s return. But March 21 came and went. Nothing happened. Badly shaken, Miller announced that he had miscalculated by one year, so he set another date for March 21, 1844. That prediction likewise proved to be wrong, and Miller admitted defeat. Sick, discouraged, and cast out, Miller returned to Vermont and organized a little church. Although he never lived to see it, from his efforts arose a segment of Protestantism that still continues today known as Seventh-day Adventism.

Such predictions are also to be found among mainline denominations. Some years ago, I heard Christians on several occasions speak of the years 1982 and 1983 as candidates for Christ’s second coming. Then someone made a prediction for September 12 and 13, 1988. And there are many more.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not opposed to Christ’s return. I’m all in favor of it. But what I am opposed to is the greater willingness among many people to set a date for Christ’s return rather than to live with Christ’s words in our text and be moved by them to a continuous state of waiting. If you don’t know the exact date, then you must wait. And many people don’t want to wait. Too often, I don’t want to wait! But waiting expectantly is the place where hope lives.

If even the angels in heaven don’t know the date of Christ’s return, and if Jesus the man chose in his human nature not to know, then we shouldn’t expect to know. And it will not do to say, “Well, we can’t know the day or the hour—like the verse says—but we can know the year or the week.” “For you yourselves are fully aware,” Paul wrote, “that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (1 Thess 5:2).

If you don’t know when it will happen, there is not much more that you can do but wait. Well, you can hope and wait. Because though we don’t know when Christ will come back, we know that he will come back.

II.

But there is more that you can do besides hope and wait. You can hope and watch. Jesus says in our text, “Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning” (v 35). Because we don’t know the exact time of Christ’s return, we not only hope and wait, but we also hope and watch, living each day as though Jesus were returning tomorrow.

Jesus tells this story in our text: “It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake” (v 34). Jesus tells the story about himself and his disciples. He is the master of the house. By his ascension into heaven, he has gone on a journey. In the meantime, he has put his disciples in charge of the work he began to do on earth. He also charges not just the doorkeeper but all of us also to keep watch for the master’s return. The last verse of the text makes that clear: “And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake” (v 37).

A couple of men went out to the Civil War battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to view the area. While they were there, they came across a lookout tower. They eagerly huffed and puffed their way to the top, expecting to be able to survey the entire area when they finished their climb. To their disappointment, they found they could only see the trees that surrounded the tower! Apparently, the engineers who designed the tower forgot that the trees around it would continue to grow, and eventually the trees grew to be twenty feet taller than the tower. This teaches us why we need the reminder of Christ’s second coming. Life, with all its joys and difficulties, has a way of growing up around us, blocking our view and taking away our perspective. We need our thinking redirected toward God once again. We need to rekindle our hope for the future in a day and age when hopelessness abounds.

“Come,” says Jesus, “and be lifted above the cares and concerns of this world and be reminded of eternal values. Remember my birth at Bethlehem, and think about the work I came to do to relieve the world of its condemnation: my suffering and death on the cross. But remember also my promise to return a second time. And in the meantime, hope and watch.”

The apostle Paul tells us how to watch with hope. To the Corinthians, he wrote, “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong” (1 Cor 16:13). In other words, watch for Christ’s return with courage. To the Ephesians, he wrote, “Praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication” (Eph 6:18). In other words, watch prayerfully. To the Colossians, Paul wrote, “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving” (Col 4:2). In other words, watch with thanksgiving for the fact that we have nothing to fear at Christ’s return, we who trust in him as our Savior. And in our text, the implication is that we are to “stay awake [continuously]” (v 35, present tense). In other words, we should live each day in the light of the fact that it may be our last.

Watch for Christ’s return, our text says. Watch prayerfully, confidently, thankfully, and continuously. Part of our watching must recognize the fact that though he is absent physically, Christ is among us in his Word and in the Sacraments and, through them, living in each believer’s heart.

III.

Did you notice that in this brief parable about a man going on a journey, Jesus said that the master of the house “leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work” (v 34)? Jesus didn’t tell us to spend all our time waiting and watching and hoping and to forget everything else. As a matter of fact, the Scripture elsewhere tells us, “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2 Thess 3:10).

Jesus himself was the prime example of one who was willing to work as he watched and waited for his Father’s plan to unfold. He worked hard to accomplish our salvation. It wasn’t easy for him to put up with the stubbornness of the Pharisees, the fiery temper of Peter, and the cunning shrewdness of Herod. It wasn’t easy for him to allow himself to be betrayed into the hands of sinners and be nailed to a cross. It wasn’t easy for him, while he was hanging on that cross, to endure the pains of hell itself. Even though Jesus was God as well as man, it was not an easy task for him to pay the accumulated debt of the sin of all people. But because he loved us enough not to turn away from that most difficult of all tasks, he accomplished his work. Jesus told his Father, “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (Jn 17:4). And because of it, forgiveness and eternal life belong to each believer.

Jesus worked to accomplish our salvation. We work, not to accomplish our salvation, because that work has already been accomplished; we can add nothing to it. We work to bring that message of salvation to others, because we know that the God who has extended that message to us offers that same gift of hope to them too. We are grateful for being brought to know and believe in our Savior. We want others to come to faith in Jesus too.

How do we work in the light of Christ’s second coming and in the light of his saving us by his atoning work on the cross? The apostle Paul addressed himself to those very questions when he wrote to the Thessalonians. The Thessalonians were troubled in many ways about Christ’s second coming. Paul wrote to set them straight, and in the light of that second coming he wrote these words: “Now may our God and Father himself, and our Lord Jesus, direct our way to you, and may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, as we do for you, so that he may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints” (1 Thess 3:11–13).

In other words, live lives of holiness and love, striving to do what is right, in the light of Jesus’ return. That will include concern about world hunger and world missions, personal witnessing and personal giving, and much more as well—from committee work to Bible class instruction to prayer, and on and on. Live as though Jesus were physically here, reminding us by his physical presence of the physical scars he received in dying for us.

If ever you have the chance to visit the catacombs in Rome, those tunnels under the ancient city, where many of the early Christians were buried, you can see the symbols of faith on their tombs. Three common symbols appear: the dove, the fish, and the anchor. The dove symbolizes the Holy Spirit. The letters of the Greek word for “fish,” ICTHUS, stand for the words “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” The anchor comes from the idea that as Christians were going through difficult, insecure times, their hope in Christ anchored their souls.

As we approach Advent and Christmas on this Last Sunday of the Church Year, we anchor ourselves in hope for Christ’s final coming. We set our sights on Jesus Christ and the cross on which he died for us. We remember the rising of Jesus from the dead as the most hopeful thing that has ever happened. In the light of the uncertainty of exactly when he will come, we hope and wait; we watch and work. We won’t be hopeless; we won’t be like Puddleglum or Eeyore. We’ll be full of hope, watching and working with our eyes fixed on Jesus. Amen.

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