“Be Ready”

Luke 12:32-40

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

August 19, 2007

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

               When I was getting ready to go on Sabbatical almost a year and a half ago, Patrick Mavity decided we needed to sing a song at the UBC Cabaret.  It was entitled, “Hallelujah, I’m Ready”.   I was certainly ready for a break from my ministerial duties and to try on some other things for a while.  By the time the sabbatical was over, I was good and ready to reconnect with the UBC community.

               We are always supposed to be ready in our lives.  We are supposed to be prepared, like the Boy Scouts say, for any catastrophe.  That means we need water and duct tape, right?  When I was in San Francisco, we had neighborhood earthquake preparedness trainings.  We learned how to hold our cupboards closed with rope, to hold down our tchotchkes with paraffin.  We learned how to grab all of the essential things in a hurry.  We knew where our gas lines were and how to shut off the gas.  We always wanted to be ready.

               These days, we have relearned that we ought to roll down out windows if our car is in the drink, so we can get out fast.  Many Minnesotans learned this from simulating cars going through the ice and knew this trick, which likely saved many of their lives when the bridge collapsed.

I have found myself reflecting this past week or so about the odd practice of getting used to the bridge being gone.  We are getting used to the reports of the recovery efforts. Many of us have gotten our own look at the wreckage. We are getting used to finding our way around town.

They say that we never get over the loss of a loved one, but we get used to the hole in our lives and we integrate that loss into our very beings. I have also found myself remembering the fragility of life and wondering if part of the reflection on the bridge collapse might be an evaluation for each of us about the things that are most important in our lives.  Jesus encourages us to be ready for God comes at an unexpected hour. Death comes, says Jesus, like a thief. It robs us of time, of the things we have been meaning to get around to doing. Maybe we need to reflect upon how we use the life we have.

               Are we ready to account for our lives work? 

               Are we able with good conscience to account for our actions and our deeds on this side of heaven? 

               Are our affairs in order?  Our affairs are more than financial affairs. 

               Are our interpersonal affairs in order? 

               Are there things that hold us back from being all that God intended us to be?  That’s what I want to look at today.

                In today’s scripture reading, Jesus says “be dressed and ready for action.”  Or as my old swim coach used to say, “Gird your loins”.  Jesus says blessed are the ones who are alert.  The alert ones, ready to serve will instead be served. 

               One of the ways we are ready for action, says Jesus, is to rid ourselves of the things that stand in the way.  He says to sell our possessions and give alms.  Jesus knew that hoarding possessions tends to make us lose our focus.  Rather, he says, focus on giving more than getting.  Giving alms is all about taking care of the needy.  We need to be at least as outward-c\focused as we are inward-focused.  That’s how you can be alert and ready, because you focus on what’s around you.

               Baptist Peace Fellowship Bible study leader Jane Medema said that living only for yourselves will rob your soul.  God is more interested in communal salvation than personal salvation.  God is anxious to give you the kingdom, the commonwealth of God.  So get ready.  Make yourselves purses that won’t wear out.  Get your priorities in order and get on the right side.  We need to get ready.

               My dad was telling me about a seminar he attended recently where the group had you list the regrets of your life and the steps that led to those regrets.  It’s an examined life that he was looking at.  After making this moral inventory, then he was asked what he wants to do with the rest of his life.  What would you do if you did not have those impediments standing in your way?

               It led to many conversations that were long overdue.  And those conversations are certainly not done.  He had told me that he visited because the bridge came down and he realized that life was short.  He recently asked me to help him on a homework assignment:  List his five best assets and his five greatest barriers.  I’m still working on that one, trying to give it the attention it deserves.  What a gift it is to have this kind of encounter and to be encouraged to tell the truth.  He is interested in being alert, ready and attentive to life moving forward.  He’s interested in learning from the past and looking to the future.  I’m thankful that we are moving toward the future together. 

               This past summer, the Sacred Harp Singing community lost a central figure.  Minja Lausevic was a teacher of ethnomusicology at the University Of Minnesota and was a fine friend, collaborator and encourager of people to experiment with music.  She met Tim Eriksen at Wesleyan University and together they traveled the world seeking out and making music.  They both provided music for Cold Mountain and their oldest son, Luka (then two years old) had a small scene at the very end of the film. 

               While in Massachusetts, she died after the sudden recurrence of an illness.  She left behind her husband and two small children, Luka and Anja.  She was 41 years old.  Martha Henderson, one of the sacred harp singers, wrote these words about her this past week reflecting upon an annual singing in Afton, MN:

 

            I look forward to this singing.  It is a charmed time that comes for only three hours each year, and then disappears like Brigadoon.  While we exist in this magic time, the weather is always warm and beautiful; the grass is always green; …there is always wonderful Sacred Harp singing in a good and welcoming space.  I need to hold onto this warm, green memory to carry me through the cold, stark, white and gray months of dark winter, where color and warmth are only a memory…

            We have been doing this singing here enough years now that layers of memory have built up around it, just like on Christmas and Thanksgiving, where we repeat the same rituals year after year.  We do exactly the same things in exactly the same places, yet time has flowed on and we are not the same, nor is the event itself exactly the same.  Everything is the same, yet ... not…Here we are always in the now, yet the now keeps moving forward, leaving the former now behind.   Where did the time go?
            I have photos of this singing from several years ago.  I took them as a matter of course -- just some singing photos, fun but not particularly interesting.  (Singing photos all look alike after a while.)  I put them away. 
            Recently, I got them out again, wondering where all that time had gone so fast away from these photos, which looked and felt like they had been taken yesterday.  Then I saw a photo which fixed this set firmly in the past:  Tim Eriksen and his wife Minja Lausevic sit with their small son Luka (no daughter Anja yet) in the graveyard, where everyone sits because that's the green space; there is no other.  Outdoor church activities take place in the presence of the dead, almost as if the honored dead are still included, still participating, even though they can't participate in the same ways they used to.
            Tim and Minja sit in this churchyard eating their roasted corn; small Luka…stands by them.  It is a beautiful, green day with a blue sky.  They're just eating dinner, enjoying themselves.  But next to Minja -- who has an ear of corn raised to her lips -- is an obelisk of the kind one sometimes sees in old cemeteries…

            The photo was taken on August 9, 2003.  How could I have known then -- how could anyone have known -- that less than four years later, Tim would leave us for Massachusetts, and Minja would belong to eternity?
            I remember, as if it were yesterday, taking this photo.  I remember the complete ordinariness of the day -- everything the same as always, just a fun and wonderful time, with me going around taking photos of people who were living their lives right then at that instant, completely unaware -- as I was also unaware -- that time was slipping inexorably into the future.  They were too busy talking and having a good time to notice.  And the golden sun shone over all; the green grass was a carpet for their feet. 

            I'm reminded of something that I often heard recited in church when I was younger:  "In the midst of life, we are in death."
            Standing in that square today, where everything is always the same yet changed, I reflected that exactly four years and two days earlier, Tim and Minja had been in this very spot I was standing.  Tim had led a song holding small Luka -- I have a photo of this, too -- right on the spot where I was leading 456 now, because I had learned it from Tim off of one of his recordings.  And everything today was new, happening now, yet not; the same, yet could never be the same.  In that song I love so much was joy, and indescribable poignant grief.

            During the dinner hour, after eating and visiting with other singers -- sitting in the churchyard as we always do -- I found the exact spot where Tim and Minja had sat to eat their dinner four years and two days before.   Just a few feet of green lawn, it looked cavernously empty now.
            I wandered a short distance to a memorial garden that the church had made in 1999 -- the same year we began singing at this event -- apparently for one of their members who had died.  It's a small, enclosed space, very beautiful and peaceful.  I thought of Minja; wondered whether, when she had been here that time, she herself had walked in this garden.  Then I walked back to the living, but she came with me.
            I returned to a table where a number of our singers were sitting in the beautiful, warm sun, just having a good time talking with each other.  I paid close attention to everything.  I looked closely at their faces.  I tried to take in every ... single ... second, not miss even one.   Time, every second, was slipping into that inexorable future.  I wanted to capture this moment, these few golden hours, these people, in my mind before they disappeared forever.
            I wonder how often we really pay attention to our fellow singers, those people whom we see every week or every month.  How often do we truly look, truly see them for the great qualities they possess?  Do we ever sit and think of each one separately, consider what makes them important to us, consider how we would feel if suddenly they were not with us?  Do we ever make it a point to notice these things?
            I noticed, or tried to.  Every second and minute that went by, I paid attention.  It was hard work.  It is not easy to pay attention at every moment.

            Jesus says that we are to be alert.  We need to address the things in our lives that are left undone to the best of our abilities.  We also need to not simply live in the past, but remember that this is the only now we will ever have. 

Be alert.  Notice those around you.  Be ready.  Be grateful.  Be blessed by God and by the people around you who are the very image of God.  If there is unfinished business, do your best to attend to it.  If the other party is unwilling or unable to engage in such a dialogue, then be confident that you have done your best.  Move on to the next encounter, alert and ready and with God at your side.

               Friends, we don’t know when our hour will be up.  We can be hoping to come to terms with something or someone and then a tragedy can come like a thief in the night and rob us.  None of us can be ready for that.  But what we can strive to be ready for is to meet our God and to live our lives with integrity and hopefulness.  That’s the gift of God.

Spend some time with folks who mean something to you.  Let them know how important they are to you.  Live your lives with a sense of priority.  Connect your priorities with God’s priorities.  If you live your lives by these principles and priorities, you’ll be alert and ready.  Along the way, you will bless people and remind them all that that they are in your heart and God’s heart.  That’s a blessed gift.  May we always be ready to receive it and may we always be ready to give it.