The Old South Church in Boston

How Discern the Signs of the Times?

Sermon by James W. Crawford

Luke 12:49-56*

The Fourth Sunday in Lent, April 1, 2001

How discern the signs of the times? How read the significance of what lies in store for us? My soul! We do spend enormous amounts of psychic energy measuring variables, calculating trends, evaluating probabilities. The weather, for instance. Most of us accept to some degree a hoary old bromide like “Red in the morning, sailors take warning. Red at night, sailors delight.” Or again, in the middle of a thunderstorm, my mother used to promise the skies would immanently clear if we could find enough blue to make a Dutchman a pair of pants. To be sure, technology makes these techniques and perceptions a little primitive. With satellite pictures and computer models we assume weather forecasting gains accuracy and sophistication. . . maybe.

An article in The Wall Street Journal this last week questions the astuteness of our high-tech weather forecasting. The author, assessing the online capabilities of weather channels, discovered every channel, three weeks ago, “brandishing its usual array of scientific models and Doppler toys,” spooked us with the Blizzard of the Century. Remember? The apocalypse that never was? The author is not impressed. She refers to her granddad’s dog Tippy who let everyone know a thunderstorm was coming by heading for the woods. “A day or so later,” she writes, “as an all clear signal, Tippy returned to his post at his favorite pear tree.” She wonders if we might dispense with all our electronic and satellite prowess and, like her granddad, just get a dog like Tippy . “It’s your call,” she says.

But its not merely the weather. We try to assay the signs of the times in other areas, as well. Most of us find ourselves sensitive to economic indicators and try to read the implications of company earnings, manufacturers’ inventories, and consumer confidence as basic in determining whether the economy heads, as they say, North or South. We embrace census results and calculate the impact on political clout and government subsidies. We probe social trends shaping the stock on supermarket shelves, skirt length, tie width and prime time sit-coms. We scan the polls probing the popularity of our prospective new governor; we figure in hamstrings, wrist tendons, rotator cuff breakdowns, club house chemistry and the Green Monster as signs basic to discerning whether it’s “this year” or ‘wait ‘till next” for a certain baseball team opening its season in Baltimore tomorrow afternoon.

And yes, some of us, as I did, will take a look at the potpourri of tabloids on the shelf at CVS to catch a glimpse of the future cast by psychics: Item: from Pierre Rizzuto of Italy who predicted the Seattle earthquake on his radio show, he predicts, now, the Empire State Building will collapse after being attacked by a mutant strain of Cambodian termites. The Weekly World News promises five more Megastorms this spring, my National Enquirer horoscope offers me four lucky numbers; a palm reader makes herself available to analyze my love life and career. We find ourselves drowning in prophets and pollsters, seers and scientists, psychics and sorcerers, professors and preachers who make it their business to discern for us the signs of the times.

And Jesus? He knows we lap this stuff up. We build our lives around it. We stake our incomes on it. We risk our futures for it. And do you know what Jesus calls us? Do you remember how he tagged us? Hypocrites! Hypocrites! Do you know what Jesus means by that? He means we purposely miss the point. He means we know what is really at stake in this world, but we use a variety of cover-ups to avoid it. He means we possess at our fingertips a true knowledge of what it takes to set the future straight but we evade it with ruses by the ton. Jesus says we divert ourselves with our computer models, our religious folderol, our psychic gamesmanship, our market analyses, our incessant polls, our chronic dependence on the latest trend. Jesus calls us hypocrites because we deny the sign looming right in front of us—the sign signaling the ‘true meaning of this or any other time—we bury it in hearsay and surveys, the predictions and extrapolations technology, economics and science uncover, assemble and manufacture. We hide the authentic sign of our times with what our seers and stargazers, our political pundits and economic gurus sell us.

And what, then, is this authentic sign of our times? What sign, amid all the vast range of prognostication, hints and intuition, ought we to discern as a revelation for our own time? The New Testament asserts, the true sign of the time is the Cross of Jesus Christ. To discern the sign of times, as the New Testament urges us, means not so much ferreting out, say, the future of the Israelis and the Palestinians, weighing the chances of the Dow returning to 11,000, or your love life getting a lift. No way! It means confessing finally that the sign of this time and every time is the sign of the Cross. We live in an era tending to read and live by everything except the Cross of Christ: fear of missile attacks, Federal Reserve Board observations, fall fashion predictions. “Come off it,” cries the new Testament. We need discern these times—our times—as ripe, as appropriate, auspicious, the critical point, the crucial opening for deciding to get on board and serve in behalf of the grace and peace, the compassion and courage of Jesus Christ, risking the vulnerability and painful consequences the Cross represents, yet confident that in the Providence of God the tenacity of love and the patience of hope bear the last word.

What might this binding of the critical moment and the risks of the Cross look like? How might we recognize properly discerning the signs of the times? Let me offer an illustration: The day after tomorrow, April 3, marks the 33^rd anniversary of Martin Luther King’s final address. Do you remember it? It was an address amid the chaos and the bitterness surfacing during a strike of sanitation workers in Memphis, the speech they call, “I’ve been to the Mountaintop.” Dr. King begins that speech by alluding to a possible question asked him by Almighty God: “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” Dr. King then ticks off decisive moments in the story of western civilization: the Greeks, the Romans, the Renaissance, the Reformation, our civil war, the great depression. He then says, “Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty and say, ‘If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.’” “A few years in the second half of the twentieth century!” . . . Got it? The hour! The era! The times! Opportune. Auspicious. Critical!

And the sign for such a time? Andrew Young paints the picture. Setting the mood for this last address, Young remarks that he and other King associates had heard the gist of Dr. King’s Memphis comments many times before. Memphis, he writes, “did not seem as dangerous as Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964, or Chicago in 1967, other times where Martin reminded us that he had ‘seen the promised land.’” Then Andrew Young continues, “Martin Luther King had lived his life in the shadow of the Cross for the past decade. As a young author, twenty-nine years old, he had been stabbed with a letter opener by a demented woman in Harlem. He often referred to the fact that the blade pressed against the main aorta of his heart, and if he had merely sneezed it would have severed the artery and he would have bled to death. He once received a beautiful note from a ten-year-old who said, ‘I am a little white girl, but I thank God you didn’t sneeze.’”

“Martin often discussed this near death experience to remind his followers that death was an ever present possibility. He usually did so in a rather joking manner, concluding for us that we had better be ready to die. ‘If you haven’t found something for which you’re willing to die, you’re not fit to live,’ he said.

“On more serious occasions, which were very rare, he reminded us of the scar shaped like a crucifix that remained on his chest as a result of the event. ‘Each morning as I brush my teeth and wash my face, I am reminded by the Cross-shaped scar on my chest that each and every day could be my last day on this earth.’ Then he’d smile and say we’d better make sure that what we’re doing is worth dying for.”

The next day, April 4, 1968, a bullet severed Dr. King’s spine just below his chin.

How discern the signs of the times? Well, we can scan the sky for clues to the weather. We can listen to Alan Greenspan for a hint on the economy. We can read David Gergen for a glimpse of public policy pursued under the rubric of so-called “compassionate conservatism.” That is one way of reading the signs of the times. As informative as that may be, Jesus says it all misses the point. Buying into that stuff, we avoid the tough tasks, run from the true risks, evade the laying of our lives on the line for something worth dying for.

So then, how do you, how do I, how does this church, how do we discern the sign for these times? Our answer is critical.

SCRIPTURE READING

Luke 12:49-56

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided:

father against son

and son against father,

mother against daughter

and daughter against mother,

mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law

and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?