On the Verge

 

To live lives . . . while we wait.

(Titus 2:12b, 13a)

 

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2006

(Volume 1, Number 26)

First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6^th, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 

I want to begin tonight with a silly story which I used some years back to introduce a children’s Christmas pageant.  As families gathered the Fellowship Hall was alive with excitement.  The place was sparkling with smiles and laughter, the gathering anticipation of children and parents and grandparents.  Cameras and videos were everywhere, prepped and ready to do their work of recording the children’s version of the Nativity Story.  When I rose to introduce the pageant I told of a similar time for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  Snow White had taken many pictures of her little friends at Christmas and went to the store to have the film developed, carefully marking her order so she could get the enlarged, color prints that she so desired. 

 

Now, this was all, of course, in the Once-Upon-a-Time land where Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs lived, a time long before digital cameras.  Why, in Once-Upon-a-Time land, they didn’t even have One Hour Processing.  They had to wait.  And the wait took days and days.  Snow White waited a full week, but when she returned to get her pictures, she found that there had been yet another delay.  Snow White was visibly upset, but the clerk behind the counter tenderly sought to console her.  “Don’t worry, Snow White,” he said.  “Your PRINTS will come.”

  

Well, I told you it was silly.  The story has point, however, that Advent, these four special weeks which inaugurate our church’s liturgical year, is all about waiting for our Prince to come.

 

Waiting for Christmas isn’t easy.  The child in me recalls but well how difficult it was to go to sleep on Christmas Eve.  I suspect we have some children here tonight who will live through that excitement in these next hours.  All is Promise, we have repeated this Advent season, but the Promise of his Coming is not Now – it is Tomorrow.  Tomorrow holds excitement.  And today? Well, it’s a state of limbo, an empty, hollow passing of hours that don’t really matter. 

 

Here’s the question.  What do we do “while we wait” for something exciting?  How well I recall those sixteen hour trips back to Arkansas from Michigan on Christmas, how the long road trip had barely begun when we heard the familiar chorus from our girls, “Are we there yet?”   (In fact, as I reflect, I think Sherry was the director of that chorus!)

 

After a time Sherry and I would urge the kids to “go to sleep, we will get there quicker.”  That was more than mom and dad making an effort to discover peace and quiet.  There’s actually something to that.  You see, if you’re focused on what’s ahead, on the Promise of arriving at a wonderful place, perhaps it’s best to dull your senses to the Now.  When tomorrow is in sight, the hours don’t matter.  Just make them go, quickly.

 

William Willimon tells the story of how a bishop described one of the pastors under his care.  “Poor guy,” lamented the bishop.  “He spent 40 years on the verge of ministry.  He kept waiting for a bishop like me to send him to the perfect church.  Of course, the perfect church never came.  At congregation after congregation, he always found something wrong.  He just never found the right church where he could minister effectively.  Forty years waiting.  Forty years complaining to the bishop.  Forty years on the verge.” 

 

What a sad commentary of a ministry lived on the verge, a ministry ineffectively accomplished because his heart and mind were always somewhere other than he was.

 

That, I think, is what Paul’s letter to Titus is warning us against, living our lives on the verge.  “Things aren’t good now, so I’ll begin to live tomorrow.”  Paul says we are “to live our lives while we wait.”

 

Ah, but it’s so easy to think, “I can only truly live when I at last have the perfect job with the perfect salary, the perfect marriage, the perfect house, the perfect car.”  Living on the verge means foregoing present joy because our eyes are fixed on an as-yet-unfulfilled Promise, so convinced that the better life is near, so near we can almost touch it, so near that we convince ourselves to lay everything else aside to gain the Promise.  

 

It’s the laying everything else aside that is the problem.   Living on the verge robs you of joy in present blessings.  It’s one thing to have a goal, quite another to be so goal-fixated that we begin to seep negativity, losing the ability to rejoice in the blessing all around us.

 

Paul Greenberg wrote an editorial Wednesday as a tribute, a eulogy, to his friend, and mine, W. E. Ayres, who passed away two weeks ago.  W. E. was longtime president of Simmons First National Bank and a longtime member of Lakeside United Methodist Church in my hometown of Pine Bluff.  The title of the eulogy was, “It’s Still a Wonderful Life.”  He mentioned the film which has become a Christmas classic, Jimmy Stewart’s playing of George Bailey who, like W. E., was a banker.  Greenberg noted that George Bailey is seen by some as a tragic figure.  He certainly saw himself as a tragic figure.   Always tied down to the responsibilities of home.  Never able to visit Europe.  Never able to fulfill his dreams.  Tied down to Bedford Falls, a miserable little town that’s never going to be anything but a miserable little town. 

 

Writes Greenberg, “George Bailey a tragic figure?  Why, he’s the richest man in town, as his brother says at the end of the film. He makes Mr. Potter, the old miser, look like a pauper -- Because George Bailey has loved and sacrificed and built and given and stood alone a time or two for what he believed.  No he never got to take that grand tour of Europe.  But he didn’t go through life as a tourist, either.  He lived.”

 

I love that.  His life was not a sight-seer.  He lived where he was.  Paul (the other Paul, the apostle, not Greenberg) might have said, he “lived his life while he waited.” 

 

To be sure, George Bailey began by living on the verge.  All his plans seemed thwarted.  He felt stuck. Living on the verge always makes one feel stuck.  It took the bumbling guardian angel Clarence to open his eyes to how important his life was.  That’s when George realized that he wasn’t a tourist– this is where I am, and I will live to the fullest in the Here, in the Now. 

 

Concludes Greenberg, “think of those who make a difference in your town – and those who don’t.”  Want to know the difference?  Let me take a stab at answering his question.  The people who don’t make a difference are those who are living on the verge, waiting for their Prints to come.  Dulled to today’s opportunities, they are interested only in the prospect of escaping to another reality, sleeping the time away in order to arrive at their destination quicker.  It’s this get-me-out-of-here mentality that drains each moment of energy. 

 

The people who make a difference are those who live lives while they wait.  This is a fundamentally different attitude – seeing promise in each day, in each moment finding opportunity to fulfill their larger calling of being a human person who touches others with grace.

 

Let us live our lives, while we wait.