On Your Toes
Mark 13:24-37

November 30, 2008


Did you hear it? Over and above the sound of Patricia’s voice reading the Gospel was a sound unlike any other in the Scriptures.

It seems a little odd to begin the new Christian year and a new Gospel, Mark, by first reading from virtually the end of the book and the end of the story. These are the weeks of the Advent of Christ, the coming of the Light into the world, yet Jesus is giving out dark, gloomy words about the end of this world, right on the verge of his arrest, trial and crucifixion. Small wonder people have called Mark 13 the “Little Apocalypse” and in troubled days in this troubled world, many might be tempted to say that this describes Apocalypse Now.

Watch is the word. You do not know when the time will come, when the master of the house will return. Watch out, keep alert, lest he find you fast asleep and your opportunity is lost. He might come in the evening or the morning, at midnight, or at cock crow.

There aren’t too many of us ready for the crowing of the cock or rooster. It catches you by surprise, alarms you. And where else do you hear the cock crow in the Bible? Only a few verses ahead when Jesus cautions Peter that he will deny his teacher three times before the rooster calls out again. If we are supposed to watch out, to be ready when the cock crows, how are we supposed to be ready all the time? Is it possible to always be paying attention, to be continually on the alert, and be human? Do we even know what it is that Jesus wants us to keep watch for?

I once preached a sermon about preaching sermons to my congregation, in which I made the point that, give me a week, and I couldn’t remember what I preached about? Rhetorically, I asked if there were any people there that remembered what my first sermon was about six years earlier. I honestly couldn’t remember myself. During the coffee hour, Ron Langdon walked up to me. Ron was the moderator or lay leader of the church when I arrived and moreover was a barber in the old school. Barbers listen more than they cut hair.

“You preached about moose,” Ron said, and I gasped because he was absolutely right. He had triggered my memory. The sermon was about the lesson in trying to find and see moose; you don’t find moose - the moose find you. I was amazed, but after all, as a barber behind the chair, Ron knew how to wait and listen.

A few years later I preached virtually the same story in a seminary chapel before a collection of seminary students, only I added that little postscript about the barber and the moose. Several of the students talked to me a few days later and said that my sermon had terrified them. “I realized that it means that when I get up to preach every Sunday, people are actually going to listen to the words I say, and that is simply a terrifying thought.” My sermons have done a lot of things to people, but that’s the only time one of them terrified listeners.

We are all human and know that one of the most difficult spiritual and physical tasks is to be constantly on guard and alert, watching at every moment for the thief to come during the night. We are exhausted way too early in the waiting and would barely know that Christ has come and dwelt in our midst.

However, what Jesus is calling to you is to be fully, completely alive. When you are watchful, you appreciate the smallest items, and are overwhelmed by the biggest things, feel the deepest love and are wounded by the shallowest hatred, and recognize the inhumanity of humanity to its own brothers and sisters.

Watch and you just might hear and see someone who will change your whole being; or you might just change someone else’s whole being by the right word at the right time. The kingdom of heaven arrives when you recognize that it is right here.

Fred Craddock told about when on a cross-country drive he had stopped at a small Southern diner to refresh himself with an early breakfast and some coffee.

As he waited for his breakfast order to come, a black man came in and sat down on a stool at the lunch counter. The diner’s owner treated him contemptuously, clearly a vestige of that old Southern racism. As he sat in his booth a little ways away, Craddock wrestled with saying something to chide this manager for his shameful, racist conduct. The black man quickly slurped down some coffee and fled the diner. Craddock meanwhile remained silent. “I didn't say anything,” he confessed. “I quietly paid my bill, left the diner, and headed back to my car. But as I walked through the parking lot, somewhere in the distance, I heard a rooster crow.”

Craddock preached the same sermon at another church. After the service, a man came up to him in the narthex, shook his hand vigorously, and said, “Thank you, pastor, for that powerful sermon. That really hit home! Oh, but by the way, what was that business with the rooster?”

Don’t ask for whom the cock crows - he crows for thee!

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan