God of Time and Space, enter our hearts this day and show us your
sacred truth. May we meditate upon your
goodness and grace. May love be our
guiding principle today. Amen
How many of you have enough time in the day to do everything
you need to do? How about want to
do? How many of you sometimes think that
if you just had a few, even two, more hours a day that you would be more
satisfied? How many of you think that
time goes faster on some days than it does on others? We know a lot about time. Mostly, most of us know that we need more of
it. Of course, time efficiency
folks—don’t you hate those people who tell you where you waste time?—any way,
time efficiency folks tell us that we don’t need more time, we just need to use
our time better. I promise you, this is
not a sermon about using our time wisely; but, it is a sermon about the
stewardship of the time we are given.
I’ll leave the suggestions for organizing our time to the experts.
It gave me pause
when I realized that we don’t own the time we inhabit. We
have no control over it. We have control over the way we use it; but, we don’t
have control over it. There will always
be 24 hours in a day with varying amounts of light and darkness depending on
where you live in relation to the equator.
The months will slip away and we will grow older. Time is known to fly or drag; but one thing
is sure—time passes. Just as I cannot
put up my hand and say “Stop!” to a raging river, I cannot say “Stop!” to the
passage of time. Since I have no control
over this force of nature, I am left with one conclusion: Time, like so much else of life, is on loan
to us. God, the Source of the Universe
lends us the hours, days, weeks, and months to us as we go throughout our lives
in this part of the Cosmos.
So, I want us to think of God’s time in our lives in two ways—first, in the amount of time we re-invest for God’s justice work; and, secondly, the amount of time we spend with God—whatever that looks like to you. When doing research for this sermon, I came across some very interesting resources. The US government, particularly through the Department of Labor, has a chart for every imaginable use of time. I chose one particular demographic, which while it does not include all of us, still gives us some very good statistics. Employed people, ages 25-54, who have children, use their time like this: Working and work-related activities= 8.8 hours,
Sleeping = 7.6 hours, Leisure and sports = 2.5 hours, unidentified = 1.7 hours, Caring for others = 1.2 hours, Eating
and drinking = 1.1 hours and Household activities = 1.1 hours.
This adds up, of course, to 24 hours. Not surprisingly, adults over 55
spend far less time working = only 3.4 hours up to age 64 and have much greater
time for leisure and sports = 5.2 hours.
We also sleep about an hour more and, fortunately, I couldn’t find the
statistic on how much longer a day we spend eating and drinking. One statistic that caused me great pain is
that adults over the age of 65 who do not have a spouse or partner, spend on
the average of 10 hours of their waking time alone. This is a statistic that we
would do well to remember as we plan ministries and outreach.
While
leaving aside the question of how much time we have for God’s justice
work—because that is a question you must answer for yourself; I am going to
make a rather radical suggestion. The
amount of time that you spend doing God’s justice work, through this church or
another organization, is directly proportional to the amount of time that you
spend alone with God. The reason for
this slips by us unless we are paying pretty close attention. I think it safe to say, that the more time we
spend in the presence of God, the more we will want to do and seek ways to do
God’s work of justice. Now, let me be
clear here—I am not suggesting that you must be out in the streets with a sign
picketing Walmart for the way it treats its workers in order to be working for
God’s incoming reign of justice. You may
work at the campus, preparing a beautiful place where people can hear God’s
voice. You may work in a soup kitchen or
a thrift store. There are many ways to
do God’s justice work. On your Estimated
Giving Card, there is a place for you to indicate where you see yourself being
involved in the ministries of Open Circle.
As you do that, feel free to indicate how many hours a week you wish to
give to that ministry.
You may
find it strange, in the midst of our Fall Stewardship Campaign, that I want to
talk about the time we spend with God. I
often have people who tell me, as they are explaining to me why they do not
attend church—a question, by the way that I never ask but they seem insistent
on telling me—that they can find God in nature or in a beautiful song, or in
whatever. I realize that my question
really should be, and it is a question that I ask myself and you as well—“yes,
but do you?” I think that one of the
reasons that churches and communities began springing up in the First Century
after Jesus walked on this earth, is that it was ‘set-aside’ time—a time when
nothing else was planned except for worship.
The problem that happened soon after is that, too many times, the way of
worship, the prescription for worship, if you will, took over the act of
worship. The way people worshipped
became more important than the who (the God of love, compassion, and peace) and
the why (because we worship to be unified with the Spirit of God and because
this is where we learn who we are). So,
as we free ourselves from the proscribed ways of worship, our worship becomes
more authentic and fluid with God’s Spirit; and, it is here we gain motivation
for our private time with God, and here we make our initial attempts to love
our brothers and sisters and celebrate the quilt of diversity that they
embody. Our worship, just as our
individual time with God is intertwined and interdependent with the time that
we spend working for the in-breaking of God’s reign of justice. To miss the interconnectedness of these two
uses of time is to miss a valuable insight that leads to spiritual maturity and
gives us the ability to make informed decisions about both. Until we realize that spiritual ‘work’ is
both private and communal and that they are both equally important, we will
continue to fall prey to what Jesus warned us about.
The
great Rabbi Jesus tells us to be sure we are not just “acting a role” when we
try to do good. He pushes us to make
sure that we are not playing to the crowd.
“Just do it!” says Jesus, “quietly and unobtrusively”. He insists that we “work behind the scenes”
like God does. And then he links it to
our private spiritual life and exhorts us to be real and authentic before
God. He says, “Here’s
what I want you to do: Find an alone place, away from any others, to you will
not be thinking of anything but God.
Just be with God. Before long,
you will feel the focus shift from you and your thoughts to God. This is when you will begin to sense the
presence of God’s divine grace”.
“I tried it
and doesn’t work that way for me!” If
that is something you might be thinking you are not alone. Spending time alone with the Source of all
being can be hard, maybe even frightening.
“What if I find out that I don’t know how to be real with God?” is a
question that may arise. Perhaps
spending time with God is not something that you particularly want to do. It may help to know that there is nothing you
can feel that hasn’t been felt or thought before. If we are to be good stewards of the time
loaned to us, however, we must spend some small part of that time discovering
what it is we are to do. Time alone with
God is time well spent and will lead us to the place of spiritual maturity in
our decisions regarding all that we give back to God.
