The Hour is Coming, The Reverend David R. Williams, Lent V--Year B--April 2, 2006

They want to see Jesus.  The Greeks, the disciples, you and me – we want to see Jesus. Jesus is a little testy.  We are not sure why.
 
“The Hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified…” Jesus says.
 
“What hour?” We ask.  “What is Jesus talking about? Where?”
 
A holy man sits in a Church courtyard writing in a book.  “I approach the Holy Man,” Theophane writes in Tales of a Magic Monastery.
 
“He looks so holy that I simply ask him, ‘Tell me what God is like.’
 
With feather gentleness the holy man replies, ‘It is Lent now.  I’m accustomed to refrain from talking during Lent.  But take this book (it was the book he had been writing in). If you read this at the right hour, it will tell you what God is like.’
I couldn’t wait to bring the book back and share it with my wife. Back home, she was a little less excited than I about the book, because her mind was on our first child that she was carrying.  ‘What did he mean by at the right hour? She asks.
I didn’t know.  We begin to speculate.  Maybe at noon on Good Friday.  Maybe after the Easter Vigil. Maybe at the moment when we are in deep distress.  Perhaps we should wait for God to reveal to us the right hour.  It might even be years from now.  We decide we shall wait for a sign.”
 
“The hour has come,” Jesus says.  On this the fifth Sunday of Lent, we know Holy Week is approaching.  Holy Week means palms and parades.  It also means the Passion: a trial, crowds of people yelling, the dreaded Cross, and death.
 
What hour has come for us?
 
Jeremiah reminds us of covenant – that bond between God and humanity; between God and us.  Speaking to an exiled nation, he points to a very different kind of covenant – one etched not in stones, but in our hearts.
 
We reflect for a moment on other “covenants” – amended promises God has made with us.  God obviously loves us, his creation.  God gave us a rainbow way back when the world was flooded and Noah began a new relationship.  Abram and Sarai were given new names as signs of an amended covenant with God – a promise moving the family of God into future generations.  The Ten Commandments, etched in stone and given to Moses as the next major covenant amendment.  The statue of a bronze snake was the most unusual symbol of God’s covenant reminding us of God’s relationship with us even in the darkest images of creation.
 
What we are realizing once again through the Covenants of the past and the anticipation of something new is that we are on a journey.
 
Now Jeremiah points us to a new covenant – one, completely different.  Jesus says, “The hour has come.”
 
Today we commission and send forth twelve special “pilgrims”.  Our Journey to Adulthood students and their class leaders soon embark on a long-anticipated and quite special journey.  They will travel to Ireland and live among sacred places visited for centuries by Christian and other religious pilgrims.
 
A pilgrim is not on a mission trip of digging holes, hammering nails and painting dilapidated homes. In time, if a pilgrim searches and travels honestly with an open heart, a pilgrim becomes the best and most proficient of all missionaries.    A pilgrim is not a traditional tourist, waiting for a guide or leader or a place to entertain.
 
On a pilgrimage, the weather can be disappointing and lousy.  Our pilgrims from Holy Comforter may have some cold days in Ireland – cold and rainy.  Weather will not affect the hunger and desire of a pilgrim in search of the Sacred, at the right hour.
 
A pilgrim has an open heart to God’s Holy Presence. A pilgrim is ready, attuned to the hour of The Holiness.
 
On recent pilgrimages, I constantly felt as if I was two or three days behind any realization of the   sacred discoveries of my journey.  I would wake up in the middle of the night and say, “Wow! I cannot believe what I saw two days ago…. a cross, a mound, a hillside, a ruin.”  And I would get out my journal and begin to write.
 
On one of the days of pilgrimage our guide, The Rev. Marcus Lozack (the guide as well for our youth pilgrims) had our bus drive up to what appeared to be just an old cemetery.  It was pouring down rain.  Marcus began to tell us about a High Cross in this cemetery, one carved and placed here 1500 years ago.
 
We thought that, because of the rain, Marcus could tell us about the cross from the bus and we could view it from the bus window
 
“Out of the bus”, he says. “We are pilgrims. This is a cross that must be touched if it is to be really seen.”
 
Later, I thought of all we’d have missed by not venturing out into the chilly rain. Marcus took us into the history of this incredible sacred icon, showing us the Creation story carved in the foot and up the sides of the cross. As we looked to the very top of the cross we not only saw images of  the Resurrection but were blessed by the refreshing holy waters of God’s natural rains – trickling down our foreheads.
 
The Hour has come.
 
Henri Nouwen, a Catholic Monk and prolific writer of spirituality, says that we go on journeys in search of that which already exists in our hearts and souls.  “We were innocent before we started feeling guilty; we were in the light before we entered the darkness; we were home before we started to search for home.  Deep in the recesses of our minds and hearts lies hidden the treasure we seek.  We know its preciousness and we know that it holds the gift we most desire: a life stronger than death,” Nouwen says.
 
“’Two weeks later, my first son was born,” Theophane continues. ‘How can I tell you what it        was like? First the worry, then – that child.  I was a father.  You grow up when you become a father. When I looked at that child I was so proud. I knew I was somebody.  And yet humbled.  I scarcely knew how to hold him, much less bring him up.  I used to think I had it all figured out, but that kid was bigger than I.
 
That night the child, my baby, appeared to me in a dream.  ‘What is god like?’ he asks.
 
That did it.  I get up and reach for the book.  I bring it to my wife and tell her, ‘This is the right hour.  We’ll open it now.’
 
I open the book at random.  I read, ‘It’s very simple.  God is a father.’ My wife opens it again.  She reads, ‘It’s very simple.  God becomes a little child.’  ‘Let’s open it again, ‘ I cry.  ‘Together’.  I take her hand.  She opens it, and we read.  ‘It’s very simple. Each breath you breathe is the breath of God.’”
 
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” Jesus says.
 
We send our pilgrims on a special journey this week. We all are on a journey of some kind, seeking the amended covenants of a loving God.
 
St. Francis of Assisi once said, “Did the Lord’s flock actually follow him in tribulations and persecutions and hunger, sickness and trial and all the rest, and thereby receive eternal life from the Lord?  What a great shame, then, that while the saints actually followed in the footsteps of the Lord, we, today’s servants of God, expect glory and honor simply because we can recite what they did.”
 
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”  The journey continues.
 
Amen.