A sermon by the Rev. Kathleen Russell, Assistant Professor of Contextual Theology for Ministry, given on December 1, 2005, in Christ Chapel

I have to admit that when I started working on this sermon I felt a lot more knowledgeable about preaching about the Second Coming than I ever have before. The reason for this is that last year I ended up reading nine -- count them -- nine GOE essays on Premillenial dispensationalism or dispensational premillenialism , (take your pick….) -- which for the uninitiated was the subject of the history question on last year's general ordination exam. Which all goes to prove the point of Fr. Hoster's sermon yesterday: if we can complicate matters, we will.

Are these complicated matters?

The first part of this chapter of Mark is a vivid description of the run up to the Second Coming, with its catalog of bad things -- bad things that if we watch the news seem only too familiar -- wars between nations and among families, religious persecution, women fleeing disaster with suckling babes, earthquakes and even worse earthquakes in winter, false messiahs and false prophets. But there is good within this, for these things point to the coming of Christ, like the sweet promise of the fig tree blooming, the moment when the elect will be gathered together and taken to God's heart.

But what makes it complicated is that Jesus makes no promise that the elect will be exempt from any of these terrible events (current bumper stickers notwithstanding), and complicating it even further is the fact that we don't know when this will happen. No body knows except God the creator, the Father. This all makes for some very bad existential angst; and we who are here, in the mean time, in the time given to us to keep watch over the household -- we are left with many questions:

If the elect are gathered, then who are the elect? How do we know who they are and how will they know who they are? And even more important, how do I know whether I am included in that blessed company of saints or just a deluded pagan? Thus the promise of final vindication and revelation gets all muddied up with suffering, judgment, sin, free will, and the process of sorting out who is in and who is out, or perhaps better put, what gets us in and what keeps us out.

Keep awake, stay alert, beware: you never know when you will be called to account.

There was a time when this was somewhat simpler. Bad things happened to bad people. Bad things happen to bad people and if bad things happen to me then I must have done something bad and if bad things happen to you then you must have done something bad.

We have gone a long way toward separating judgment out from the meaning of suffering, but vestiges remain. If you think I am over drawing the picture, all I can say is, stand in any pediatric intensive care unit and listen for the whispers: What did my child do to deserve this? What did I do to deserve this? Why is God doing this to us?

That's what disaster feels like -- it doesn't matter if it's a tsunami, earthquake or even the AIDS epidemic; or on a smaller scale, losing our job, causing a fender bender or getting "DID NOT SUSTAIN" on your GOEs. We experience bad things as judgment, because they bring us face to face with our inadequacies, our illusions, our just being human.

However, we express it, what ever metaphor for judgment we use -- and I am talking here about that experience of being under judgment, of being called to account, of coming up short, of falling from fallibility to fault -- pick your philosophical idiom… we don't like it!

The passage from Isaiah captures our resistance…..first blaming God, -- "You hid your face and so we sinned," and then that plea, "No wait, that's how we feel, it's not how it is… we are in your hands and we know that you will not desert us, but where are you God?" God's face remains hidden. From our side we experience the pain of separation, of being alone, out there, waiting, watching, at risk. And so we construct elaborate ways to soften, defer or explain judgment -- Relativism, addiction, and happy talk -- you know: Blah, blah, blah, I'm ok, you're ok, blah, blah, blah,

And on the other extreme is what I call spiritual dodge ball. (This is the approach I was raised with and probably the cause of my aversion to talk of apocalypse, the last days, the rapture and being left behind.) In this approach we take being awake and alert seriously, but it's all about positioning ourselves so that when we see IT coming---and by that I mean anything resembling a threat to our sense of righteousness or complacency of soul--we can deftly get out of the way. We wave the pretty flag of righteous deeds, hoping that God will go for the obvious, while we lurch across a landscape littered with the potholes of our own making, hoping that we are okay with God. But who among us is so nimble?

The Puritans of New England, who had a gift for complicating absolutely everything, wrestled mightily with this issue. They were too learned and too savvy not to realize that calling yourself saved and being saved were two different things. And so around and around they went, tying to understand the mystery of God's will and the human heart.

Being a history major, I've always had a soft spot for the American Puritans, and I recently came across a new biography of one of their own, Samual Sewall of Boston, born 1652, died 1730.* I found myself deeply touched by this man's life, and I hope you will bear with me as I share an admittedly highly edited version of a story that speaks to the question of what does it mean to be awake and alert as we await Christ's coming.

Now we know a lot about Samual Sewall because he kept journals, pages and pages of journals, covering over 50 years of his life. While I'm not sure he would have felt at home in the blogosphere, because he didn't record absolutely everything (thank God), he certainly thought it important to keep a record of his life, and in doing so he opens a window onto a very particular landscape of faith.

Sewall was among the second generation of the New England Aristocracy; born into a good family, one of the earliest graduates of Harvard. In 1675, he married Hannah Hull; together they had 14 children, eight of whom died as infants. Having married Hannah and thus into her father's estate, Sewall chose business over theology for his vocation, but with that making and having of money came civic duty. He became a judge of the circuit court and remained one most of his life, and so it came to be that in the summer of 1692, he was one of the judges who sent those 19 women and men convicted of witchcraft in Salem to their deaths. The story of the Salem witchcraft trials carries deep layers of metaphor and meaning for us Americans.

But what did it mean for Samual Sewall?

He had entered into that summer of accusations and strange happenings like so many of his compatriots in the new world experiment in godly living, seeing it as a battle being played out for the soul of New England. The devil had it in for the godly commonwealth and so set out to destroy it. Women mostly, but men too, stood accused of great evil, of doing and being abominable things, of being the first wave of the devil's attack. Vigilance against chaos, sin and heresy, including that of toleration, was part of the Puritan interpretation of "Keep awake, stay alert, beware." The devil was loose in the land and the end times could be just around the corner. A lot was at stake. And so, unlike a fellow judge who did walk away in disgust after the first trial, Sewall stayed on, did his duty, voted for death. The crisis passed and life went on, but the effect of the trials lingered on in the hearts and minds of the colonists.

Say what we will about the Puritans, they took their faith seriously and they had a deep sense of community. The Salem "event" involved everyone. Sewall was only one of five judges who oversaw the trials and imposed the sentences, the guilty verdicts having been decided by juries.

But then something unexpected happened.

In January of 1697, on a day set aside for fasting and prayer about the trials, a sign that it was still unfinished business, Sewall walked into his beloved South Church in Boston and handed his written apology to his minister. Then he stood as it was read to the whole congregation. He could have argued, as others did, that he had been trapped by ignorance or emotions run wild, or that his duty required it, or that he was just an instrument of God's will, but what happened with Sewall was unique. He made no excuses, asking to "take the Blame & Shame of it" on himself, asking pardon of men and God.

Now I have to ask myself, was this just a form of spiritual dodge ball?

A way of deflecting God's wrath and punishment -- of hedging his bets? Was he simply tired of losing child after child and finding it indeed God's punishment -- or in his language "God's strokes" -- and so his apology was simply a way to wash the filthy cloth of guilty feelings?

Or was something else going on?

Was it perhaps a case of a convicted heart, or what we would call a transformative moment, when God surprises us and our heart and soul open to something new. It grieves me not to be able to give more detail, but here is what happened to lead Sewall into that church that day.

In May 1696 -- a few months earlier -- Sewall and his wife lost a son who was stillborn. The child remained unnamed and, significantly, unbaptized -- and thereafter referred to as little "posthumous." The following December their little daughter Sarah took ill and died unexpectedly. They put her in the family tomb on Christmas Day and Sewall took the opportunity to re-inter little posthumous, tenderly placing him with the body of his first born, John, a baby who had died twenty years earlier. This, Richard Francis the biographer, thinks was the cause of a split between Sewall and his pastor, for the child was unregenerate, outside the pale, not like the other children who in Puritan fashion had been quickly baptized after their birth; thus little posthumous had no right to be considered among the elect.

Yet Sewall felt compelled to include this child with his others. He identified with his son's outcast status and his own feelings of being cut off from God and his community. And then in the midst of this grief, Sewall happened to read Matthew, Chapter 12, verse 7, which reads in the King James Version:

"But if you had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless." This is Jesus, quoting Hosea, defending the disciples for breaking the Sabbath by taking grain from fields as they went. Jesus says, "I tell you there is something greater here than the temple." Suddenly Samuel Sewall made the connection to Salem: God would have mercy, not sacrifice.

The experience of sorrow and loss, of being in a place where God's face seemed hidden, of being cut off and disconnected, of realizing that he himself had sinned by withholding mercy and condemning the guiltless, of realizing that in judging he himself was judged…. All this brought him to that personal turning point.

Now the biographer Francis, being a good literary theorist, sees this heart change
as signaling the shift from a medieval world view to a modern one, The formation of the individual modern conscience is part of a reshaping of "narrative" from seeing danger in the outer world to appreciating the danger from the inner one. That all may be.

But what I see is a simple story of faith in which there is one more force at work beyond suffering and judgment and the end times; and that force is God's grace, cracking open a person's heart and changing the way they know themselves, the world and God.

There is one other piece of evidence that tells me that Sewall's apology was a matter of God's grace carving a flawed but worthy vessel. In 1700 Sewall wrote and published the first known anti-slavery tract in the colonies. At that time slaves made up little over one percent of the population. It didn't make him a popular guy. At the heart of his argument against slavery was his belief that people of color were human beings too, children of God.

In 1705 he fought the passage of bill in the colony that would have forbidden and severely punished marriage between white men and native and black women. He fought the bil -- which passed -- but not before he managed to weaken its provisions and insert a clause that ensured the legality of marriage between slaves. It doesn't make him Martin Luther King, Jr., but it does speak volumes about where grace was leading him. And so it went, the man who had been insensible to the cries of the innocent in 1692 found himself learning the meaning of mercy.

Jesus came knocking and Samual Sewall was awake enough to open the door.

Praise God.