The Days Are Coming… Seeing and Believing 

“There will be signs….you can see for yourselves…”  -  Luke 21:25a, 30

“Night and day we pray most earnestly…restore whatever is lacking in your faith.”

    - I Thessalonians 3:10

There is something unfaithful about patching Bible verses together like I have done here and elsewhere in this  weeklong series.  Allow your offense at this liberty to press you to read the whole lection, or perhaps, better yet, the chapter or book.  In the meantime…

Let me tell you of an unpleasant discovery early in my Episcopal life.  Having been elected to the office, I assumed my vision, values and understandings, duly examined, had been affirmed.  Quite the contrary!  My customary speaking about “taking the long view,”  “addressing our deficiencies,” “listening patiently to one another,” and “waiting on the Spirit” was unacceptable passivism.  Leaders, lay and clergy alike, pressed for “uncompromising vision with action,” “strength against ungodly challenges,” and “certainty not timidity.”  The Church adopted for itself the “America is #1” mantra and resisted any suggestion by Apostle Paul (and the likes of me) that there was something “lacking in your faith.”

Luke reports that Jesus enumerated unmistakable ciphers of the kingdom arriving, (signs in the moon…distress among nations…people fainting from fear).  I wish to tell you a sign that I will regard as an advent of the new age.  That sign (pray it comes quickly!) will be a critical mass of Jesus followers aware of what is lacking in their faith and expecting transformation.  When that is reality, unmistakably present and felt in our personal and corporate bones, we will have the moment about which Paul wrote to the Thessalonians (“restore whatever is lacking”) and Jesus announced to his friends, (“there will be signs…you can see.”)

December days, every year, have northern hemisphere people staring into innumerable weeks of a long dark winter.  Christian believers are rescued from such malaise, spiritually, when they recognize the sign of the changes for which they long is as near as their personal admission of a need for it in their own faith.