One of the activities I get the pleasure of leading for teens at the Gering Library is a Dungeons and Dragons Group. For those who’ve never played it, D&D is a tabletop roleplaying game, which essentially means that it is a mixture of acting and boardgames. Each player has a character that they either create or are assigned. The characters then form a party and are given a quest to complete by the Dungeon Master. It is the Dungeon Master that has the biggest responsibility in the game. He or she guides the action of the players and has to react to whatever random actions the players decide to do during the game.

For the teens at Gering Library, I serve as one of the Dungeon Masters. It’s a challenging role, but also a very fun opportunity to be creative. As I’ve filled this role more, I’ve discovered a couple of things that make a big difference for me when trying to direct play toward the goal I’m trying to reach. The first is getting to know the players and how they use their characters. And the second is being prepared. It’s that second part that is the real key to being a Dungeon Master. The more prepared you are for the adventure, the easier it is to adjust on the fly.

That was put to the test for me this week. The travelling party in the game I was DMing had been captured, tied to chairs, and tossed into the dungeon. One of the teens made the reasonable decision to have her character attempt to grab her dagger and cut through the ropes entangling her. One of the other teens took a very different tactic and had his character lick the ropes wrapped around one of the other characters. Believe it or not, I hadn’t prepared for that scenario. What complicated it even more was that he rolled a 20 for the action. If you don’t know what that means, let me simply say that rolling a 20 on a 20-sided die when doing anything in D&D will almost assuredly make that action successful. Roll a 20 to attack, and you are sure to hit. Roll a 20 to uncover hidden traps, and you will see them all. All my preparations had not prepared me for a roll of 20 on licking.

That might sound like a ridiculous scenario that would only ever happen in a teen D&D campaign. But don’t crazy, weird things happen like that in life every day? Maybe it’s just me.

I don’t mind a good surprise every now and then, but I am also someone who deeply desires routine. That’s why I decided to be a pastor. I wanted a simple, predictable schedule. On a side note, just so you know, I’ve scheduled all of the baptisms, marriages, and funerals for the next 5 years, so check in with me if you want to know if you’re on the schedule for any of those. I’m being sarcastic, of course. Life, for a pastor or for most any other profession really, is rarely predictable. Routines are made to be broken.

How do we prepare then, if we can’t ever count on our routines? How can we truly be prepared for things that we could hardly even imagine let alone predict? These are the questions that I began to ask myself as I studied Jesus’ words in Luke 12 for this morning. Jesus begins this section by talking to his disciples, his “little flock,” and implores them to not be afraid because God desires to give them the kingdom. This comes right after Jesus tells them not to worry about food or clothes or anything because, if you strive for God’s kingdom, those things will be given to you as well. In other words, don’t worry about the day-to-day stuff and focus on the bigger picture. In fact, Jesus goes so far as to tell them to sell all of their possessions and give alms to the poor. Don’t worry about money because it can be stolen or lost or destroyed. Instead, Jesus says “make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Then Jesus turns to a discussion about readiness, and in doing so, uses two illustrations. First, he talks about slaves waiting for their master after a wedding banquet. Jesus says, “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.” Waiting for someone to return from a wedding reception may not seem like that big of a deal to us today, but wedding feasts in Jesus’ day could last up to a week. Their master could have come back home any time during that week. Those slaves had to be ready and alert for the entire week. But Jesus says that “Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes.”

Jesus’ second illustration talks about a thief and a home owner. Jesus says, “But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into.” When I first read through this section of Luke in preparation for this sermon, it was this part that I got stuck on. Specifically, I got caught up in Jesus’s use of the word thief here. If you remember, Jesus talked about a thief earlier in the passage as well. In that first context, he was talking about protecting against the thief who comes to steal your treasure. Here, at the end of the passage, Jesus is talking about being prepared for a thief coming, which he then equates with preparing for the coming of the Son of Man. I got stuck because it felt like the Son of Man was being equated to a thief. Once I was able to push past that, I realized that the comparison here is not so much about the thief and the Son of Man, but about the preparations done for each.

I think that is really the question about this statement by Jesus. How do we prepare for the Son of Man to come? If we prepare like the slaves waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, we could surmise that the wait will be long and will require some patience and alertness. If we prepare like the owner of the house, we might lock our door or get a motion light or rig up booby traps ala Kevin McCallister in Home Alone. The problem in both scenarios is that we don’t know when the person is coming. We can’t predict the future. Jesus says that IF the owner had known when the thief was coming he could have protected his house. That IF tells us that he probably didn’t know when the thief was coming and is probably missing his brand new watch and flat screen television.

So, how do we prepare for the unpredictable? How do we get ready for something that is coming at an unexpected time? Jesus tells us two things. He says, “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit.” Two simple pieces of instruction, but how do they apply to being ready for Jesus’ coming?

“Be dressed for action.” My kids used to love the show “Jessie” on the Disney Channel. They still occasionally go back and watch it. On that show, one of the characters, Stuart Wooten, is always needing to change into different pants to fit the situation that he finds himself in. Throughout the show, he talks about having: comedy pants, monkey bar pants, playground pants, dinner pants, surgery pants, and pilgrim pants. This is, of course, meant for humor, but it speaks a bit to Jesus’ instruction for us in this passage to “be dressed for action.” What “pants” do we need at the ready for when Jesus comes? The pants of love? Compassion? Service to others? Jesus talks in the gospel of Matthew about separating the sheep from the goats when he comes. The sheep are those who have cared for the hungry and thirsty, those who have visited the sick and those in prison, and those who clothed the naked. Jesus says that those who have done those things for the least of these have done them for him.

Jesus also instructs us to have our lamps lit. When I was a kid, I always slept with a nightlight in my room. I wanted to be sure that if I woke up in the night that I could see if there were any monsters or robbers or anything in my room so I could either hide or run. Nowadays, we block out as much light to our room as possible to try to keep from being woken in the night by lights outside. What that means, though, is that when my dogs decide they need to get up in the middle of the night, I can’t really see my way to the door very well. That has led to running into walls and doors on occasion, or smacking my knees and shins on the foot board of our bed or on other objects strewn about our room for the sole purpose of injuring me when I’m walking through the dark. Having our lamps lit allows us to see where we are going and what might be in the way.

To be dressed for action with our lamps lit means simply to be ready to go when Jesus calls. That doesn’t mean we won’t be caught off guard or sleeping. It doesn’t mean that we will be perfect in our preparation. Like the home owner, it would be great to know when Jesus is coming so we can be fully ready for him. But the reality is that we don’t know, so we need to be as ready as we can. I keep my cell phone by my bed, so that if I wake up in the dark at night, I can grab it to provide a little light to see myself safely out of the room. We can’t completely prepare for the unpredictable, so all we can do is set ourselves up the best we can for any scenario. We can have our picnic pants ready in case  someone invites us to a spontaneous picnic lunch. We can have our monkey bar pants primed for action should a set of monkey bars call our names. We’ll never be fully prepared, but I think Jesus knows that and is simply telling us to be as ready as we can be, so that when he comes we can enjoy the blessings he offers. Amen.