Yesterday, I got another opportunity to preach for the Beyond the Walls online Community of Christ congregation based in Toronto, Ontario. I enjoy contributing to their services when I can, and I was glad that the winter storm here in Kentucky (and so many other places) spared our power and internet so that I could show up as planned. I got to work Jacques Ellul into my sermon (perhaps unsurprising, given how often I reference him these days), though I did oversimplify his thinking a bit and would appreciate the opportunity to dive a bit deeper into what he had to say at some point.

In short, Ellul’s encouragement for Christians to try to bring about a better world isn’t a naïvely optimistic take—he makes it clear that he doesn’t think that human beings are capable of bringing about that better world on their own and that it would be hubris for Christians to believe that they can do so without divine intervention. I appreciate that point, and I think there’s something to be done with it, but also: 1) I didn’t have the time/space to get into the details, and 2) as a non-theist, my belief in the reality of divine intervention is… complicated, and I especially didn’t have the time/space to get into that. Again, I think Ellul can be read through a non-theist lens, so I’m happy to keep using him as a reference point, but it got too gnarly to work out in a Sunday morning sermon. In fact, one of my main goals in this sermon (like the last one I wrote on a similar subject) was to figure out how to approach the idea of a Second Coming from a non-literal, non-theist perspective. I don’t know how well I succeeded, but it was good practice for myself at least.

Here’s the recording of the service, and I’ll place the sermon text below the YouTube embed:

sermon text

Between May 2008 and May 2009, I had the wonderful opportunity of living in French-speaking Switzerland, including the towns of Chambésy (near Geneva), Renens (near Lausanne), and Sion (which is surrounded by the Swiss Alps). I have lived in several places, and I have loved many of them, but few have captured my heart in the way that Switzerland did.

In fact, during my first year of doctoral studies, one of my classmates caught me reading something in French on my computer instead of paying attention to our statistics lecture. I admitted that I was reading about Swiss universities. I still had at least four years left in my training to become a professor, but I was already trying to figure out what my chances were of getting hired in Switzerland.

I now live in Lexington, Kentucky where I work at the University of Kentucky, so obviously, those chances were not very high. Of course, I wasn’t disappointed to move to Lexington. My family lives nearby, and my spouse’s family moved nearby shortly after we arrived. I love my local church community, and at least on most days, my job is good and fulfilling. On a long day, though, you still might find me watching YouTube videos filmed from the cabin of a train making its way through the beautiful Swiss countryside.

It’s silly, but in my mind, Switzerland represents the dream of a better world than the one I live in: one where I could travel by train instead of by car, one with gorgeous scenery, and one where I would have easy access to high-quality chocolate. This is silly because I know that Switzerland isn’t perfect. If I ever did get to live there again, the trains, the mountains, and even the chocolate would eventually lose some of their magic, and I would find myself once again dreaming for a better world than that one.

Dreaming of a better world is part of the human experience—and it has also been part of the Christian tradition since the very beginning. Many of Jesus’s disciples saw in him the promise of a better world—one even better than Swiss chocolate—and they were shocked when he was killed before that world could arrive. Yet, even faced with tragedy, many of those disciples reaffirmed their faith in a better world through Jesus. If his ministry had been suddenly interrupted by crucifixion, surely a resurrected Christ would return to bring the end times and establish a better world.

In fact, many early Christians, including the Apostle Paul, never met Jesus during his ministry. In some sense, their conversion was based less on what he had previously taught and more on the better world that they hoped he would bring in the future. We’re used to thinking of the four gospels as the first Christian documents because they tell a story that happened earlier, but it’s probably 1 Thessalonians that’s the earliest surviving Christian text. Isn’t it interesting that it has more to say about Jesus’s Second Coming than it does about Jesus’s teachings? In chapter 4, verses 16-18, just before today’s passage, you can feel Paul’s excitement about the better world that awaits him:

“For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.”

Last year, my chance finally arrived. A Swiss university was looking to hire a professor who could teach and do research about online technologies. I teach and do research about online technologies! They needed someone who could speak English and French. I speak English and French! I poured my heart into that job application. I could imagine what was waiting for me and my family in Switzerland: trains, mountains, chocolate, and more besides. I looked up apartments where we might live, imagined what bus I might take to work, and considered which grocery stores we might shop at. I probably should have spent that time working on the job application, but I couldn’t help imagining the better world that I hoped would finally arrive—especially because the world that I was living in did not seem great. Then, as now, there were worrying political developments in the United States, and I wanted to escape to the better world I had been imagining for so long.

I am speaking to you today from Lexington, Kentucky, where I still work at the University of Kentucky, so obviously, things didn’t work out the way that I hoped for last year. I’m not that disappointed to still be in Lexington: I love my nearby family, I love my church community, and on most days, I love my job. But now, as then, there are worrying political developments in the United States, and I still find myself wishing that a better world would finally come.

The Second Coming of Jesus Christ is one of the oldest beliefs that Christianity adopted, and in many ways, it’s also one of the hardest beliefs for a Christian today to accept. Christians have been waiting for Jesus to come back for nearly 2,000 years, and so many generations of Christians have been sure that it was just around the corner, that Jesus was about to replace the disappointing world that they lived in with something much better.

Just as Paul was one of the first Christians to take up the idea of a Second Coming, he was one of the first to be convinced that it was about to happen—and one of the first to be disappointed that it did not. Look at the urgent and confident language in today’s passage: “the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (v. 2), “let us keep awake and be sober” (p. 6), “[God] will do this” (p. 23). We’re used to thinking of the four gospels, with their speculations about the end times, as the first Christian documents because they tell a story that happened earlier, but by the time they were written, Paul’s hope that the end times would arrive during his life had already been dashed.

One of the first times that I attended a Beyond the Walls service, on Easter 2020, I heard an important reminder from John that this very faith movement was also born in the hopes that the Second Coming was about to happen and that a better world was on the horizon. Many of our spiritual ancestors, living in the 19th century, were as convinced as Paul had been that a better world was just about to emerge, likely in their lifetimes. We are quickly approaching the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of this faith movement, and those hopes have been dashed just as thoroughly as Paul’s had centuries earlier.

If continuing to wait for a better world to emerge is a key part of Christianity, so is continuing to be disappointed that it has not yet happened.

It’s silly to compare my brief, shallow disappointment at not getting that job in Switzerland with our long-standing, deep disappointment that we still live in a world marked by racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, poverty, illness, and so much else. I must admit, though, that in the couple of days I spent moping after getting the bad news, I did think about some similarities between the two.

More specifically, I thought about some of the passages of a book that I had read earlier that year. Presence in the Modern World was first written in 1948 by the French sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul and was the result of Ellul’s trying to figure out what it meant to be Christian at that time, as his country was emerging from the Second World War and beginning to enter a time of economic and technological change.

On the very first page of the book, Ellul writes:

Christians are in the world and… there they should remain. Christians are not meant to be separate or to set themselves apart. Such separation is for God to effect at the end of time, when he will gather the wheat and discard the chaff; it is never for human beings to decide their own election.

Let me be clear on the limits of the analogy that I have been using up to this point. It was helpful for me in my disappointment to think about my duties as a Christian living in a country that I was worried about instead of dreaming about escaping it for a land of trains, mountains, and chocolate. However, there are people—in my country and others—who have far more reason to worry than I do and who are entirely justified in leaving the dangerous place they live for another, safer one.

Ellul was not arguing that Christians should not separate themselves from dangerous places or situations; Ellul was reminding us that even the best this world has to offer will always fall short of the better world that Paul dreamed of and that every Christian since has hoped for. We will always feel that disappointment that Paul felt, and that every Christian since has experienced.

And yet, Ellul suggests, Christians should not try to escape that disappointment but rather to face it head on. The second chapter of Ellul’s book is called “Revolutionary Christianity,” and he describes two characteristics of Christianity that have the potential to bring about what he calls “a profound change, a radical transformation.”

First, “Christians belong to two cities.” Even if we do not separate ourselves from this world, we never really belong to it. We cannot neglect our responsibilities in this world, but they cannot be our highest priority. We must accept that we live in a disappointing world, but we can never accept its disappointments.

Second, and most relevant to our passage today, “Christians are essentially people who live in expectation.” Not only are we constantly looking forward to a better world, but it is our responsibility to try to make it happen. As Ellul explains:

“All Christians having received the Holy Spirit are now prophets of Christ’s return, and by this alone they have a revolutionary mission…. For prophets do not merely announce to some extent an event that will happen at some point. Prophets are those who live out the event now and who make it real and present to the world around them.”

Paul’s teachings in today’s passage don’t do much for me when I think about them in terms of just waiting and hoping for a better world to come. I have an easier time making sense of it when I think of things like Ellul does—that it is our Christian duty to live out that better world now and to make it present for those around us.

Of course, this is more easily said than done. When Paul calls his audience “children of the light,” he is expressing confidence that they would recognize the coming of Christ when others did not. It is interesting, though, that he does not take the time to teach them how to recognize the emergence of that better world.

Even if Jacques Ellul invites us to think differently about how that better world might emerge, he is also short on details. In fact, Ellul insists that there is no easy manual for Christian action—as far as he is concerned, being Christian means continually struggling to decide what is right—what will bring about that better world—in each situation that we are in.

Perhaps, then, being “children of the light” today is less about recognizing specific signs of that better world than it is about believing that such a better world is possible. It might seem silly to suggest that some people don’t believe that—after all, don’t we all dream of a better world? That’s true, but sometimes we are so used to our disappointing world the way that it is that we are incapable of seeing it in any other way.

You may be familiar with “The Blue Marble,” a famous 1972 photograph of Earth taken by astronauts on Apollo 17. What you might not know is that the original picture is taken with the South Pole near the top of the photograph—upside-down from how we are used to it. Of course, in space—and, honestly, even on earth—there’s no reason that we can’t think of south as up and north as down, but we are so uncomfortable with the idea of the world being upside-down that everyone adjusts the photograph so that it fits with the vision that we have of the world.

Let us have the courage to see the world upside-down. Let us have the conviction to turn the world upside-down. Let us borrow Paul’s hope and Jacques Ellul’s commitment, and let us work to bring about the better world that we have all dreamed of.

• sermons
• Beyond the Walls
• Second Coming
• Toronto Centre Place
• Switzerland
• Présence au monde moderne
• Presence in the Modern World
• Jacques Ellul
• Blue Marble
• non-theism