A good meal. A meaningful conversation. A lovely afternoon in the park.

Perfect moments.

That’s what a man named Eugene O’Kelly began to seek after he was diagnosed with brain cancer. At age 53, he seemed to be in excellent health, traveling and working long hours as chairman and chief executive of a giant accounting firm. But then a visit to his doctor revealed that he had an aggressive brain cancer that would kill him in a hundred days.

So, what do you do when you receive such devastating news? Think about what you would do. “I had focused on building and planning for the future,” said Mr. O’Kelly. “Now I would have to learn the true value of the present.”

The true value of the present.

Being a goal-oriented, Type-A high-achiever, he decided to write a book about his experience — it’s called Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life. I’m grateful to Nancy Kay for giving me an article about the book. We can be glad O’Kelly wrote this book, because he is a man of faith who gives us some valuable advice about preparing for the end of our days. He decides to “unwind” relationships with important people in his life, taking the time to have intentionally final conversations with those who have meant a great deal to him.

He also goes searching for “Perfect Moments” — times of lingering over a fine meal, enjoying a long and deep conversation, taking the time to soak up the beauty of nature over the course of an afternoon. “I marveled at how many Perfect Moments I was having now,” he writes in his book.

Eugene O’Kelly didn’t have much time, so he had to get it right. In many ways he did, turning ordinary experiences into Perfect Moments. Then he died, reports The New York Times, just as his doctors predicted.

The end is coming for every one of us — for you, for me, for every person in this room. But so often we behave as though we are going to live forever. What does it mean for us to live with the end in mind, and learn the true value of the present?

Our Christian faith is full of reminders that life has a start and a finish — it is grounded in the conviction that there is meaning in the movement from beginning to end. For starters, our church year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, and then moves through celebrations of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus until we get to the last Sunday of the church year, which is today — Christ the King Sunday.

Our Bible is not a random collection of stories, but it moves in a meaningful way from the creation of the world in Genesis to the completion of God’s plan in Revelation. Even the story of our relationship with God has a purposeful progression to it, with God first speaking to us through Old Testament prophets, then coming to us in Jesus Christ, and finally living inside us as the Holy Spirit. For Christians, life is never marked by endless cycles of random events — it always moves from start to finish, in accordance with the Master’s Plan.

So, what can we say at the end of a year of awful news? Rapes, murders, wars, insurgencies, massacres, terrorist threats, and natural disasters have been constant headlines. School buses plunge off of bridges and kill teenage passengers. Many of you have struggled with job loss, illness, divorce, or the deaths of loved ones. The bad news has been relentless.

How do you find purposeful progression in a year marked by such discouraging news? How do you break out of day-to-day despair and catch sight of a Perfect Moment? For us, as people of faith, the best way to clarify the present is to focus on the future.

That’s right: Clarify the present, by focusing on the future.

That’s precisely what the Israelites did when they were living as exiles in Babylon, roughly 600 years before the birth of Christ. They had been beaten to a pulp by the Babylonians, and then deported to a strange land. Daniel and his comrades wonder what it means to stay true to the God of Israel in a place so far from the land of Israel, and they struggle to find joy and hope in a time of desperation and despair. “By the rivers of Babylon,” laments Psalm 137, “there we sat down and there we wept …. How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (vv. 1, 4)

But Daniel discovers hope for the present by focusing on the future.. Lying in bed in Babylon, he has a vision of God, an “Ancient One” who takes his place on a throne that is blazing with fiery flames. God’s clothing is as white as snow, the hair of his head is like pure wool, and a stream of fire flows out from his presence. The court around him sits in judgment, and the divine record books are opened (Daniel 7:9-10).. This is what we would call an “apocalyptic vision” — an unveiling or revelation of God at the very end of time.

As you might expect, God renders judgment on the empires of the world, destroying one and leaving the other three powerless (vv. 11-12). But then Daniel sees “one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven.” A human being appears, and to this son of man God gives “dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him .… and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed” (vv. 13-14).

For Daniel, and for all who have faith in God, this is a Perfect Moment.

The message of this passage is that God is working to bring order out of chaos and victory out of defeat. No matter how much horror confronts us, our Lord is working to establish his eternal kingdom in human life, marching from heaven to earth and from the future to the present. We Christians see Jesus as the son of man, the one who comes at the end of time as “King of kings and Lord of lords,” a rider on a white horse who judges in righteousness and makes war with evil (Revelation 19:11-16). He is “the ruler of the kings of the earth,” according to the Book of Revelation. “He is coming with the clouds … and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail” (1:4-7).

Whether you are an Israelite exile in Babylon, a first-century Christian oppressed by the Roman empire, or a 21st-century believer feeling overwhelmed by despair, the message is the same: God is in control. Yes, that’s right: God is in control. The forces of chaos and cruelty may take an occasional battle, but they cannot win the war, because the Lord of heaven and earth is alive and well and having an ongoing impact on human life. God’s son Jesus has come to us once, and he will come to us again, to wipe the tears from our eyes and establish a new heaven and a new earth. He comes to show us that God desires an everlasting relationship with us, one that cannot be disrupted by job loss or mourning or pain … or even death itself (Revelation 21:1-4).

In the end, it’s all about relationships. Relationship with God, and relationship with one another. Eugene O’Kelly sensed this, which is why he spent so much time with friends and family in the last hundred days of his life. “Must the end of life be the worst part?” he wondered.. “Can it be made the best?”

This is a good question for each of us, as we face the end of a difficult year. Can this challenging time be the best of times? Can we learn the true value of the present, and find perfection in the mundane? Can challenging moments — in our personal lives, in our work lives, in the life of this congregation — be transformed into something good? Can we turn ordinary experiences into Perfect Moments — moments in which we see the hand of God at work?

Near the end, Eugene O’Kelly arranged times to “unwind” with people who had been important to him over the course of his life. These “unwindings” were intentionally final conversations, held at a house on Lake Tahoe and in Manhattan restaurants, but also in ordinary gardens, by rivers, and in the middle of Central Park.. They were his time to experience friendship, frankness and fun, and he planned each one in order to make it as perfect as possible.

We can do the same. Whether we have brain cancer or not, whether we are having good days or not, we can do our best to have quality conversations with family members, friends, colleagues, and neighbors — over the holidays, and into the new year. We can work on our relationship with God by regular participation in worship, and by serving others in the name of Christ. We can look to the future with confidence and anticipation, trusting that our Lord is involved in our lives in an active and ongoing way, always working for healing and restoration and peace.

One Perfect Moment we can enjoy right now is the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. This meal originated not in a particularly happy or healthy time, but on the night before Jesus endured a horrible death on a cross. He took time to “unwind” relationships with his disciples, and have final conversations with those who meant the most to him. The meal contained nothing fancy or extravagant — only simple food including bread and wine. But as Jesus broke the bread and poured the cup, saying “This is my body, broken for you,” and “This is my blood, shed for you,” he transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary, the mundane into the perfect. He created a precious moment which could be enjoyed again and again … and he promised to be with us, in Spirit, every time we enjoy the Lord’s Supper together.

So do not despair when life is hard, or even when death is close. Christ is with you — always with you — working to bring order out of chaos, and to create Perfect Moments. Amen.


Sources:
Dean, Cordelia, “When Cancer Strikes, A High Achiever Plans..” The New York Times. March 14, 2006.. D7.