The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
November 16, 2008

Proper 28 -- A
Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18
1 Thessalonians 4:13--5:10
Matthew 25:14-29

Time is a puzzlement. And Advent, which is just around the corner, is the season of the coming and going of time. There is always time, Advent tells us, and yet there always comes a time when there is no more time. Life is like that, Advent says. Because of time, there is hope and there is judgment.

What happens if...? It’s a big question. The Christians in Thessalonika asked this question, in Paul’s time. What happens if time runs out? What happens when one dies before that day when the Lord returns?

Well, nothing ever “just happens,” as if by chance, the Scriptures assure us; all things are made to happen. So Paul tells the Christians in Thessalonika, ”Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who have fallen asleep. I don’t want you to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. Jesus died and was raised to life by God, so when that day arrives, God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.... So, about times and dates, we do not need to write to you, for you know very well that the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night, like labor pains that come on a woman in childbirth.... But you, brothers, are not in darkness, so that this day should surprise you like a thief.” Because of Christ, you know enough to prepare for that day now, ahead of time.

So the big question is not “what happens if,” in the future, but what happens here, in the meantime, “because you are all sons of the light and sons of the day, and we should stay awake and sober, as befits those who live in the light, that we might clothe ourselves now in faith and love and hope. For God has not appointed us to suffer wrath. God does not mean for us to experience retribution, but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together in him.”

Nothing ever “just happens.” All things are made to happen. God created us for himself, and Jesus died for us so that we might live together in him, and for each other. And God has given us time so that we might make such living happen, in our time.

But there will be a time when there is no more time. And that day will be like this, Jesus tells us: ”Once upon a time, there was a man who went abroad. Before he left, he called his servants and entrusted his capital to them. To one he gave five bags of gold, worth, the scholars tells us, about twenty years of wages. It was a huge amount of money! To another he gave two bags of gold, worth about eight years of wages. And to a third he gave one bag, still an awful lot to work with and a big opportunity, worth about what the servant would earn in four long years of labor. The master gave to each according to his ability. Then he left the country.

“After a long time, the master returned to settle accounts with his servants. The man who had received the five bags of gold said, ’Sir, you entrusted me with five bags of gold; here are five more that I have made with the five you gave me.’ ‘Well done,’ said the master. ‘You have made good use of what was mine in the time you’ve had. You have proved trustworthy in a small matter; I will now put you in charge of something big. Come and share your master’s joy.’ And he said the same to the servant who had received the two bags of gold and had also doubled his investment.

“But when the third servant appeared before the master, he said, ’Sir, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered. I did not want to risk what belongs to you, so I hid it in the ground, where it has been safe all the time you’ve been away. Here it is; it is yours, and now you have it back.’

“But his master said to him, ’Now you’ve torn it! Now you’ve lost it. Don’t you know what time does to uninvested wealth? Offering back uninvested wealth is like offering back a corpse in exchange for a living person. Don’t you know that hiding what I gave you is opportunity lost?’

“And the master took the bag of gold from the man and said, ’Take this useless man and throw him out into the dark.’ And the master gave the bag of gold to the servant who had ten already and who knew how to make things happen with them.”

Thomas Boswell wrote a book about baseball and time. He called it Why Time Begins on Opening Day, which is something every baseball fan understands, and if Jesus had known about baseball, he might have told his story like this:

Once upon a time, there was a game that was tied in the ninth inning. In the top of the ninth the first hitter struck out. Then the second hitter singled, so there was then a man on first base with one out. The coach then signaled for a hit-and-run.

(Now all of you know that the purpose of a hit-and-run is to make things happen, perhaps to move the runner from first base to third base, and perhaps to force a throwing error. In any event, the purpose is to put the runner in position to score, not by the off chance of the relatively rare home run, as if by brute power, but by the ordinary and rather dependable course of playing out the rest of the inning. With a man on third and one out – if the hit-and-run can make that happen – then the runner can be made to score in a variety of ordinary ways: on a base hit, on an error, on a fly ball, or even on the right kind ground ball or a sacrifice bunt.)

So the coach signaled for a hit-and-run, and on the next pitch the hitter singled to left center field. But the runner, who rounded second base easily, hesitated. He looked over his shoulder, saw the center fielder field the ball, and scurried timidly back to the safety of second base. The next two hitters flew out to center and right and, instead of scoring the go-ahead run on a sacrifice fly, the runner, along with the hopes of his team, died at second, and the advantage they could have had was lost and now belonged to the home team in the bottom of the ninth.

And the coach? Well, of course, the coach was beside himself. “Why did you stop at second when the play called for you to go to third?” he asked the hapless base runner when came to the dugout to retrieve his glove. “Well, replied the runner, ”I knew you to be a hard coach, and I was afraid I might get thrown out, so I thought it better to be safe at second than sorry at third.”

And to the this pathetic plea the coach said, “Casey, you knucklehead, don’t try to think. It’s too hard for you. I’ll do the thinking.” And to his assistant the coach said, ”Take this useless man and banish him to the bench,” where, I can tell you from experience, there is darkness and much gnashing of teeth.

Jesus is telling us that there is a danger in life, a danger of aiming too low and reaching it. He is calling us to be as entrepreneurial with the good news of God as we are with the businesses we start and with the real estate we manage, calling us to be as committed to multiplying the Gospel in the time God has given us as we are to multiplying money. Nothing ever “just happens.” All things are made to happen, and we gain or we lose according to the time we use or the time we lose.

It’s possible to aim too low and to achieve it. “And always remember,”adds Paul, ”that this is the hour of crisis. This time, now, before the master returns, not some time later, is the hour of judgment, the critical time.”

The day comes, as the prophet says, when one runs from a lion only to confront a bear. The day comes when the little beeper on the machine falls silent, and the heart stops beating, and in an instant life flashes before our eyes and is over, and, not having prepared, not having used the time we were given to invest in the eternal, we haven’t a clue what the meaning of life was, for we never came to know the love that leads some to trust God even at the midnight of their lives, even at the hour of their deaths.

Does that sound morbid? Or does it just sound true?

Mary of Orange was ready for the crisis when it came. When she was dying, her chaplain went to her bedside and began to tell her the way to salvation. And Mary said to the young cleric, ”Sir, I have not left this matter to this moment.” Mary had prepared for the time to come. Mary had not spent her life so consumed with the trivial and unimportant in life that she had neglected to prepare herself for the important. And when the time came she needed no last-minute cramming.

Nor did Cardinal Joseph Bernadin of Chicago. Several years ago, when he was dying of pancreatic cancer and had only a few months to live, Cardinal Bernadin celebrated a special mass for the ill. He spoke of death, including his own. “A dying person does not have time for the peripheral or the accidental,” he said in his sermon. “He or she is drawn to the essential, to the important – yes, to the eternal.”

Eternity, friends, is what Advent would draw us toward. But it’s a puzzlement, isn’t it, eternity, this matter of time, this almost-Advent season, the season of the coming and passing of time, this season that speaks of hope, on the one hand, and of judgment, on the other. In one sense, there is always time to change direction, always time to accept God’s invitation to the feast, Advent assures us. God’s grace is unlimited. God is a Father who opens his arms whenever we turn to him. God is gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast, never-ending love.

Yet there always comes a time, Advent insists, when there is no more time. Life is like that. The time comes when the children are grown, and having spent so little time with them when they were young, we find that we have little in common now that they are adults. Or the time comes when the children are grown, and you have spent a lot of time with them, and they are your best friends, and they marry and move to the other side of the world. And they are gone.

We in contemporary America invest so much in the inane noise and glitter of our pointless entertainment culture, thinking that it is there that one finds food and drink. But spiritually it is a bad investment. Spiritually, we are in need of blue chip investments, because we are mortal, all of us. We just don’t believe we are! Not only each of us as an individual, but all of us as a nation and a culture. We invest in entertainment and consumption as if it all will endure. But in truth, all flesh dies, and when it does, when the spiritual crisis comes, there’s no such thing as a bailout. It’s one of the facts of life. Time is gaining on us, and we would do well to heed Cardinal Bernadin’s wisdom, and Jesus’s.

But there is hope, because there is still time. There is eternity, and eternity is all time. Eternity is found in every moment. Every moment, therefore, is pregnant with the possibility of life. Time is God’s way of being patient with us, as St. Peter says. And “love,” as Mother Teresa adds, “is a fruit in season at all times, and within the reach of every hand.” So love can be made to happen at any time. Encouragement can be offered at any time. Hope can be made to happen at any time. That’s true as long as there is time. Can love be made to happen tomorrow? Can encouragement and hope be made to happen tomorrow? Sure, if there is still time then. But, more certainly, faith and love and encouragement and hope can be made to happen right now, before that Day arrives, before the master returns, because now there certainly is still time.

But when that Day arrives, when that Day comes when one realizes that he cannot be bailed out by the spiritual capital of others, would you and I be ones to run from a lion only to confront a bear?

Advent, which is coming soon, is about the investment of our spiritual capital. It is about the necessity of decision in the “yet-to-comeness” of life. Advent is about the necessity of our deciding how we’re going to live our lives in time, in the only time God has given us to live them in. Time, in other words, is about life now, which means that it is about life lived in eternity, which is about what happens when we begin to live. Time is about the intersection of our own judgments about life with God’s judgment about life.

Who knows when or where that intersection, that crisis, that time, is? Or was? Or will be? All we really know is that we live now, in the time we have been given, which means that the future is yet to be and that there is still time for it to be, still time, now, to use the time we have been given to make faith and love and encouragement and hope happen.

Advent, in other words, is about being pregnant. And Christmas is about being born. Advent is about the Word of God pregnant in the world, even in a world of terrorism, even in a world of war, even in a world of football and basketball and bread and circuses at home.

We know about being pregnant. We know, when pregnant, that one has a choice, which is what life lived in time is all about. There is time, and we have a choice. There is time, if we wish, to abort the Word, to abort the Hope. And there is also time to bring the Word and the Hope to birth. There is still time to see the Word and the Hope born and given a name, and what better time is there to hear and share good news than bad times like our time?

There is still time to give birth again to God’s Word in this given world and time; still time, in John the Baptist’s words, to repent; still time to decide for third base and home; still time to turn from our desperate notions that we can save ourselves with our money and our bombs; still time to turn to the babe in the manger and to Christ on the Cross...

...still time to beat swords into plowshares and pruning hooks; still time to heal the sick, cleanse lepers, and raise the dead; still time to share our food, our clothing, and our wealth with those who have none; still time to visit those no one else wants to visit; still time to share time with our children and tell them we love them...

...still time for spiritual investment; still time to make things happen; still time to turn from life lived for self to life lived for others; still time to sell what we have and give to the poor; still time to do for others as we would want them to do for us; still time, in other words, to be the Word of Love and Hope in this given world and time that God sends us to be.

There is time, and yet no one knows the time. That’s what Advent, and now, and eternity, are all about.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.