When I lived in Louisiana everyone kept one eye on the weather channel. When a hurricane was coming there was a run to the grocery store to stock up on the essentials you would need if the storm hit. You’d better shop early or there won’t be any toilet paper left for you! Since the pandemic started there has been a run on gun purchases in the USA – they are projecting more than 21 million guns will be sold this year. People don’t know what is coming but they think they’ll need a gun to deal with it. Those of us of a certain age will remember fall out shelters. There was a whole industry in the 60s where people would build an underground bunker in their back yard where they could hide in the event of a nuclear war. As if. The idea of being prepared, of getting ready is part of our culture. When students know an exam is coming they study in order to be ready. With Thanksgiving on the horizon you look in the cabinets to see what ingredients you have so you will be ready for the feast. Where is that sage? Since winter is approaching you’ve checked to make sure the furnace is working and that you have shovels and ice melt for the impending snow. Be prepared is more than the Boy Scout motto.
Jesus wants that to be the Christian motto. The parable of the ten virgins has as its conclusion: Stay awake. In another place Jesus says: what I say to you I say to all, WATCH. We know how to get ready for a storm, for a meal, even for a nuclear attack (well, maybe not so much that one.) How can we be prepared for God’s future? Here we are not looking at the ultimate future, the end of history that we call the second coming of Christ. After all, it was still the time of the first coming when Jesus said to “stay awake.” We need to stay awake, to be alert, to watch how God is coming to us today and not in the bye and bye. What do we need in order to be ready for the wedding feast of God? Think about a rail road crossing. Out in the country you sometimes come across an at-grade crossing without any barrier gates. On the warning saltire it will say “stop, look, listen.” Good advice to know if a train is coming. Stop, look, listen to find where God is coming into your life.
Stop. You’ve got to be kidding me. Stop? What else have we done for the past nine months but stopped! We’ve stopped hugging. We’ve stopped visiting. We’ve stopped singing. We’ve stopped going to shows, concerts, movies, church. We’ve stopped seeing our friends. We’ve stopped going out to eat. The kind of stopping we need to recognize the coming of God in our lives does not have anything to do with any of those external things. What we must do is stop our stinking thinking. We are guilty of stinking thinking when we imagine things like: this pandemic will never end and we’ll be stuck in our rooms for years to come. Or: no one ever calls me anymore. I guess no one likes me. Or: Look at all the mistakes I’ve made. I am a terrible person. Stop it. Stop stinking thinking. Instead we must realize that this is God’s world, that God isn’t done with us yet, that the future is in God’s hands, not ours, that we are loved not because of how good we are but because of how good God is. Instead of stinking thinking accentuate the positive. Remember the story about the “little train that could.” I think I can, I think I can – and it could. That kind of thinking is the oil for the lamp that opens up the possibility of seeing how close God is to us.
Once we have stopped we must look. Look at the way things really are in order to discover the face of God. Look at the sky and realize there are more than a billion trillion stars in the universe – that’s 10 with 20 zeroes after it. That’s a lot of stars. Look at nature. There is a bird called the arctic tern. It is a small bird, about 13 inches from beak to tail, weighing around four ounces. Every year, arctic terns migrate from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic Circle and back again—with twists and turns a round-trip journey of about 44,000 miles. And they’re long-lived, about fifteen years. Talk about frequent flyer miles. Look at history. God called Abram and Sarai (later to be called Abraham and Sarah) out of present day Iraq almost 4,000 years ago – and the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all claim their roots in him. Look at another human being. Their heart beats about 100,000 times a day and it sends 2,000 gallons of blood through the body. Do the math over a lifetime. Wherever we look we are going to find we live in a wonderful, a marvelous creation. God is hidden in plain sight.
After we have stopped and looked we need to listen. The most important place to listen is in prayer as the oil lamp which illumines God’s presence. One of the hardest things to do in prayer is to be still, to listen. We talk, we have all our requests in prayer but being in the quiet is hard for us. It seems like wasting time. Just listen. I’m reminded of a story. A carpenter and his apprentice were walking together through a large forest. When they came across a tall, huge, gnarled, old, beautiful oak tree, the carpenter asked his apprentice: “Do you know why this tree is so tall, so huge, so gnarled, so old and beautiful?” The apprentice looked at his master and said: “No…why?” “Well,” the carpenter said, “because it is useless. If it had been useful it would have been cut long ago and made into tables and chairs, but because it is useless it could grow so tall and so beautiful that you can sit in its shade and relax.” Relax. Listening in prayer can seem useless. We have to wait on the Lord for God does not come in our time but God always comes on time. So stop, look, listen and discover how close God is.
