Poolesville Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
02.26.12; Rev. David Williams
There are few things that are more anxiety producing than being unprepared for something. That basic gnawing feeling that you’re just not ready for the arrival of an inescapable reality is one of those things that justifiably tears and wrenches at our psyches, stirring in us that lingering stress dream.
You know the one, that dream most of us have.
It’s the student stress dream, which crawls its way out of our subconscious whenever other stressors arise in our lives. You’re dreaming along, happy as a clam, when suddenly you step through a door, and there you are in class, the test before you. You don’t have a clue what the class is or what the subject is or why it is you’re only wearing a powdered British lawyer’s wig and a rhinestone studded halter top.
Maybe that last one’s just me.
But most of us at some point encounter some variant on those anxiety dreams, because feeling like you’ve not done what needs to get done really gets to us. If you’re a musician, you don’t know the piece. If you’re an actor, you’re playing Macbeth, only Lady Macbeth is Adam Sandler and he doesn’t know any of his lines, either. If you’re a pastor? Well, most of our dreams involve catastrophic worship experiences, most of which coincidentally also involve Adam Sandler.
So we try to be ready for things, we do. But it is easy, very easy, to not take the time to be prepared. It’s easy not to be ready to deal with that particular moment when it arises, because we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s just not possible that it’ll happen. It’s easy to get distracted, to know that something needs to happen, and to say...well...you know...I’ll get around to it. I’ll get it done eventually.
Like, say, backing up your computer. That one can hurt, particularly if you’re a writer. Or, say, not keeping your backup in the same place as your computer. Carrying the drive you use to back up your laptop in the same bag as your laptop might seem to make sense, because it lets you back up on the go. I mean, if you drop the thing, what are the odds of both of them breaking? And you almost never let the thing out of your sight. Still, you know you should be backing up into the cloud, onto some distant server, just in case. You just...well...can’t quite get around to it.
But then when you return to your van with a couple of bags of bagels, and there the van door is, wide open, and the bag with your Mac and the backup drive containing the only copies of your half-finished sermon, your final doctoral paper, and a 25,000 word manuscript have wandered off to be sold on Craigslist, well, then you realize that the time to have taken steps to remedy that problem was the last time you were reminded about it.
Yesterday was not a particularly fun day.
But as I filled out the police report, it did remind me that for some things, some very important things, the time to be preparing is right now.
The discipline of preparedness and the imperative of the right now are two key themes in today’s annoyingly apropos reading from the Gospel of Mark. Mark’s Gospel is perhaps the most direct and to the point of all of the four narratives of Jesus. His language is terse, and his stories are completely devoid of anything other than the most essential elements.
Here we are in the first chapter of Mark, for instance, and things are very different than the first chapters of Luke and Matthew. Those other two stories of the life of Christ begin with tales of the birth of Jesus, and long lists of ancestors. They take a meandering storyteller’s path to the beginning of Jesus’ teaching and ministry.
Mark just doesn’t have time for that. This Gospel gives us a quick introduction to John the Baptist in the first eight verses, and then...here’s Jesus! He gets baptized, and then wham, he’s out in the desert for forty days of preparation.
Those forty days of preparation are non-random. Within the ancient Hebrew tradition, forty is a number of completeness or fullness. A generation is forty years. Moses spends forty days and forty nights on the mountaintop before he comes back with the 10 Commandments. The Israelites wander in the wilderness for forty years. During the story of the flood, the rain came down for forty days and forty nights, while Noah popped dramamines and thought to himself that animal stench and rocking boats really aren’t two great tastes that taste great together. When applied to time, forty means “enough.” It means “sufficient.”
And so where Matthew and Luke both give details about that time, Mark hits us with the shortest possible version. What happened in the desert? Enough that Jesus was ready.
Ready for what? Ready to proclaim and teach the Gospel. What is that Gospel? The essence of that teaching can be found in its completeness in verse 15, summarized in typically blunt Markan style. “The time is fulfilled. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Good News.”
This Kingdom proclamation is the essence of what Jesus will teach in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, and it speaks directly to the urgency of being ready, because what matters is happening right now.
What is most significant in this tight little synopsis of Christ’s teachings is the immediacy of that declaration. What Jesus is NOT saying is that we’re waiting around for something to happen before things matter. What this is NOT saying is that our response to this event can wait. Things are already happening, and have already happened.
When the author of Mark conveys the essence of Christ’s message in the Greek, he uses language that leaves no doubt on that front. When he talks about the time being fulfilled, the verb he uses for fulfill is in a form that indicates completeness. Even the word used for time by Mark is not the Greek word chronos, which simply delineates the passage of one moment to another.
Instead, Mark presents us with time as kairos, the Greek term that delineates time as a completed moment, a moment of accomplishment. This is time outside of time, and is instead something complete in and of itself.
The nature of that time is revealed in the next phrase. “The Kingdom of God is at hand” means precisely that. The thing that Jesus proclaimed is not something far off. It is close enough that if you reach out, extending your fingers just a little, it’s right there, as close as the person nearest to you.
What that means for us, right now, in this 40 day period of preparation, is that we are meant to feel intensity and urgency of purpose as we act in the world. That is always true, of course. That is always meant to be the dynamic of a faithful life.
But we lose that in the shuffle of the day to day, as the stress and sparkle of the world turns our attention away from those things we know we really should be attending to. Those things are not the stuff of data and REM sleep compare and contrast exams. They go deeper into our relationship with the creation into which we have been placed, and the other souls with whom we share it.
Are we prepared, in the right now, in the This Instant, to respond to the world in such a way that we are acknowledging the reality that Christ proclaimed? Being prepared to encounter each moment in grace is the essential task of every Christian, because...as we were reminded this Ash Wednesday...our lives are finite. The vital, turning-point instants that shape the flavor and nature of our days can sneak up on us, as stealthy as a thief. No matter where we find ourselves, that moment could be upon us. There isn’t a single moment when we can be unprepared to respond in keeping with the grace of the Kingdom.
A cutting word can be stilled on your lips, and the arc of a relationship can be changed. A word of forgiveness can be found and offered though the wound goes deep, and a brokenness can begin to heal. A silence can be broken, and in doing so a falsehood can be quashed, or an injustice halted. In an instant, we can find everything that defined the pattern of our lives shattered, in that call that comes too late in the night, or that look in the doctor’s eye. How do we survive such moments? Because we don’t know when those moments will come. We have no idea.
If we are unprepared, undisciplined, unfocused in our Way, then we’ll meet those unexpected moments of kairos possibility with our anxieties, our angers, our fears, and our selfishness. And from those places, what we’ll write onto the fabric of time and space will not bend things for the better, not live into the reality of that Kingdom.
So in the days ahead, use the time to claim the time. Whatever actions deepen your capacity to live into the Kingdom, recommit yourself to practicing them. Prayer and service, worship and justice, meditation and action, each of these, renewed across these days, can strengthen us in our yearning to live into the time at hand. And the time is, and always has been, at hand.
Let this season, in its completeness, complete us to respond to that essence of Christ’s message. The time is right now.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
No comments:
Post a Comment