My watch broke some time last year and I have never gotten around to getting it fixed so I don’t wear a watch. And I seem to be getting along just fine. With eight clocks of one sort or another in a one-bedroom apartment, knowing what time it is at home is no problem. When I’m travelling by car, I have a car clock. On the subway there are clocks in every station. There’s a clock on the desk in the middle office where I work two days a week and a big clock on the wall in the main office. And, if I’m nowhere near any other time piece (as my father used to call the various instruments that ticked out the hours), I can turn on my cell-phone and see what time it is. And I can also check the time on my iPod if I’m using it.
With that many time-keepers for one person to use, it’s not hard to understand that we’re a culture ruled by clocks, ruled by the passage of time. The concept of “mañana” or “I’ll get to it tomorrow” is not one we subscribe to—and, if we sometimes find ourselves putting things off, we feel guilty. Keeping up is huge in our world.
Barbara Brown Taylor, in her newest book, An Altar in the World, says: in our “can do culture...the ability to do many things at high speed is not only an adaptive trait but also the mark of a successful human being. As much as most of us complain about having too much to do, we harbour some pride that we are in such demand….Someone just told me that in China, the polite answer to ‘How are you?’ is “I am very busy, thank you.’ If you are very busy, then you must be fine. If you have more to do than you can do, and the list never gets done but only longer, then you must be very fine, because not only in China but also right here at home, successful people are busy people. Effective people are busy people. Religious people are busy people. For millions and millions of people, busy-ness is The Way of Life.”
And there seem to be two occasions in each year when we are very conscious of time and how we have used it—our birthday and New Year’s Eve and Day. And heaven help those who have both fall on the same day!! Keeping track of time and always feeling as if there is not enough for all we want to do, affects us all at some point in our lives—for some, every day. And not having to keep track and feeling that we don’t have enoughto fill the hours is seen as something not to be desired—as a sign of uselessness or failure.
Calendars and clocks
have become our masters in modern society.
In his book, Time Wars, Jeremy
Rifkin, an American economist, writes that the idea of our lives and the events
in them being controlled by blocks of allocated time is, in terms of centuries
at least, a relatively new idea. The
idea came from the Benedictine monks, “whose passion for organizing and filling
every minute of the day, grew out of St. Benedict’s conviction that ‘idleness
is the enemy of the soul.’” This was in
the 6th century but not until the 15th century did clocks
begin to rival churches in the town squares of
Much has been gained in terms of production and organization by clocks and keeping time, but when life became divided and subdivided into seconds, minutes, and hours, many things were also lost. Our distance from the natural rhythms of life keeps increasing. Hardly anything is seasonal any more. Last week I bought some blueberries, one of summer’s most luscious offerings, at the grocery store. They were good, but they lacked the tender sweetness of the wild blueberries I buy at a roadside stand each August.
And, for those of us who call ourselves people of God, who follow God as we find him in Jesus, we are also coming to live at an increasing distance from the ancient but timeless understanding that each day, each moment, is an unearned gift from a gracious God, rather than a commodity to be traded or spent for something else. Taking time to worship or to pray seems to us something to be fitted in, rather than something on which we base our days.
Barbara Brown Taylor tries to counteract this tendency to fill the hours in her book. She talks about taking a “Sabbath,” one day of total rest. And how reluctant we are to do that. And how difficult it is to do it with all we have to accomplish—or think we do. And how even more reluctant we are to change our lives so that we have to accomplish less. She goes on to say that, in the first account of creation in Genesis, God calls everything, including the human creation, “good.” But the creation of the seventh day, the day of rest, God calls holy, and this, says Brown Taylor, made “Sabbath the first sacred thing in all creation.”
“It is hard to understand,” she says, “why so many people put ‘Thou shalt not do any work’ in a different category from ‘Thou shalt not kill’ or ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ especially when those teachings are all on the same list.”
The ancient teacher, whom we know as the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, wrote after the Babylonian exile, a time that taught the Hebrew people that human experience was never going to be an uninterrupted walk in the park and that time should not be a tyrant that demanded all our allegiance. “There is a time for everything,” he says. For birth and for death, for dancing and for mourning, for peace and for war, for planting and for harvesting, for keeping and for throwing away, for speaking and for being silent, for hating and for loving, and everything that God makes is good, is suitable, for its own time.
Our reading from Matthew’s gospel today is the ultimate statement by Jesus on the whole concept of trying to control time. We usually interpret, “take no thought for tomorrow” as not worrying about tomorrow. But it could equally mean, stop trying to controltomorrow by planning everything out to the last second. It is good to look ahead and plan for the future. It is devastating to organize that future minute by minute with no room for the unplanned, the moments when God slips into our world and brings us up short with a glimpse of breathless beauty or unexpected grace.
If we are busy looking at the clock, we cannot see the person laughing beside it, we cannot see the tree sparkling with ice in the winter sun, the child looking in wonder at a dandelion, or the majesty of the heavens. If we are listening for the ticking of the seconds, we cannot hear the love behind a simple “How are you?” or the joy within our communal singing of a hymn, or the praise of a bird warbling in the tree.
One of the things we often do, or plan to do, at this time of the changing of the years, is make resolutions. And have you ever noticed that most of those resolutions have to do with activity, with working at something. (Just as an aside, statistics show that more women than men make resolutions but more men than women keep them.) And the top 3 New Year’s resolutions? To lose weight, to exercise more, to stop smoking.
But seldom do we make the resolution to do nothing, to turn off the world, to not look at a clock, to stop doing and start being. If I told you that my New Year’s resolution was to sit and stare at a tree for a half-hour each day, you would probably think one of two things. Either “Is she nuts?” or “Where does she get the time to do that?” And yet, perhaps stopping for one half-hour each day and just being might be the way to a more efficient use of my time. And, by saying that, I have bought into the culture obsession with filling time by doing something. I’m looking at a tree so I can do more. What would be wrong if the sitting and staring did nothing except make me feel better and bring me closer to the God who created that tree?
In a few moments, in the place of our usual Affirmation of Faith, you will be asked to participate in John Wesley’s New Year’s Renewal of our Covenant with God. And in what we say are words like “waiting,” “laid aside,” “brought low,” “empty,” “have nothing.” All our service of God does not need to be busy or active. It seems vital that some of our service needs to be found in waiting and in emptying ourselves so that God can come in and we can know the presence of the One who called inactivity holy.
We heard this morning, “Once we were not a people, but now we are God’s people.” Once we were ruled by the clock, now we are ruled by the presence of God within us and seen by us in the moments God offers in the quiet, inactive being. We are living stones, not building ourselves into spiritual houses but letting God build us into those who are one with the good creation and with one another outside of daily time.
We are a holy people, living lives in time outside of time, God’s time, the time in which we become more holy.