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“Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes…”The Future Shapes the PresentWhat we believe about the future shapes how we live in the present. We spoke last week about how God can set us free from slavery to the God of Mammon, from anxious toil and restlessness. Today we hear from Christ something about how we to think about what is to come.Before we look more closely at these words, it’s worth noting that, when it comes to the future, we live in a world which is profoundly lacking in hope. On an individual level, the average modern secularist thinks little about his own mortality or about what is to come on the other side of death. As a society, we tell ourselves stories about the imminent end of the world and, due to this profoundly negative narrative of eschatological despair, we struggle to see the continuance of our own species as a positive thing.It's so important, therefore, that we attend to a specifically Christian eschatology. That is, a Christian vision of the last things and the end: the end of our lives and of the end of this world.In our passage today, Christ speaks of what doctrinally is called his Second Coming. He came for the first time in the Incarnation. He lived, died, rose, and ascended into Heaven. He will come again. This will be the second time. This will be the Second Coming.We live in the middle of those two times. And we therefore wait for him to come again. We wait for the close of history which will be brought about not through any means of man or through the explosion of the Sun, but through the return of Jesus.This is what the story Christ tells us is about.The Night of this Life“Stay dressed for action and keep your lamps burning,” Christ tells us, “and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the wedding feast, so that they may open the door to him at once when he comes and knocks.”What an evocative image to which we can all relate. It is nighttime in the house of the master. Who knows how long the servants have been waiting for his return? And yet he still has not come. They know he will come but they do not know when. They are tired. They are longing for their beds. Their eyes are drooping. They are, perhaps, wondering if he will indeed return at all that night or if he has found somewhere else to stay. Their only option is to stay awake and alert, even in the midst of all of these questions and doubts. Because the only thing they know is that he is coming at some point. But they do not know when.We’ve all been there of course, diligently trying to stay awake because we are waiting for something late at night with eager anticipation. I remember as a young child desperately trying to stay up to watch Match of the Day on a Saturday evening and somehow finding myself awake the following morning in my bed having missed the programme entirely and been put there by my mother.Christ is telling us, then, that the world and the time we live in is a little bit like that. It is the night before the coming of God. And the night is soporific. It calls to us to lie down, to sleep and to enter a world of dreams, a world in which there is, in fact, no master, a world in which the master will never return and in which therefore we have no need to stay awake at all.Our dreams are various – of the ultimate reality of the material world, of comfort, of wealth, of distraction, of entertainment, of sexual self-expression, of power, success, prestige, aesthetic pleasure. There are endless dreams. And yet the dreams don’t call us to wake up to the great reality that we will face at some point.Being ReadyHow, therefore, are we to resist the siren call of sleep? Christ gives us a picture of spiritual alertness. He speaks of being dressed and ready for action – or, more literally, of having one’s loins girded. This phrase refers to the gathering up of a long, flowing garment and the tucking of it into one’s belt. In the contemporary world, we might speak of pulling our so