“You also must be ready: for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”

(Luke 12:40 (RSV)

 

Are you ever bothered with the problem of life’s loose ends? Do the left-overs from yesterday ever worry you when you wake in the early morning hours and think: “I haven’t written that letter. I haven’t prepared for that meeting. These things remain from yesterday and last week that I haven’t done and tomorrow I must attend to them.” How life’s loose ends have power to gather their forces together and tyrannize over us and pressurize our days!

Well, there is a way to freedom from this petty tyranny! The way is made clear in Jesus’ quiet talk with His disciples recorded in Luke’s 12^th chapter. “Be ready,” said Jesus, “for you don’t know the hour when the Son of man comes. If servants knew when the master of the house were returning, they would be ready and at the door to let him in. If a man knew the hour a thief were coming to break into the house, he would be prepared for the intruder and not suffer his place to be plundered. If the Lord of a household leaves a servant in charge, and returns to find him beating his fellow servants or starving them, will not the master punish that unfaithful steward for mishandling his affairs? Be ye, therefore, ready also, for the Son of man cometh at an hour ye know not of.”

What in the world is Jesus talking about? Who is he talking about? When Peter heard his Lord on this theme he asked: “Is this teaching for us alone or for everyone?” Our additional question comes bubbling out: “Is this teaching just about your second coming, Lord, and does it have relevance to that event and that time alone, or has it relevance to all the years and to this present moment of our lives?”

As Jesus answered Peter to give assurance that the teaching was not for the twelve alone but all people, so I’m convinced that He intends this teaching about the end of life to have relevance for the daily round of life, even for our intense anxiety with life’s loose ends. Jesus is saying, in effect, “You stand under incalculable responsibility. You must be faithful in little things because there are no little things. You must be faithful in God’s absence because God is never absent.” As Kierkegaard put it — God is incognito in His universe. Eschatology, which seems to treat entirely of the awesome end of life, is really primarily concerned with life’s awesome nature. It is the vertical dimension of our experience, the depths and height of meaning we find in it, which is expressed in all our conceptions of a future heaven and hell. We must live in readiness for judgment because we are constantly under judgment; we must live in readiness for victory because victory is a constant possibility. This is the glory and the peculiar torment of human living.” (Interpreter’s Bible – on text)

Yes, Jesus’ quiet talk with His disciples about human existence and its appointed end is intended not to stir us up to feverish anxiety in tying up life’s loose ends, but rather to call us to a poised frame of mind, a constancy of spirit which will give us calm peace and satisfying joy every minute of every day.

Jesus is saying here two things we need to learn and never forget. One is this: the very nature of our existence, our service, our work in this world is its incompleteness. Nothing we can do will ever make it complete. We, therefore, must come to terms with life’s loose ends — come to terms with them by accepting them. Every day will be full of them. We must accept this fact of our existence and live with it.

Our perfectionist tendencies, our proud ambitions, make us eager to finish things up, to get the job done and over with. Yet, in the providence of God, it may be intended that we should only initiate and someone else finish. King David dreamed of building the Temple. But the construction was saved for Solomon. Paul planted churches, Apollos watered the growing plant and God gave the increase after using many and diverse husbandmen.

How many worthy men and women have never finished the work they set out to do? They were called from their labors, from our point of view it seemed, prematurely. This mother is taken while her children of tender age are needing her most. This father in the midst of his work is removed from this world and the family income is stopped.

What is dramatically and tragically placarded before us in death, over and over again, confronts us also, though less conspicuously, in life’s daily round: namely, that the very nature of this life we live is its incompleteness. Life’s bound to have its loose ends.

So? Why, accept it. See that we are more interested in the direction and intent of our lives than in personal accomplishments. Our Lord is not saying to us: “Be sure that when I come you have finished.” But rather He is saying: “See that when I come I find you faithfully doing your duty.” More important than completion is dedication and association. God cares not so much what we have accomplished as who we have been working for, and how we have treated those whom He has assigned on the same job with us.

The stage manager in Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, remarking about that promising young lad, Joe Crowell, who had a good mind and completed a fine education and then died; said this: “All that education for nothing!” But was it for nothing? Not as the Christian faith sees the economy of the ages. All this life is preparation for a better. The nature of life here is its incompleteness. Completion waits for a fairer land, the Christian’s own country. And here, where there are always loose ends, why, the man or woman of faith accepts that fact, knowing, with Fenelon, that “God will give us all the time we need to come to Him,” praying all the while the earnest petition in W. H. Auden’s couplet: “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.”

Then there is this second thing Jesus is saying to us here in these eschatological paragraphs: The very nature of the happiness possible in this life is a snatched joy — a fleeting thing that is grasped at any and every moment of life as it is lived. We wait in vain for the perfect situation. If our happiness tarries until all life’s loose ends are attended to and neatly tied we will never have it. We have our existence in a world where there is always some threat of catastrophe, some gloom of sorrow, some excruciating pressure.

After the Iranian hostage crisis there came the Polish crisis, then the Falkland’s War, then the Invasion of Lebanon and the destruction of Beirut and on and on, from one crisis to another. Either it is our Uncle Bill who has just died, or the father of our across the street neighbor. And pressures from people who want to force our hand or make us pawns of theirs will never cease.

This is the kind of world ours is — this is the harassed life we live. It will never be different. We may come out now and then into a peaceful green valley between the foreboding dark hills through which our journey has come and into which we will so soon again press on, but the peaceful rest is brief.

“Earth is one of the uninhabitable planets,” wrote Peter Vierbeck. “Unlike the habitable ones,” he says, “earth is a planet built with a cellar of error, death and decay. If frail children scrawl blueprints of progress on the ceiling, how will that conjure away the reality of the dark cellar? Does not everything in the house, including the ceiling itself, rest on the foundation of that cellar of error, death and decay?”

But some of the inhabitants of this uninhabitable planet seem to carry with them their own climate which is simply out of this world. They seem to move under perpetual sunshine. They have the secret of grasping joy and peace in any sort of circumstance.

Long ago I admired the paintings of Corot — those few, small, precious canvasses I had seen of his in the Metropolitan and the Frick Museum in New York. Later, in the Louvre, I saw great numbers of his paintings and learned something of his life and I admired his work all the more.

For Corot was born in 1796, in the fearful interim between the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; he grew up amid international upheavals that shook the world; and he lived at last to see the Prussians in 1870 conquer Paris, and cut down for firewood the lovely forests that had been Corot’s joy and glory. He lived in a dreadful era for France. And yet it was written of him that “he grew up in a generation of blood and thunder, of ambition and intolerance and hatred and dishonesty and revenge. But his character remained untainted by the savage stupidities of the age.”

Yes, Corot remained a man of gentle and kind nature, a spirit of singular beauty, and the quality of his spirit is revealed in all his paintings. The essence of the beauty captured by his paintings is that of the loveliness of light on field and forest, buildings, and face and form, with the grays and purples of darkness all about — and always that little touch of bright red somewhere on the canvas.

Some, like Corot, have learned how to grasp the beauty and the joy in whatever gloom or glory they pass through. How do they do it?  Each has his own way, but this seems generally true of all: It comes of an awareness of God’s presence and a willingness to become aware of others — their fellow travelers — their needs and comforts.

Walking up the driveway to the hospital some time ago, I had a letter in my hand which I intended to mail without fail or it would not reach its intended destination on time. My thoughts were on the people I planned to visit and I was oblivious to what was going on about me. Dimly I heard breaks squeak beside me, and a pleasant voice calling: “Do you want to mail that letter, Sir?” I looked up into the smiling face of a young postal delivery clerk at the steering wheel of his small truck. He was alert to the help he was prepared to give as he moved through life. Not the usual picture we get nowadays of the postal service! Each of us does not have the same thing to give, but we all have something and if we remain alert and willing to serve others at the gospel’s level of love, that supplies the inner glow under very dark clouds and preposterous pressures.

I once heard a woman say when someone was applauding her for a remarkably unselfish thing she had done to help another: “Oh, there are always so many things just sticking out that need to be done.”

Do you know William Barclay’s remark about that familiar gospel passage which tells of the mothers bringing their little children to Jesus and the disciples’ gruff refusal and trying to prevent the intrusion on Jesus? Barclay said: “It is one of the loveliest things in all the gospel story, that Jesus had time for the children when He was on the way to Jerusalem to die.”

We are busy, we are troubled, we are pushed. What about? Why, we all, like Jesus, are on our way to keep our appointment with death. But we have time, even as He did, for the children, if we will take it, and therein lies the secret to seizing life’s joy.

 

PASTORAL PRAYER

Our Father, we bow in thy presence again. We have come from our several duties and separate walks to this holy place and this sacred hour to join together in praising Thy name, giving thanks for Thy goodness and asking Thy mercy.

Life has been almost too much for us, Lord. We come with our hurts and our wounds. How many times we have been almost defeated. In the struggle we have lost what we thought we had gained. Cut down around us are the companions on whom we depended, whose love supported us and whose faith encouraged us, and in our lonely helplessness we have turned and fled to Thee. Puzzled and dispirited, confused and faint-hearted we come, for Thou art our fortress and our refuge — our help which is present in every trouble.  Hear us as we pray for those dear to us who are hard pressed by their circumstances — the sick, the bereaved, the discouraged, and those caught in the net of their own sinful acts and plans. Deliver the poor people of Central America and Lebanon  and South Africa from the perils and ravages of their Civil War; and the people of Florida from the perils of the hurricane. Save us all from the terrible madness of a nuclear holocaust.