August 12, 2007 at Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK
Wisdom 18: 6-9 + Psalm 33 + Hebrews 11:1,2, 8-19 + Luke 12:32-48
That kingdom promised so convincingly by Jesus was a long time coming. Those whose faith in that Kingdom were brought to hope for it by eyewitnesses. Luke preserved their stories and memories, but they were beginning to die off. Stories of healing, of the dead being raised to life, and memories of how he fed huge crowds helped for a while. His instructions about forgiveness, trust, generous kindness, and mercy were still fresh in their minds. But their expectation that it was all going to come together and sweep them into glory was beginning to fade. It was a long wait, and some began to wonder. If they had it wrong about how and when it would come to be, perhaps they had it wrong about the whole thing. Maybe none of it was true.
Into that thinking comes Luke’s Gospel and the parables of today. The building of that Kingdom was obviously not going to be by the hand of Jesus. Rather, it would come pass slowly built by the patient conscious effort of the people over generations of time.
The story of these parables is not too far from the truth. In the face of what seems to be the absence of the Lord, and what seems to be His reluctance to build the Kingdom he promised; the great temptation to build one’s own kingdom is great. The thinking goes like this: If this is all there is, and if this world is where we’re going to live, and if it really is just our world and not God’s, we had better carve out a chunk of it for ourselves. If we look around and see that what really makes a difference in this world is power, possessions, influence, then we would be fools not to put our reliance on those things as well.
The silence of Christ leaves all sorts of opportunities to fill that silence with our own voice. The risk is that we might begin to sound like the man of last week’s story and talk to ourselves and substitute Christ’s design of the Kingdom with our own. Luke’s Gospel fills that silence for us and for those who would be disciples of Jesus, it is possible that the silence is really an invitation to listen.
We do not live with the absence of Christ if we listen for his voice. He is present for people of faith, present in the church where those first disciples found him when they thought he was dead. What is discovered in the waiting is the gift of faith, but that faith is not something we have. It’s something we do because of our relationship with God. This faith is not a kind of token we save up and use to get something, but a sign of shared responsibility.
Those who wait with that kind of faith are not waiting with some vague notion of Christ’s return but live with a very real sense of his presence in the needs of our world. Rather than begin to build our own kingdom in the absence of Christ, these parables suggest that we might busy ourselves with completing His work. Doing so might raise in us a new sense of urgency because we have been entrusted with so much and there is a growing consciousness of the acute need for redistribution of this earth’s bounty and for just stewardship. These parables suggest that the proper time for justice and for right distribution is not some future time when the “master” suddenly arrives, but rather it is the work already being done by faithful stewards when the critical moment comes.
It is a long wait for the Kingdom and for Christ’s return, but not because he has failed to be present and not because he has been silent. The wait is made all the longer by failing to see that what God has given us is sufficient for the building of that Kingdom and the completion of God’s creation. While we wait for God to do something, God is waiting for us to be something: good and faithful stewards, busy every day not with “just doing good” but with life as it shall be in the Kingdom of God which has already begun.