Readings: Wisdom 18:6-9; Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19; Luke 12: 32-48
Imagine that you see me at the train station:
you see me repeatedly check my watch,
check the arrival board,
perhaps check my appearance
in some reflective surface.
At a particular moment,
you see me stand up
and move toward the entrance
to a specific platform,
looking intently at the crowd.
You see a look of recognition cross my face
as I approach a woman and kiss her
(you surmise—correctly—that this must be my wife)
and then you see us happily depart the station together.
If someone were to ask you what I was doing
when you saw me at the station,
you would likely say
that I was waiting for someone.
Now imagine that you see me
on another occasion at the train station:
you see me browse the magazine rack at a newsstand,
buy an iced coffee at Starbucks,
stare blankly at crowds of people departing the trains,
yawn, scratch, read the paper, blow my nose,
and, eventually, leave the station alone,
having done a bunch of stuff
without any obvious single purpose.
If someone were to ask you what I was doing at the station
you would probably not say
that I was waiting for anyone or anything.
You might say instead that I was “loitering”
or, maybe, if you wanted to make me sound less criminal,
“killing time.”
“Waiting” is something different from simply “killing time.”
Waiting is not merely hanging around as time passes;
it is about your life coming into focus
around the person or thing that you are awaiting.
When you await someone or something,
your anticipation gives shape to time.
Every moment is given meaning and significance
by the act of waiting
because each moment moves you closer
to that for which you wait.
Killing time, in contrast,
is shapeless, formless, directionless.
Time moves forward, but isn’t going anywhere;
passing moments have no particular significance,
no particular goal or end.
Killing time is, frankly, boring;
as the term itself suggests,
it renders time lifeless.
Waiting, on the other hand, brings time to life,
as our moments are filled with meaning.
In today’s Gospel reading
Jesus calls on us to live lives of waiting,
not lives of merely killing time:
“be like servants who await
their master’s return from a wedding,
ready to open immediately
when he comes and knocks.”
Jesus speaks of your lamp being lighted
and your loins being girded—
symbols of wakefulness and readiness for action.
The servants whom the master commends
are not those who pass their hours killing time,
but those who keep an active watch
for the one whom they await.
The passing of time for these servants
is not the slow trickling away of life,
but a mighty flow that carries them
toward the arrival for which they wait.
The master whom we are awaiting
is Jesus himself, of course.
He is the master who returns from the wedding,
who with his arrival brings with him
a measure of that celebration’s joy.
Indeed, he bids his waiting servants
take their place at his table
so that he can serve them and share with them
all that he has received from his Father.
Jesus is the one whose awaited arrival
brings time to life,
gives form and direction and meaning
to the moments of which our days are made.
To be his disciple, to know him as master,
is to stand with lamp lighted and loins girded,
ready at every moment to welcome his arrival.
To await him is to accept time itself
not as something to be endured or killed,
but as God’s gift to us
to be used for God’s glory.
Yet even before the master returns
the time that he gives us,
the time that is brought to life by awaiting him,
is already filled full with his presence.
Indeed, the one we await arrives
at an hour we do not expect
because is arriving at every moment.
He comes to us invisibly,
in the gift of grace.
He comes to us visibly,
in the poor,
the imprisoned,
the stranger,
the suffering,
in all those we serve for his sake.
He comes to us in the Eucharist that we celebrate,
sharing with us the joyful wedding feast of the Lamb,
bidding us to receive from him
the food and drink of eternity.
We wait for one
who is already present with us in our waiting.
Time given over to awaiting the master
who arrives at every moment
is time that carries us forward
into the fullness of God’s kingdom.
Time given over to our own pursuits,
our self-made goals and personal agendas,
is simply killing time,
no matter how important
those goals and agendas might seem.
The call of Jesus in today’s Gospel
is to embrace time as God’s gift to us
and to use it for God’s glory,
standing ready
with lamps lighted and loins girded,
servants awaiting the master
who gives life to our days of waiting.
As I begin my ministry with you
here at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen
I pray that our days together
will not be merely killing time
but will be time that is filled full
of the presence of the one
whose arrival we await.
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Watch this homily here.
