One time, in November of 1999, when I was living in McCall, I got a strange phone call. A secretary from one of the other churches in McCall asked me if I was going to attend a meeting that night. I asked her what was the meeting about and she said, “Y-2-K.” I said something to the effect of, “Excuse me?” She was beginning to get upset with me and repeated slowly as if I could not understand, “Y-2-K.” She went on to say that there was a group of people planning to gather at a local church camp on the evening of December 31^st of that year. They were expecting the world to end that night and wanted to invite my congregation. I told her thank you, but I planned to watch it on TV. She didn’t think that was funny and hung up on me.

You students are too young to remember that many people seriously thought the year 2000 (Y-2-K) was going to be the end of the world. Computers all over the world would fail, planes would fall out of the sky, bank records everywhere would be wiped out. This would lead to chaos, famine, nuclear war, and we needed to be prepared.

I know that not a few people in Valley Country were stockpiling food, water and of course ammunition.

This was not the first time nor will it be the last time that people have seriously predicted the return of Christ and the subsequent end of the world. It happens so often that the only consistent element of these predictions is that they have always been wrong.

Ironically, in the gospels when Jesus is asked when the end will come, he says he doesn’t know. One might reasonably ask that if Jesus didn’t know, how could anyone else know.

Human beings have a strong desire for answers. There are many questions that do have answers. For example, what is the shortest distance between two points. It will always be a straight line (except of course in football).

But there are questions in life that have no answers. People assume falsely that the job of religion is to answer questions.

In the gospels, Jesus is asked 183 questions. He only answers three of them.

But when Jesus asks questions, the issues are so important questioners are stunned into silence. He doesn’t give answers to his own questions.

In today’s gospel, Jesus asks three questions and the last question is the unanswerable one, “When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on earth?”

Given our ego-driven desire for answers, that is one of those questions heard often in this school- or any school. The answer is “That is a good question.”

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