Imagine this scenario: The bank calls you on Friday afternoon to tell you that someone is going to deposit – on a daily basis - 86,400 pennies into your account starting on Monday morning. Do the math: That is $864 a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.
What an incredible windfall! And it is not even from winning Powerball or the Maine Lottery! You are one lucky dude!
However, there is one stipulation. You have to spend all the money the same day it is deposited. No balance will be carried over to the next day. Each evening the bank will cancel whatever sum you did not use. Use it or lose it!
Do the math: $864 times seven days is over $6000 a week and almost $315,000 a year at your disposal. What’s not to like about that, right?
Now let’s change the scenario just slightly – to make it more believable, to actually make it a real life situation. Every morning a deposit of 86,400 seconds is deposited into your time account. Do the math: That is 440 minutes which is 24 hours.
And the same stipulation applies: Nothing is carried over to the next day. There is no such thing as a 26 hour day (no matter how much we might wish otherwise at times).
From today’s dawn until tomorrow’s dawn, we all have that same precisely determined amount of time. As someone once said: “Life is a coin. You can spend it any way you want to, but you spend it only once”
I agree with Albert Einstein: Time is an amazing phenomenon! We all are given the same amount each day, and, in that sense, we are all equal. We get 86,400 seconds deposited in our time account whether we are a penniless nobody or Bill Gates, whether we are old or young, whether we are married or single, whether we are Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindi, Buddhist. It does not matter who we are. It is only matters what we choose to do with that which we are given.
We cannot escape time. It invades our every move: “What time does the meeting start” “What time will it end” “I don’t have time for that” “How much time will that take” “Don’t waste your time on that” “It’s time to go” “I need a time out” “What time is dinner” “It’s time we had a long talk” “I don’t have time.”
As Baptist pastor, Elmer Towns, noted, “God has given the gift of time to every person (in every place and in every era). God has given us yesterday, today, and maybe tomorrow.” It is up to us to make today – this day – count.
We have spent five weeks now here in church trying to reconcile our fast-paced and often frenetic lifestyles with the idea of slowing down to make each day count.. We have hoped to deepen our spirituality and make the season of Lent more meaningful.
We have attempted to create moments here in worship for silence and stillness, moments to be “unbusy”. We have experimented with strategies to incorporate into our lives that could help us reconnect with one another and with our unhurried God. We have focused on finding our quiet center, and we have approached this quest from several angles. And now we have finally come round to talking seriously and directly about time.
Over these weeks in Lent, if we have learned nothing else, I hope we have realized that to find our quiet center, it is helpful to engage in those traditional Lenten rituals, but in new ways. Rather than fasting from food, we need to fast from worry and fear. Rather than rotely confessing our sins, we need to be more broadly self-reflective.
Rather than isolating and insulating ourselves from the world, we need to be intentional about our use of time in the world. None of these Lenten rituals comes easy in our culture. We so highly value busyness, productivity, and multi-tasking and too often devalue the intentional use of our time.
That’s nothing new though. As a species, we have always been fixated on time. More than that, our need to be precise in our understanding of the passage of time has increased astronomically through the ages. Egyptians were content to use sundials in 3500 BCE simply to ascertain the arrival of the spring planting season – nothing more. Likewise, Stonehenge was built about 2000 BCE, but only to mark the annual summer and winter solstices.
More precise measures of time were introduced in the Middle Ages. Candles were made with time markings etched into the wax or tallow. The first mechanical clocks appeared in England in 1368 followed by the first public clock tower in 1541. Not long afterwards, clock towers began to rival churches in town squares. In 1577, the minute hand was invented, and a watch-making industry was thriving in Geneva, Switzerland within the next ten years.
Humanity was learning that time flies, so it is best to be productive in order to get one’s work done. Time was no longer tied to the seasons of the year, but rather to the watch on your wrist or the hourly chiming of the clock tower in the village square.
Medieval monastics tried their best to maintain the rhythm and seasonality of life even as marking time by the hour and minute became more important to a faster-moving society. They ably incorporated their secular chores into worship times throughout the day, creating a sense of holy rhythm and wholeness as work and worship became two sides of the same coin. I remember spending time in a Benedictine monastery when I was in Divinity School and experiencing that same sense of wholeness. It was a marvelous feeling of the natural ebb and flow of creation.
In addition, some of these monastics created Books of Hours which were beautifully illustrated abbreviated forms of the daily liturgies for laypeople. In fact, from the fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, more books of hours were made than any other type of book. The tension we feel today between the inevitable passage of time and the need to reclaim that natural sense of rhythm and seasonality is nothing new!
However, for us, finding that natural sense of rhythm and seasonality in our busy lives is often well-nigh impossible. Imagine: We determine who wins or loses a running or swimming race by a hundredth of a second. We measure computer memory speed in nanoseconds. And now we even have zeptoseconds – a trillionth of a billionth of a second.
How long ago it seems that, as time inevitably passed from season to season, we flowed freely with it, accepting its moments of joy and times of sorrow, and never believing that we did not have enough of it – or that it was essential to measure it so minutely. Surely that is what the author of the passage in Ecclesiastes was reflecting on. “For everything there is a season…” The good and the bad flowed through life, and it was up to us to ride the waves of life and death, of mourning and dancing, of laughing and weeping.
Presbyterian pastor Joanna Adams tells the story of a preacher whose congregation adored him because he always finished his worship services right at noon, within the allotted 60 minutes for church. Then one Sunday, the impossible happened. The pastor preached until 12:30.
On the way out, one of his parishioners angrily inquired, "What happened to you?"
The preacher answered, "For years I have always put a candy mint in my mouth as the service started, and I would tuck it away. It was always gone at exactly noon. That way, I never had to look at the clock or worry about what time it was. But this Sunday it didn't go away, and I finally realized I had put a button in my mouth."
All kidding aside, Adams does not deny the importance of time and notes that “knowing what time it is differentiates the foolish from the wise. Some hold on for dear life to that which is actually finished and done. Some refuse to let go of a relationship that has ceased to be nourishing. Others try to breathe life into, say, a church program that has been around for too long, but no one is brave enough to bury it.”
She goes on to say that we all need to keep track of time. “There are deadlines to meet, buses to catch, papers to be turned in. Calendars and clocks have become our masters in modern society…. Surely much has been gained (she says) in terms of production and organization, but when life became divided and subdivided into seconds, minutes, and hours, many things were lost. We experience those losses every day (she continues). Our distance from the natural rhythms of life keeps increasing. Hardly anything is really seasonal.
You can get tomatoes, summer's most luscious offering, anytime of the year now, though the ones you buy in January are likely to have been shipped 1,000 miles and will taste like cardboard. (She concludes that) we also 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.” The lines between busy and rest, work and play, have become increasingly blurred. And at what cost?
Even Jesus spoke of time – but not zeptoseconds. “The Kingdom of God is at hand,” he preached, and “the time is fulfilled.” Something bigger was at stake – God’s dream for the world.
Though there is a time for everything, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, surely Jesus would tell us that it is time to put aside our busyness and multitasking (just like he told Martha rattling around in the kitchen with her pots and pans), that it is time to let go of our worries and fears (remember the lilies in the field), that it is time to slow down and recognize that we move too fast, that it is time to reconnect with ourselves, our God, and one another in a deeper and more meaningful way.
Surely it is time to make time to live into the essence of Jesus’ ministry. As Adams wrote, “Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies; do good to those who persecute you.’ It is time, not to answer evil with evil and hate with hate, but a time to answer evil with love and hate with compassion. It is time for God’s dream for the world to become a reality.
In the end, our Lenten series has nothing to do with stopping time by insulating ourselves from the world or even cocooning ourselves in our quiet center once we find it. Instead, it has everything to do with living into the time we are given each day, living into the natural rhythm of all that Jesus stood for – compassion, reconciliation, radical welcome.
86,400 seconds in a day. Do the math: That is 525,600 minutes in a year. That is all we are given, but it is enough to live as God challenges us to live. Listen to this song from the musical, “Rent”. It says it well:
PLAY SEASONS OF LOVE
Let me end – not only this sermon but also this Lenten worship series with an ancient Sanskrit poem. Tuck it away in your heart, and pull out when you are feeling frazzled, when worry and fear, when busyness and multitasking, are beginning to claim you:
"Listen to the salutation of the dawn...
Look to this day, for it is the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the realities and truth of existence:
the joy of growth, the splendor of action, the glory of power.
For yesterday is but a memory, and tomorrow a vision, but today well-lived makes every yesterday a memory of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope."
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