Pasadena
Presbyterian Church MAKING THE MOST OF OUR TIME (HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING?)
Sermon preached by Dr. Mark Smutny Sunday, August 16, 2009
Time is precious for me these days. This Tuesday at noon, my wife, Dr. Barbara, leaves LAX to fly to Dayton, Ohio where she will be for the next six months caring for her mother and cultivating her new sense of call to write. I will see her next in early October. Tomorrow we're planning a romantic picnic lunch in San Pedro at the Point Fermin Light House Park, one of our favorite destinations in Southern California. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, near the historic lighthouse and the beautiful perennial gardens, we'll lay out our blanket. From our picnic basket will come slices of cold poached salmon, fresh peaches, squares of Ghirardelli brownies, and chilled Chardonnay. Every moment together between now and that flight on Tuesday will be precious, every conversation, a treasure, every glance, lasting. With time so short, we need to make the most of our time.
If you ask our sons, now 23 and 26, what they recall as their favorite family time, they will tell you about the time when they were eight and eleven and time stood still. They will tell you about the time when our family vacation took us on a horse pack trip into a wilderness area in central Idaho. The four of us, Barbara, the boys and I, each on a pack horse, guided by an outfitter, and two more horses hauling our camping gear: fishing rods, cook stove, tent, great food, steaks, wine, eggs, fresh vegetables, fruit, you name it, bacon, were hauled by horseback thirteen miles into a mountain wilderness where at 8,000 feet all there was, was pristine alpine beauty, jagged peaks, three be-jeweled azure lakes, Uno cards, a campfire, marshmallows, chocolate, graham crackers, and ourselves. Technology was banned. No Game Boys. Game Boys were the mobile computer toy of the time. Game Boys were banned.
To this day, the boys insist playing Uno by candlelight in a tent with their mom and dad was the coolest family vacation they ever remember. A deer came through our camp every evening at dusk. It had great big antlers. He was so graceful. “Shush! Be still!”
At night we dragged our sleeping bags from the tent and lying on our backs we watched shooting stars. "There goes another one!" If you ask our boys, now grown men, it was the best family time ever. They remember it like it was yesterday. We made the most of our time. Indeed, for the four of us, time stood still.
Time is such a precious commodity. Each one of you remembers sacred times in your lives when it seemed as if time stood still, as if, somehow, God must have been near: · At the birth of our children · During the dying moments of a loved one · When the sacred vows of marriage were given and received · In a church retreat when we committed our lives to Christ · In a time when we hit bottom and someone cared so much as to lift us up · In a time when were taught something so profound at just the right moment and that time became preserved in our memory in a way that now seems timeless.
In such timeless times, we know time can be pregnant with new life and the presence of God.
Let us also acknowledge right here, right now, how much of our time we squander; how much of our time we waste. We waste time staring mindlessly at the television or computer screen. We say we are bored with nothing to do, with nothing meaningful to do, as though God did not need us for something. Or conversely, we rush about pretending to fill our time with important things. We sure seem to be busy with important things. We’re busy rushing to and fro, brushing by one another, breezing by one another, being productive. We’re so busy it’s difficult sometimes to take the time to notice the important things: a baby’s perfect hand, a grandmother’s kind, wrinkled eye, or a flower’s exquisite, unfolding petals.
Whether we waste time by doing too little or doing too much, all these ways of squandering time bring us to this remarkable little passage from the 5th chapter of Ephesians where making the most of our time is discussed with remarkable insight. I think I’ll read it again. It’s so brief, yet so rich.
Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. So do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The church people in Ephesus, which was a major town on the coast of Asia Minor, the current country of Turkey, were struggling with what to do with their time. They were facing evil times, according to the scripture. We don't know exactly what the evil was. We know generally that the early church faced oppression and discrimination and we also know that the church faced division and turmoil from within, especially as it attempted to bring together into one church people from different groups and ethnicities. Indeed, the whole Epistle to the Ephesians is about multiculturalism and the church and the need to discover both unity in Christ and diversity in Christ and the struggles of doing that well.
"The days were evil," says the text. We don’t know precisely what was meant, but apparently some in the church community thought they could numb the pain of evil times with alcohol. That’s why the writer tells the church people in Ephesus not to get drunk with new wine and not to be foolish for that is debauchery, to use the language in the Bible.
Now using new wine to numb pain should not be strange to our ears. We routinely self-medicate as we attempt to blot out the unpleasant realities of life. Some of us use booze. Some of us use shopping. Some of us use excessive work. Some of us use porn. Some of us use overeating. Some of us use prescription medications prescribed by doctors but then use more medicine than we are supposed to use.
Whatever method we use to self-medicate in order to numb the pain of living in difficult times, the point of Ephesians in Chapter 5 is that if we use these methods of self-medication to escape the pain of living we will be pretty much useless to the Christian cause. He calls self-medication and attempts to numb, debauchery. They’re all forms of wasting time.
You see, the writer of the Epistle to the Ephesians was writing to the church in Ephesus and to the other churches in Asia Minor and the Greek Islands, and eventually, in the fullness of time, to us, because he was concerned about the use of our time for the Christian cause and he wants us to use our time wisely. He’s asking us, “Will you use your time to bear witness to the Lord of love, to the Lord of light, to the Lord of hope and peace and love or will you waste your time on lesser things? That is the question for us in this passage.
He wants us to be empowered to use our time as a sacred trust. As a sacred trust, he wants us to see each moment as an opportunity to bring life and love and joy into this world and thereby bear witness to the Lord of life and love and joy. That's why tomorrow, around noon, I plan on having a picnic lunch with my wife on the peninsula in San Pedro. I plan on offering a portion of cold poached salmon to her, a sip of chilled wine, and a kiss, because time is oh so precious. Barbara and I have so little time.
That is why this afternoon or this evening I hope some of you call your parents and tell them you love them. Or maybe it's your children you need to call, or a friend you need to call to tell them you love them. Maybe it's been too long and you realize time is short and you need to pick up the phone and call them because they need to hear from you.
Or maybe you need to thank someone. Maybe you need to write someone a letter expressing what they really mean to you. Maybe you need to thank them, expressing what they mean to you, so that when they receive the correspondence that letter will become for them a timeless, eternal gift of grace that they will never forget. Maybe you need to provide that gift to them. Do it.
Maybe you need to take the time to write a check to the church, yes sacrifice financially, because the Gospel has convicted you and you need to give back.
Maybe you need to take the time to reorder your priorities. Maybe you need to shift some time away from watching television and dedicate more time toward visiting shut-ins, volunteering at a homeless shelter, singing in a choir, ushering at PPC, assembling food baskets on Thursdays, joining a Bible study for your soul care. The possibilities are endless. The benefits are out of this world. Time is precious. Make the most of it. The writer of Ephesians is urging us to make the most of our time because time is so precious. He wants us to bear witness to the Gospel.
There is more. Curiously, he also urges us in difficult times, not only to not self-medicate through alcohol and any other contemporary form of numbing. He not only urges us to seize each moment to bring grace, love and joy for the sake of the Gospel, but he also encourages us to be filled with the Spirit. He sounds Pentecostal.
He says in verse 19, “Be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
He says the antidote to evil, the antidote to pain, the antidote to the stress of daily living, is not self-medication through new wine, but “singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.”
· The solution to suffering is not booze but singing hymns.
· The alternative to anesthesia is not work but a singing, thankful heart.
· The way to bring hope to a world in pain is to sing of God’s Amazing Grace:
The writer of Ephesians is a very wise man. Picture a congregation in the latter part of the First Century of the Christian Era, pummeled by oppression, fearful of arrest, concerned about what tomorrow will bring, torn inside by fear of betrayal, prone to suspicion of differences. Some in the face of such pressure numbed their pain with new wine. They were useless for the Christian cause. From afar, the letter arrives and they read it out loud in worship and they hear these words of encouragement: “Be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
And they begin to say to themselves, let’s start singing. And one voice begins to sing:
My life goes on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation. I hear the clear, though far off hymn, that hails a new creation. No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that Rock I’m clinging. Since love is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?
Except instead of English, he sings it in Greek or Aramaic. Soon all join in. They discover that if they sing, their fear and their pain are transformed into joy and thanksgiving. Life becomes good. The really cool thing about singing spiritual songs is that singing can heal pain and it can help you cope with suffering, evil and hardship.
That’s why we sang “Jesus Loves Me This I Know” last Sunday on Barbara’s last day with us to remind us that when we are sad, Jesus still loves us and we are still one community in the Lord.
That’s why when African Americans were enslaved; spirituals emerged as a form of defiance and triumph over oppression and victory over the sin of racial hatred. God was still victorious and would deliver.
That’s why when six million Jews were systematically murdered by Hitler and his regime in the Final Solution, in the ghettos and the death camps you could still hear violins playing and voices singing as a protest against the unspeakable evil. The song goes on.
The writer of Ephesians knew that one of the church’s greatest resources in times of persecution and suffering and hardship was to sing.
That’s why in a few weeks in the face of the church’s budget deficit, we’re going to have a benefit concert organized by Georgia Stitt and Anne Wareham to benefit the operating budget. That’s September 11. That’s a Friday. We’ll play music and sing our way out of our deficit. It’s biblical. It’s right there in Ephesians, chapter 5. We’ll sing our faith. Laugh raucously. And have a good old time. Be there with your wallets.
That’s why when I get up in the morning, I love to sing. I sing hymns from the previous Sunday. I whistle tunes. I sing Willie Nelson songs. I sing because I can’t keep from singing.
My advice to you is to sing. Whether you believe you can’t carry a tune in a bucket or you have a voice like Eli or Anita or Jayne, or some where in between, if you sing and give thanks to God in everything, you’ll be fine. You will make the most of your time if you build in plenty of time for singing, for you will bring joy to your life and to the lives of others.
Time is short. We’re given so little of it. Golly. My wife leaves on Tuesday and here I am spending my time with you. It’s time to say Amen to this sermon. It’s time to sing a hymn, collect the offering, sing another hymn, pronounce the benediction, hear the organ postlude, mingle on the patio, attend the Town Hall meeting, and go home.
It’s time to take every moment we are given on this earth and treat it as a sacred treasure, a moment pregnant with possibilities, an opportunity to see God’s dazzling grace disclosed, a time to bear witness to God’s love and the Gospel of Jesus.
There are so many possibilities for what to do with your time:
· You could play a game of Uno with your children. · You could have a picnic lunch with your partner. · You could make a phone call to a parent or child or friend and tell them you love them. · You could help feed the hungry here at PPC on Thursday mornings, · You could visit shut-ins, write a check to the church, join the choir, sing a song of protest, telling the world as it rushes about, to get its priorities straight. · You could “make a melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Whatever you do, make the most of your time. In the power and through grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. .
(c) 2009Smutny
All rights reserved. Permission
granted for non-profit use with attribution. |
|
