These Are Serious Times

You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” (Luke 12:56 ESV)

Here in Atlanta we’re dealing with the after-effects of Hurricane Dennis. In Georgia that means plenty of rain, some flooding and loss of power in some areas. It also means we’re relatively fortunate given what some areas along the gulf coast are left to deal with.

Relatively fortunate . . . most of us.

There’s been a news story in Atlanta that I can’t make sense of, can’t get my mind around. Part of my brain wants to wrestle with it to see if I can arrive at some suitable way to think about it. Another part of my brain wants to forget about it and pretend it didn’t really happen.

On Sunday night a 35 year old man in the Decatur area went to bed, probably with the sound of rain peppering his roof. Sometime early Monday morning a massive tree fell on his house, ripping into his bedroom and killing him. He has a wife and small children. They managed to escape. The newscasts keep saying that this man died instantly. I keep wondering how they know that and I keep praying it’s true. Perhaps we’re not supposed to ever get comfortable with stories like that. TV tries to help us. We get about 60 seconds of the tragedy and then we break to something else, often some clever and funny commercial that makes us smile again. It’s the randomness of it all that bothers me. The randomness means that no one has immunity.

So if that’s the case, what are we to do with that? How do we live and what does it mean to live well. These are the questions that have been stirred up this morning as I read through the text of Luke 12. The scripture hasn’t offered an explanation. It rarely does. But to listen to Jesus is to hear some things that need to be heard as we watch the movements of a hurricane and hear about a family robbed of a father and husband and see a mangled and charred bus on the streets of London.

It seems like the people among whom Jesus lived were very much like us. Over the past weekend I was constantly turning on the weather channel. The frequency of special weather bulletins on our local TV channels signaled the level of threat and fed our voracious appetite for radar images and information about trajectory and wind speed. This is the kind of thing Jesus confronts in Luke 12:54-56. Jesus observes that his audience is very perceptive and interested in weather patterns. They know that cloud from the west, coming from over the Mediterranean Sea, will be full of moisture. “There’ll be rain,” they say. Likewise, these folks know that a south wind, coming from the arid desert places, will be like an oven blast. “It’s gonna be a hot one,” they say.

Jesus makes his point with a question. “You know how to read the weather, but why can’t you interpret this present time?”

It’s “this present time” that deserves our attention, our efforts to discern accurately and respond wisely. The pressing question of Jesus’ day, and ours, is “what is God doing?” The people to whom Jesus spoke were good at reading the almanac, interpreting earth and sky, but they were missing the work of God present among them in Jesus.

In his book Serious Times, James Emery White shares this quote from Paul Helms:
“The whole of a person’s life is fundamentally serious, something for which he is responsible before God, and for which he will have to give an account . . . He is individually responsible to God for what he ‘makes’ of it.”[1]

White recounts a line from a letter written by John Adams to his friend Thomas Jefferson toward the end of their lives. “You and I have lived in serious times.”

This is what Jesus knew. This is what he wanted others to understand. This is what we need to understand as well. These are serious times. This theme is woven throughout Luke 12 – in a sense, through the whole of scripture. In the voices of prophets, Jesus, and the apostles, the call is consistent. Don’t miss what matters most. Don’t be distracted by the dramatic and thus miss the truly urgent.

We respond to the randomness of a fallen tree not by trying to avoid trees or by sitting up all night during storms. I heard a radio interview on Saturday with an American woman who lives in London. The interviewer asked, “will this terrorist attack cause you to come home?” The answer was no. It made me think, “why would coming back to the USA be a good response? What would that solve?”

Jesus said, “don’t fear those who can only kill your body and then do nothing else. Fear the one who holds your eternal destiny, who can throw you into hell” (Luke 12:4-5).

We don’t answer the urgency of these serious times by simply protecting ourselves against terrorists or hurricanes. We answer the urgency of these days with readiness. Jesus uses the image of a boss returning from a business trip to find workers productively engaged. Be ready, watchful, alert. “It will be good for those servants whose master finds them ready, even if he comes in the second or third watch of the night” (Luke 12:38).

These are serious times.

And serious times call for serious lives. This doesn’t mean sour and sober, guarded and tentative. It does mean looking deeper than wind and clouds, getting beneath the surface, interpreting the days in which we live, ready to be a part of what God is doing. This is what Jesus calls us to. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it” (Luke 9:24).

[1] Quoted in James Emery White, Serious Times, p. 10.