The Sacrament of the Present Moment

The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, 11/12/23

Readings: Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25 (Stop worshipping old gods), 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 (On the resurrection of the dead), Matthew 25:1-13 (Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids)

Last week I prepared an activity on contemplative prayer for the youth in our EYC group. My idea was to have all of us gather here in the nave on the eve of All Saints week, dim the lights, put on Gregorian chant, to invite our youth into a space of quiet contemplation in the hope that we might carve out time in our chaotic lives to simply be still, listen, and be present to God’s loving presence in our midst. The coup de grace of this contemplative moment was that we were going to light the thurible – our liturgical incense burner – and experience how the smoke, rising up like our prayers, can help prepare us for a bodily encounter with the divine.

I was very excited to share with our youth how, in our tradition, we experience God not just as some transcendent and remote being, but as a God who comes to us in the present moment, through our senses. The Anglican tradition is replete with this theology of embodied encounter. At any given worship service, we are likely to encounter holiness through all five senses. We hear God’s praises sung through organ and song, we see the beauty of God in this space, in stained glass windows, we feel the tenderness of God in a handshake or embrace with our neighbor, we smell God’s sweetness in the candles and incense, and finally we taste God’s love in the broken body and blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

With fifteen minutes before the youth’s arrival, I excitedly buttoned up my cassock and went to light the thurible. However, when I arrived in the sacristy, I realized that despite several days of planning this exercise, I had overlooked one critical detail: the coals were nowhere to be found. And as we all know, there can be no smoke without fire. So after a brief moment of panic, I remembered the sage liturgical advice of one of my seminary professors who told us that if you ever find yourself in such a bind, the same charcoal brickettes that we use for the thurible can typically be found at your local tobacco shop. With just moments to go, I rushed to my car and hurried over to a tobacconist that I passed every day on my morning commute. As I pulled into the seedy parking lot beneath garish neon lights, I tried to reassure myself by thinking that this was the kind of place that Jesus would hang out, right? So I took a deep breath, and walked through the doors, still wearing, mind you, a full length cassock and collar.

As I walked up to the register, the clerk and a customer who had been engaged in a lighthearted conversation, quickly fell silent and stared, probably wondering which of us should feel more embarrassed. Generously, he broke the silence and said with a grin and said: “Need a pack of smokes, father?” To which I replied, “well, kind of.” He graciously assisted me with my purchase and I scurried back over to the church with my coals and our contemplative exercise that evening was a stunning success. The youth learned how to be more fully present to God’s presence, and I learned that adequate preparation is everything, and that from time to time, even vice can be a means of providence.

In today’s Gospel lesson Jesus tells his disciples a similar story in the parable of the bridesmaids. In this parable, ten bridesmaids, or wedding attendants, are excitedly preparing for the arrival of the bridegroom and the commencement of a joyous wedding celebration. Five of these bridesmaids have come prepared. They brought their lamps and flasks of oil to keep them lighted throughout the nighttime vigil. The other five bridesmaids, much like myself, had brought ample enthusiasm for the momentous encounter that was to come, but had been less scrupulous in their planning. They brought their lamps, but in their excitement had completely forgotten that lamps need oil to fulfil their intended function. And with no late-night convenience store available to remedy their predicament, these bridesmaids found themselves unprepared and so were unable to experience the full poignancy of the occasion that they had been so eager to attend.

In Christian tradition this parable has long been interpreted as a cautionary tale about the importance of cultivating spiritual readiness to encounter our Lord at any given moment. This is a lesson that I believe this community understands well. First of all, because you are here. You set your alarms this morning, set your clocks forward last week, dressed yourselves, and made it from your homes to gather together in the presence of God as we celebrate His real presence with us in this Holy Eucharist. Second of all, many of you, in fact all of you, have had some role in preparation for God’s presence with us, either through altar guild, singing in choir, serving as an usher, lector, or acolyte, or even just being present to God’s presence here with us. Whatever you are doing this morning, even if it is simply showing up with a willing heart, you have played a critical role in our preparation to receive God in this heavenly banquet.

So rather than lecturing to you about the importance of preparation and readiness to encounter God, I would like to draw our attention to the ways that preparation itself can be a spiritual practice and an opportunity to encounter God who is ever with us.

The reality is that the majority of our lives are spent in preparation. Whether in school or at work or at home, we are often busying ourselves for something that feels more significant on the horizon. Perhaps it’s getting into the best college, or getting the best job, or preparing for a trip, wedding, retirement, or the birth of a child. Regardless of what it is that we are preparing for, it can be hard to escape the feeling that what we are doing now is simply a holding pattern until we reach whatever horizon we are working towards. Then, once we reach it, we can finally be fully content.

But friends, as I’m sure you already know, once you do reach whatever goal you are currently working towards, there is bound to be another one waiting for you, and the cycle of preparation repeats itself. If we were to read the parable of the bridesmaids at face value, even the bridesmaids who came prepared for the wedding banquet would have to find something else to do once the wedding was over.

But this parable is not merely about accomplishing an endless and changing sequence of tasks until we can finally rest in the eternal changelessness of God. There is more that we can do until that time to cultivate a sense of God’s presence with us during the seemingly mundane passages of our life’s journey.

An 18th century Jesuit priest named Jean Pierre de Caussade wrote beautifully about what he described as the Sacrament of the Present Moment. He presciently sensed that early modern society was moving towards an unhealthy obsession with busyness and sought to remedy our spiritual restlessness by drawing us back to an awareness that God is the center and ground of our being. And there is no better time or place to return to that center in God than in the midst of our busy lives. Caussade wrote that if we are to successfully counter the forces seek to distract us from the truth of our belovedness by God, we must begin by “embrac[ing] the present moment as an ever-flowing source of holiness.” Rather than looking to some far-off horizon for hope and contentment, we can begin our experience of contentment in God in the here and now, no matter what we are doing.

The very fact that Jesus came to his disciples outside of the synagogue and accompanied them as they worked, prepared, and rested is a testament to God’s desire to make holy the things that are mundane. Caussade wished to remind us that our daily routines can themselves become acts of devotion if we can just manage to cultivate an awareness of God’s presence with us as we undertake them. We can begin to do this through simple things, such as giving thanks to God for the new day that is given to us when we wake. Then, throughout the day, we can take moments to pause and remember that God is present with us no matter what you are doing. You can even set reminders on your phone to do this if you need to! 

Each moment given to us is sacramental, it is an opportunity to open ourselves up to the presence of God’s loving presence alongside us. This week I invite you into this practice of becoming more attuned to the Sacrament of the Present moment, even while you set yourselves to tasks that do not feel particularly prayerful. Whether you are preparing a meal, entering numbers on a spreadsheet, or scurrying off to complete some task that you forgot to do earlier, each of these moments is an opportunity to remember that God is with us in all that we do, and in all that we do we are blessed with the Sacrament of God’s abiding love, should we just take the time to recognize and receive it. Amen.