I’m always envious of people who can carry on a conversation, attend to peoples’ comfort and still remember how many spices to put in the turkey dressing? I wonder if that is a skill that is learned or will I be embarrassed for the rest of my life watching other people casually go about a multitude of their daily chores without missing a beat?

Ah, but I have accomplished one surprising “multi-task.” Each morning as I begin my hour on the treadmill, I first crank up my I Pod filled with good jazz and strap it to my ears. Hey, it works and makes the time go faster too; at least it seems so. Exercise and entertainment all in one; you can’t beat that.

Now given those mundane remarks, let me say that you will find some comparisons in the gospel for this 19th Sunday in ordinary to this problem of “multi-tasking.” Actually, Jesus is suggesting to the folks listening to him that it is always wise to be prepared at the very moment God seems to be calling us to some daily task. “Tighten your belt” he says “and have your lamp lit and ready at hand when the Lord calls.” (loosely translated!)

The point that Jesus is making is that God can call us at any time of the day or night with some important issue to attend to.

Now, do not be alarmed or imagine that some day you may hear God’s voice at the other end of the telephone line. Obviously, it does not happen that way. Believe me, however, when I say that I have heard what I thought was God’s voice coming at me in some ordinary daily experience. For instance, the very evening as I am writing this, a friend of mine called to say that his wife had only a few weeks more to live. She is battling cancer. There were tears in his voice and he simply wanted to talk in order to take away his feelings of sadness and desperation. He lives many miles distant from where I live and there is no way I could have just packed up and drove to see him. The telephone would have to do. We spent over a half hour in conversation. Actually, I listened mostly, but that was enough. God calling?

Now, obviously, I could have simply not answered the phone and gone on finishing this piece of writing. But as it turned out, that half hour on the phone was a sign of God’s grace for both of us.

In other cases, folks just want to chat, but there must be a reason why they want to do that. There may be some bit of news they want to share or a problem they want to explore. So, in such instances we simply “tighten the belt, light the lamp” and listen.
So, you see, in cases like that, we set “multi-tasking” aside and pay attention to the matter at hand.

I can also remember many instances in my life when I happened to be busy about something and suddenly some event in nature suddenly overwhelmed me: a sunset or sunrise, a fierce thunder storm, a sudden lightning bolt or simply something that makes one stop and say, “wow, how can that be?”

The point to all this is to say that “God experiences” happen at any time, in any place and perhaps when we are totally involved in something that we feel we can’t put down. Of course, unless we put it aside, we may be missing an experience of the divine clothed in human dress.

One thing we know for certain as we read the gospels. Jesus was an acute observer of nature and of human habits. How often he would stop and point out some purely natural earthly phenomenon and say, for instance: “See the birds of the air or the flowers in the field.” They do not “multi-task;” they simply do what they are created to do and nothing else.

A momentary aside here regarding what Jesus refers to as the “coming of God’s kingdom.” At the time of Jesus there was a strong notion that the end of Roman domination was very near. A (the) Messiah would come and restore Israel to its ancient status. Interestingly, people at that time imagined that Jesus was the coming Messiah and that he would restore the kingdom to Israel.

Jesus, of course, refused such kingship and insisted that the kingdom of God was already among them, that God could be experienced in many, many different ways simply by being alert, by having one’s belt tightened and a lamp ready to light the way.

What Jesus is talking about in these lines, therefore, is what he calls the kingdom of God within you, those experiences in this world that remind us that God is calling for attention. The sacred is always experienced through the human, the natural, the physical, the worldly, and the historical.

Yet, it is often difficult to notice the coming kingdom, the divine experience because it seems so ordinary, and it happens precisely when some other issue has our full attention.

Given all that I we will need to learn to be more perceptive regarding ordinary matters that happen around us. Some day we may be absolutely overwhelmed by what we notice and discover that it was all grace; everything is grace, or, as Jesus would say: “Be prepared for the kingdom of God is near, even at your very door step” or at the other end of the telephone line!

The scriptures : Wisdom 18: 6-9; Hebrews 11: 1-2, 8-19; Luke 12: 35-40