William H. Willimon - "What Time Is It?" (November 11, 1984)
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| - | Received him with joy, threw a party for him, | 0:03 |
| and all was forgiven. | 0:06 | |
| Matthew tells a similar story. | 0:09 | |
| I preached on it a few Sundays ago here in the chapel. | 0:12 | |
| A man goes out and hires some workers | 0:16 | |
| to work in his vineyard early in the morning. | 0:18 | |
| Goes out in the middle of the day, | 0:21 | |
| hires some more people. | 0:22 | |
| An hour before quitting time, goes out again. | 0:24 | |
| Then, when the sun goes down and everyone is called in, | 0:29 | |
| he pays even the people who got there late, | 0:32 | |
| they get paid as much as those who'd been working | 0:39 | |
| in the vines all day. | 0:41 | |
| There is grumbling. | 0:45 | |
| "Do you begrudge my generosity?" | 0:47 | |
| the master asked the grumbling workers. | 0:51 | |
| And we love that little parable, | 0:56 | |
| because it means that what we hoped is right, | 1:00 | |
| there's still time. | 1:03 | |
| So what if you haven't opened the book? | 1:07 | |
| There's only a couple weeks til the exam. | 1:10 | |
| There's still time. | 1:12 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 1:14 | |
| So what if you haven't gotten your life together, | 1:16 | |
| don't worry, the Father waits, | 1:19 | |
| you may be the eleventh-hour worker | 1:20 | |
| who gets just as much grace as those | 1:23 | |
| who've been in the vineyards all day long. | 1:25 | |
| There will always be a tomorrow. | 1:28 | |
| God's Kingdom is like that, says Jesus. | 1:30 | |
| God is in the grace business. | 1:34 | |
| There will always be a tomorrow | 1:38 | |
| for homecomings and decisions. | 1:40 | |
| Why trouble ourselves about the present | 1:45 | |
| when there's always grace for the future? | 1:47 | |
| Of course, all would be well if Matthew | 1:52 | |
| told only one story: | 1:55 | |
| the one about the laborers in the vineyard. | 1:58 | |
| We could let grace be grace, a gift could be a gift, | 2:01 | |
| and we could drift on through today | 2:04 | |
| to an ever-open tomorrow. | 2:06 | |
| Ah, but Matthew tells other stories. | 2:11 | |
| A group of girls are invited to a wedding party. | 2:15 | |
| Well, they meant to go get oil for their lamps, | 2:19 | |
| but it was first one thing and then another, | 2:22 | |
| and then when the call finally came out, | 2:25 | |
| "Come to the party," the oil is gone. | 2:27 | |
| They have to go buy more oil, | 2:31 | |
| and by the time they get to the party, | 2:33 | |
| it has begun without them. | 2:38 | |
| The door is shut. | 2:41 | |
| They cry out, they bang at the door, | 2:44 | |
| they claw at the door, but no, no, | 2:46 | |
| you had your chance, it's over now. | 2:48 | |
| No more tomorrow. | 2:51 | |
| Or today's lesson from the Gospel: | 2:55 | |
| When you see the fig tree blossom, | 2:59 | |
| anybody can tell what time it is. | 3:02 | |
| No one knew the time. | 3:05 | |
| When Noah built the ark, his neighbors ate and drank | 3:09 | |
| at backyard patio parties, they looked over the fence, | 3:11 | |
| they saw that crazy old man hammering feverishly away. | 3:14 | |
| If they had only known, the clouds which gathered | 3:19 | |
| on the horizon would spoil more than their picnic. | 3:23 | |
| Jesus says, "Thieves don't send engraved announcements | 3:30 | |
| to alert you of a nocturnal visit." | 3:34 | |
| That's the way God is. | 3:39 | |
| The way life is, sometimes. | 3:42 | |
| It can just come upon you like a thief in the night. | 3:47 | |
| Jesus, Jew that he was, | 3:53 | |
| had no Greek view of history. | 3:57 | |
| Unlike the Greeks, Israel viewed history | 4:01 | |
| not as a never-ending circle, but as a straight line | 4:04 | |
| with a beginning and an end. | 4:09 | |
| In the Bible, human history begins in Genesis; | 4:12 | |
| it ends in Revelation. | 4:15 | |
| There is a beginning and end. | 4:22 | |
| Someday there will be no tomorrow. | 4:28 | |
| The invitation is given, when it is rejected | 4:33 | |
| it goes elsewhere, the door is opened, then it is shut. | 4:37 | |
| The gavel comes down, the ticking clock is silent, | 4:41 | |
| the little up and down line | 4:46 | |
| on the bleeper becomes steady, | 4:48 | |
| and it's over. | 4:53 | |
| There is no more tomorrow. | 4:56 | |
| That's a word that isn't popular these days, is it? | 5:03 | |
| We'd rather Matthew tell us stories | 5:07 | |
| about eleventh-hour workers and good little bad boys | 5:08 | |
| who get grace rather than about procrastinators | 5:12 | |
| who end up out in the cold. | 5:15 | |
| A recent survey, 99 percent of Americans like | 5:19 | |
| the story of the prodigal sun better than | 5:22 | |
| the story of the foolish virgins or the thief in the night. | 5:24 | |
| (congregation chuckling) | 5:28 | |
| And that was possibly the way it was | 5:31 | |
| for the church in Matthew's day. | 5:33 | |
| The time of crisis was over. | 5:36 | |
| It's hard to live every day, day-in, day-out, | 5:40 | |
| as if there's no tomorrow. | 5:43 | |
| Jesus had promised that he was returning soon | 5:47 | |
| to reclaim the faithful, but where was he? | 5:49 | |
| They'd been waiting and waiting. | 5:55 | |
| By the time the Gospel of Matthew was written, | 5:59 | |
| the church had been waiting | 6:03 | |
| for maybe 75 or 80 years for the return of Christ-- | 6:04 | |
| that's a long time to stand on tiptoes. | 6:08 | |
| It's hard to maintain a sense of crisis for 80 years. | 6:12 | |
| And therein was the problem: | 6:18 | |
| "there will always be a tomorrow," | 6:21 | |
| some must have said, after all there had been | 6:25 | |
| about 29,000 tomorrows | 6:27 | |
| since Jesus had promised he was returning. | 6:30 | |
| The once taut church relaxed, | 6:36 | |
| it loosened its grip, | 6:39 | |
| settled down into the everyday-ness of things. | 6:43 | |
| And that, our stories indicate, is dangerous. | 6:47 | |
| To live as if there will always be a tomorrow | 6:54 | |
| is to be a fool. | 6:56 | |
| The best-selling religious book of all time | 6:59 | |
| is a rather shoddy piece of rehashed millennialism | 7:03 | |
| called The Late, Great Planet Earth. | 7:07 | |
| 50 million people have paid good money | 7:11 | |
| to read Mr. Hal Lindsey's view of the end, | 7:14 | |
| and yet the most disturbing thing, | 7:19 | |
| it isn't only Jerry Falwell, Hal Lindsey, | 7:20 | |
| and James Watt talking this way. | 7:23 | |
| The gathering ecological crisis, | 7:27 | |
| the threat of nuclear war, international monetary problems, | 7:30 | |
| suddenly, it seems as if all kinds of people | 7:35 | |
| are talking apocalyptic. | 7:38 | |
| Everybody but the church. | 7:42 | |
| The liberal, contented church | 7:45 | |
| that long ago made peace with the present and decided not | 7:49 | |
| to think too much about tomorrow. | 7:54 | |
| Next year, next administration, | 7:58 | |
| maybe we'll sit down with the Russians and talk disarmament. | 8:02 | |
| There's still time! | 8:05 | |
| It is so easy to be fooled. | 8:11 | |
| Here we sit with all this substantial stone enclosing us. | 8:15 | |
| This church has been here for 50 years, | 8:21 | |
| so it's not too unreasonable to assume | 8:24 | |
| it'll be here 50 more. | 8:27 | |
| You'll come home for your 50th reunion, | 8:31 | |
| and everybody will look exactly as they do now, right? | 8:35 | |
| A few Sundays ago, after the service ended | 8:44 | |
| in this vast, eternal looking neo-Gothic place, | 8:48 | |
| tourists were milling around in the nave, | 8:53 | |
| looking at the windows, admiring the carving. | 8:57 | |
| A man slumped to the floor. | 9:03 | |
| His wife cried out, the Duke Emergency Team was called. | 9:06 | |
| Later, as I sat with her over at the emergency room, | 9:12 | |
| she told me they had moved to North Carolina | 9:17 | |
| less than a month ago. | 9:19 | |
| Early retirement it was to be, in this climate, | 9:22 | |
| more hospitable than Iowa. | 9:25 | |
| They had come to Durham to walk in the Duke Gardens, | 9:29 | |
| to visit the chapel. | 9:32 | |
| He had no history of heart disease. | 9:36 | |
| She went in to see the chapel, she left a widow. | 9:41 | |
| Who are we kidding? | 9:49 | |
| We who smile and go about our business, | 9:51 | |
| raise our children, build our houses, | 9:54 | |
| go to football games, take afternoon naps, | 9:56 | |
| all under the vast shadow of the great, dark mushroom cloud, | 9:59 | |
| the flash, the roar, the rush of wind and rubble | 10:05 | |
| and for the race, there's no tomorrow. | 10:08 | |
| Is that why not everyone thinks it's such a grand idea | 10:14 | |
| to return to homecoming and class reunions? | 10:17 | |
| These occasions make time seem so linear. | 10:23 | |
| Life so finite. | 10:29 | |
| That bittersweet realization that | 10:34 | |
| the ever-rolling stream of time bears all our dreams away. | 10:37 | |
| It was at the funeral of her beloved husband, | 10:45 | |
| she asked if she could say a few words | 10:48 | |
| to the gathered congregation. | 10:50 | |
| "If you're going to love somebody," | 10:53 | |
| she said with tears in her eyes, | 10:55 | |
| "for God's sake, do it today. | 10:57 | |
| "If you're going to tell somebody | 11:02 | |
| "that they're special to you, do it now." | 11:04 | |
| She had become wise the hard way. | 11:12 | |
| Jesus says we can live any way we want, | 11:19 | |
| we can put off life as if there were always a tomorrow. | 11:22 | |
| We can make it all look so secure and solid and eternal, | 11:25 | |
| yet for me, for you, for us all | 11:31 | |
| there will be that day when there is no tomorrow. | 11:33 | |
| The invitation comes, the door opens | 11:40 | |
| and light shines through, the word is spoken. | 11:44 | |
| And then the waters rise, the bell tolls, | 11:50 | |
| and it is time, | 11:55 | |
| for good or ill, it's time. | 11:58 | |
| Of that day and hour, no one knows. | 12:04 | |
| Watch. | 12:10 | |
| Well I was serving a little church in rural Georgia, | 12:14 | |
| and let me tell you, there's not much more rural | 12:18 | |
| than rural Georgia. | 12:20 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 12:21 | |
| One of my members had a relative who died | 12:23 | |
| and Patsy and I went to the funeral as a show of support. | 12:25 | |
| The funeral was in a hot, crowded, little, | 12:30 | |
| off-brand Baptist country church. | 12:32 | |
| I'd never seen anything like it. | 12:37 | |
| They wheeled the coffin in, the preacher began to preach, | 12:40 | |
| he shouted, he fumed, spit, flayed his arms. | 12:43 | |
| "It's too late for old Joe," he screamed. | 12:47 | |
| "He might have wanted to do this or that in life, | 12:50 | |
| "too late for him now, he's dead. | 12:53 | |
| "It's all over for him. | 12:56 | |
| "He might have wanted to straighten out his life, | 12:59 | |
| "but he can't now, it's over." | 13:02 | |
| What a comfort this must be | 13:08 | |
| to the grieving family, I thought. | 13:10 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 13:12 | |
| "But it ain't too late for you, brothers and sisters. | 13:14 | |
| "People drop dead every day, so why wait? | 13:18 | |
| "Now is the day for decision, now is the day | 13:21 | |
| "to give your life to Jesus. | 13:23 | |
| "Come, give your life to Jesus." | 13:26 | |
| Well, it was the worst thing I had ever heard. | 13:30 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 13:32 | |
| "Can you imagine a preacher doing that kind of thing | 13:34 | |
| to a grieving family?" I asked Patsy on the way home. | 13:37 | |
| I've never heard anything so cheap, | 13:41 | |
| manipulative, inappropriate. | 13:43 | |
| I would never preach a sermon like that at a funeral. | 13:46 | |
| She agreed. | 13:50 | |
| She agreed that it was tacky, manipulative, calloused. | 13:52 | |
| Of course, she added, | 13:59 | |
| worst of all, what he said was true. | 14:03 | |
| (electronic interference) | 14:18 | |
| (organ music) | 14:21 | |
| (congregation singing hymn) | 14:45 | |
| - | I believe in God, the Father Almighty, | 17:31 |
| maker of heaven and earth; | 17:34 | |
| And in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord; | 17:36 | |
| who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, | 17:40 | |
| born of the Virgin Mary, | 17:43 | |
| suffered under Pontius Pilate, | 17:45 | |
| was crucified, dead, and buried; | 17:47 | |
| he descended into hell, the third day he rose from the dead; | 17:50 | |
| he ascended into heaven, | 17:56 | |
| and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; | 17:58 | |
| from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. | 18:02 | |
| I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, | 18:06 | |
| the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, | 18:10 | |
| the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. | 18:15 | |
| Amen. | 18:19 | |
| The Lord be with you. | 18:21 | |
| - | And also with you. | 18:23 |
| - | Let us pray. | 18:25 |
| (congregation shuffling) | 18:26 | |
| Eternal Spirit, whose timelessness outshines | 18:38 | |
| all our earthly achievements, we worship thee. | 18:43 | |
| Very mysterious is this universe into which | 18:50 | |
| Thou hast given us birth. | 18:52 | |
| From the freshness of April that passes | 18:56 | |
| to the chill of November, | 18:58 | |
| soon to be restored by the quiet of a winter's sleep, | 19:01 | |
| we stand in awe before the mystery of Thy creative powers, | 19:06 | |
| O God, completely beyond our abilities | 19:10 | |
| to predict, to master, or to comprehend. | 19:13 | |
| Lift us up, we beseech Thee, creating God, | 19:20 | |
| from ingratitude to thankfulness. | 19:23 | |
| Strangely co-mingled is our life of things, | 19:27 | |
| good and evil, happy and sad. | 19:31 | |
| Forgive our eyes, their tendency to see only the shadows. | 19:35 | |
| Grant us an hour of joyous thanksgiving. | 19:40 | |
| Let memory be our sacrament, reminding us | 19:43 | |
| of places where beauty dwells, | 19:47 | |
| of friendships that bless us, | 19:50 | |
| of moments when Thy presence has healed us. | 19:53 | |
| Tune our spirits once again to gratitude. | 19:58 | |
| Lift us up, we beseech Thee, redeeming God, | 20:04 | |
| from cowardice to courage, remembering this Veterans' Day | 20:07 | |
| those who have given their lives to win the peace. | 20:12 | |
| Grant us the persistence to pray for peace, | 20:16 | |
| to struggle for peace, to suffer for peace, | 20:20 | |
| that we may study war no more. | 20:24 | |
| Joining hands with those we call our enemies, | 20:28 | |
| we beseech Thee, O God, help us to recognize | 20:32 | |
| and to overcome the real enemies of humankind: | 20:36 | |
| ignorance, poverty, disease, | 20:41 | |
| hatred, oppression. | 20:45 | |
| Tune our hearts, O God, to courage. | 20:49 | |
| Lift us, we pray Thee, sustaining God, | 20:55 | |
| from selfishness to service. | 20:58 | |
| Teach us the compassion of Christ, | 21:02 | |
| who emptied Himself even unto death on a cross. | 21:05 | |
| Grant us the hope which rises above frustration, | 21:10 | |
| the patience to endure the strain of waiting. | 21:14 | |
| Dedicate us afresh to the never-ending task | 21:18 | |
| of putting the needs of others over our own satisfactions. | 21:22 | |
| Direct our hands to service. | 21:28 | |
| So, may we run and not grow weary, | 21:32 | |
| walk and not faint, | 21:36 | |
| and love will be all-in-all in this wonderful, | 21:39 | |
| terrible, beautiful world. | 21:43 | |
| Amen. | 21:47 | |
| And now, let us offer our gifts and ourselves to God. | 21:52 | |
| (organ music) | 22:00 | |
| (choir singing) | 23:53 | |
| (organ music) | 28:35 | |
| ♪ Praise God from whom all blessings flow ♪ | 28:59 | |
| ♪ Praise Him all creatures here below ♪ | 29:05 | |
| ♪ Alleluia, Alleluia! ♪ | 29:11 | |
| ♪ Praise Him above, ye heavenly hosts ♪ | 29:18 | |
| ♪ Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost ♪ | 29:24 | |
| ♪ Alleluia, Alleluia, ♪ | 29:30 | |
| ♪ Alleluia, Alleluia, ♪ | 29:37 | |
| ♪ Alleluia! ♪ | 29:43 | |
| ♪ Amen. ♪ | 29:51 | |
| - | O God, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth. | 30:04 |
| One age declares Thy goodness to another, | 30:08 | |
| and Thy steadfast love is the mainstay | 30:12 | |
| of our ever-restless hearts. | 30:15 | |
| So, we offer these gifts unto Thee | 30:18 | |
| in joyful thanksgiving for Thy plenteous blessings | 30:20 | |
| towards us, that Thy name may ever be glorified | 30:23 | |
| and the work of Thy Kingdom ever increased. | 30:28 | |
| This we pray in the name of Jesus Christ, | 30:32 | |
| who taught us to pray with confidence: | 30:35 | |
| Our Father who art in heaven, | 30:38 | |
| hallowed be thy name. | 30:41 | |
| Thy kingdom come. | 30:43 | |
| Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. | 30:45 | |
| Give us this day our daily bread, | 30:49 | |
| and forgive us our trespasses, | 30:51 | |
| as we forgive those who trespass against us, | 30:54 | |
| and lead us not into temptation, | 30:58 | |
| but deliver us from evil. | 31:00 | |
| For thine in the Kingdom, and the power, | 31:02 | |
| and the glory forever. | 31:05 | |
| Amen. | 31:08 | |
| (organ music) | 31:10 | |
| (congregation singing hymn) | 31:55 | |
| (organ music) | 34:22 | |
| And now, let us go forth in peace | 35:04 | |
| to love and serve God and our neighbor in all that we do, | 35:06 | |
| and may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, | 35:10 | |
| the love of God and the communion and fellowship | 35:13 | |
| of the Holy Spirit be with you all. | 35:16 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 35:19 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 35:22 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 35:25 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 35:30 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 35:35 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 35:42 | |
| ♪ Amen. ♪ | 35:50 | |
| (organ music) | 36:10 | |
| (congregation talking) | 40:09 |
