Gn 2:1-3; Ex 20:8-11; Ep 5:8-16

13 July 2003

“Time”

Sometimes when I’m out walking my dog, or maybe driving the car, or maybe just sitting still, there’s a thought that comes to me.  I wonder about the particular piece of space I’m occupying—that my body itself is taking up—and I wonder who and what else has been there.  For example, in the space immediately behind this pulpit, who or what was here at this time yesterday?  Last year?  A century ago?  A millennium ago?  A million years ago?  A billion years ago?

If we go back in time for almost any spot of land in this area, we might find that it’s been occupied by, say, a Seneca Indian. Further back in time, we might encounter a woolly mammoth.  Keep going back, and we’ll find ourselves under a thick layer of ice.  Go even further back in time, and we might be face to face with a dinosaur.

Then I think of the opposite.  I think of the future, after I’m dead and gone.  Who will occupy my spot on the earth?  Maybe you can see where I’m going with this.  Trapped in time as we are, we only have freedom to move around in space.  To my knowledge, no one has been able to travel through time!

In his classic work, The Sabbath (which, by the way, is a very poetic, colorful book), Abraham Heschel reflects on this very thing.  He sees it as speaking to the very heart of Jewish spirituality.  And I would say that it applies to Christian spirituality, as well.  “Every one of us occupies a portion of space,” Heschel observes.  “The portion of space which my body occupies is taken up by myself in exclusion of anyone else.  Yet, no one possesses time... This very moment belongs to all [the living] as it belongs to me.  We share time, we own space.  Through my ownership of space, I am a rival of all other beings; through my living in time, I am a contemporary of all other beings.”[1]

Among other matters, this has to do with our stewardship of creation. That includes our stewardship—our care for—the things of space (materials, objects, money).  It also includes our stewardship of time, our care for it.  Creation includes both space and time.

Our Old Testament readings on the Sabbath bear witness to this two-sided approach.  The Genesis story has God finishing the work of creation on the seventh day.  After making the birds and the bees and the fishies in the deep blue sea, how does God finish creation?  By bringing something else into existence: rest.  It is on the seventh day that God creates the Sabbath; God creates peace.  The other days of creation are pronounced “good.”  Only the seventh day is pronounced hallowed; only the Sabbath is declared to be holy.

That’s important because, to the best of our knowledge, prior to the Jewish emphasis on Sabbath, holiness had always been associated with certain places:  a sacred mountain or forest.  Even within Judaism, there was the temple.  But with the Sabbath, we have holiness located in time itself.  Heschel speaks of building a “palace in time.”[2]  So, when we speak of “wasting time,” we speak of wasting something precious.  When we speak of “killing time,” we speak of killing something sacred.

This focus on holy space, as opposed to holy time, can take a serious toll.  Space has limits on accessibility; time is something everyone shares.  A perfect example of this is the Arab-Israeli struggle.  There’s only so much room in the country, and certainly in Jerusalem.  This has happened, and continues to happen, all over the world.  There’s no shortage of disputes about holy places that are either honored or desecrated.  But when the Sabbath arrives, it’s the Sabbath everywhere.

Still, regarding the Sabbath, even if it is a foretaste of the world to come, as Rabbi Heschel believes, the seventh day “needs the companionship of all other days.”[3]

It isn’t treated as holy if the other six days are spent in activities that contradict it.  The

same could be said in a Christian sense, about the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day.

Indeed, in our epistle reading, Paul encourages the Ephesians to remember that though “once you were darkness, now in the Lord you are light” (v. 8).  If we behave no differently than people who are clueless as to what it means to be a Christian, what good are we?  We’re certainly not doing them any favors by hiding our light!

The apostle wants his hearers to live wisely, “making the most of the time, because the days are evil” (v. 16).  Because the days are evil.  The Revised English Bible says, “for these are evil days.”  Notice the difference?  The New Jerusalem Bible reads, “for it is a wicked age.”  The original Greek simply says “for the days are evil” (oti ai hmerai ponhrai eisin, hoti ai hēmerai ponērai eisin).

It would make sense to understand that verse as referring to a certain time, to particular days, as being evil.  It seems that Paul is warning the church about the times in which it lives.  But it seems it’s also possible to take that line, “because the days are evil,” in a more general sense.  Could it also be a comment about time itself?

Our friend Abraham Heschel seems to sense this.  “Most of us seem to labor,” he says, “for the sake of things of space.  As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face.  Time to us is sarcasm, a slick treacherous monster with a jaw like a furnace incinerating every moment of our lives.”[4]  (I did say that it’s a colorful book!)  Those of you who’ve had more experience with time than I have could probably tell some stories about that “slick treacherous monster.”

Unfortunately, we flee to the realm of space—to the realm of possessions.  We sense time slipping away, like sand through the hourglass, and by getting…stuff, we try to fill the hole that our apprehension has dug.  Americans are great at this!  We work to get more and more money so that we can buy more and more things—and the more things we have, the more we have to take care of.  Which means there’s more to fix, or simply replace, and that means more to go into the trash.  Really, it’s not a wise use of space or time!

When Paul advises his audience to make the most of the time, he literally says “redeem the time” (exagorazomenoi ton kairon, exagorazomenoi ton kairon).  While we lack the power to redeem ourselves or anyone else, we do have the power to redeem the time that’s been given to us.  Time need not be the slick treacherous monster.  It can be appreciated for what it is:  a gift from God.  Instead of wasting or killing it, we can treat it as part of God’s good (even holy) creation.

I realize that it’s one thing to say all that; it’s another to live it.  Kristen Johnson Ingram, a writer who lives in Oregon, asks the question, “How do I treat the gift of sacramental time?  Is my desk an altar, is our dinner table a Eucharist, is this house a temple?  Not always.  This morning my husband and I argued about the trash.  We were not wide awake while we juggled wastebaskets and sacks and tried to organize the recycling boxes, and he swore at me.  In fact, he used a short, unpleasant obscenity that made my cheeks get hot and my already irregular heartbeat go into a second of frenzy.”

She continues, “I wanted to have back the moment before he cursed; I wanted the earlier time returned to me.  Instead of waiting to see if the sands would run backward, I made a fuss, saying loudly that I did not deserve that language and he had no right to use it.  We quarreled for a moment, and then it was too late to snatch back the time.  I microwaved a bowl of oatmeal and ate it with no pleasure, gulped a cup of coffee seasoned with rancor.  I smacked time and sent it yipping away.”[5]

Does this sound familiar?  I know I’m not the only one here to wish I could have the moment back—or even to relive the entire day.  I think of times when I’ve been guided by folly and not wisdom, and I cringe.  And then there are the times when placed at a crossroads, and I refused to choose.  I refused to redeem the gift of time given to me by God.  So what conclusion does Ingram reach?

“We did not stay mad,” she says. “I came into my office and started writing and I could hear the news from his radio in the next room.  We called out our opinions about the freak storm and the situation in the Middle East.  I remembered to dash into the utility room to take meat from the freezer so I could make my famous pot roast of pork with cilantro and orange for dinner.  He did some laundry.  There was no permanent damage.

“Or was there?  We can never have the time back…God holds out the sacrament of time and sometimes I turn away to partake of something else.  Today my husband and I committed an egregious sin—and this was only an eighteen-second skirmish.”[6]

Too often, our time together results less in holiness and more in strife.  Unfortunately, that happens among people of faith, as well as among those who seem to have no faith.  It need not be so.  Stephen Doughty, from whom today’s call to worship has been taken, reminds us that “God’s life can hallow our phone calls and our meetings, our massive celebrations and our times of quietly gathering in pain.  It can even saturate our fractures and our yearnings for reconciliation.  If we come together in Christ, God soaks with divine intention the time we share.”[7]

I began by mentioning all that has come before in the place I occupy on the earth, as well as all that will follow.  I also said that we’re trapped in time, and one consequence is that we’re confined to a certain point in Earth’s history.  We are set within the stream of time and are therefore in relationship with the past and the future.  We inherit both blessing and curse from the past; what we leave to the future remains undecided.

Now, keeping in mind that the next in my sermon series on spiritual themes is imagination, I ask you to imagine.  There’s plenty of cynicism, indifference, and attitudes of “I don’t care” in our society and in the church, even here among us.  As I just said, I believe the future is undecided.  We have free will; it’s up to us to choose.  What I want you to imagine is this:  what kind of a future will we choose for ourselves, for our children, and for our church?

I’m serious about this.  I really want you to take time and imagine and to be in conversation with me about these questions.  I’m finding (very slowly!) that the path to wisdom is less about being fed the right answers and more about learning to ask the right questions.  So, to borrow from the apostle:  how can we, as individuals and as church, live as children of light?  How can we redeem the time?

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