Keep your lamps lit, Jesus says in Luke 12. Be like servants in the house whose boss is set to return tonight. Maybe the boss will return in the evening. Or maybe it will be the middle of the night. Or maybe it will be nearly sunrise. Whatever the case may be, the servants’ patient watchfulness will be rewarded when he finally comes home. He’ll be so happy with them that he sits them down at the table and serves the servants! But the parable suddenly takes a dark and unexpected turn. The boss isn’t the only one coming to the house tonight. While he enters through the front door, a thief will come too, sneaking in another way. “The Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect,” Jesus concludes.
Oh, the unpredictability of the one who comes.
It has to be this way, that God is on a schedule you and I are simply not privy to. It has to be this way, or else God stops being God and instead becomes a delivery truck driver, beholden to the stops along his route we’ve arranged for him. Even if it doesn’t feel like it, it is the more blessed and happy existence to anticipate, to be forced into a constant watchfulness, to keep our lamps lit, whether this moment is the moment to be confronted by God or not. Something is going to take hold of our attention span. Shouldn’t it be the God who wants to make his presence known to us?
Perhaps you know the experience of reading a scripture 10 times, 30 times, 50 times, when unexpectedly on the 51st reading, an invisible barrier shatters as the Holy Spirit reaches through the words on the page to abruptly grab your heart. The biblical text suddenly looks and feels and tastes different than it did before. The words are the same as they always were. You’ve read those words, heard them preached. But now the alertness has paid off in a most noticeable way. We keep our lamps lit not just by scripture and prayer, but by returning to scripture and prayer, again and again and again, knowing that the God who wants to make his presence known will do so, whether it’s early this evening or the middle of the night or closer to sunrise. What Jesus assures us of in Luke 12 is that God is ready to show up. Whether or not we bother to notice is up to us.
It’s not if, but when. God wants to make his presence known. Like the master who serves the servants, God wants to spark within us joy and delight. And like the thief, God wants to unsettle us. Either way, the life of alert, watchful anticipation of the God who wants to make his presence known is the most joyful, purposeful way of being human available to us. We don’t have to sacrifice this watchfulness in order to go about our day. Our work and schedules demand our attention. But the joyful anticipation of God’s arrival in our day doesn’t have to take a back seat to anything. We can (must) still keep our lamps lit, watching for God to show up and delight us, or unsettle us, with his presence. A routine of scripture and prayer will work wonders. Just a small, repeated, scriptural prayer like Psalm 130 (“My soul waits for the LORD more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning”) will keep us quite awake.
God is eager to show up in our life, in our day, in our attention span, even if his arrival happens on a schedule we’re not privy to. Will we bother to notice when he gets home?
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