by Dave Wilkinson

Acts 1:1-11

November 3, 2002

I really wasn’t feeling ghoulish. It just sounded interesting to go on a Jack the Ripper walk that was being advertised in the Original London Walks brochure.

I think Carol thought I was at least — weird until evening came. We arrived at the appointed place near the Tower of London to meet our guide. Carol was surprised to find about 120 tourists and residents already gathered. None of them looked especially ghoulish or strange. They were just ready for a good, safe scare where something happened years ago but wasn’t going to happen again.

We heard about some scary stuff and stood in some spooky places. But we were taking part in an essentially safe story — especially since we were a large group and our guide was a retired inspector from Scotland Yard.

But not all stories are safe. Not all stories have been tamed. The gospel is one of the other kind — the wild stories. These are the stories that pull us in and demand our response.

At the beginning of the film The Neverending Story, a young boy named Bastian is in an old bookstore. He asks the bookstore owner about a special book that he has noticed.

"What’s that book about?" asks Bastian.

"Oh, this is something special" says the bookstore owner.

"Well, what is it?"

"Look, your books are safe," the owner says. "By reading them you get to become Tarzan, or Robinson Crusoe."

"But that’s what I like about them," replies Bastian. "Ah, but afterwards you get to be a little boy again."

"What do you mean?" asks Bastian.

"Listen," says the man. "Have you ever been Captain Nemo, trapped inside your submarine while the giant squid is attacking you?"

"Yes," says Bastian.

"Weren’t you afraid you couldn’t escape?"

"But it’s only a story!"

"That’s what I’m talking about," says the man. "The ones you read are safe. And this one isn’t. You can’t know where it is going to take you."

That’s the way it is with the Bible. It is not at all safe. It isn’t safe because it isn’t just about God. It’s about God and us. We cannot claim to have genuinely understood the Bible without taking the risk of not knowing where we will end up.

And there is no place less safe than what the Bible tells us about the second coming of Jesus Christ. It impacts us directly. It could happen before this service is over which means that God would find us in a good place. It could disrupt our lives and our plans. But it is also at the same time, a place of hope. In fact – it is ultimately the only place of hope for our decaying, troubled world.

You have heard the word catastrophe. In Greek the word denotes something that moves something radically out of its usual state. We are used to that being a bad thing — the catastrophe of war, the catastrophe of economic collapse.

But in Greek there is also something called a eu-catastrophe. The prefix "eu" means "good" as in eulogy — the good word — or euthanasia — the good death.

A eucatastrophe is something that takes things out of their usual rut and sends them in a good direction -- like falling in love or me wining the lottery -- which I won’t ever do because I don’t ever play..

In the Apostle’s Creed we proclaim faith in a major eucatastrophe when we say of ourselves and Jesus, "I believe that He will come again."

In the words of Dr. George Ladd in The Blessed Hope: "God will not permit Satan to exercise his power in human history forever. Man will not destroy himself from the face of the earth, nor will this planet become a cold, lifeless star. The day is surely coming when the knowledge of God shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, when peace and righteousness shall prevail instead of war and evil. The day is surely coming when God will take the reins of government into His hands and God’s will will be done on earth even as it is in heaven. This glorious destiny for people will be achieved only by the personal, visible, glorious return of Christ. He is destined to be Lord of lords and King of kings. The second coming of Jesus Christ is an absolutely indispensable doctrine in the Biblical teaching of redemption. Apart from His glorious return, God’s work will forever be incomplete. At the center of redemption past is Christ on the cross; at the center of redemption future is Christ returning in glory."

After all of the past tenses in the Apostle’s Creed (conceived, crucified, dead, buried, descended, rose again, ascended into heaven); and one present tense: "He sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty;" we have a future tense: "From there He shall come.

From there He shall come.

Do you remember the musical Annie? A little red-headed girl is in an orphanage and she hopes – knows her parents will come for her. In the midst of a depressing orphanage, with an abusive, alcoholic house mother, she remains positive with hope.

That is a parable for us. For we live in the orphanage of this world. We are not oblivious to its hurt and evil. But we also know something. We know that our Brother will return for us.

Our Brother – the One who did al the past tense verbs of the Creed (suffered, died, rose again, descended into hell, ascended) is also the One who will come for us. The One who comes is the same one who offered Himself to the judgment of God for our salvation.

That is the reason for our hope. It is the reason Christians have always had hope. It was the reason that early churches in New England put a rooster on their weather vanes. The rooster was a symbol of vigilance. And we are called to be awake and aware as we look for our Brother’s return to take us home.

Dorothy Sayers wrote in an essay titled Creed or Chaos: "A young and intelligent priest remarked to me the other day that he thought one of the greatest sources of strength in Christianity today lay in the profoundly pessimistic view it took of human nature. There is a great deal in what he says. The people who are most discouraged and made despondent by the barbarity and stupidity of human behavior at this time are those who think highly of Homo Sapiens as a product of evolution, and who still cling to an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment. To them, the appalling outbursts of bestial ferocity in the totalitarian states, and the obstinate selfishness and stupid greed of capitalist society, are not merely shocking and alarming. For them, these things are the utter negation of everything in which they have believed. It is as though the bottom had dropped out of their universe. The whole thing looks like a denial of all reason, and they feel as if they and the world had gone mad. "Now for the Christian," Sayers continues, "this is not the case. He is as deeply shocked and grieved as anybody else, but he is not astonished. He has never thought very highly of human nature left to itself. He has been accustomed to the idea that there is a deep interior dislocation in the very center of human personality, and that you can never, as they say, "make people good by Act of Parliament..."

Sayers concludes: "The delusion of the mechanical perfectibility of man through a combination of scientific knowledge and unconscious evolution has been responsible for much heartbreak. It is, at bottom, far more pessimistic than Christian pessimism, because , if science and progress break down, there is nothing to fall back upon. Humanism is self-contained—it provides for man no resources outside himself.

Well we need resources outside ourselves. We need God to set all things right. And, in the second coming of Jesus, right is what we are promised. We can endure – because we know "this is not all there is"!

This is the true Neverending Story. It is not safe. It could happen in the next instant. It could disrupt our plans. But it is good. And to remind us that something good is coming Jesus gave us this Lord’s Supper. It is not just a reminder of what He has already done for us. It is also a promise of what He will do for us. It is, He said, a faint foretaste of the celebration we will share with Him forever.