Our choices embody our priorities…indeed, we could almost say that what we are today is the total of what we chose yesterday...for good and for ill. What we choose is not a part of our life; it is our life.

            The men in today’s gospel made choices. One chose to buy a field. Another chose to buy some oxen. Still a third chose to marry a wife. Now there’s nothing wrong with fields, and oxen, and getting married; but these choices came at a very high price. Their choices embodied poor priorities. They chose these things over the King’s gracious invitation. They chose what is earthly, over what is heavenly. They chose things that bring worry and care, but they passed up on the one thing that brings everlasting joy. They got what they chose…but oh, what they lost!

            Not so with the men and women we commemorate today: the holy ancestors of Christ our God. Oh, some of them were wealthy, some had great power, some were great warriors. But they counted all these things as loss, for the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus. They traveled through this life as pilgrims, and kept their minds fixed on the coming of enfleshed God. And so they became partakers of the table of God and of the Lamb.

            Beloved, we think of time wrongly when we think of near and distant past and future. Really there are only three days: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. 

            To yesterday belong the holy ancestors of Christ we celebrate today. To yesterday belong our departed loved ones, and those they loved. To yesterday belongs all our own life that has passed so far. You mustn’t think that the ancestors of Christ are somehow more remote and harder to access than last night in your own life. Neither is further removed from us than the other. Both alike are completely inaccessible to us.

            To tomorrow belongs what will happen to the people we love and live with…to our neighborhoods and to our nation. You younger folk don’t realize how quickly the time goes. To tomorrow belongs the return of Christ in glory, and the judgment of the nations; the sending of the goats to eternal judgment, and of the sheep to eternal life. We err when we think of Christ’s return as far off in the distant future. It’s just tomorrow, my friends. 

Tomorrow will come. But for now, it’s just as much out of our hands as yesterday. How foolish to live as if it never will come!

All we really have, is today. And we realize that every liturgy in the Precommunion prayer: “Like the thief will I confess thee: Remember me when thou comest in thy Kingdom.” We live, each of us, like that thief suspended on the tree beside Christ. We have our yesterdays, full of things to regret and be sorry for; we have our today, with its share of grief and suffering; and we have tomorrow, when Christ returns in glory. We don’t have time to delay. We do have time, right now, to repent; to turn to Christ and beg that he remember us in his Kingdom.

Do you remember how Christ answered the plea of the thief? He forgave his “yesterday.” And he turned his “tomorrow” into today: "Today you will be with me in Paradise."

Beloved, this is the day of salvation. Our King invites us to his feast. Let nothing else come first. Let us choose wisely, while it is still called “today.” Eternity begins today, here and now.