A few of the cast members of "Sweeney Todd," the fall production of Prep's "Cape and Sword."

SHORT SERMON FOR MASS WITH THE CAPE AND SWORD DRAMA CLUB AS THEY PREPARE THEIR SUNDAY PERFORMANCE OF "SWEENEY TODD."

TEXT FROM MARK: "YOU KNOW NOT THE DAY NOR THE HOUR"


Those first men and women who had an experience of Jesus Christ risen from the dead believed ardently that he would soon return to usher in the kingdom of God. While Jesus had told them that they could not know the day nor the hour, they imagined that there would be little or no delay. Why would the Lord tolerate the persecution of his friends over a long period of time? The early Christians slowly organized as if for a future but no Christians in that era needed to prepare so much for a long future as for the imminent return of their Lord and Savior.

The return of the Lord, of course, would mean damnation for those not among the elect and physical destruction, too, of anything alien to the kingdom. God had promised never to use the flood again to destroy the earth but, as you know from the chorus of Sweeney, it was to be fire the next time. And the early Christians lived with some expectation and fear.
And still we do. And better not to be complacent. Who knows? The world might end even before I come to the final syllable of this sen....tence.

There are times when I have prayed that the Lord Jesus would come quickly. Why would he not? Why would the Lord not join us in our desire to save children who suffer from hunger and lack of love? Why would the Lord not come to save us from our own failures? I do not know the answer that has led to this two millennia delay. This only: I believe that God loves a good story; some say, and not cavalierly, that God creates us in this world with the same hope as authors who let their characters write the authors’ stories. In our lives, it is said, people write the story about themselves. And there have been some splendid stories written in the lives of our fellow human beings in these two millennia.

The life stories of so many just since my own birth support the notion that maybe, just maybe, despite the genocides and the tsunamis and the random brutality and the plagues of illness, we human beings are working out a redemption of some consequence in tandem with the Lord Jesus. We have reason to be astounded at so many of the redemptive stories of our brothers and sisters in recent decades. The stories of the stars of the civil rights movement in our own country, for example! So many stars but I have a favorite: Rosa Parks. No one could deny that this dignified woman, a dedicated teacher of the young in her church, deserved to sit on a bus wherever she wanted to sit. If the Lord Jesus had come to end the world before Rosa was born, God even in the divine person would have felt a void in the divine heart where she belonged.

Make a list of like persons of the past century: Anne Frank, Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, Mahatma Gandhi. And on and on. God surely has some purpose in raising up men and women like them. They would not have lived their heroic lives if the world had ended in 1900. God could put an end to this world and to our suffering but the cost may be too great, too great for God who doesn’t want a good book to end.

We may be reluctant to put aside a desire for the end of the world and its suffering. We must, however, surrender ourselves to God’s mysterious plan. Right here in front of me I see a good reason, too, for hope in an immediate future. You who are involved in the Cape and Sword know about stories. You study and recreate stories. You learn to love not only the technique of music and motion, but also the beneficial power of a story to move hearts and free them for what is good. Surely the God who loves you wants you, with good reason, to finish writing the best of your stories, the masterpieces of your own lives. Give us time, Good Lord, to finish our work.