August 5, 2009 + “Be Prepared!” (Luke 12: 32-40) + Hayward Fong

A certain lord kept a fool or jester in the house as great men did in olden times for their amusement. This lord gave a staff to his fool and told him to keep it until he met a greater fool than himself, and if he met such a person, a greater fool, he should give him the staff.

Not many years later, the lord fell sick. His fool came to see him and was told of the lord’s illness. The fool asked, “Whither wilt thou go?” “On a long journey,” said the lord. “And when wilt thou come back again,” asked the fool, “within a month?” “No,” said the master. “Within a year?” asked the fool. “No, never,” responded the master. “And what provisions hast thou made for thy long journey?” asked the fool. “None at all,” replied the master.

“Thou meanest thou art dying, going way forever,” said the fool, “and thou hast made no provisions before thy departure? No plans, no nothing? Here, take my staff for I am not guilty of any folly as that. Thou art a greater fool than I am.”

Are you like the master, a fool, because you have not planned for that last journey? Harsh though it sounds, that is the statement in our Gospel lesson for this week. It speaks about being ready for the coming of Christ. It speaks of our Hope.

As Paul wrote to the Romans, “…we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. …we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:22-25).

Not long before his death, Henri Nouwen wrote a book entitled “Sabbatical Journeys,” in which he wrote about some friends of his who were trapeze artists, called the Flying Roudellas. They told Nouwen that there is a special relationship between the flyer and catcher on the trapeze. This relationship is governed by important rules, such as “The flyer is the one who lets go, and the catcher is the one who catches.” As the flyer swings on the trapeze high above the crowd, the moment comes when he must let go. He flings his body out in mid-air. His job is to keep flying and wait for the strong hands of the catcher to take hold of him at just the right moment. One of the Flying Roudellas told Nouwen, “The flyer must never try to catch the catcher.” The flyer’s job is to wait in absolute trust. The catcher will catch him, but he must wait.

Nouwen said, “Waiting is a period of learning. The longer we wait, the more we hear about him for whom we are waiting.” Waiting is not a static state, it is a time when God is working behind the scenes, and the primary focus of his work is on us. I like Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Romans 8:24, “Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. God is creating his life within us, and we must wait for it to come to full term.”

The second point is we are to wait expectantly. Gary Preston tells a story in his book “Character Forged from Conflict,” that illustrates how we are to wait. He writes: “Back when the telegraph was the fastest means of long-distance communication, there was a story, perhaps apocryphal, about a young man who applied for a job as a Morse code operator. Answering an ad in the newspaper, he went to the address that was listed. When he arrived, he entered a large noisy office. In the background a telegraph clicked away. A sign on the receptionist’s counter instructed the job applicants to fill out a form and wait until they were summoned to enter the inner office. The young man completed the form and sat down with several other waiting applicants. After a few minutes, the young man stood up, crossed the room to the door of the inner office, and walked right in. Naturally the other applicants perked up, wondering what was going on. Why had this man been so bold? They muttered among themselves that they hadn’t heard any summons yet. They took more than a little satisfaction in assuming the young man who went into the office would be reprimanded for his presumption and summarily disqualified for the job. Within a few minutes the young man emerged from the inner office escorted by the interviewer, who announced to the other applicants, ‘Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming, but the job has been filled by this young man.’ The other applicants began grumbling to each other, and then one spoke up, ‘Wait a minute! I don’t understand. He was the last one to come in, and we never even got a chance to be interviewed. Yet he got the job. That’s not fair.’ The employer replied, ‘All the time you’ve been sitting here, the telegraph has been ticking out this message in Morse code: “If you understand this message, then come right in. The job is yours.” None of you heard it or understood it. This young man did. So the job is his.’”

The young man got the job because he was not just waiting – all the others were waiting – but he was waiting expectantly. We, you and I, are all sitting in the waiting room. But it is how we wait, and what we do with the waiting, that is important. Waiting does not mean just sitting down and doing nothing. You have to be watching and looking for God to fulfill His promise. You have to believe He is going to do it. We could miss what He is doing because we are just waiting without expecting God to really come through.

Finally, Jesus is reminding us that we are accountable to Him for the faith lives which we live. Our Lord challenges us to be faithful at all times as we walk our journey of trusting in Him. Our faith is not something which we turn on and off, but something which is always prevalent in our lives. Jesus wants us to be accountable in our faithfulness, a faithfulness based on the promises of God as we find them in the Bible and we are asked to have the same kind of reliance. The Gospel message is essentially a promise for our lives in which we are asked to believe.

It is like the following: Far away in a desert stands a water pump in the sand. You are alone, your canteen is empty and you come upon that pump. Tied to it is a hand written sign put there by some pilgrim. The sign reads, “I have buried a bottle of water to prime the pump. Don’t drink any of it. Pour in half of it to wet the leather. Wait, and then pour in the rest. Then pump. The well has never run dry, but the pump must be primed to bring the water up. Have faith, believe. When you are through drawing the water, fill the bottle and bury it in the sand for the next traveler.”

Having come upon this pump in the desert with this sign and being out of water, what would you do??? Will you dig up the water bottle and drink from it?? Or will you believe and believing, dare to pour that water, every drop of it into the old ‘trusty’ pump?? Because you trust, you take a risk, both for yourself and for the next person who will pass that way. What will you do???

Will you be faithful in the written promises of God? God has promised through Christ to care for us, to redeem us, to provide for us in His unique way. Faithfulness calls us to rely on God’s promises for our lives not ours. Faith is trust. Faith is trusting in God’s promises each day, because we are accountable for our faithfulness at all times when we need it and when we don’t. Confidence in God’s promises is a way of life. We are held accountable for the way we live and because we believe and trust we will want to live a faithful life.

Let me close with another story. A man owned a little grocery store. It was the week before Christmas, when a tired-looking woman came in and asked for enough food to make a Christmas dinner for her small family. The grocer asked her how much she could spend. “My husband did not come back; he was killed in the War and I have nothing to offer but a little prayer,” she answered.

The grocer was not very sentimental or religious, so he said half mockingly, “Write it on paper and I’ll weigh it.” To his surprise, the woman took a piece of paper from the pocket of her dress and handed it to the man saying, “I wrote it during the night while watching over my sick baby.”

The grocer took the paper before he could recover from his surprise and, because other customers were watching and had heard his remarks, he placed the unread prayer on the weight side of his old-fashioned scales. Then he began to pile food on the other side, but to his amazement, the scale would not go down.

He became angry and flustered and finally said, “Well, that’s all the scale will hold. Here’s a bag, you’ll have to put it in yourself. I’m busy.” With trembling hands, the woman filled the bag and through moist eyes expressed her gratitude and departed.

When the store was empty of customers, the grocer examined the scales. They were broken and they had become broken just in time for God to answer the woman’s prayer. As the years passed, the grocer wondered about the incident. Why did the woman come at that particular time? Why had she already written the prayer in such a way as to confuse him so that he did not examine the scales.

Years went by and the grocer never saw the woman again. Yet he remembered her more than any of his customers. He came to treasure the slip of paper upon which the woman’s prayer had been written – simple words, but from a heart of faith. They said, “Please, Lord, give us this day our daily bread.”

The lady’s written prayer was a great act of faithfulness. She believed God would provide and He was true. She didn’t know exactly how God would do it, however, the unique circumstances of the story with the scales being broken, people in the store, and the frustration of the grocer all lead to God’s way of providing for this young mother.

The Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect Him. But we are called to live in the present, waiting in hope, waiting expectantly, and waiting faithfully as He has called us to serve with that which has been gifted us.

Amen.