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The Reverend Beth Fain
December 2, 2007
Matthew 24.36-44

Advent 1a/RCL: Be ready

I have to tell you that everytime I hear our gospel this morning, when Jesus talks about two men working in the field and one is taken up and the other left behind that I go to a Sci-Fi movie image in my head.
A beam of light shining down on one of two people, and the next thing you know he's gone-with a bewildered companion left behind to speak to the authorities who won't believe what he tells them.
Watching. Waiting. And, oh yes, being prepared.
A returned a couple of weeks ago from my seventh retreat at Our Lady of Grace Monastery outside Indianapolis.
There are many so wonderful parts of being on retreat with the Benedictine Sisters and with the 29 other women pastors.
It is a place where I find comfort and peace.
The Benedictine Sisters are never frantic or in a hurry.
They are always prepared.
I arrived the night before the retreat was to begin, and my room, and all the other rooms for the women clergy arriving the next day, were already ready.
Little gifts, little notes in every tidy room.
Over 24 hours before they needed to be ready.
One of the Benedictine's core values is hospitality; they believe that every person, every, they meet is to be treated as Christ. From personal experience, there is nothing more hospitable than having things ready and waiting for you.
I, on the other hand, tend to live a life of triage.
All too often, I seem to complete a task at the final possible moment.
The problem with waiting until the last minute is that something more urgent may come to bump the last minute task to a too late task position.
Not being ready, I have waited until it is too late.
In our gospel today, Jesus exhorts those he loves to be ready.
There are two Greek words that are translated into English as ready.
One means to be ready in the sense of waiting.
The other means to be ready in the sense of being prepared.
The word used in our gospel today is the prepared ready.
The month-or more-before Christmas, most of us spend a lot of time preparing for that big holiday.
We cook our best foods.
We shop and buy gifts for those we love.
We fancy up our houses with special Christmas decorations.
We reconnect with people who are important in our lives.
Those preparations that we make for the secular holiday of Christmas are fine metaphors for our even more important preparations for the HOLY Day of Jesus not just being born the first time, and not just for Jesus coming again, but the reality of the incarnation of Jesus in our day to day lives.
Everytime we cook. Everytime we give. Everytime we create beauty. Everytime we tend to our relationships.
The Church calls this season of preparation Advent.
In our world, Advent's partner, Christmas, gets most of the attention.
But we in the Church would be amiss if didn't pay at least equal attention to Advent.
So our worship, our liturgy during Advent, is a metaphor for how we are to prepare our hearts and lives for the holy day of Jesus. One change that we'll experience at St. Mary's during Advent is how we will be invited to do The Peace.
As I remind us from time to time, The Peace is not optional during the Eucharist.
The Creed is. The Confession is. The Peace isn't.
That's because The Peace is part of our liturgy in obedience to one of Jesus' instructions:
In Matthew 5. 23 Jesus says, So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.
Our quality of our relationship with God can never be isolated from the quality of our relationship with one another. Any of you remember when the Prayer Book was last revised and The Peace became a major part of liturgy?
All the controversy of whether or not to shake your neighbor's hand much less give a hug to a stranger?
There are still Episcopal churches where exchanging the word of Peace is a quiet, dry moment.
However, from time to time, in places like St. Mary's where The Peace is a time of great joy, conversation, if not lively children returning from Children's Chapel, the priests have to remind us of Jesus' teaching and the deeper theological truth of The Peace. The Peace is about reconciliation.
It is about making up with people who have something against us-or at least beginning that process.
Before I was ordained, my family and I worshipped at St. Cuthbert.
We were all active in the parish, and Sunday morning, besides getting a toddler boy and a teenage girl out the door, I would often be baking communion bread or getting ready to teach a Sunday School class.
Things were almost always frantic, and, truth be told, it was a rare Sunday that one of us or another weren't pretty cranky on the way to church.
I was always struck at the mystery that happened in worship.
That no matter how cranky and irritable and plain mad I was at the beginning of worship, by the time I'd sung and prayed and listened to God's word and the sermon, by the time The Peace came around a little miracle, if there are little miracles, had happened.
God's peace was in my heart, and so when I greeted Jay and Jacob and Lisa with The Peace of the Lord it was a time of reconciliation.
That often lasted all the way home from church, too!
It's part of the reason that I personally prefer the contemporary version of the Lord's Prayer to the traditional words we use because praying "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" (trespass not being a word we use in our day to day speech) makes it all too easy for us to gloss over the commandment that Jesus has given us to forgive as we wish to be forgiven.
Why the words forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us smack us square in the face with what Jesus wants us to do to get ready for him.
It is wonderful at St. Mary's that we love one another so much that we have a lively, extended Peace.
But a midworship break to check in with one another is not what The Peace is about.
It's about intentionally getting our relationships in order.
Either by making a commitment in our hearts and with God to make peace with someone who isn't here that we know we're out of relationship with or by actually seeking out a person who has something against us.
Or by simply reminding the neighbor God places next to us that making Peace with one another is absolutely possible-and a commandment.
< This Advent, James and I, your priests, and Russ, your deacon, invite you to greet one another with liveliness and joy and conversation-in the fellowship time after worship.
But during the liturgy of itself, use The Peace as a point of considering the reconciliation that God is nudging each of us to do. Reconciliation-forgiving and being forgiven is one of the most basic tasks of being ready for Jesus the Christ. In Advent, when all the good and bad of past experiences and relationships seem to bubble to the surface, the first way we can choose to be ready as Jesus taught us to be is to intentionally make steps towards making up with those who have something against us.

Being prepared. Being ready.
So that when Jesus comes at an unexpected time, which Jesus will, we will be ready. . . and waiting…and watching. Amen

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