All Saints by the Lake
December 3, 2023
[Robin Stuchbery, son of Ben (Incumbent in St.-Agathe and Arundel) and his wife Erica, who very politely waited to be born last December 18 until his parents’ doula had finished directing the Christmas pageant]
It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch.
Over the past couple of months as we’ve wrestled with parables from the Gospel of Matthew, there have been stories about kings giving their slaves enormous amounts of money and punishing them when they do the “wrong” thing with that money, and stories about kings who send their slaves to invite people to a wedding banquet and the guests are so angry that they kill the slaves.
If I were a slave in a Biblical parable, I’d be deeply relieved to hear that all I have to do to keep this master happy is continue with my ordinary daily work!
But being ready, keeping watch, staying awake, while not the most stressful thing imaginable, has its own challenges.
In Advent, we are literally anticipating a birth, and our Advent waiting is often compared to the anticipation of those last uncomfortable, unpredictable, exciting weeks of pregnancy. When you’re waiting for a birth, you’re waiting for your whole life to change, and most of the time you have only an approximate idea of when that will happen. Such is the event of Christ’s return which he is telling us to prepare for in today’s gospel.
A birth changes everything for the people most directly involved – the parents and the baby – but there are lots of other people affected too: medical professionals, grandparents, friends who may be taking care of an older child while Mom and Dad are at the hospital.
As a doula, I’ve been on call for more than a few births, and it’s hard to describe how completely the state of being on call takes over your life. At every moment, you have to be thinking, “What would I do if the call came now? How about now? When would I finish what I’m working on? How long would it take me to get to the hospital, given the current traffic situation? Whom would I have to call to hand off other things? I’m about to go to bed, how will I manage if I need to stay up all night? When did I last eat, shower, run my doula uniform shirts through the laundry?”
When I’m on call, I literally cannot leave my phone outside arm’s reach at any moment, around the clock. If I sing in a concert, or take a meeting that absolutely cannot be interrupted, or drive an hour outside the city for a hike with a friend, I need to alert my client and my backup. When Peter was little and I was first training, I had to think about who would take care of him when I was called out at midnight (as I was, for my first three births in a row!). Now, I need to think about whether there’s food in the fridge that he can heat up for dinner, whether I’ve reminded him to set his alarms if I’m at the hospital when he needs to get up for school. And so on, and so on.
This is the kind of watchfulness that Jesus is invoking when he describes waiting for the coming of the Son of Man. The knowledge that at any moment, your life could change completely and you’d have to react to a whole new set of circumstances and stimuli; you have some idea of what the experience will entail, but no idea of the details, and you can only trust that you have what it takes to meet the moment.
What would change if we did, in fact, live as though we were “on call” for the return of Jesus? Not in a scared, punitive way – yes, I had a button on my backpack in high school that said “Jesus is coming, look busy,” but I don’t actually believe that Jesus is coming to vent God’s wrath on us, but rather to reconcile all things and make them new, and to invite us to joyfully participate in that process.
What if we were on the lookout, all the time, for signs of God’s presence at work in the world? What if we were prepared to jump into action, responding to whatever situation we were presented with, using the gifts and talents God has given us?
Jesus says, “From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates.”
In nine years of taking births as a doula, I’m not sure I’ve ever been called to come in completely out of the blue. There’s always that initial text, “Hey, things are ramping up a bit, we’ll probably be heading to the birth centre soon …” And sometimes, of course, there are days or even weeks of “something might be happening” before the final “yes, come now!”
Likewise, God sows signs of God’s presence everywhere if we have eyes to see – little nuggets of love, generosity, hope, peace, and joy, that give us an inkling of what the world will be like when God’s purposes are fully revealed. Where in your life is God sending you texts – “hey, no need to spring into action quite yet, but things are definitely happening!”
And of course, Jesus also references a whole staff of servants keeping the household running when the master is away. None of them are doing this alone. Any individual slave, if literally expected to keep awake all day and night indefinitely, would soon be hallucinating with exhaustion and no use to anyone. But as a group, if they take shifts, they can handle it easily. Someone will be watching at the door every hour, no matter when the master returns.
And doulas always, always work with backup. Even if I didn’t have a demanding full-time job as my primary commitment, I would need another qualified person to step in if I came down with a galloping case of norovirus, or had two clients in labour at once, or have been at the hospital for 24 hours and need to sleep before I can go back to providing support.
So, we are called to keep watch, not as isolated individuals, but in community. And as we keep watch, we can witness to each other about the places where we have seen God showing up. As Paul writes, “the testimony of Christ [can be] strengthened among you, so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
We don’t have even the vague kind of due date that expectant parents do, but we know, with Paul, that God is faithful, and in the fullness of time, we will be summoned to meet him. Until that day, let us work together, be attentive to the signs, and wait with equal faithfulness, in this time of being “on call”.
Amen.
Leave a Reply