“But of the times and seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you.

For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord cometh as a thief in the night.”

(I Thessalonians 5:1-2)

One night I was roused from sleep by a muffled sound in the hall just outside the bedroom. I raised up, bleary eyed, to see a strange man holding a burning match and stepping across the threshold scarcely six feet from my bed. “What do you want?” I blurted out; and the intruder, or prowler, or whatever he was, turned, threw down his match and scurried down the stairs. I jumped up, and finding nothing else handy, picked up an empty suitcase by the door with the hazy notion of hurling it down the stairs on top of the head of my disturber. But I was too slow. I could hear him still in the house, bumping in the dark against furniture on the first floor. But I wasn’t in a hurry to hasten down and encounter him in the darkness, so I began to yell orders to Teapot, like: “Call the police” and “Don’t come out in the hall.” “There’s a burglar in the house.” But in spite of my good directions, her curiosity prevailed. She stuck her head out the door and seeing me standing there in my pajamas with the suitcase in my hand, concluded, so she said, that I was about to take leave of her after all these years of happy married life.

Ever since I was so rudely awakened by that intruder I have understood better than ever before that puzzling figure of speech Jesus used so often — I mean that metaphor of His to describe the coming of the Kingdom of God as “a thief in the night.”

And also I’ve come to a better understanding of why the early church used the same imagery to convey the meaning of the Advent Season, the coming of Christmas, as a thief in the night. Were not the shepherds on the Judean hillside shocked and surprised when they heard the angelic choirs singing their song of “Peace on earth to men of good will” to announce the Savior’s first Advent? And would not His second Advent be in like character from man’s point of view, unpredictable, surprising? So, the call to worship for the faithful in every Advent season must sound the same note as did St. Paul to the Thessalonians: “Of the times and seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord cometh as a thief in the night.”

The unbelievable wonder of it, the inevitable righteous judgment of it, the immeasurable grace and goodness of God breaking in upon the darkness, ignorance, stupor, fear and sin of mankind, always has an element of shocked surprise which is like nothing more than the coming of a thief in the night.

But it’s not so much the suddenness, the shock, the unpredictable aspect of this “thief in the night” character of the Advent which my own experience drove home to me, as it was the revelation of how desperately my relationships with other people stand in need of redemption, not just in one moment of high religious ecstasy, but over and over again.

The aptness of the church’s ancient Advent symbol of her Lord’s coming as a thief in the night has dawned with new clarity upon me since I experienced first hand my own consternation, confusion, and inadequacy to deal with the presence of this unknown person I suddenly waked up to discover so close beside me. How ludicrous and non-sensical and unproductive was everything I did.

Man’s most perplexing problem has always been his dilemma over how to handle his personal relationships. One of the Beatles’ songs, you remember, beat out the refrain: “She’s leaving home after living alone for so many years.” Lots of the young people lost in the drug culture of the big cities are there because of the oppressive estrangement they felt at home. Sociologists say that the “generational discontinuity”, always operative in any society, is more pronounced in America today than ever before in any culture. And many a young person who has not completely opted out from the adult world, nevertheless feels ambivalent about returning home, even for Christmas holidays. Not only do the young folks feel that the older generation does not understand them, they also feel that they do not understand the older generation.

A daughter, after her mother died, was concerned over the aching loneliness her father was going to experience. She urged the pastor to find something at the church for him to do. Several of the minister’s suggestions received from her a negative reaction: “No,” she said, ”No, I don’t think he would like that.” “Well,” said the pastor, “you know your father so much better than I do, what would you suggest we ask him to do at the church?” Whereupon the daughter replied: “I don’t really know. I really don’t know what he is like.”

Is our problem of generational discontinuity simply that time moves so fast that we cannot handle the job of keeping current in our relationships? Are we simply incapable of living up to the exhortation from “Hello, Dolly”: “Keep on growing, keep on growing”? Parents, busy about many things for the support and security of their children, may make the fatal mistake of pegging their emotional and intellectual relationship to a son or a daughter at a chronological point passed by years ago.

One father, who thought of himself as a reasonably devoted parent, was driving his teenage daughter to school one morning. When she got out of the car and started walking across the campus, he noticed that she had left on the car seat the paper bag containing her lunch. Spontaneously he called to her: “Sister Baby, Sister Baby!” She was not yet out of earshot, but she never turned to look back. Only when he saw her neck and shoulders stiffen, as if bracing to receive a blow, did he realize what an impropriety he had perpetrated in blurting out a family pet name, a hangover from childhood, to a teenager on her school campus and among her peers.

But as important as is the time factor in keeping current in our relationships: important to “keep on growing, keep on growing”; important to know what time it is and really to know each other now as the people we are now and not 5, 10, or 20 years ago, and relate to each other genuinely and authentically on that chronological scale — far more important is it for us to relate to one another in Christ.

Our human relationships need redemption more than they need renovation. It’s not old fashioned furnishings that have soured our personal relationships so much as it is our selfishness and unreliability and unfaithfulness and withholding of love that have rendered us alien, or persons non grata, to one another.

The song of the angels to the Bethlehem shepherds was: “Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior” — not a counselor, not an advisor, not the leader of a new social group, not even a new philosopher — but “a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”

Each one of us needs a Savior for our soul, a redeemer from sin. He must come with a power to change human hearts from within. He must come with a love divine to reconcile our rebellious hearts to the forgiving Father, and then effect a reconciliation of loving forgiveness, acceptance and service for all people.

It is not enough for us to say we honor His name. We must honor His presence in our human relationships. That undoubtedly means making room for His forgiveness unto the uttermost: our forgiving the mistakes, the slights, the displeasing habits, the nervous and unlovely ways of others. It means making room for His respect for all people: young and old, rich and poor, powerful and weak. It means making room for His righteousness and reverence and devotion to the Heavenly Father’s will in everything. It is not enough for us to say we honor His name. We must honor His presence in all the transforming power He so silently brings to every moment for glorifying every relationship with His heavenly radiance.

Often we make the silliest of assumptions that in the close, dear relationships of the family, and with our sweethearts and best friends, we can dispense with Christ. We think we can trust our own hearts there. So we are a bit squeamish about intruding Christ’s name or His presence there. Where we really need Him, so our foolish assumptions go, is in those vexing relationships with other races and nationalities, our enemies and our competitors. This is the greatest of follies. That amazing drama, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, with all its distasteful obscenity and vulgarity, at least revealed that it is the closest of human relationships, even of husband and wife and parent and child, which can produce the cruelest treatment, the deepest hostilities, the foulest decay, and most demonic destruction of people.

The currently high homicide rate in Memphis and Shelby County, our law enforcement officers tell us, is mainly caused, not by burglars, robbers and drug addicts, but by husbands and wives, sweethearts, parents and children.

The human heart needs a Savior, and the place where the heart is most lost and in the dark and in desperate confusion is the place of our human relationships. It’s here that we act as ridiculously pathetically as I did when awakening to discover the strange prowler in my bedroom. Unless Christ comes with His love and His righteousness, bringing both moral principle and never ending compassion into all our relationships, all our motions toward one another are as wildly disordered and inept as was my household when the prowler came. Christ must come and keep coming ceaselessly into these relationships, for they are ever changing, ever growing relationships. They stand in constant need of new and fresh redemption at every moment.

A few years ago the disillusioned youth of our affluent society were saying: “You can’t trust anyone over twenty-five.” Why, what poppy cock! You can’t trust anyone who is untrustworthy, be he 25 or 95. And if the older generation needs the redemption of Christ from their preoccupation with wealth and status and power in order to be open and aware and compassionate with their own sons and daughters, so also does the younger generation need the redemption of Christ from their rebellion against all the rules of reliability and all the standards of purity and truth and moral responsibility.

Whatever we have out of our past: labors, material, wealth, structured pretentiousness, proud power — there always remains in the present moment the desperate need to build the church of Jesus Christ, the beautiful church which is His body, the church of human relationships, structured in love and righteousness, reaching out to all the world. For such building we sinful, frail human beings are not competent. Therefore, He keeps coming. Watch ye, therefore, lest the Master of His house come and find thee unaware. For unto us there is born a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.