March
11,
2005
Lente Noonday Preaching Series
Calvary
Episcopal Church, Memphis, TN
God’s
Time:
Three Ways to Re-Orient Our Clock and our Calendars
by
Lauren Winner
(this sermon is also available in audio )
As I thought about what to reflect on for our few minutes together
this afternoon, I was struck with surprise at how far along in
Lent we were. Lent started very early this year, and I myself was
not ready for it. I was having a really cool Epiphany. (laughter) I
grew up Jewish and became a Christian a little less than a decade
ago, and one of my constant intentional tasks
in growing ever deeper
into my baptismal vows has been an effort to live more deeply each
year into the rhythms of the Christian calendar…into the
rhythms of the church year.
There
are many calendars that govern our society. For me, the dominant
calendar remains the academic calendar.
I’ve been
in school almost as long as I’ve been alive, so for me that’s
the most dominant calendar. I think of September as the beginning
of the year, and winter break and May are very important times.
So
I’ve been trying to shift that calendar
to second string and place the church calendar as the skeleton
of the way I inhabit
time.
And
this year, for the first year since I was baptized, I really
got Epiphany. I really was able during Epiphany to spend
time reflecting
on who Jesus was and what he came to do, which is, of course, one
of our tasks and one of the gifts the church gives us during the
season of Epiphany. Epiphany, the word, of course, comes from the
Greek word for manifestation. And during Epiphany we spend time
reading passages from scripture and reflecting on stories about
Jesus’ life that tell us who Jesus was and what he came to
do. We read about the miracles he performed and the healings. We
read about his baptism, and we read about the transfiguration.
I
was really getting into this this year, and was kind of annoyed
when Lent came creeping up on me so suddenly.
Until it occurred
to me—and this was really a moment of grace in my year—that
Lent is really an extension of Epiphany. Lent
is simply a longer season in which we reflect on that most revealing
story about Jesus’ life
that tells us about who he is and what he came to do. So now I’m
a little bit sad that Lent seems to be rushing by so quickly. But,
unless Jesus shows up soon, we’ll get to do Epiphany and
Lent again next year.
All
of this has prompted me to think a lot about time and the ways
that we inhabit time. Now I have up here with
me Sybil’s
cell phone. I have the cell phone here (and I think it’s
turned off) because my watch is broken, and so I’m using
it to keep time. And that is one of the things that I like about
cell phones…that they have clocks. They serve as watches.
But I only got a cell phone about two years ago, and I’ve
been spending a lot of time thinking about the way that cell phones
not only tell time but the way they dictate the way we live in
time.
Now,
let me just ask you…how many of you have cell phones?
And how many of you have e-mail, or use e-mail regularly? And how
many of you would say that you have way too much time on your hands?
(laughter) How many of you would say that you really wish you had
more time? That you don’t have enough time to do everything
that you want to do? Most of us, and me too, by the way.
The
[longer] I spend trying to live into this Christian calendar,
the more I begin to suspect that our modern society
and our modern
technologies, for all the wonderful things that they do, really
work against God’s vision for how we inhabit time. Because
in God’s economy, time is abundant. In God’s economy,
there is no scarcity of time. If we were inhabiting time as God
sees creation, we would all say that we had abundant time. And
yet, of course, most of us feel that time is very scarce, that
we don’t have enough of it.
I
was thinking even the other day about the way we speak about
time. I heard myself three sentences ago say “spend” time.
How do you spend your time? That’s a very modern phrase.
In the 19th century, people didn’t talk about spending time;
they talked about passing the time. No one says that today, and
if you heard someone say “I passed the time in thus and such
a fashion,” you would think “Oh, that’s quaint.” There’s
sort of a leisurely-ness to passing the time.
But
our modern vocabulary for time actually uses terms all derived
from business and finance. We spend time. We
save it. We manage
time. In Indiana, one of the standards of learning for fourth graders
is time management. So one of the fourth graders’ assignments
is to keep a day-timer. Now, this was actually something I read
a few years ago…maybe now they keep Blackberries in fourth
grade, I don’t know. (laughter)
I
am so out of the loop, by the way, I didn’t know what
a Blackberry was…and I heard someone, I think it may have
been my sister, referring to thus and such about her Blackberry.
And I said, “But it’s December! What are you talking
about? You don’t have blackberries in December.” I
don’t have a television. I’m kind of a Luddite when
it comes to these things. But I do have a cell phone.
At
any rate, I want to spend a few minutes together today sharing
with you three practices from the Christian tradition
that I try
to integrate into my own life and that I feel help ground me in
a more godly orientation towards inhabiting time. And for me, Lent
is the perfect season to reflect on this question of time and how
we live into time, because Lent is the one season of the church
calendar that most of us have some connection with. In fact, many
non-Christians, if you ask them something about Christian seasons
or the church calendar, they would know that during Lent, people
give up chocolate. But that might be all they know. They might
not know when Lent is or why people give up chocolate. But they
would have some sense that there’s a season in which you
give something up if you’re a particular kind of Christian.
So
one of the practices is the practice of inhabiting
the church calendar. I don’t know how many people here today are Episcopalians,
maybe there are other people visiting from other churches or visiting
from no church at all. Though not a lifelong Episcopalian, I’ve
been an Episcopalian as long as I’ve been a Christian….and,
I’ve felt some despair in the last couple of years. The Episcopal
Church nationally is going through a bit of a shaky moment. And
at times I sort of pull my hair out and think “Why am I bothering
with this silly denomination? I should just become _____” (you
know, fill in the blank, whatever it is, depending on the day of
the week).
But
I think that one of the wonderful pieces of our Anglican inheritance
and our Episcopal tradition that the
Episcopal Church has to offer
the wider church is this inhabiting of the church calendar. Many
churches, particularly more Protestant churches, do not spend a
lot of time being intentional about the church year. But I find
it increasingly valuable to re-orient my calendar away from the
academic calendar, away from the Hallmark calendar, away from the
calendar of the federal government. I mean, Lent usually corresponds
with the time that we’re preparing our taxes. I always hope
that Easter is a bigger day for me than April 15th. But it doesn’t
always win!
So,
practicing this annual cyclical church calendar is one of the
ancient practices of the church that I think can
ground us in a
more generous and godly sense of inhabiting time. The
second practice that I want to commend to you is the practice
of regular, daily prayer. …I have found
it valuable to both commit myself to a daily prayer habit during
Lent but also for
the first time to really scale back my expectations.
I
am in the habit, and I don’t know if this resonates with
many of you, of setting such lofty prayer goals that I can’t
possibly meet them, and after four days of not meeting them, I
feel like a total failure and I want to chuck the whole thing.
So, sometimes I’ll say, “Great, I’m gonna commit
myself to saying the Morning prayers and the Evening prayers from
the Book of Common Prayer every single day…” I’ll
say that on a Monday and by Wednesday I’ve blown it and I
feel like, “Well, why bother.” It’s the same
way with our New Year’s resolutions. Every year I resolve,
on January 1st, to exercise daily. It doesn’t happen and
then I give up completely.
I
was recently speaking to someone very wise who made what seemed
like the most obvious point. It was so liberating
for me to hear
this very holy man say, “If you just pray a minute three
times a day, that counts.” Praying for one minute, even once
a day, counts. So my very small goal that I have set for myself
is to pray every day for one minute at noon. And I have actually. … I’m
a writer; I spend a lot of time at my desk and checking e-mail….
I’ve found a program that I can subscribe to that will send
me a prayer message every day at noon. I get this in my e-mail
in my inbox, it dings and tells me I have mail. Then I’m
pulled out of the daily routine, the hustle and bustle, the glimmer
and seduction of my work and my computer. So the
committing of the daily rhythm of prayer is helping me find my
grounding in
God’s
time.
I
just want to repeat what this interlocutor said to me. “Prayer
for one minute once a day or one minute three times a day counts.”
The final practice that I want to share a little bit about is
the practice of keeping Sabbath. Those of you who have read some
of my books know that I grew up Jewish and observing the Sabbath.
Friday night to Saturday night was a significant part of my own
spiritual formation, and it is one of the things that I have really
missed since becoming a Christian.
In
observant Jewish communities, … the Sabbath is really
a day apart. It is a day that is truly separate from the rhythms
of work and week. And I’ve tried to think creatively about
how we as a Christian community might learn from the Jewish community
about keeping Sabbath. Obviously, our Sabbath practices are not
going to look identical to the Sabbath practice of the Jewish community.
But I’ve begun to instigate a few observances on Sunday,
the Christian Sabbath, in my own life. And I want to share two
of them with you before we close.
One
is, in the Jewish tradition… the Sabbath (Friday night
to Saturday night) begins with a Sabbath dinner. If some of you
have Jewish friends, you may have been invited to their home for
Shabbat dinner, Friday night dinner…the lighting of the candles,
the special blessings with wine and bread…and in general,
just a very leisurely introduction, transition into the Sabbath.
So some friends of mine from church and my husband and I have begun
to do this on Saturday nights. We don’t do it every Saturday.
But once a month, twice a month, we will gather on Saturday night
to have some special prayers and songs and a leisurely dinner to
inch us into a day of rest and celebration.
I
really commend that to you. It’s really changing the
rhythm of my week. It’s beginning to orient my week around
Sunday, instead of having Sunday be the exception to a week that
is oriented around work and commerce.
The
second thing that I do in my Sabbath practice is actually something
I abstain from, something I don’t do. I have given
up using e-mail and my cell phone on Sundays. If we had more time
today, I would say a little bit more about why I think these particular
technologies shake up the way we inhabit time. There’s a
certain instant-ness to these technologies and, particularly for
those of us who are active in the workforce, the sense that people
can get hold of you….any time of day, regardless of where
you are and demand your instant attention.
Setting
those things aside has been very very liberating. There’s
just no other word for it. Very liberating for me in terms of having
a Sabbath, a day where I not only rest, but where I clear away
the bustle so that I can attend to God in a particular way. It’s
not that I think we can’t meet God during the week or when
we’re chatting on our cell phone or when we’re in the
bustle of the world, but I believe that having a Sabbath where
we dedicate 24 or 25 hours to attending to God in a particularly
focused way helps us to recognize God when we’re back in
the bustle and the craziness.
I want to close
by reading a poem about time by Jane Kenyon. If you don’t know her poetry, I strongly commend it to you.
She died a few years ago of leukemia. She was the wife of the poet
Donald Hall. She wrote this poem, called “Otherwise,” when
her husband was quite ill with cancer and prior to her own diagnosis
with leukemia.
Otherwise
by Jane Kenyon
©2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birchwood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
Let us bless the Lord. Thanks be to God.
©2005
Lauren Winner
"Otherwise," by Jane Kenyon, reprinted from COLLECTED POEMS with
the permission of Graywolf
Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.
 To
purchase a copy of Jane Kenyon's COLLECTED
POEMS visit amazon.com. This
link is provided as a service to explorefaith.org visitors and registered users.
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