..."A diverse, spirit-growing, justice-seeking community"   PAST SERMONS "Deliver Us From E-mail" June 12, 2005 Reverend Robert M. Hardies, senior minister SERMON Many of you know that about 10 years ago I worked for a while as a human rights monitor in Guatemala. I lived in the middle of the rainforest, in a tiny village that some refugees had carved out of the jungle. There was no electricity. Water was brought up from the river in large containers that women carried on their heads. The village was run as a cooperative. And every Thursday at 5:00 p.m., the Board of the cooperative would meet for business. One of my jobs was to be at those meetings to document their work. My first week on the job I wanted to make a good impression. So I showed up at the Board meeting 15 minutes early. When no one else was there, I thought, "Well, I'm early. I'll wait." By 5 o'clock -- the scheduled start time -- one other person had showed up. I checked my watch and looked around anxiously, wondering if I'd come to the wrong place. If I'd gotten the time wrong. The other person who was waiting didn't seem the least bit concerned, he passed time sharpening his machete. Finally, between 5:30 and about 6:00, the hall gradually filled up. People trickled in and greeted one another, the men told stories about their day in the fields. And, according to my detailed notes, the meeting was gaveled to order at 6:23 when the president of the cooperative finally showed up. I learned two things that night. First, I learned that, in the jungle, 5 o'clock doesn't really mean 5 o'clock. Rather, it means the time after you've returned from the fields and bathed at the river, but before you go home for supper. That's all that 5 o'clock means. The other thing I learned that night is that I wouldn't be needing my watch in Guatemala. So back at my hut I took it off and didn't put it on again until the day I flew home. I was reminded of this story when I read something that a Latin American author recently said to a US audience. He said: "You Americans, you have all the clocks. But we have all the time." You have all the clocks. We have all the time. And he's right, isn't he? We have no shortage of gadgets that let us know what time it is, but the only thing they ever tell us is that we don't have enough of it. That we're running out of it. That we're late, and it's time to move on to the next thing. So our days consist of rushing from bed to breakfast to dropping the kids at school on our way to work, then back from work to the gym and grocery store and dropping the kids off at soccer and cooking and loading the dishwasher and going to bed, exhausted. Too many clocks. To little time. A few weeks ago many of us gathered on the shores of the Chesapeake for the annual church retreat. A time to relax. To get away from the relentless clock. That Sunday I preached a little sermon about the importance of getting away. Of taking retreats and scheduling pauses into our lives. After the sermon, one father of two came up to me and said, "With all due respect, Rob, that sermon didn't reflect my experience at all. What do you mean, 'pauses'? What do you mean, 'retreats'? A few days later I was at church with our youth group, rehearsing the Sunday service that they led last week. We finished up about 9:00, and as we were leaving I saw a tired mother look at her watch and say, "Now we're supposed to go to a Nationals' game." Whenever I hear us talking about our crazy schedules I'm reminded of that stressed-out mom in the bubble bath commercial from the early '80s. Whenever life got too crazy for her she'd shout: "Calgon, take me away!" Remember? Then we'd see her slide into a sudsy bath. How did our lives get so busy? How did they get so filled up? And how do we get a handle on it all? Well, I want to suggest that it might be helpful to step back for a moment, here. To step back from the details of our own lives and calendars. And try to get a perspective. Try to see this issue of our busy-ness through a spiritual lens. You might even say an existential lens. I think it might be helpful. I think it might give us some insight, and help us with our busy schedules. The first thing that you realize as you step back is this: we will never win the race against the clock. Do you understand what I'm saying? Time is ticking. And one day -- maybe a long way off, but perhaps sooner than we'd like -- time will run out on us. Now even if that's not something we consider on a daily basis, it is something that we, human beings, are fated to know about ourselves. We are fated to know what St Augustine once wrote, that "between the darkness of the not yet" and "the darkness of the no more" we have precious little time. This knowledge makes many of us anxious about time. It's as though every time we check our watch we're not just asking "how much longer till my next appointment," at some level we're asking, "how much longer before I die?" Not consciously, but at some level, every time check is an existential time check. And one way we try to salve our anxiety is by moving really fast. Pretending that we CAN outrun the clock. One theologian calls this, "salvation by hyperactivity." It's a heresy rampant in Unitarian circles. There's another way, though, to respond to the finality of the clock. And that's to accept it. There's a freedom that comes in knowing that outrunning the clock is a futile exercise. The freedom is that we can let the clock go. At least the existential clock. And let our salvation by hyperactivity go, too. Now, that's easier said than done and that's a whole other sermon. The other thing that the prophets and sages remind us about time is that it's not simply our own. And this actually helps lift us out of our existential crisis, too. Our time is not our own. Rather, time is a gift that is given to us for some purpose larger than ourselves. Time and history, then, become the arena in which these higher purposes are either fulfilled or squandered. The Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams once wrote an essay called, "taking time seriously." In it, he said, that God's purposes -- or whatever ultimate purposes our lives are given to -- will only ever be realized in time. Don't wait around, he said, for the next life. Because this is the only one we can be sure of. That's why it is a religious obligation to take time seriously. At the end of our days, we will be judged according to how seriously and for what purposes we used the gift of time. Let me try to make this really concrete. I want you to try to visualize your calendar. Some of you could probably whip out your Blackberry and call your calendar up right now. Imagine your calendar. A mentor and colleague of mine, the Rev. Kate Tucker, once suggested that we treat our calendars as scripture. As religious texts that narrate and reveal our faith as it is lived out through our actions in time. So Imagine that an anthropologist 200 years from now discovers your calendar. What would they say was most important in your life, if they looked at your calendar? What if they asked the question, "What kind of faith does this person have?" "What kind of God or Ultimate Value does this person worship with their time?" What conclusions might they draw if they looked at your calendar from this past week, say? Or from this past year? Think about that for a moment. Are you satisfied with the conclusions that anthropologist would draw? If you ask, why make such a big deal out of the calendars, I would remind you of the words of Annie Dillard in our reading this morning: "How we spend our days is [ultimately] how we spend our lives." We can make up excuses about our calendar for this particular week or that one, but weeks add up into months that add up into years that total a lifetime. And that's why our calendars are so important. If you are unhappy with how the scripture of your life reads. If the story your calendar tells isn't the story of how you want your life to be told. Then let me suggest a few tips. I'm going to go from the easiest to the hardest. First, make a list of the priorities in your life. The things that are most important to you. The things that you want the story of your life to be focused on. Sometimes it helps to imagine me or Shana giving the eulogy for you. I know that sounds morbid, but I'm serious: What would you want us to say. Make a list of those things. Prioritize that list. Second, take a completely blank calendar and start scheduling chunks of time for the things on your list. It makes sense, doesn't it, that the things higher on your list should get more time than the things lover on your list. After you schedule the priorities, then fill in the rest of your time with the things that aren't priorities, but are necessities. Compare that calendar to your current calendar. Third, here's where it starts to get hard. Start making choices. Being clear about what you want to say "yes" to in your life means that you must also be clear about what you need to say "no" to. In order to take time seriously, in order to get a handle on your calendar, you HAVE to learn to say "no." Even to things that are worthy. There will be many worthy things that you will not have time to say "yes" to. You don't have to apologize for that. Other people will say "yes" to those things. Take all the things you say "no" to off of your calendar. The fourth and final thing, is also the hardest. The British sculptor, Henry Moore, was once asked by an interviewer "now that you are eighty, you must know the secret of life. What is it? Moore answered: "The secret of life is to have a purpose, something you devote your entire life to, something to which you bring everything to every minute of the day... And the most important thing is... it must be something you cannot possibly do!" (SUN, 2/94) This gets back to my point about realizing that our time is not our own. Rather, that it is a gift that has been given to us for a higher purpose. Discovering that higher purpose is, ultimately the key to making sense of our time and our lives. That purpose is what helps integrate all the little spaces on our calendar. Our lives can be incredibly busy and complicated, but not feel busy if we have that purpose that is thread through everything we do. Without this purpose our lives appear scattered, frenzied, out of control. And we are left feeling anxious, depressed, frustrated. With this overarching purpose, though, that same complexity and chaos can take on a new meaning. And it can seem rich and complex and diverse, like a tapestry of many colors. Suddenly, our lives make sense to us. It does not matter that we are busy; our lives have a purpose that integrates and keeps us whole. Find that purpose! Friends, my hope for us is that this community might be a place where together we can identify those purposes that are worthy of our lives, that we can discover the purpose that is hidden in our lives and that we may accomplish those purposes together. May it be so. Amen.