Good morning. This morning we continue in our series on the Good News. Today’s subject is, good news for those who watch. Well, the reading was a bit obscure, but the concept sounds simple enough. I looked up some statistics. Children watch 5 hours a day, a third of preschoolers can watch in their own bedroom, nearly half of adults eat their main meal while watching although 2/3rds say there actually isn’t anything worth watching, and a quarter of all women set up the video when they go abroad so they can watch what they’ve missed when they get back. I don’t have a figure for how many hours men watch for, but I would bet you it’s quite a lot. Jesus said, take heed, watch, for you do not know when the time will come. Watch, for you do not know when the boss will get back, and he might find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Watch.
We laugh. But I am being profoundly
serious. Jesus said, watch. What, in the sophisticated world we live in, can
that possibly mean? And as I ponder the text, it gradually dawns on me that he
didn’t mean watch the telly. He meant, watch out for him. He meant, he is
coming again, the world will explode when he does, and you want to make sure
you’re caught in the act of doing something you’re actually supposed to be
doing. This saying isn’t for those who do not know God. It’s for those of us
who do. It’s for the ones who’ve already got the tickets and who don’t want to
miss the show when it actually starts. It’s wrapped up in the language of Old
Testament apocalyptic, but it’s got to mean something. And that something has
got to be specific. I joke; but if you are watching you do have to know
why
you are watching and what you are meant to be doing while you watch. The famous philosopher Kafka said that the meaning of life is that it stops. And the question is, what happens then.
Let’s pray…
1.
How do we spend our lives?
I read a survey recently. It offered a statistical breakdown of what we spend our lives doing. A typical person who lives to be 70 years old will spend those 70 years in lots of different ways. In particular, they will spend:
v 23 years asleep
v 14 years at work
v 8 years on leisure activities
v 6 years eating
v 5 years travelling
v 5 years dressing and washing
v 4 years talking (more for some people I can think of)
v 3 years being ill
v 3 years doing nothing in particular (probably while they’re getting better)
v 1 year on the phone
v 80 days looking in the mirror
That doesn’t make life sound very important, does it. But most of us know that we want it to be about more than just an accumulation of things we do because we do them. We want our life to be about something. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here. If you don’t, ask yourself why you are here. Jesus himself was extremely focussed. He knew his time was short, and he knew what he was supposed to do in it. And that is how he seems to be saying here that we should live. He says it’s like you are at work and the boss is out, and you’ve no idea when he’ll get back, but you are employed by him and you have a job to do, and it won’t be a good idea to be found not doing it whenever it is that he does return. I identify with this. The other day I went out to do the shopping, and I told the children what they were supposed to be doing while I was out. I wanted one lot of homework, three lots of music practice, two lots of tidying up and a complete change of clothes. I got back to find them watching Blue Peter.
Now the servants in Jesus’s story knew what their job was. They knew what their life was all about. Verse 34, it is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. The question for us is, do we know what our life is all about? Do you know what job you have been given, what you are on this planet for, what you are going to be asked to give an account of, what you are going to be rewarded for, what part you play in the purposes of things? Are you watching aimlessly, flicking from channel to channel although there actually isn’t anything on, or do you know what you are meant to be doing, and are you busy doing it? Jesus is saying to his followers and to all of us, watch. There is something to watch for. There is something to be doing while you watch. Life isn’t just about sleeping and working and leisure activities and doing nothing in particular. Life has purpose. Your life has purpose, and you need to know what it is.
2.
The values of our world
In 1984 I went to Yugoslavia. We stayed in Mostar, before they blew it up. We found a faded hotel and booked in. The receptionist was called Yuri. Yuri was employed by the state, and we gradually discovered he spent half his time playing chess in the hotel lobby, a small proportion of it booking people in, and the rest escorting guests to wherever they wished to go, cash in hand. His preferred guests were female, available and blonde, but as one of these wanted to go to the same place we wanted to go to, he agreed to take us along as well. In one of the moments when we got his attention – I think she’d gone to powder her nose - Roger asked Yuri about his job satisfaction. Yuri had no job satisfaction. He had an absent and bureaucratic employer. He said it made no difference whether he did his job well or whether he did it badly. He wasn’t going to be inspected, and even if he was it wouldn’t matter if he was playing chess and attending to the needs of young ladies, as long as he was wearing the prescribed uniform and present in the prescribed hotel. In the absence of an employer, Yuri had ordered his own priorities and was making the best of the opportunities in front of him. That’s what they were all doing. That’s why they got into the mess they got into.
Now we have something in common with Yuri. Our employer is not a communist state but God, but like the communist state God doesn’t obviously pop round to inspect us either. So the question is, are we living like Yuri in the hotel lobby, or are we living like the servant whom Jesus tells to be alert and doing his job? Of course we all want to be like the watchful servant. But in practice we aren’t always clear about what that means. We can’t do a job unless we know what it is. We can’t order priorities without some kind of idea what they ought to be, and we are surrounded not just by the attractions of the television but by a whole host of voices which tell us what is important in life. Now obviously it seems a bit fantastical that our priorities should be that the Son of God is going to appear in a cloud accompanied by angels and whisk us off to heaven in the lap of the four winds. So I thought I’d see what some of the alternatives are. What else might the servant be tempted to do, instead of his job?
Here’s where I looked. The Sunday Times comes, as I am sure you know, in lots of sections. All of them tell us what the world thinks is important. I made some notes.
1. News
The news section was very helpful. From the first few pages I discovered that the interesting things to be thinking about are these. Pet dogs can give you food poisoning. The chief executive of Jarvis, the company which doesn’t inspect train tracks, got a pay rise taking his salary to nearly £600,000. The change in drug laws will make cannabis much more popular, and Tony Blair’s court costs more than the Queen’s.
2. Business
Then I moved on to the business section. I couldn’t understand much of it, but I did manage to pick up that F1 teams will have to run 3 cars. I noted that a pensions boss has attacked hedge funds, which I suppose fits with gardening as one of the main activities of the retired. And I found that something called the Agony index has risen; it measures corporate distress, which I take to be what servants suffer from when their job satisfaction is low.
3. Travel
Well, we spend of our lives 5 years travelling, so the travel section was helpful too. You can buy sun safe clothing. You can enrol for cooking classes in St Tropez, with wine tasting laid on for non-cooking partners, and it only costs £1685 for a week, excluding flights. Or you can try kite surfing, which means you hold a kite and stand on a surfboard in a very windy place, and it knocks you off.
4. Appointments
We spend 14 years working, so I looked at the appointments section, which said the main thing is to earn as much money as possible. It was all about 6 figure packages. As I earn a no figure package I passed on to the
5. Home section. There I found how a tennis court can add value to your home, and so I made a mental note to ring the diocese. But I also discovered CCTV and infrared devices no longer deter burglars, and you need a double security gate, so I crossed out the tennis court and put that down instead.
6.Money. As these things sounded expensive, I moved on to the money section. That wasn’t written in English, so I tried the Magazine. That had an article entitled, ‘deadly secrets of the man next door – did one man kill his wife, his neighbour and his best friend?’ I spose he must have reckoned there was no chance at all of the boss coming back.
7. Culture. That was a bit gruesome, so I turned to the culture section. That was much more helpful. Not much about culture, but pages and pages on watching.
8. Style. And then lastly, the style section. Oh no, there was the Funday Times, but we use that for the rabbit’s loo, so I didn’t check it out. Anyway, the Style section had an article on how science can make you better in bed; one on which media stars are wearing which precious stones and how much they cost; and an advert for anti age night cream, very useful if you’re up all night watching.
And that’s the best the Sunday Times could offer. That, according to the voice of the world we live in, is what our priorities should be, and what we should be doing. It is a voice which feeds us day in, day out, whether we know it or not. It sounds funny, read like that, but it isn’t funny. What goes into our heads determines the way we think. It is very hard to have control over what goes into our heads, to distinguish the things which are good and responsive and creative from those which really boil down to little more than alternative ways to fill the vacuum which Yuri filled with chess and sex. The problem is, that this passage talks about angels and figtrees as ways of understanding reality, which may be more picturesque but doesn’t seem more real. I’ve never seen an angel as far as I know, and the only fig tree I’ve seen recently is the one John and Jane Woolmer have just cut down in their garden. The Sunday Times is more immediate, it talks about the world we see around us, even if not necessarily the world we actually live in.
So, back to the question. It’s all very well to be told to keep watching, and to keep doing what we’re meant to be doing while we watch, but what exactly is that, and how do we know?
3.
Vocation
Most years we go to Colin Urquhart’s Faith Camp in Peterborough. We like it because you get something completely different. Every year they bring in a speaker from some part of the world where things are going well, and that speaker tells us how he or she has understood the message that what we must do is to watch, and how it is that they have been told to work while they watch. One year there was this guy called Hector Jimenez. He comes from Argentina. He knows all about the temptation to watch in the way the world says watch; he was a drug addict and he has 2 bullets embedded in his body. But God called him out of that and told him to work with drug addicts, then to work with the church, then to pray for the leaders of his city. His story was remarkable, and he’d got a church of thousands of people. But really in all the hours I heard him speak, only one thing struck me. I got it twice every time, once in Portuguese and then in English. This is what he kept saying. And the Lord said to me, Hector. And the Lord said to me, Hector. And the Lord said to me, Hector. I went to bed each night with those words ringing in my ears. And I said, OK God, if you really are serious about the job you have given me to do, I need to hear that same sentence. And the Lord said to me, Alison. And the Lord said to me Alison. That’s what I need to happen. If you want me to work until you come back, I need a job description and I need the resources. Speak to me.
Then I curled up in my sleeping bag and went to sleep. That night I had a dream. I was in Italy. I have spent a lot of time in Italy over the years, and I was still teaching Italian at the university. One of the things I enjoyed doing years ago when I was a student in Florence was that every week I would get on a train and go and wander round a city I hadn’t been to. And that’s what I was doing in the dream. It was a pleasant city. I was standing in a tree lined square, with a church in one corner. I wandered into the church, just as I used to when I was there. A lot of Italian churches have wall paintings, and this one did too. So as was my habit, I wandered over to look at it. There was only one other person in the church, a woman sitting on the ground in the corner with a walking stick. I took no notice; Italian churches often have people sitting on the ground with walking sticks. So I just carried on, and walked over to look at the paintings. I was busy admiring them when I heard someone call my name, ‘Alison’. I turned round, and it was the woman. I thought I must have misheard, because I’d never met her before. Are you Alison, she said. Er, yes, I said. You are supposed to pray for me, she said.
And then I woke up, knowing that God had responded to my question. What I was supposed to do was pray for people. I had to spend a long time thinking about what that meant, and what it didn’t mean. In church terms, it meant getting more involved in prayer for healing, and in taking responsibility for prayer ministry when Graham and Joyce Butlin said God was moving them out of Trinity. But then I was still teaching Italian part-time at the university. So I said to God, OK, do you want me to carry on doing that, or not? I prayed that he would make it clear. 10 days later my head of department rang up, very nervously. They’d had a 90% budget cut and hoped I wouldn’t mind too much but they were having to axe all their part-timers. Oh, I thought. OK, God. That’s clear enough. So I said, thank you George for letting me know; that’s fine. Are you sure, he spluttered? I discovered later that after 6 years they weren’t legally entitled to sack me just like that. But I didn’t mind; I had asked God to tell me, and he had.
I’ve had other experiences like that. Always I have found that if I genuinely ask God what it is he wants me to be doing, he tells me. It’s hard to ask, because you might not get the answer you want. When we left Cambridge 18 years ago Roger walked round a housing estate and said OK God, if you want to send me somewhere like this, that’s fine. I was a bit cross, actually, because he hadn’t consulted me. God sent us to an identikit housing estate in Corby. We would never have chosen to go there; but we learnt a lot of things while we were there. Sometimes God offers more short-term assignments. But I know that if we truly want to know what is the job that we are supposed to be doing while we watch, then God will tell us. For me it’s mostly meant things in the church. For others it has been a calling within society, to do a particular job, serve the community in a particular way, give to a certain person or situation. I know there are lots of us who have had these experiences, and I hope some of you will be willing to encourage us by sharing them with us. But if you have not, if you aren’t sure whether you are watching and whether you are doing the right things while you watch, I invite you to pray. I invite you to say to God, OK, speak to me. You are my boss, and my life is at your disposal. Please tell me what you want me to do. That’s the only way on earth I know to have real job satisfaction.
We’re going to have a time of quiet now. I invite you to pray. I invite you to remember that you are watching. I invite you to remember that you are living between the day Jesus went away and the day he will come again. And I invite you to consider the job that God has given you to do in the meantime. It may be small or large, obvious or hidden. I’ve put some questions on the overhead which may help you to pray more clearly.
Personal
mission questions:
· why am I in the world?
· What is my overarching purpose?
· What would I like to be said of me after I’m gone?
· What difference is it going to have made that I was here?
Personal
values questions:
· what is really important to me?
· What do I stand for?
· What three values do I want to live by?
· Which of those is most important?
Persnal commitment questions:
v Do I understand my own spiritual gifting?
v Have I said to God that I am willing to do whatever job he has called me and equipped me to do?
v Have I received and understood his answer?
v Am I doing it?