People Get Ready
Stay awake! Keep watch! Get Ready!
Back in 1990 I had these sayings painted on florescent cardboard placards so I could use them in a clown sketch for Advent. It was a response to the challenge from Jesus to be ready for the BIG DAY of his return, as outlined in Matthew 24. (See the previous post). The placards sat behind the piano for years afterwards. My 17 year old son told me this last weekend that he’s had those phrases in his head all that time because of the constant reminders peeking out from behind the piano!
Another reminder to be alert (the world needs more lerts!) comes from the song written by Curtis Mayfield in the mid sixties. Mayfield was inspired by the work and speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. In that famous Washington speech in 1963 people around the world were challenged to get ready for a world that would look differently. No longer would racism be the norm. Instead boys and girls would grow up no longer basing their friendships with each other on the colour of their skin.
And so… Curtis gives us the words of “People Get Ready”.
“People get ready, there’s a train a’coming
You don’t no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear those diesels humming
You don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord”
Curtis’ song goes on with the sense of a joining a coast-to-coast movement that will be marked by loving and not selfishness. There’s an excellent radio interview with Curtis on the NPR web site prepared for the 40th anniversary of the 1963 Washington March.
‘People Get Ready’. That’s the gospel I hear resounding in Jesus’ words. We don’t know when we’ll be called to action. We don’t know when we’ll encounter Jesus in the lives of prophets, poets, activists. We don’t know the hour or the day when we’ll be facing our ultimate crises of faith and action - turning points that change our world. So we need to prepare ourselves.
This summer I’m focusing on preparing my own kids for living by themselves or with others. They’re picking up some of the disciplines of cooking, keeping house and finding their way around with public transport. One day they’ll need to daily call on all the skills they’re developing now. That’s the kind of challenge Jesus gives us. The way of life we develop now will make a difference to the way we face our crises in the future. The decisions we make each day will nurture in us the character we’ll need as face the big day, whatever that might be.
What do I think about the possibility that Jesus will return in a big showdown style arrival on Earth? Will he come to wind the whole cosmos up? I’m not a betting person. And I’m with Jesus in not trying to predict the end every time I see some evidence of disaster or ‘one world government’. I remember reading a Christianity Today article in the 1980s outlining the dawning realisation among conservative evangelicals that we could be on earth another thousand years. That gave credence to the phrase, “Plan as though we’ll be here another thousand years, live as though we might be gone tomorrow”. That article named for me my own changing mindset. I’d gone through Hal Lindsay’s “Late Great Planet Earth” as an impressionable teenager. And now I was starting to put roots down in to the future of the planet.
Now, I’m happy to keep the ‘return of Christ’ in my vocabulary and in my consciousness. But more immediately I’m aware of the 21st century crises I’m encountering that give me the chance to help ‘write history’ with other people in the Christian movement. I’m happy to be part of the gospel movement, on board Jesus’ global and cosmic gospel train.
