"Br Prepared" given November 12

"It's like this," says Jesus, "the Coming Kingdom is like 10 young women, five of whom acted prudently, and five who acted imprudently. Some ended up on the inside at the feast. The others were excluded. Keep watch. Keep awake."

It must have been difficult for those who first heard these words in Matthew's Gospel to stay enthused--awake. Despite Jesus’ promise to return soon—it had been at least two generations since his time of earthly ministry. One can almost feel their energy and expectations sagging as Matthew's church settled in for the long haul. Jesus' promised return would not happen soon, it appeared. The Kingdom would be delayed.

You and I have never known a time other than that of a Kingdom delayed. In Jesus, we have experienced the in-breaking of God's Kingdom, but not in its fullness, not in completeness. And so we wait as well.

And one of the skills one gains as one waits is the skill of not getting too excited about the prospects of time fulfilled. Don't drop everything and run when someone shouts, "He's back!" That will only lead to disappointment when things don't work out as expected. False alarms produce people who no longer move when they hear the alarm sound. We all remember the story of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

Half of the young women in the parable prepared themselves, procured oil for their lamps, and were ready for the beginning of the wedding festivities. Half were caught unawares, off guard when doors shut and the music began. Their cries of, "Lord, Lord, open to us," went unheeded.

Life is like that, Jesus seems to say. We say we want God in our lives, that we pray God's will to be done at last on earth as it is in heaven. Yet, when the alarm sounds, when the cry goes out, we are not ready. To be fair, it is hard to wait, particularly when the wait lasts for two thousand years plus seventeen—give or take a decade or two.

Life may be more urgent than we know. Our lives do not go on forever. The parade passes by. Will we be ready? Will we be prepared to commit?

Jesus' use of parables in his teaching is meant to surprise—to shake us up, to disrupt the accustomed flow of our lives, to make us sit up and take notice. The placid surface of our lives is disturbed by the form of the parable.

Most of us know what it's like to be unprepared. I say "most of us" because I know there is a disgusting minority of people who always do things on time—or worse early. They never rush their income tax form to the Post Office at 11:59 on the 15th of April. They've never needed an extension on the deadline for their term paper. They've even got their Christmas shopping done for this year.

You and I all know people like that. These are the same people whose lawns are always immaculate and whose cars never have a McDonald's cup protruding from under the front seat. They make the rest of us look slothful and uncaring. Yes, many of us can relate to the five foolish bridesmaids who neglected to bring extra oil for their lamps when the crisis finally arrived.

Of course, Jesus is talking not just about any crisis, but rather the crisis which occurs when the Kingdom of Heaven breaks into our lives, when there is the Advent of God. So many of Jesus' parables talk about the problem of the absence of the master followed by the master's sudden, unexpected return. But is the return of the master ever truly unexpected? Is that hour when we stand face-to-face with God unexpected?

A young child hears that the circus has come to town and the child jumps for joy, breathless with excitement. The child begs for us to get in the family car and go directly to the city auditorium to buy the tickets. Don't wait. Go now. It's a circus!

Two days before a family's annual vacation, the kids were already packed, ready to travel. They were sleepless the night before, so filled with anticipation.

The parents, on the other hand, were adults. Vacations come and go every year. What's the big deal in a circus? There's no chance of a sellout. We can get tickets next week when it's more convenient. We'll have plenty of time to pack tomorrow. For there will always be a tomorrow, right? Wrong.

On Memorial Day weekend, Donna and I were making a routine trip to our daughter Gwyneth’s home, only to be rear ended on I 94. Although we were shaken up, neither of us were critically injured, though our car was history. It's always a bit frightening to realize how fragile life is. One moment you are moving along fine when, bang, out of nowhere, everything ends.

Many of us have had the experience of friends dying in their 50s. or 40s. A woman in my ordination class died in her late 30s. She died unexpectedly--only six or seven years after ordination. She must have had a heart condition or a tendency toward strokes, or some disease I didn’t know about. Twice a year I receive the Alumni magazine from my college—whether I want it or not. I was shocked. She was the first of my contemporaries to pass on.

Twice a year I get the alumni magazine from my college—whether I want it or not.

And for more than a issues when I turn to the section on the doings of the class of 1969, somebody—a friend, or someone I barely knew--has passed on—unexpectedly—at least to me. When will we learn to stop using that curious expression, "died unexpectedly"? We are creatures. We are terminal, our lives are short-lived as grass in the field, as the Psalm reminds us. Our bodies are not destined to go on forever.

Yet something about us wants to conceive of our lives as a river, a river that goes on and on. Like Little Orphan Annie in the Broadway play—we believe—without thinking about it, “The Sun’ll come up tomorrow”. But whether or not it does, the truth is we won’t necessarily see it. Our lives have a beginning and an end. That means that opportunities come our way that do not come again. There are moments that occur that do not reoccur.

God intrudes, but often only in a momentary, fleeting way. You and I must be ready. Isn’t that the message we take from Jesus' parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids?

We are toward the end of Matthew's gospel, toward the end of the church's year, and here is a story about endings. Time is up. The ones who were locked out perhaps intended to prepare themselves, had good intentions to get oil for their lamps. You know where the proverbial road of good intentions leads.

Somehow, we continually reassure ourselves with, "There will always be a tomorrow. The sun comes up every morning. Don't rush to judgment."

But life cannot be endlessly deferred. There are opportunities that come to us that don't come again. Jesus urges us to be alert, to watch, to be prepared, for the time in which we live at this moment may be the time for decision, for commitment, and a verdict.

A psychiatrist was commenting on the millions of Americans who require regular doses of sleeping pills and sleep aids in order to sleep. He was asked, why do we need these narcotics in order to get a good night's rest?

"Regret," was the doctor's reply. "The longer a person lives, the more there is to regret. Late at night when things are quiet and our lives pass before us, we need some help suppressing, forgetting the regret."

That insight ought to make us more decisive, more willing to risk, to venture forth, more expectant. I expect that it has just the obverse effect. We have missed so many opportunities by the time we are 50 or 60 or more, why expect more?

"People are always ascribing their situation to good or bad luck," says a management consultant, a man who helps business do better. "But from what I can see," he observed, "good luck, lucky breaks, good opportunities come everyone's way from time to time. The future belongs to those who expect to get a good break and are ready to cash in on that break when it comes their way."

I wonder if this is a parable for our relationship to God. We say that we want God close to us, that we would like God in our lives. But are we ready when God comes?

Novelist Reynolds Price, in his book A Whole New Life, tells of a stunning vision of meeting Jesus, Jesus baptizing in the Jordan, a vision that Reynolds was given one night during the depth of his illness with cancer.

He reports the vision in the book with calm certitude and many people, after having read the book, have written to Price telling him of similar experiences when they vividly knew the real presence of Christ. He has received thousands of these letters.

When he was being interviewed about the book, the most frequently asked question was about the vision. Did it really happen? Did it happen just the way he described it? Was he sure that it was really a vision of Christ or just something in his imagination?

When one interviewer on a New York television program pressed him at length on this, Price finally said, "Look, I'm from North Carolina. Maybe that explains it. When you grow up in that part of the world, you just naturally get the impression that Jesus cares about you and that one day he will get to you. So, when the vision happened, I just thought to myself, "Well, here it is. I was ready for it, being from North Carolina."

Jesus ends today's parable with the admonition to watch. To be ready for the time that is the right time, time fulfilled, our moment when God arrives on tiptoes, or comes rushing in, or surprises us with light, or flirts, or speaks.

St. Augustine, in his Confessions spoke of his life as a journey back to God. He searched for God, only to discover that, throughout his life, God had been searching for him:

Ask the beauty of the earth, the beauty of the sky. Question the order of the stars, the sun whose brightness lights the day, the moon whose splendour softens the gloom of night. Ask of the living creatures that move in the waves, that roam the earth, that fly in the heavens.

Question all these and they will answer, "Yes, we are beautiful." Their very loveliness is their confession of God: for who made these lovely mutable things, but he who is himself unchangeable beauty?

Too late have I loved you, O beauty ever ancient, ever new, too late have I loved you.

I sought for you abroad, but you were within me though I was far from you. Then you touched me, and I longed for your peace, and now all my hope is only in your great mercy.

Give what you command and then command what you will.

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless till it rests in you. Who will grant me to rest content in you? To whom shall I turn for the gift of your coming into my heart so that I may forget all the wrong I have done, and embrace you alone, my only good? (Augustine, Confessions, Book 8.)

Question: Have we stopped journeying, ceased searching? Are we so content with present arrangements in our lives that we, unlike Augustine, have no expectation of conversion, of meeting, of being swept up in the great purposes of God? Perhaps those five maidens who neglected to acquire oil for their lamps simply stopped imaging that the promised party would ever begin. 

"Something Beautiful" given Nov. 5, 2017

I wonder how many of us have ever been to a place that is really beautiful to us. I'm thinking about someplace so lovely, so tranquil, so engaging, so wonderful that we look on it for the very first time and say,

"Why would anyone want to leave this place?"

I can think of a few places like that-- Door County Wisconsin, the Big Sur coastline in Northern California, the Columbia River Gorge, the Rockies. Many of you, no doubt, have a list of places that you feel that way about. Places you can't imagine anyone ever wanting to leave. To some extent, I have to confess that I've always felt a little bit that way toward Chicago. Although when I tell people that, some of them look at me like I'm crazy. Yet three times, I've lived in various parts of that area, and always ended up moving away.

Why would anyone want to leave a place they love? If you're fortunate enough to live there, why would anyone want to leave a community where they have roots and ties, memories and friends? If you don't live there, why not open a restaurant and settle down? Or retire there? Why would we ever leave a place, a job, a home, a family, a relationship that we like?

Yet we do that very thing all the time. All of us are always leaving in some sense of the word, all the time. We leave one kind of life for another. We move away from one project or another, one job, one stage of life, one set of friends, one kind of time. We enter the next relationship, the next career, the next school, and the next after that, and so on. We human beings are always moving on, until we come to the end of our pilgrimage, the last of our life stages.

Life itself is movement and change. Whether we leave home, or spend our entire lives in the home where we were born; whether our changes are peaceful and gradual or wrenching and sudden; pleasant or unpleasant; we never stop leaving for that next change.

That's the way life is. And so the cliche question, "why would we ever want to leave here", is as deep a question as ever gets asked in this life.

And all the "becauses" that we give to answer it, get drowned out in the depth and force of the question itself. If we are reasonably content with our life-- why would any of us-- all of us-- ever want to leave where we are now?

Frederick Buechner, a novelist and minister, wrote about the Boys Prep School where he was once chaplain. The Latin motto of that school loosely translated as "come to this place, little boys-- in order to become men". Buechner suggested an alternate, more inclusive paraphrase that wouldn't make too bad a motto for life itself. "Come to this place, all of you-- come to whatever place you choose-- in order to become human beings."

Maybe that's the reason we spend our lives moving from place to place, stage to stage, way of living to way of living.

Question: "Why would anyone ever want to leave this place?"

Answer: "In order to become a human being.

No matter what a particular place, or school, or city, or job, or community can offer us in education, or entertainment, or challenge, or friendships-- sooner or later, something else will be needed. Unless those places can offer us that something-- that opportunity to keep on growing, keep on becoming, keep on moving toward a fuller humanity-- sooner or later, that place will become a part of our past, rather than our future.

After all, that's what we're here for. The fact is that ultimately, each and every one of us has been planted on this earth by our Creator with the task of becoming a real live, self-actualized, full-fledged, fully grown, emotionally balanced, spiritually mature, intellectually aware human being.

In The Power and the Glory, novelist Graham Greene tells the story of a seedy, alcoholic priest, who is about to be executed for his faith. On the eve of his execution, he sits in his prison cell with a flask of brandy to keep his courage up.

...Tears poured down his face. He was not at that moment afraid of damnation--even the fear of pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint, and a little courage. He felt like someone who had missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew that at the end there was only one thing that counted--to be a saint.

At the other end of the religious spectrum from the Catholic Greene, is Albert Camus, the self-proclaimed atheist existentialist. In his classic novel, The Plague, there is recorded a conversation between two atheists. One is a journalist, the other a physician trying to battle the plague that has devastated the city in which they live.

"It comes to this," says one of them, "what interests me is learning to become a saint."

Why would we ever leave this place? Why are all of us, always leaving all the places and times, and stages, and relationships, and ways of living, and worlds? What is the underlying motivation that underlies this never-ending

movement in our lives? Why would anyone keep striving to grow? What is the purpose of our lives on this planet, anyway? What are we here for?

To become men, says the Latin motto. Which is to say, to become human beings. To become a saint, says this pair of oddly mismatched novelists. And although they use different words, the underlying reality is the same.

To become a saint is nothing more or less than to live, striving to fulfill our potential, to become and to live as authentic human beings-- just as our Creator intended.

To be a saint means to live with courage and self-restraint-- as the alcoholic priest says. But it's more than that. To become a saint is to strive to live-- not with my hands clenched to grasp, or in a fist to strike. Rather it is to live my life with hands open-- stretched out-- to give, or to receive, or to pray-- all with equal gladness.

To become a saint is to weep for the broken and suffering of this world. But it is also to be strangely light of heart in the belief that there is something greater than this existence. There is something that mends and renews in this universe. There is something-- Someone who cares about us.

More than that, to be a saint is to know joy. Not the happiness that comes and goes with momentary circumstance. To be a saint is to know the joy that is always present with us-- supporting and undergirding us like a deep underground well. This is the joy of the saints-- always there to nurture-- always available-- no matter how dark and terrible the night.

To be a saint, you see is to be just a bit out of touch with the rest of the world-- and maybe just a bit out of our mind. It is to lead a life that is always giving away, and yet is always full.

The question arises, how do we find such a life? What do we do in order to begin living such a life? Where do we go to learn to live compassionately, spontaneously, generously, joyfully, naturally-- as naturally as the grass grows?

I wish I knew. I wish I had a sure-fire blueprint for total human- ness, for sainthood. I wish I had that plan-- and that it was usable for all of us. But the way will differ radically for each of us. How do we become human beings? How do we become saints? How do we discern the Divine Will and Realm of our God?

In this morning's Gospel-- the Beatitudes-- we find a portrait of human beings caught up in the Call and Rule of God for their lives.

Blessed-- says Jesus-- are the humble, the peacemakers, the pure of heart, the merciful, the non-violent, the persecuted, those who mourn for their own sins, those who hunger and thirst for God's coming Realm of Justice and Righteousness in the world.

An impractical dream? An impossible model? A prescription you and I could never hope to fill?

Yet aren't those really the exact qualities we would like to be able to show forth in our lives? Aren't they exactly the way that we'd like to be able to live? Isn't there at least a little bit of room for us there? Aren't we all of us--somewhere--to some extent--sometimes--in that list? Don't we think that we could like a little bit closer to that model if we tried?

Aren't these Beatitudes really the exact way of living and being in this world that we are so desperately seeking? Aren't they, as best as we can discern, God's Will for each one of us in our personal lives? Aren't these

traits really manifestations of God's Holy Spirit in human life? Wouldn't we all be happier if we could live that way?

Jesus taught about God's Realm in parables-- a pearl of great price, a treasure hidden in a field. There's a note of almost unbridled joy and surprise. God's Reign-- in our world-- and in our lives-- will be and is so much more wonderful than anyone of us could have believed or hoped for or imagined.

There is a sense in Our Lord's teachings that once we have glimpsed God's Realm, once we have tasted the new life in Christ, nothing else will ever quite matter as much. All the other pearls-- next to that pearl-- will become as costume jewelry. Every other field we ever walk across will seem to be a vacant lot covered in weeds.

In the end, there is only one thing that really counts, says the alcoholic priest to himself. There is only one thing that really interests me, says the atheist to his friend. To be a saint-- to be fully human—to be true to our highest self--to enter into that Kingdom that Jesus taught about-- the coming and Eternal Realm of God.

In that light, the Beatitudes no longer seem like an unattainable, impossible model of perfection. Rather, they become an accessible aim for the living of our everyday lives. They are no longer insurmountable tasks, but rather

the very reason we find ourselves in this world. They become, not impractical ideals, but a style of life, exactly the way of life God has called us to live.

If you stop and think about it, it is a radical and unexpected idea that we've been placed here in this world to become saints. So many of us stand in opposition to religion-- like Camus' atheists. So many people say they want nothing to do with sainthood-- yet ironically it is saints that we all strive to become. It is joy-- the joy of the saints that we pursue all our lives long.

God knows, so many of us settle for so much less. People settle for achievement, money, power, prestige, job, security, respect, friendship, contentment, or maybe living in a place we call beautiful. Yet all of these things are mere pearls. Not the pearl of great price we long for and would sell all we have for-- but the other pearls-- the ones that inevitably become costume jewelry and turn to ashes in our mouths.

It's hard to know how to fit into this world. It hard to know how to live at times. A little more courage and self-restraint, maybe. More than that, maybe we need to stop looking so hard, and begin to simply stretch out our hands and let it come to us. It may be challenging, or it may come to us naturally—but if we are true to it, it will bless ourselves as well as others.

However inanely, however desperately, however blindly we thrash about seeking God, and God's Realm-- no matter where we look-- it is always, also seeking us. If it is our secret purpose in this life to become saints, it is also God's not-so-secret purpose to make us into saints.

According to the Scriptures of the Buddhist faith-- this is a "Buddha -making universe". Which is really a way of saying that it is the nature of reality itself to enlighten and set free the whole creation-- down to the last blade of grass. In Christian language, it is the ultimate purpose of our God to redeem and save the world, to make full human being-- saints-- of all of us, "to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ", as Paul put it.

Why would anyone want to leave this place? No matter how beautiful the place may be, and then the next place, and the place after that, and the place after that-- all of our lives long? We can never answer that question in full. At the end of the day, we can only say, that's how we are.

We leave, sooner or later, because it's part of our very nature. We change because that's the way life is. We grow because something has been planted inside us. Something has been planted within us by God that calls us out--calls us to become more than we were. “To go on toward perfection” as Wesley put it.

And that something might be no larger than a mustard seed-- perhaps a face in a crowd-- a kind deed-- an important event-- a teacher who changed our life-- a glimpse of dawn-- a dream we can never quite remember or totally forget-- an act of worship— a child’s love-- the need of another-- the embrace of a friend.

Whatever form it comes to us in, God calls each of us to strive, to grow, to become. This creation is ablaze with miracle-- and only the Creator knows how the seed of the Divine Realm may best be planted within us. But for each of us, the seed is there-- the seed of sainthood-- and it has a lifetime to blossom and grow and bear fruit.