First Parish Church-Wintle Sermon The Most Important Thing

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING

A Sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. Thomas D. Wintle,

Senior Minister of The First Parish Church in Weston, Massachusetts, on September 12, 2004.

The scripture reading was Luke 15:1-10.

"Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them,

does not light a lamp, sweep the house,

and search carefully until she finds it?" (Luke15:8)

Do you ever have that feeling of having lost something, but you're not quite sure what it is? Oh I don't mean walking into a room and forgetting why you went there. You know the joke, don't you? – you know you're getting older when you think more often about the Hereafter, as in, "What did I come in here after?"

Maybe it's not a "thing" you feel you've lost, but some part of your life, something that once gave you joy but isn't around anymore, or not very often.

I titled this sermon "The Most Important Thing." Think about that for a moment: what is most important to you? Some answers come quickly: our family, the people we love, or the gift of life itself. Some answers come with some reflection: to make a difference to some small part of the world, to stand for justice and caring, to live with integrity, to love God and your neighbor as yourself. I remember a sermon in which we were told that if we wanted to know what a person treasures in this life, study their checkbook. My father was an accountant, and after he died I remember looking over his ledgers, account books, and I learned so many things I never knew about my family while growing up. What would your checkbook say about you?

I want to suggest something different this morning. I want to suggest that "the most important thing" is TIME, how we handle our time. It may also be the thing we have lost: as children, we had "time on our hands" and time moved slowly, now we "don't have enough time" to do so many things we want to do. If you want to test that, try to get five people in Weston to schedule a meeting!

It's all about priorities, of course. Your calendar says more about you than your checkbook. Assuming that each of us is given a finite amount of time on this earth, and we don't know how much time we have left, how we handle our time seems to me the most important matter with which we must deal. A person who was facing the fact that he was dying said recently "I wish I had more time, I wish I had taken more weekends off."

What is the problem and what can we do about it?

The Massachusetts Council of Churches and many other groups have endorsed a national effort called "Take Back Your Time (TBYT)," with the sub-slogan "Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America." They say that too many of us are over-worked, overscheduled, overwhelmed, teetering on the edge of burnout, and this threatens our health, our marriages, our families and friendships, even our community and civic life.

I'm always a little skeptical about such national campaigns, but somehow, coming back from summertime schedules makes it easier to hear when they say:

• the number one cause of premature heart disease, according to the clinic in San Francisco where the term "Type A personality" was coined, is what they call "time urgency – a continual sense of time pressure." (TBYT 78).

• people who are exhausted from work will be more likely to curl up in front of the TV than to attend a town meeting. (66)

• employers who seek to keep workers as part-time or temporary in order to avoid medical or pension benefits thereby force many to work two or three jobs (124)

• it's not just the poor, some law firms expect their lawyers to bill 50 or 60 hours a week (125).

• from 1973 to 2000, the average US worker added an additional 199 work hours to their annual schedule.

• 80% of men and 62% of women work more than 40 hours a week, longer hours than medieval peasants.

There are social justice issues involved here, as well as personal choices about life-styles.

There is some guidance that our religious tradition offers about time. It's been around so long that we've found thousands of ways to ignore it, but we do so at our peril. You see, the very concept of the SABBATH says that there is a way of showing reverence for time.

What is Sabbath? It comes from a Hebrew verb meaning "pausing" or "ceasing." In the book of Exodus (20:8-11), the fourth commandment says we should not work on the seventh day because on the seventh day of Creation, God rested. In the book of Deuteronomy (5:12-15), the reason for the rest is to remember how our spiritual ancestors were freed from Egyptian slavery. Either way, the idea is that we hallow time; we show reverence for time, by keeping Sabbath. What exactly does that mean?

Let me suggest three aspects of Sabbath-keeping that teach about handling time well (and I add, I do not mean just the Jewish Saturday or the Christian Sunday, but what Sabbath refraining-from-work means).

It means to pause, a pause that refreshes. Do you know what it means to pause? To pause is to stop your normal activity, to give up control for a time, to step back. That is so very hard for many people. Sometimes we hold on so tightly to every event and every moment that, even when exhausted, we can't let go because we're afraid everything will spin out of control. Rabbi Arthur Waskow writes that the Hebrew words used in many of the Old Testament passages about Sabbath and sabbatical years mean, literally, "release." It is, he says, the same as what Buddhists call "nonattachment."

Workaholics need not fear here, however, because one of the great values of a Sabbath pause is that we then emerge refreshed, thinking clearer, seeing with refreshed eyes. The concept is exactly the same as that which allowed agricultural land to lie fallow for a season, that its nourishing power might be replenished.

We need the Sabbath pause.

Second, good Sabbath-keeping is decluttering. Writer Donna Schaper gives this definition in a wonderful little book Sabbath Keeping: "Decluttering is clearing away the less important things on behalf of the more important things. Decluttering gets down to what matters, spiritually as well as physically. You cannot make dinner with yesterday's dishes still clogging the sink, nor can you keep Sabbath if too many worries clutter its gate." (32)

I remember so clearly the decluttering Sabbath experience of preparing to move to Weston nearly ten years ago. On the second floor of our previous house, there was a back room with bookshelves filled with some twenty years of theological journals, some read, many not yet read but carefully saved for future reference. We rented a dumpster, put it at the end of the driveway under a window of that room. And one day, I went through the journals, one by one, reviewing the tables of content, deciding what to save, and what I would probably never ever need for a sermon. And I took the discarded journal, tossed it out the window, and it sailed into the dumpster. I can tell you: every unread academic journal that sailed into the dumpster lifted a burden from my shoulders, I can feel it still.

What clutters your attic or desk or list of things-to-do? When your Sabbath-keeping allows you to let-go of the less-important things, suddenly your world is less crowded, more spacious.

We need the Sabbath decluttering.

Finally, Sabbath-keeping is about "setting aside time for God" (Schaper 1). I don't know what your own concept of God is, but I hope it means at least that which is most important in this life, that which is most real, that from which you cannot hide. Whatever else people might mean by the word "God," I'm sure it means having accountability to something far greater than our own personal needs and desires. There is more to life than ME.

Sabbath-keeping helps us to reverence and sanctify time by urging us to use all the ancient disciplines and practices that enable people to see beyond the everyday, the here-and-now, and reach for wider horizons. If you come to church regularly, you will learn how to pray, how to listen to scripture in a way that opens you to hear the voice of God speaking not just to the ancient world but to YOU right here, right now.

Sabbath pause. Sabbath decluttering. Sabbath time for God.

III

We began with the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. Do you ever have that feeling of having lost something, but you're not quite sure what it is?

I urge upon you, at the start of this new church year, the very ancient discipline of Sabbath-Keeping. Whatever our age, whatever our loss of memory, the discipline of Sabbath tries to teach us to honor and reverence the gift of time.

You and I will die. Face it. My colleague Forrest Church says that the beginning of religion is the recognition of the twin miracles that we are alive and we will die. We have only so much time left.

Remember the Sabbath day . . . and keep it holy.