Being Awake and Serving God - More on the Theology of Tennis

Jesus says, "Keep Awake!", but this section of scripture always seems a little threatening to me, like that bumper sticker that says, “Jesus is coming soon, look busy!” It rings a wrong number because, I think, the wakefulness Jesus’s looking for is not anxiety, but the alertness of a ready friend, someone prepared and ready to take the opportunity, like a seasoned dancer or a trained athlete. So I want to tell you about my theology of tennis as a model for good discipleship.

 It’s been almost twenty years since I was on a court, but I played tennis most of my life and, growing up, since I wasn’t raised in a church, the local tennis club served the purpose of a community with a shared purpose. It provided a place for both discipline and joy, a safe haven for me and my family to go to meet the world. I played a lot as a kid and in my early teens, but when I was in my mid-teens I decided I didn’t like practicing that much. And I needed to practice: I tried percentage shots that didn’t pay off, I had a tendency to lose focus and I got too tight when the score was against me. But I decided I didn’t like tennis that much.

But in my late twenties, one summer when I was leaving my job and preparing to return to University, a friend and I spent two or three evenings a week as well as most Saturday mornings working on our game. We even had private lessons back to back so that we could work on our weak areas together. By the end of the summer when I returned to Uni, my game was better, more consistent and disciplined — and I was surprised to realise that my whole life was better as well: better physically, mentally, even spiritually.

So a few years later when I was studying religion I wrote a paper on a theology of tennis called “Serving God,” subtitled “ways to serve, receive and return bright vehicles of meaning.”

And that’s what I remembered when I saw the Gospel for today, where Jesus calls the bridesmaids to be disciplined, alert and ready when he comes; prepared, ready for action, like intimate friends, like good athletes, to serve, receive, return, all the bright opportunities, that come in living in love with the possibility, the promise, the hope of God. That is why we’re here, to prepare ourselves for the great heavenly wedding banquet which just might, by the grace of God, start right here and now.

Like a good tennis lesson, our liturgy is a kind of practice session in stretching out and moving into, exercising, the actions and motions of belief. It’s a kind of dancing lessons! We can forget this, but visitors and newcomers always see how very odd it is. We sit, stand, kneel and bow, some of us cross ourselves this way and that, we pass and give and receive, we move forward and back. Finally we return to the same place, but changed, somehow, by the motions we go through. You can see newcomers looking around, thinking, “What in God’s name are they going to do next?”  But what we are doing is actually a rehearsal routine for the rest of our lives in the rest of the world.

For if you really look, you can see our whole liturgy, from Baptism on, really is a lot like a tennis lesson or a dancing class where we come to move in the world with the God in whom we live and move and have our being. In the end, it is all about the we way we prepare, wait, serve, respond, return: and those are the actions that we learn here.

We come to church on Sunday, bringing all our particular questions and concerns, issues and ideas, histories, hopes and fears, the best and worst of who and what we are, where we come from and where we are going. We take all that when we get here and we mix it up with this liturgy of confession and praise, mercy and glory, in listening and responding to the words in psalm and scripture, the articulation of the community of faith gathered through history into the present day. And this changes everything.

We present our sins, our concerns, our thanksgivings, all our self-offerings: and then join with Jesus in his self-offering as disciples and friends, becoming in this eternal communion. Taking all that we have and all that we are, and giving it all over, giving it all up to  receive his body and blood, to remember that we are members of his body. To paraphrase St Augustine, “This is what we do: this is who we are.”

That’s how faith moves in the heavenly courts, in one simple and elegant motion. We come to reach for Christ; and Christ comes to us and uses our ministry to reach out to the world. We come to get a grip on him; and we stay to learn to hand him to the world and hand the world back to him. All in one motion. For the hands which meet the body and blood of Christ here, are the same hands — same body — that touch the world in daily life in the places where we make business, peace, war and love, touch the lives of friends and strangers, spend our days. In one motion of outpouring love God in Christ reaches into the particulars of all our daily liturgies so that we come to move like Christ, like love, in all these places.

Every one of our ministries happen when we serve, receive, and return God’s love. Every one! It doesn’t matter whether it’s throwing a ball, cooking a meal, writing a paper, fixing a fixture, applying an appliance, telling a tale or doing a deed. We join in ministry, with Christ when we  lovingly to share the world we know well, sharing that clarity and light with  others, so that they know themselves to be part in that relationship, that action, that clarity and light as well. And it can happen everywhere! Some people heal with kindness, others love the stranger, others listen well. Some make justice, visit the sick, give to the poor, live cheerfully, tell the truth. Sometimes we can just barely show up, but we do what we can.

It happens anywhere we act out, serve out, flesh out, live out the reconciling life of Jesus in the ministry of acceptance, love, and forgiveness. For that is the liturgy, these are the places and the actions where we both find and serve the very God who loves and serves us. To paraphrase St Augustine one more time, “This is what we do: this is who we are.”

May the Spirit give us breath this morning to joyfully take up our lives and our ministries as God’s gifts to be received and God’s gifts to be given, and we pray all this in Christ’s name. Amen.