Preached at Beckley Presbyterian Church on November 28th 2004 

This year Yvonne and I took a late vacation.  June and July were busy.  August came, and it was time to get Matthew and Helen back to college.  So vacation time arrived in early September.  We decided to go and visit the Capital City, Washington. D.C, and stayed in the delightful town of Alexandria.  My Grandparents on my father’s side hailed from Alexandria in Scotland, so it was interesting to see the U.S. version.

The only drawback to our vacation was that the same week we decided to visit the Big City, so also did Hurricane Francis.  There wasn’t much left to her in terms of winds, but she still managed to bring a lot of rain, meaning that indoor activities were a must on some of the days we were there.

Thankfully, in the Capital, there’s a lot you can do that takes you indoors.  So we spent quite a bit of time in the Smithsonian.  They had an exhibition of photographs of Liverpool, England, the city Yvonne and I grew up nearest to. The pictures were by Paul McCartney’s Brother, Mike, and taken around the time the Beatles were starting to become famous.  It was fun to look at the pictures and recognize places that we knew in a previous life.

Another of the things we really enjoyed was going for the first time to an IMAX cinema.  If you have never been to an IMAX theatre and you get a chance to go, you’ll be in for a treat.  The first thing that hits you when you enter an IMAX theatre is the size of the screen.  It’s huge!  The movie we saw was about dolphins.  When they lowered the lights and the film started, well you felt like you were there, riding on a dolphin’s back through the waves.  Even though the theatre kept still, it felt like you were moving.

Of course this doesn’t impress my wife Yvonne, who seems particularly susceptible to motion sickness around water.  I think we are the only couple in Raleigh County who, if they go to the Dairy Queen in Hinton, can’t sit next to the window and look out at the view, because the river rolling by puts her right off her food.  I warn you of this in advance just in case any of you ever had a notion to take us on a boating excursion.

IMAX cinema technology presents a new way of looking at things, a new approach to becoming involved in the motion picture experience.  And if you have to look away at the screen for a moment to realize you are in a theatre and not actually in the movie, then so be it!

Today, in the Church Lectionary calendar, is the First Sunday of Advent.  A Lectionary is a suggested set of readings that can be used over a period of time so as to bring a balanced selection of readings from Scripture before a worshipping community.  Many Reformed Churches use what is called the “Revised Common Lectionary”, which suggests readings over a three Year period.

So today is the First Sunday of Advent, the First Sunday of Year A, and the first Sunday of a new Church Year.  What a great day for a preacher to be beginning his ministry in a new congregation!  Year A.  Sunday #1.

The Gospel reading today came from Matthew Chapter 24.  It’s a reading that calls us to approach celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ in the context of a much larger framework.  It proposes that to really understand why Jesus came, we have to look at a bigger picture.  A picture that extends all the way from before time, to a day when time as we know it shall be no longer be relevant.  It calls us to IMAX our view of God’s purposes.

Let me ask those of you who are of my generation and a little older, do you remember your first television set?  I can still recall the first one we had in our house in England.  The screen can’t have been much bigger than the ones you now get in the back of airplane seats or minivans.  But the cabinet was huge. All polished brown wood, with big black knobs on the front and vents at the side.  I can almost smell that old television!  Isn’t it strange how the memory works?

Of course it showed only a black and white picture and you had to adjust the horizontal hold and the vertical hold and run around with the antenna to get the picture to stop wobbling.  And when you did get it settled there was only one channel to watch, in England the good old B.B.C.  (I guess over here it was A.B.C.)

Over time the screen grew bigger and the cabinet grew smaller.  Transistors and chips replaced valves and tubes. Along came color and more channels and cable and satellite and pay per view and videos and DVDs and bigger screens and plasma screens and analog this and digital that.  Same sort of things happened in the cinemas.  From silent movies with those wonderful Wurlitzer organs, to today’s multiplex surround sound experiences.. and yes.. IMAX.

Some years ago the author J.B Phillips wrote a book with the title, "Your God is Too Small".  The theme of the book was that our experience of God has become restricted by our limited vision of God.  That to grow in our spiritual life we need to expand our view of what the Almighty can do.

Back in my Sunday school days we used to sing a chorus that declared:

“My God is so Big, So strong and so mighty, There’s nothing my God cannot do.

My God is so Big, So strong and so mighty, There’s nothing my God cannot do.

The mountains are His, the valleys are His, the stars are His handiwork too.

My God is so Big, So strong and so mighty, There’s nothing my God cannot do.”

So, on to our reading from Matthew.  You may have heard some preachers interpreting this passage in a very literal sense.  They will suggest that the coming of the Son of Man or the coming of the new Kingdom or the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, the end of the age, however you want to phrase it, is immanent and approaching and that, buddy, you better be ready, because otherwise God’s going to get you.  I presume that they hope that in taking such an approach they will somehow scare us all into believing the gospel message.

I read some of the ‘Left Behind’ series that’s so popular at the moment.  It taught me an important thing.  That if there is a smell of rapture or Armageddon in the air, make sure that you never get on a plane with a Christian pilot. Because the moment the last trumpet sounds, whoosh, they are out of the cockpit and floating heavenwards, which leaves all those who don’t embrace their theology praying that the automatic pilot knows how to get the plane back on the ground!

My problem with applying such an interpretation to passages like this one from Matthew is that it makes God so small and life much too simple.  The beauty in this passage is in the ambiguity and the tension.  Our verse were the end part of a whole chapter of apocalyptic visions that conclude with Jesus speaking about a fig tree putting forth it’s leaves as a sign of the nearness of summer, and how heaven and earth would pass away,  but His words would always be around for us.

You can almost hear the original listener’s anxiety, “But when Lord, when is all this going to happen?”  Jesus seems to shrug His shoulders and say, "Guess what?  I don’t know, the angels don’t even know, it’s in my Father’s hands”.  It’ll be just like the days of Noah.  Life will be rolling along much as it ever was – a normal day, people working, eating, doing what they have to do.  All Jesus can tell us is that it will be as unexpected as a thief in the night.

I love that picture.  Because who ever expects a thief?  Thieves don’t make appointments.  They don’t call us up and say, “Hello, this is Bob the Burglar here.  Would it be all right if I come over and take your stuff next Tuesday around 2 a.m. in the morning?”  Matthew 24:36 - "But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

Can you see how this passage calls us to look at the bigger picture?  The Presbyterian Brief Confession of Faith begins with the words, “In life and death we belong to God, through the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit.”

The bigger picture, the IMAX view, is that God has got our lives covered, past, present and future.  We don’t need to know all the intricate details about how and when and where.  If God’s Son, Jesus Christ, didn’t need to know, then why should it be necessary information for us?  How much greater to make our aim simply to trust that in God’s hands everything about our lives is going to be all-right.

Here’s the bigger picture!  That through praying and caring and sharing and studying God’s Word and God’s people, by seeking to be the people that God wants us to be, by doing all the practical and every day discipleship stuff, the love of God can be born into the midst of every day life.

The First Sunday of Advent.  The First Sunday of a New Church Year.  Year A, Sunday #1.  A day to look forward and to declare our belief that whatever may come, God has it under control.  So it is with a sense of anticipation that I begin my ministry in your midst.  Not because I know what the future holds, but because I know who holds the future.

The events of the First Christmas were anything but clear – unexpected pregnancy, a census, a birth in a stable, shepherds and wise men. Who would believe God could be mixed up in all that!  Only with the benefit of hindsight do we now see the bigger picture.  Let us not limit God because our vision of what God can do in our situation, in our life, in the life of God’s church is too small. Rather let us place our faith in the IMAX GOD!