Now is the Time – Prepare to See the Light
Bethel UMC, Greenville, SC
This week we watched the movie Kate &Leopold. It is the story of an English nobleman named Leopold, who is forced to live with his uncle in New York City after his family lost its fortune and status. Leopold is fascinated by the inventions that are changing the world in the late 19th century, but his uncle is determined that Leopold's future lies in marrying wealth. One the evening in 1876 Leopold is supposed to announce which wealthy young woman he will marry at a ball. Instead he follows the stranger who attracted his attention that afternoon at a ceremony at the construction site of the Brooklyn Bridge. This stranger, Stuart, caught Leopold's attention because of his strange reactions to the camera flash and the speech. When Stuart runs away from the ball, Leopold chases him and follows him through a portal which allows them to travel through time to Stuart's home in New York in 2001. There Leopold meets Stuart's ex-girlfriend, Kate. She is consumed by her career in product marketing. She is an expert at working with focus groups to determine what the public will like. Although she is very successful at her job, she is bitter and unhappy and dreads Mondays. She is frustrated with life and unhappy when she meets Leopold. At first she is frustrated by this charade of a man acting like he is from 1876, but she is won over by his genteel ways and falls in love. When Leopold returns to 1876, both he and Kate are aware that they are missing something and are not happy in their own time.
The movie opens with an expression of our human condition of often being dissatisfied with the current time. Leopold is watching Roebling, the architect and builder of the Brooklyn Bridge. In the opening line, Roebling proclaims, "Time. Time, it has been proposed, is the fourth dimension. And yet, for mortal man, time has no dimension at all. We are like horses with blinders, seeing only what lies before us. Forever guessing the future and fabricating the past."
His observation that we are "forever guessing the future and fabricating the past" indicates that in some way we don't really see the current time for what it is. Instead we tend to either focus either on the past or the future, rather than the current moment. We often avoid the present when it is dark. However, our images of the past and the future are not accurate and often skewed by the darkness in our lives. Many people look longingly back at the past remembering only the good or even shaping whatever the past held to be a better time than the present. Many others focus on an image of the future. Their guesses about the unlit path of the future are skewed either by their greatest hopes or worst fears. Being so focused on their image of the future prevents them from living in the present.
Both these approaches are very common at this time of year. As we begin this holiday season some people will tell stories and dream of past Christmases and long for the home of their past. They wish for a simpler time and to recover the joy that they experienced as children over small Christmas gifts and treats. They may get lost in our nostalgic memories. Others will get lost in the hustle and bustle of the rush to Christmas. They become lost in the shopping, the wrapping, the decorating, and the baking. They focus on turning this Christmas into their guess of what the perfect Christmas would be. They aren't concerned with the past or with the current moment – just trying to achieve their image of the perfect Christmas Day in the future.
In either case we seem to embrace our society's habit of focusing only on the holiday and then jumping to the next holiday. Our commercialized world struggles with what to do with the in between times. That wasn't the way of the Church when it established the Christian calendar. They didn't begin the new year with Christmas. They built in this time that we call Advent before Christmas for the purpose of preparing for Christ's coming. It is a time to slow down and focus on getting ready for the big event, not by getting stuck in holiday traffic on Woodruff Road or hunting a parking place at the mall. There is another way to slow down. We are to prepare by looking for the light of God in our lives and examining our lives to see if we are living each day as if Christ were coming again at any moment.
The church calendar doesn't begin with an emphasis on the coming of Christ on Christmas long ago, but on the second coming of Christ. For those who are not accustomed to following the lectionary and the Christian calendar, it seems odd not to be focused on Christmas morn and singing Christmas carols as soon as Thanksgiving is over. However, those who developed this calendar and the lectionary realized that we need to prepare for Christmas as if Christ was coming to us once again.
We must choose whether we will focus on being ready in this moment at the current time for Christ to come into our lives. Jesus told the disciples about a man who would have stayed awake if he had known when the thief would come in the darkness of the night. He continues by telling about the brides to be who kept tending to their lamps – they long for the future, but must attend to the moment at hand so that they will be ready when their groom comes. His point was that we must be prepared at all times and aware of what is happening now for he did not know when the Day of Judgment and neither do we.
We know that Jesus came long ago and that many people did not recognize him as God's light entering their world. The light did not come as they expected and they missed it. So often, we miss something important because we aren't looking for it.
At the end of the movie, Stuart and Kate's brother, Charlie, realize that Kate is in the pictures that Stuart took at the party in 1876. They must rush to find her at her promotion party and tell her to go back to 1876 so that the past, the present, and the future are not altered. None of my family remembered seeing Kate in the initial scene party scene where Leopold was trying to select a bride. We wondered if had missed her. When we replayed that scene and were looking for her, we saw her. When we weren't looking for her, we missed seeing her.
We often miss something if we aren't looking for it or aren't expecting to see it. In my Theology of Pastoral Care class we are reminded to be looking for Christ in our midst, in the events of every day life. We call this seeing the gorilla dancing in our midst, because of an experiment in which students were told to watch students in black and white shirts bouncing a ball to each other. While they were counting the number of times the white team bounced the ball back and forth, someone in a gorilla suit danced through the scene. About half of the students watching didn't see the gorilla. Even when we watched the video and knew that the gorilla was coming, about half the students who were focused on counting the passes missed the gorilla.
We know that Christ came – has died, is risen and will come again - to bring light to our world, but if we aren't looking for the light then we might miss it. That is why we are encouraged to prepare, to be ready and waiting during these four weeks of Advent. We are to be looking for the light, ready to recognize it. We need to take this time to prepare so that we are ready and watching, so that we can identify and walk in the light.
We are to be looking for Jesus in our midst. We must learn to see the light so that we can follow Isaiah's instructions to walk in the light and so that we can follow Paul's instructions to put on the armor of light. In order to recognize the light, we must know what to look for and be prepared to see it. If we are too busy looking behind us or too far in front of us, we might miss the moment.
We may not know when that final moment will be, but we are challenged to be prepared, to be watching for that time. That means that we must live in this moment alert and ready, like the man who knows that the thief is coming in the darkness of the night. We must be prepared to see the light as it enters the darkness of our lives and our world. We need to be watching and waiting for it, ready to walk in the light.
Let us pray,
Gracious God, you sent your light, Jesus, into the world long ago as an infant born to poor parents where no one was expecting the light to shine. Prepare our hearts so that we might recognize your light in the midst of the darkness and grant us the courage to walk in the light, through Jesus Christ who reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
