What makes something worth waiting for?

Homily

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time A

8 November 2020

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG +JMJ +m

Life is a whole lot of waiting, and watching, and preparing.  It sounds, boring I know, but it's not.  Life is worth living! Yet this is the way things are.  If I am bad at watching and waiting and preparing, I am bad at life.  For life is less about making things happen, and more about being ready for the pivotal moments of life that are about to come.

These crucial moments of my story will surely come.  They always do.  It might seem as if they are delayed, like nothing is going on, but the moments won't be late.  If all I do in life is grab what fast, cheap and easy, I'll miss these moments that change everything.  I

What must I be most ready for?  Today's Gospel parable is crystal clear.  God wants to be married to me.  God is coming for me, to be married to me.  It's going to happen!  Am I ready?   I am watching and waiting and preparing for the coming of the bridegroom.

What makes something worth waiting for?  I hate to beg this week's pivotal question, but I must.  The things that are worth waiting for are the things that take time.  We value most the things that take the longest to develop.  Valuable things, like relationships, are valuable precisely because they take time.  Try rushing a relationship, and let me know how that is working for you.  It can't work.  It won't work.  Love is spelled T-I-M-E.  Show me your schedule, and I will tell you what you love.

What about marriage then? What makes it worth waiting for?  The scriptures propose marriage to God as the ultimate destiny of every person.  The readings today are dripping with nuptial invitations.  Wisdom is desperately searching for a husband in today's first reading, for someone who might be watching, and waiting and worthy of her.

St. Paul talks about the bodies of our loved ones waiting in patient hope in the ground for the day of resurrection, the day of ultimate consummation of creation's marriage with God. Death, like life, is a whole lot of waiting. This month especially we watch, and wait and pray with the names of our beloved written in our chapel book of the dead.

Finally, there's more wedding talk in the Gospel.  The parable present marriage as a waiting game.  The bride, through her maidens, is waiting for the groom to come down the aisle, as it were.  This might seem strange at first, until we remember how slow guys are at relationships, and how hesitant they are to commit.

Yet hopeful and ready waiting pays off in spades in the parable, just as it will for you.  Those who choose fast, cheap and easy, who think marriage won't take much time, are the fools.

Don't be a fool!  Be ready for your marriage to God, the ultimate invitation of your life.  Almost everyone likes a fast Mass, including me.  I like everything as fast as possible.  Yet the Mass doesn't work like that. Life doesn't work like that.  Love doesn't work like that.  This nuptial banquet takes time to reach fulfillment, both in me and in its destiny to marry the world to God is a single and true communion.  The question of this Mass is not how long it lasts, but whether I have oil in my lamp.

Do I spell love T-I-M-E?   Do I realize that  God will surely come to be married to me?
Am I ready?  Do I recognize this crucial moment lies at the heart of everything, that marriage takes time, and that it's worth waiting for?