Preparations

Even with my limited experience, I told him that one of the things that he was doing was not right, but he assured me that he was following correct procedure.

It was not.

We've had to have Sam our Amish carpenter friend come four times over the years to correct the various problems that have surfaced with that poor workmanship.

I should have had Sam do it from the beginning and then it would have been done correctly.

Judgment has been rendered, and I would never recommend that firm for any work in the future.

They were not prepared to do good work.

So we hear the parable of the wise and foolish virgins today.

Half of them were not prepared to do good work.

The moment for action came and they were not ready to respond.

We could hear this story in several ways, the first of which is bad news; those who are not ready are locked out.

No one likes to hear that.

Stay alert! Is the admonition.

But who can sustain that for the long haul.

Everyone gets tired; vigilance is so hard to maintain.

So do we get excluded just because of our human frailties and failings?

Everyone does foolish things; everyone is weak and flawed in many different ways.

We blurt out the same exclamation that others did to Jesus: “Then who can be saved?”

It is depressing!

But, as we saw in other stories of Jesus, the point is not about what has happened, but about what might happen if things are not radically reoriented in our lives.

And that reorientation is framed with Good News:

It is not all up to us.

God is providing the resources, and doing the work of salvation.

It comes to us in a cycle of events that goes like this:

We receive the work of salvation.

We hear it with joy. We revel in it.

We live in it. We share it. We give it away.

We are to give an accounting of what we have done with it.

We next need to confess our shortcomings and failures.

We can trust that there is forgiveness for any of these things.

We receive Christ's word of salvation.

We hear it with joy...and so on through the cycle again and again.

...for the ones who know it best are hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest... as the old hymn says.

To be prepared is to be aware and ready to move from step to step in that lifetime of cycle that brings us Good News, which comes to us fresh every day, scripture says.

To be under judgment is in one sense to be refusing or unable to move from step to step in the life-cycle outlined a moment ago, refusing to invest, to venture, to trust and act on that trust.

Easy? No,...but what word from Christ Jesus said it would be easy?

Anyone want to claim that he or she has it all together, all these matters of living in our faith under control, spiritually savvy, and always energetically engaged. No?

Life is much more complicated than that, isn't it?

Perhaps we shouldn't be thinking of this preparation for the return of Christ Jesus as a matter of time as much as a matter of degree.

We not only experience a delay in Jesus' return, but we also experience times of drought, times when God does not seem to be close to us, times of emptiness and even the absence of God.

Our life of faith is not a nice straight line increase.

There are ups and downs, times when we are more engaged or less engaged.

There are times when we might feel especially close to God, and far too many other times when we have and emptiness, a terrible distance.

We are called to wait through those times, with the confidence that the dry season will end, that eventually the rain will return, the desert will boom, and we will be renewed in the faith.

It doesn't matter if we are talking about a classroom of students, a stadium of fans, a nave of worshipers, or some other gathering, not everyone gets the same thing from the same experience.

It may be much, or little; significant for some but not for all.

“I didn't get anything out of the service, ...or the class, ...or the event,” someone laments.

That is not necessarily a tragedy; it may just not be the right time for that particular person.

An astute spiritual director once said: “The spiritual practices of prayer, Bible study, and regular attendance at worship, are not simply what you do in order to get close to God, or to celebrate God's activity in your life.

Sometimes you do these things because they are what you do when God is not particularly close to you, when you do not feel a vibrant spiritual closeness.”

They are parts of our preparedness, the things we do while waiting, so that when the dry time is over we have the right habits engaged already, prepared to take up the new content that is made available to us, ready to welcome the Lord Jesus.

It is unrealistic to expect that we are all at the same point spiritually at any given time.

Perhaps we should not fret about that, and learn to wait, expectant that God will come to each of us whom he has named his own, in his good time.

Even our most respected spiritual warriors have gone through those dry times.

After her death, it was discovered that Mother Teresa wrote about her extended periods of doubt and emptiness.

Martin Luther openly spoke of his long nights of terrified spiritual loneliness.

Yet both of them continued in prayer, in worship, in receiving the sacraments, trusting that the awareness and the joy of those practices would be revealed to them at God's right time.

And so the admonition is to stay awake, to be prepared and watching.

Put ourselves where the preparations can be most likely to happen, here in this gathering of God's people.

A pastor was working with a group of catechetical students, and one of the students was clearly there under duress.

The body language was clear; he turned his chair sideways and stared out the window, but he was listening.

The pastor was talking about the scene of Jesus' baptism, when the heavens were ripped open and the Spirit descended upon Jesus.

He said, ”What that means is that we can now get to God.”

“No it doesn't,” blurted out the kid who didn't want to be there.

“Well then what does it mean?” retorted the irritated pastor.

“It means that God can get to us. And the world isn't safe anymore in its old ways of doing things,” replied the student.

And the pastor recognized at once that the student had the better answer.

It isn't that we can work our way to God, but that in Jesus, God can reveal himself to us.

Paul didn't get to God; God got to Paul at the right time...and the world is different because of it.

Luther or Mother Teresa didn't pray their way up to heaven, but God revealed what each of them needed, at the right time as they were actively preparing and waiting, and we receive part of that blessing through them.

One more vignette:

A person told Dr. Willimon, “I feel like I've been preparing for this all my life.”

This startled the good pastor, because the man's parent had just died of a massive heart attack..

What did the man mean?

“All that time in church, listening to sermons, Bible-reading, praying, receiving sacraments, was getting me ready for the worst day of my life; it was like disaster training.

Now the disaster has come.

And I am reaching down and pulling from those resources, praying that I am fully prepared to deal with what needs to be said and done on this day.”

That's an interesting way to think about our gathering here; a training session, a disaster preparedness drill, as preparation for handling sorrows, and ultimately, for handling joy.

Wake, awake!

No eye has seen, no ear

Has yet been trained to hear

What joy is ours!

We go until the halls we view

Where you have bid us dine with you. [LBW#31]

Amen

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.