This sermon was written for Sunday, February 19, the last Sunday in Epiphany, for St. Mark's Episcopal Church. A modified version was preached. The texts for this Sunday were: Exodus 24:12-18, 2 Peter 1:16-21, Matthew 17:1-9, and Psalm 2.
My mother has a favorite saying these days that she pulls out each time my sister and I regale her with a story of an epically sleepless night or another afternoon spent nursing a sick child while sick ourselves. “The days are long,” she reminds us, “but the years are short.” The days are long, but the years are short. There is much wisdom in this saying I think, and not just for early parenthood.
It points to the very human experience of the mysterious flexibility of time: how it stretches and compresses strangely - flying by one sec and dragging on the next. The quite fascinating thing is that modern scientific theory actually supports what we know to be true from living our lives. A key tenet of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity declares that time is not universal, it is individual, relative. Other intriguing scientific studies have worked to prove that time is indeed not as static and predictable as the clock would have us believe.
Throughout most of human history, time was told by our daily tasks - like milking the cows - or through our natural world - by the sun or the birds. In fact, each little community held their own loosely agreed upon conception of time. It wasn’t until the advent of the railroad that all the clocks needed to be synchronized and our lives became beholden to their ticking. Jay Griffith, the author of A Sideways Look At Time, argues that the British Empire was less of a triumph of an empire of space as it was the imposition of an empire of time - Greenwich Mean Time - on the entire globe. In the context of an economy in which folks are paid by the hour, literally buying and selling measured units of our lives, time feels like an expensive and scarce resource - one it’s increasingly clear we need to rethink our relationship with in order to live a good, full, meaningful life.
During my internship at St. Aidan’s in San Francisco, I had a little project where I asked parishioners about why they came to church. One woman explained that she wasn’t sure what she believed - she didn’t know if she was on board with Jesus and God and all that. What she did know for certain was that church felt different from the rest of her life in a good and sacred way. Time, she explained, behaves differently here. In the Eucharistic moment, all else slides away. She is here, she is present, in a way she had trouble putting into words. Her week was incomplete without it.
One especially secular way of looking at religious practice is as a collection of ancient human technology. Over generations, human beings have figured out through prayer and ritual how to access the transcendent, how to slow down time. Practicing this ancient technology allows us to resist so many of the insistent, urgent pressures of modern technology and all the ways they have been reshaping our brains and our ways of being with each other. There is a reason clocks have never had a place in church sanctuaries. Here we don’t just step out of invented clock time - we actively resist it. Through prayer and song and practice, we step into God’s time - into the past and into the future and radically into the present all at once. Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
Figuring out our theology of time is not just an interesting thought exercise. It is at the heart of our faith and spiritual practice. When Moses ascended up to the mountaintop to be with God, he did so following the pattern of sacred time - six days and a special seventh day, 40 days and 40 nights. Today we still gather in that pattern of time, every seventh day. This particular Sunday, we stand on the threshold of the beginning of 40 days and 40 nights of coming closer to God: the season of Lent.
The fourth commandment Moses brought down from the mountain required God's people to transform their relationship to God and each other by changing their relationship with time. For six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest. Keep the Sabbath day and make it holy. On that day, we declare that our ultimate allegiance is to God - not to the clock, not to an empire, not to our jobs, our landlords, our chores. One seventh of our lives is set aside for God alone.
The Christian practice of Lent is about resisting all that which struggles to take hold of us: our addictions, vices, and temptations, collective and individual. These 40 days of resistance, this special time of saying no, prepares us for saying yes to the joy and mystery of Easter.
To that end, Christians use this liturgically bounded season to give up a harmful habit that pulls us away from God or to take on a new spiritual practice that brings them closer to God. The practice of Sabbath is both: a dedicated time to say no to work, consumption, and stress so that we can say yes to rest and devotion to God.
If you haven't yet figured out how you'd like to focus your Lent (and you've got three days - it starts on Wednesday), I have a suggestion for you:
Figure out how to add a Sabbath practice to your life, just for each of these 40 days. Find a way to set aside a regular amount of time for just rest. It doesn’t have to be a full sundown to sundown every seven days, do what’s most realistic for you. And here's what our tradition teaches us rest means: no work, no buying or selling things, no watching tv, or mindlessly scrolling on social media. If you really want to be hardcore it’d mean no chores, no volunteering or busy work, not even participating in your favorite hobby. Rest is a time to just BE.
Sound way too hard? Try really short amounts of time - like 5 minutes a day, or the length of time it takes you to finish a cup of tea. Sound impossible? Try a span of time when you make sure to be fully present in what you are doing: banish phones, conversations about work or current events, or thoughts about your to-do lists from your shower or your child’s bedtime routine or dinner each night. The important thing is to make it a regular commitment - not one you do whenever, not rest you earn. Something to hold yourself to - and recommit to when you stumble.
If you think you’re going to need more guidance on this, pick up a copy of the book our parish is reading this Lent, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying no to the culture of now. If you think you’re going to need solidarity and accountability from others, stop by at our Lenten discussions on Sunday evenings or Wednesday midday.
Through our faith tradition and the practices of our ancestors, God has given us the power to free ourselves from the tyranny of the clock. We can cultivate the ability to step into sacred time - those transcendent moments that both fly by and last a lifetime. Amen.
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