Turbulent times call for great leaders. Those great leaders have not always been leaders with a perfect formula, but they have always been leaders with a vision. Moses ventured onto holy ground and caught God’s vision of a free Hebrew people. Jesus was born into the understanding that his life would reveal God’s love and save the world. Peter and Paul then built the church on Jesus’ vision of hope, joy, and trust in God. Throughout history, God has called forth leaders whenever the signs of the sun, moon, and stars seemed to call for it, whenever God’s people were plenty confused and afraid.

Jesus’ reminder to the great masses of us during those times is to pay attention. “Be on guard,” he says, “so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.” “Be alert at all times,” he says, “praying that you may have the strength to escape these things and to stand before the Son of Man.” He seems to be saying – if you can’t lead, follow; and if you can’t follow, at least get out of the way!

I’m not sure exactly how often we experience times like this that Jesus is talking about. Sometimes it seems so overwhelmingly frightening, that he must be talking about some end of the world scenario – a popular book and movie theme these days. But on other days it seems like the signs of the times are always with us – that when we pay attention, the world is always preparing us for the next evolution, the next big change that will rock our foundations and wreck our sense of security. In the apocalyptic texts attributed to Jesus, there’s always kind of a “now, but not yet” quality to his words. Yes, these may be signs of something that will happen in our distant future, but you never know, earth shattering news comes to particular people and particular communities every day. And our day could be today.

It makes me wonder about Jesus’ whole “prepare and be ready” bit. I attended the “Disaster Preparedness” health lunch Meg set up for our church a couple months ago, and I have yet to check my flashlights, get batteries for the radio, and stockpile jugs of water. I’m just not that concerned. Maybe I should be – but natural disasters just aren’t high on my radar list. In other ways, I try to be dutifully prepared. I have a will to designate guardians for my children, should, God forbid, anything ever happen to me or my husband. We have insurances of all the various varieties, and make deposits to meager college and retirement savings plans. Still our financial planner has given us a much longer list of the financial “shoulds.” Sometimes I think it would be easy to get sucked into preparing so much that we lose sight of everything else. The devil is in the details. Jesus was talking about having a heightened awareness of the things that “could be” – and we have learned how to take his encouragement to be prepared to a whole new obsessive level.

But I think what happens in our world is that we have grown to put our trust in the things, in the preparing, rather than putting our trust in the one who is calling us to be prepared. Jesus isn’t stupid. He knows that we won’t exactly be ready for change of cosmic proportions – any time that it comes. We will fight it, deny it, worry about it, and maybe even try to drink it away. Our courage will fail us. Our prayer life will falter. We will belittle and sabotage the leaders that God puts in our midst because their presence alone reminds us of the kind of times that we’re in. Moses was ridiculed; Jesus crucified; and Peter and Paul lived with all kinds of criticism and judgment. God’s leaders know that leading will be a tough if not impossible task, and they take it on anyway.

But in anxious times, God’s leaders won’t be the ones whipping up the fear factor. At least I don’t think so. I’m not exactly a judgment day preacher. I’ve heard some of those guys, and they terrify me. At the last Oak Ridge ministers’ lunch that I attended, probably a year or so ago, one of the participants stood up and talked about a clear vision he had from God to tell people to “get their houses in order” because the rapture, the end of the world as he expected it to be was near. “Just look at the signs,” he told us. Well, the signs he was noticing were not exactly the signs that I would say denote the end of the world. But much later, I realized that, as crazy as it seemed to me, he was making an important point. Not so much the point about salvation that I think he wanted to make, but there is something to the “getting one’s house in order” part.

Jesus knew that human beings would experience the anxiety that goes along with sensing national distress. He knew that we would experience confusion, fear, and pain in our daily lives. He understood that disasters, both natural and those of our own making, would shake our trust in other people and cause us to question God’s hand in the course of human events. But even as he knew those things, he also wanted us to know the longer story, the lasting saga, the epic tale of God’s love that would go on, and on, and on, and on forever.

That, we can prepare for. We may not be able to read the signs clearly and predict what our futures may be, but we can be on guard when our confidence is weakened. We can raise our alert levels when prayer starts to get tough. In those times, we need God all the more. In those times, Jesus tells us that, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” There are certain things that are lasting, and they aren’t jugs of spring water, canned meals, and flashlight batteries. Love lasts. Jesus’ words of hope last. Generation to generation, we can remind our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren that God’s love was with us, even in the worst of our worst times when it looked like the world was about to crumble.

When it comes right down to it, Jesus isn’t giving us a blueprint for what’s going to happen when the end comes or nor will he explicitly tell us who’s going to get left behind. What Jesus tells us is that God’s love will never wane. The rest is uncertain, unpredictable, and sometimes a great big old mess. There will be times for us to lead, times for us to follow, and likely times we should just get out of God’s way. The signs are here, right now, to show us the way to Jesus, and there are likely signs yet to come.

Amen.