Be alert! Get ready! Watch! Stay on your toes! Don't blink! Today's scripture passage builds to a tense ending. And the lectionary committee, in its wisdom, begins the passage with Jesus almost cooing to the disciples, "Do not be afraid, little flock." What does selling your possessions and giving away the proceeds - because you are going to inherit the kingdom - what does that have to do with being ready?

We have lots of examples of readiness in our culture. Army Reserve units for military preparedness. Evacuation routes marked on coastal roads in case of tsunami. Schools hold fire drills to get children out of buildings quickly. Medical facilities hold practice events for mass emergencies. Households strap down water heaters and stockpile food and water for the possibility of earthquakes. Tadd Krueger is part of the Portland Police SERT team, and he tells me they are in constant training to be ready for life-and-death crime emergencies. Municipal firefighters sleep at the station and practice getting into their gear and onto the engines for rapid response to calls.

All of these readiness examples are geared to a specific event. The Army knows it might have to fight a war. Schools know they need to get kids out. Police serve and protect. Particular disasters require particular responses. We don't know if or when any of these events might happen, but we want to be ready in case they do. So we gear up. We prepare. We try to anticipate what might happen so we can be ready for anything. Jesus tells his disciples to be ready for action, because the Son of Man is going to return and that will be God's kingdom. He is not saying anything about what that return will look like, whether it will be good news or bad when it happens. He just says "Be ready." And the way he says to be ready, it is pretty clear that God's kingdom will not only be a surprise, it will be disruptive. Kind of like a thief. No one knows when or even if a thief will come, but when it happens, it is disruptive. "Be ready! Be alert! I'm not going to tell you what to expect or when to expect it. But be ready!" Will the coming kingdom shake us up like an earthquake or will it throw everything into disorder like a thief? All we know is, we've gotta be ready. Is this making your tension level go up or down?

Well man, even Jesus admits the homeowner can't stay awake 24-7, just in case a thief comes. A person's gotta rest! Even firefighters sleep at the station. But the firefighters - as well as the homeowner in the parable and the Christian at whom Jesus' parable is aimed - even the firefighters get to sleep. The difference is, firefighters have planned and practiced what to do in case of an alarm. They know what gear they to put on, they know where they stow it, they have already agreed on what positions they ride on the engine and what job they do when they ride that position. While they wait for alarms, they carry on with their regular duties. Christians, you get the impression, should be ready for when the time comes, and in the meantime, they should carry on with their regular duties. The important thing is to be ready.

Ready. I just have this picture in my mind of someone - after 2,000 years of trying to "be" ready - narrowing the eyes and asking, "Just how ready do we need to be?" As if to cut off negotiations, Jesus gives us another picture. Just - ready. He shows us a group of servants waiting for their boss to return from a party. "Blessed are those slaves," he says, "whom the master finds alert when he comes." You get the impression that the big guy has been having a great time at the wedding reception, it has gone on late, someone is going to have to hear the knock on the door to unlock it and let him in. How many people does it take to unlock the door? Wouldn't one do? Apparently not, because the boss is so happy to find folks waiting up for him, he does something odd. The master becomes the servant. The master makes a midnight snack and invites the servants to sit and eat. Just because they were alert and could open the door to him. He blesses them and waits on them. He waits on them.

How alert are you when you are wakened in the middle of the night? I'm irrational. One night when my son came home late, I woke up and called out, "Is that you, Linda?" thinking it was my oldest daughter. I don't have an oldest daughter, and she certainly isn't named Linda, but it made perfect sense at the time. That is not what the returning master had in mind for "alert." He knows these folks are "alert" because they are dressed and they are watching. When we were kids, our mother taught us that good manners when waiting for a ride to pick us up meant that we were wearing our hat, coat, boots, and mittens and be watching out the front window, so that when we saw the car drive up, we could bolt out the front door and dash down the steps before the driver put the car into park. This is what Jesus means by "alert." Ready to go.

What these alert servants in the parable receive is a blessing from their master and a tasty snack. Their master waits on them. This really disturbs me. Masters are not supposed to wait on servants, least of all returning masters. Servants are supposed to meet the master at the door, take his coat, hand him his slippers and robe, give him a mug of warm milk, turn down the covers and put the newspaper next to him. Is this what the kingdom of God is going to be like? Jesus is going to wait on us? I guess so. If he finds us alert when he comes. As in, if he finds us ready.

Well then, just how ready do we need to be? This is the sort of question a person asks when there is only a limited amount of something, and that something needs to be parceled out--rationed, divvied up to cover all the bases. It's the sort of question civil defense authorities ask when allocating funding. The sort of question water resource people ask to balance endangered fish species with farm economies. The sort of question over-extended folks ask when putting something on their calendar. The sort of question dying churches ask in struggling to keep their doors open just a little bit longer. How ready do we need to be? Ready - for what?

"Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." "How much" is not the kind of question we need to ask about the kingdom. It pleases God to give us everything. Everything - the whole kingdom. To prove his point, Jesus says, "sell everything, give it away, then make purses." Purses?! You just gave everything away! Jesus' anti-stewardship campaign statement says, "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Not, "give where your heart is," but "where your stuff is, your heart follows." Your stuff brings your heart along.

My spiritual director has been trying to help me expand my prayer life. I am a very slow learner, but she is patient. The last time we got together, she gave me an assignment. "Two or three times a week," she told me, "spend your quiet time in a beautiful place and just pray. Do not read prepared prayers or meditations, do not read your Bible, do not journal. Just pray." That's harder than you think! I saw the wisdom in "spend your quiet time in a beautiful place" one morning when I prayed in the house. As I sat quietly in God's presence, my eyes happened to fall on my work area. I began to think about how to re-arrange the desk to be a more effective workspace. Then I looked up and saw a picture needing straightening, spider webs to dust. My to-do list grew longer and longer. This was not prayer. This was "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." My treasure was what I do and how I do it. My heart was involved in "doing," not in "being" with my God. A sobering lesson.

This week, Kathy Scott, acting as webmaster for my home presbytery in Wisconsin, sent me a sermon written by one of my friends. Glen preached to John Knox Presbytery about the kingdom of God being like a banquet, and he illustrated his sermon by talking about his ministry at Port St Vincent, a homeless shelter for men in Madison. Actually, Glen talked about his faith journey in ministering to and eventually with poor people. He says that as he first moved from a wealthy Chicago suburb to the world of poor people, he struggled with guilt. "I have so much, they have so little," he thought. Eventually he realized that he was working with real people, and that their circumstances were different from each other, but that this was within God's providence. Later, he says, God brought him to the point which Henri Nouwen calls "solidarity" with the poor. Without realizing how, Glen began to see that what happens to the men at the Port affects him. From being held hostage by his guilt, to being freed up to do God's work without guilt strings attached, he came to a place where he was connected to the people he was serving. This is what Jesus is talking about when he says, "Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven." This is the spiritual freedom that comes from generosity. When you are generous your heart follows your treasure. Your "treasure" brings your heart to the kingdom of God, to the very heart of God.

This is why the lectionary committee kept together these two continuous pieces of Luke's gospel. They could have just given us parables about readiness, about being alert for the kingdom of God. That would have made Jesus' point about the coming of the Son of Man and the kingdom of God. But we would have been left at negotiations--"How ready? How alert?" Without generosity, our treasure stays in the here and now, therefore our hearts stay in the here and now. Then we are forced to ask the kind of questions people ask when they think there isn't enough - "How much? How ready?" When we trust the providence of God enough to give freely and generously, we are freed from the anxieties that wear us down. Because, of course, anxiety keeps us from being alert to the coming kingdom. We don't need to ask "how" ready when our attention is focused on the coming of the kingdom. May God give us all generous hearts.