"Blessed Deadlines"
Rev. Dr. Charlie Maahs
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Luke 16:19-31
Grace to you and Peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ!
The great Jazz artist, Louis Armstrong, was supposed to have said one time:
“Never mind creativity, man, just give me a deadline.”
Whether he said it or not, it could well serve as a motto for any number of occupations I can think of, including that of a pastor.
I wish I had thought of Louis Armstrong’s line myself, for when creativity doesn’t come my way I look for a deadline. Sometimes it is the deadline that lends the inspiration that will not come any other way.
Come to think of it, I waited until this morning to get serious about preparing this sermon, and the looming deadline of 7 p.m. this evening gave me all the inspiration I needed to get off my duff and get going. (P)
We all know that deadlines have a curious way of breathing down our backs. Some days we may prosper because of them. Other days we must certainly suffer because of them, but deadlines are a fact of life.
April 15 is our deadline for we know what.
December 31ST is the date by which we must fit in that last medical procedure if you’re aiming for coverage under the current year’s insurance deductible.
Twenty-four hour sales events cause consumers to do ridiculous things like get in their cars at midnight and drive 10 miles to buy hand towels that are on clearance at the big box department store. (I could have seen my mother doing something like that).
Or if we are going to get a 0% interest loan and deal on a new car, the car salesman says, you have until Saturday to make up our mind.
So let’s think about deadlines this evening (this morning), not only the material ones we may face from day to day, but the spiritual deadlines that are equally important.
There are spiritual deadlines as well as other sorts of deadlines, and it’s the spiritual ones that can be especially deadly.
For example, when Jesus met a rich man one day, who had an overcrowded garage stuffed with junk to the rafters, this man thought he had the perfect answer for his excess, namely, put up a few extra pole barns out back.
When Jesus learned of his expansion plans he uttered a deadline that is still reverberating in our ears today: “You fool,” said Jesus, “this night your very soul will be required of you.”
The shopper, or collector, or hoarder inside of that man had met its match. It was an ultimate deadline that bigger barns would not touch. (P)\
A deadline may be many different things, but it is ever fuzzy or vague.
The first part of the word, “dead”, suggests a certain finality.
The second part of the word, “line”, suggests that there’s a distinction between making it and not making it, and it is not a fine line at all.
(At the notorious civil war camp known as Andersonville, 31,000 Union soldiers lived in absolutely hellish conditions. Lawlessness, disease and overcrowding placed that camp within one of the most horrific chapters of Civil War history.
At Andersonville there was a light fence known as the “deadline”, erected about 20 feet inside the outer stockade wall. That deadline demarcated a no man’s land. Anyone who crossed the deadline was immediately shot by guards who were posited at intervals around the wall. That’s a very serious definition of a deadline) (P)
I remember a fascinating article by author and essayist, Garrett Kaiser, published a number of years ago, and in it he extolled the blessing that a deadline can be.
“Curse it though you might,” he said, “It always blesses you.”
OK. Let’s look at the four ways that Kaiser finds deadlines to be a blessing for your life and mine, and then before we’re done I’ll share a final word about the deadline story in our Gospel Lesson from Luke, chapter 16, today, that ought, I hope, to keep us thinking. (P)
1) “First”, says Garrett Kaiser, “deadlines give us a sense of urgency.” We all know something about this characteristic. A deadline can instill a crisis. It can inspire us to get up and move on a situation that deserves our attention but that has not been receiving enough of it.
A deadline can get adrenaline moving in a way that caffeine cannot.
When I was still a parish pastor, I noticed that when loved ones die it’s not uncommon for survivors in that family to suddenly recount all of the things they were going to do with dad but never got around to before he died. It’s a kind of communal lament.
(It happened to me as well. When my father was dying of pancreatic cancer, I’ve often thought since then, why didn’t I go and be with him for a couple of weeks before he died, maybe tape some of his stories, he had some great ones, and just spend some time with him during his last days….Well, I had a congregation to serve, I had a family to care for, I was 700 miles away, and it didn’t happen…)
And since our driver’s license print only our birth dates and not our death dates, we never think of death as a looming deadline, but it is.
2) “Second,” says Kaiser, “deadlines compel us to seek help.”
Now, isn’t that the truth? As the clock zeros in on what little time we have remaining before something is due, we begin to realize how much we could benefit from the help or the input of others.
We start to come face to face with our own limitation and insufficiency. When a deadline pinches us we turn to the wisdom and support of others if we are smart. (In fact, I went to see Pastor Susan for inspiration yesterday…) We reach for assistance, and that’s not all bad, you know.
3) “Third, deadlines force choices upon us,” says Garrett Kaiser.
If all of us had as much time to ponder our choices as we wished---in other words, a life with no deadlines---many of us would still be standing at the ice cream window we first stepped up at age four.
But as dad and mom reminded us, “Come on, make a choice will you? Ice cream bar, ice cream sandwich, choose something! We don’t have all day!”
From what does a deadline spare us? Death by indecisiveness.
Again, drawing from Kaiser a little saying that makes good sense: “A deadline is the mother bird that teaches our fledgling desires to find their wings by knocking them out of the nest.” No bad.
4) Fourth, deadlines offer mercy, we could even call it grace.
This sounds counterintuitive, I know, but it’s not. Without deadlines in our lives we would be hopelessly strung out between procrastination on one end of the behavioral spectrum and perfectionism on the other.
Deadlines keep us from swinging too dramatically to either extreme. If it weren’t for deadlines you and I might never finish anything. Just think, my sermon and this service might never end. (Don’t worry, it will!)
Deadlines extend to us the gift of mercy and grace where we get to finally say,
“It is done. I am finished. I no longer have to live with the weight of this project, or that review, or this test, or preparing a sermon, that is hanging over my head…and maybe I can even go home this evening and watch “The Mentalist” on TV, without a deadline in mind because I’m even ready now for Sunday’s preaching!!!! The beauty of a Thursday evening service! (P)
Now what does our Gospel Lesson from Luke 16 have to do with deadlines?
This is the story that Jesus tells starring Abraham, the patriarch of the Hebrew people.
And in this story a rich person is rotting in hell and a lame beggar is enjoying heavenly abundance secure in the bosom of Abraham.
Both the rich man and Lazarus have died, but a gigantic chasm separates them in death. They’re left to call back and forth from heaven to hell. The rich man never caught onto mercy when he was alive, for his daily routine was to walk past the begging Lazarus and never notice the man’s plight.
So when the rich man falls into the clutches of hell it should come as no surprise that he fails to understand there as well. He gasps for a drop of water, pleading for Abraham to make Lazarus his errand boy and have him offer up a drink.
It’s a tragic story of a deadline that has passed for a human being obsessed with taking extraordinary good care of himself. When the rich man refused to take no for an answer from Abraham he pressed further, hoping that Lazarus might be the one to warn his brothers to take all spiritual deadlines seriously.
Abraham spoke this memorable line denying the rich man such messenger service. He said: “If these brothers of yours cannot bring themselves to listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone were to rise from the dead.”
In other words, “Sorry. But NO!” If they are so spiritually deaf to the Word of God and their hearts are so hermetically sealed, even the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ will not be enough to convince them to care for the poor. (P)
A couple of weeks ago, when Pastor Roger prepared some material for this lesson for the area pastors who gather here every month at Advent for text study, he wrote at the very end, this important question that caught my attention: “Where is the Good News here in this story of the Rich Man and Lazarus?”
Well, for me the Good News is this: We can complain about deadlines all we want, but complaining about them requires a whole lot of mental energy. Far better that we treat them as blessing instead of curse, for who knows, were we to take even a few SPIRITUAL DEADLINES seriously, we might find ourselves moving with some fresh urgency to express the love of God, attending to those on the doorstops of our lives who are having a very hard time of life.
So you see, one of the real points of Jesus’ story is not to disparage or be critical of how much do we have in this life, but it is this: “How much do we care about others in need?”
Let us Pray: “O Lord, I never thought we would pray for this, but thank you for deadlines and for the blessing they offer our lives. Remind us of their urgency, especially when the need of other people is at stake. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.