Sermon — November 8, 2020
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Back in March, people kept reminding everyone that this year was going to be a marathon, not a sprint. As a runner for many years, I found this metaphor kind of strange. After all, a marathon is a race too; it’s a longer one, sure; you have to pace yourself; but you still leave everything out on the course. The next few months, I thought, were going to be some of the hardest of our lives, and I wanted to do my part. In thirty years, when my grandkids interviewed me for their school history class about what I’d done during the great coronavirus pandemic of 2020, I wanted to have a good answer. I wasn’t a doctor or an EMT or a grocery-store clerk, but I wanted to be able to say that I’d done my part. And so I threw myself into caring for other people in the midst of a catastrophe, doing way more than I could handle.
As the year ground on, though, I came to realize something. It wasn’t a sprint, and it wasn’t a marathon. There was no defined distance we were going to run. I couldn’t carefully manage my energy to have just enough to reach the finish, and then be able to take some vacation and collapse just on the other side. It wasn’t a sprint, it wasn’t a marathon; it was as though the world’s supplies of gasoline had disappeared, and we all just had to walk everywhere for eighteen months. It was never going to work to push as hard as we could to get to the end, and then collapse six inches past the finish line. We had to wait, and to wait, and to wait; and if we didn’t change how we lived our lives during the waiting, we would never be able to make it through.
I’m not sure these eight months of waiting really prepared me for the waiting of the last week, but in a sense they’re the same; not a sprint, not a marathon, no pre-determined finish line or end date; just waiting as sustainably as possible for something to change.
The early Christians thought a lot about waiting. There are clues, scattered throughout the New Testament, that the earliest followers of Jesus expected him to come back, in person, and soon. In this morning’s epistle, for example, Paul writes to the Thessalonians twenty or thirty years after Jesus has died, and tries to encourage them to be patient. Reading between the lines of the letter, it seems that they’re concerned about their church members who have died before Jesus returned. These faithful people waited patiently for years, praying for Jesus to come back soon and rule the world—and it hadn’t happened yet, and they’d died before they could see that day. What a crushing blow for these faithful few to miss out on their victory. I don’t want to take this metaphor too far, but it was as though a fervent supporter of one political party or the other had died between Tuesday and today, never knowing who had won the election, never getting to celebrate their candidate’s success.
But no, Paul writes! The dead haven’t missed the opportunity to meet their Lord. The dead will see Christ again. In fact, they’re with him now. And they’ll see you again too, Paul says, on that day when all are reunited, when, “Lo! He comes with clouds descending.”
Paul comforts these early Christians with a message about the next world. But at the same time, he encourages them to live well in this world. Just a few verses before our reading begins, he urges them to love one another “more and more,to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we directed you.” (1 Thessalonians 4:10–11) Don’t let Jesus’ return take you by surprise like a “thief in the night,” he says, but live each day as though it could be the day that Jesus returns. Live each moment as though you’re about to come face to face with Jesus.
And this, of course, is more or less exactly what Jesus himself teaches in the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids. It seems to have been the custom for the groom’s party and the bride’s party to meet somewhere between their two homes for the wedding, and so these bridesmaids have gone out for the wedding in joyful anticipation. But the groom is delayed. Some of the bridesmaids have extra oil for their lamps, so when the groom finally arrives, they still have enough fuel to light their way as they walk with him to the feast. But some have used theirs up, and they’re left in the dark. No wedding feast for you!
In other words, Jesus seems to say, I’m coming back, but I might be delayed. (Little did they know…) You expect me to come back soon, and it might not be so soon at all. In fact, it might not conform to any human sense of linear calendar time, but I won’t leave you standing at the altar. I promise that I’ll return. But in exchange, you need to be prepared. You need to wait well. You need to tend to your lamp, to stock up on oil, to make sure you don’t burn through everything you have in the first few hours (or, as the case may be, the first few centuries). You need to live each moment as though I’m about to return, because when I do—there won’t be time to pop down to the corner store for more oil for that lamp. The time to prepare will have passed.
Like I said, I’m a runner. People often ask what my favorite part of running is, and my stock answer is, “Stopping.” I like knowing when the race will end. But I don’t think it’s just me. I think this yearning for a result, this need to get to the next stage of something, is part of a deeper spiritual truth, a fact about humanity that pervades every part of our lives.
There’s a constant temptation, I think, to put life off until we round the next corner. Over and over, we set our sights on the next landmark, and procrastinate on change. “Once the kids are in college,” we say, “then we can focus on our marriage.” “Once we retire, then I’ll have more time to volunteer.” “Once this pandemic’s over, then I’ll cut back on the wine.” We tell ourselves the same lie in a thousand variation: once I reach the next stage, everything will be different; then I’ll do the things I know in my heart I should be doing now.
Of course, it never happens. The next stage arrives, and it comes with its own new stresses and worries, and we don’t do what we said we would, because while circumstances around us have changed, we are still the same. And the temporary holding patterns we created while we were waiting for things to change have become more-permanent habits.
I don’t mean to be pessimistic. I don’t mean to say that nothing about your life, or your family, or your job will ever change. But I do mean to say that they’ll never change on their own. The patterns and the habits that we create now while we wait are the ones that will continue after circumstances change. A a new job or a new president, a newly-empty nest or a newly-ended pandemic won’t actually fix the problem all at once.
Paul knew this. Jesus knew, too. They taught us that the moment for change isn’t some future when it seems like it will be easier. The moment is now. This isn’t some generic advice to “live in the moment,” to “drink life to the lees,” to suck all the pleasure every day. It’s something different. It takes time and work to learn to love one another “more and more,” as Paul writes. (1 Thess. 4:10) It takes attention, like a lamp carefully kept trimmed and burning. It takes time to reshape the habits of our hearts. We can’t just wait for the magical future to arrive; in fact, Jesus seems to say, when we reach that next stage, it will already be too late for us to change.
“Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” (Matthew 25:13) Amen.