The Path of Discipleship - Sabbath - Letting Go of Time

We are well past the era of the blue laws.  I know folks who still grumble at the thought of stores being open on Sunday and sports practices and games that conflict with Christian worship.   There are still a few vestigial rules here and there, mostly around liquor sales on Sunday morning.  We in the church may fuss about it, but do we really want to admit that one the impulses for church attendance was that people had nothing better to do?  That our real impulse for closing stores is simply to narrow the options of Sunday morning?

                At the same time, I think that we in the church need to rediscover and redevelop the meaning of Sabbath.  We have come to equate Sabbath with worship, that to observe the Sabbath is to go to church.  Yet the Sabbath has more to do with lifestyle and rhythm than a fixed day or a holy hour.  In recent years I have spoken to families in the effort to involve them more deeply in the life of the community and frequently I hear that one reason for not attending worship is that Sunday morning is the only time they feel they have as a family.  Sunday is the day they can sleep in together; enjoy a slow breakfast and long conversation together.  And more and more I am torn between my hope that such families might make their way into worship once again and my hope that such families can have that sacred time together, that time to slow down and simply “be” together.  I don’t want church attendance to be one more thing that they are obligated to do, a piece of inconvenient clutter in an already cluttered schedule.

                And now we are back at things, back with Meister Eckhart and his reminder that “To be full of things is to be empty of God.”  Our schedules are full of things.  Some of them are necessary.  Some of them are good and life-fulfilling.  Some of them are busywork and some of them are clutter. 

                At its heart, Sabbath is essentially time to step away from things.  It is time to breathe and rejoice is the essential act of being alive.  For the contemplative, it time set aside to dwell with God, neither asking for help nor moving toward praise.  Sabbath is time simply spent being with God.

                A number of the gospel stories revolve around Jesus challenging the legalistic concept of Sabbath that had developed in the first century.  He healed non-life-threatening illnesses on the Sabbath.  He allowed his disciples to pick grain and eat when they were hungry on the Sabbath.  He told the people, “The Sabbath was made for humanity; not humanity for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27)  Sabbath is meant as a gift, and when it ceases to be a gift but becomes an obligation, it ceases to be Sabbath.

                Human beings need rest.  We are not made to be productive all the time.  God knows this, but we forget.  We become convinced that we are measured by the things we get done and things we experience.  We stress about leaving a mark on the world and are envious of those who are proclaimed to be successful.  The good news that Jesus brings to us is that we are already enough in the eyes of God.  As we enter the next section in the Easter season, talking about stewardship, I will write a bit about how we might use time in more faithful ways, but that won’t change the fact that you are already enough by being you, loved in the sight of God.

                I encourage you to develop some Sabbath practices and these can range from small to large.  You can spend time in retreat, disconnected from the world for a few days.  You can seek to observe a full-day weekly Sabbath, where you refrain from work and, as much as possible, refrain from obligating others to work on your behalf.  You can build a Sabbath-hour in your day, a time to put productivity aside and simply rest or enjoy God’s creation.  You can take Sabbath-breaks, 5-minutes of quiet or, one of my favorites, three deep breaths to remind you of who and where you are.

                All of these practices can be Sabbath: a time to let go of time; a time to brush up against eternity.  May you rediscover the freedom and blessing of Sabbath rest.

The Path of Discipleship - Self-Control and Grace

The apostle Paul lists self-control as one of the fruits of Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23).  As we deepen our lives in faith, self-control can be one of the byproducts.  Those who participate in efforts such as the “Get Rid of It” challenge are practicing a discipline of disconnecting from “things.”  As we learn to let go of the “things” of life, they cease to have control over us, our thoughts, our attention and our time.  We learn to say, “No” or “Not now” or at least “Not yet,” and in doing so we gain self-control.

                The process seems great in theory and yet many people have trouble with self-control.  As Paul wrote to the Romans, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)  How many times have you tried to start a new habit or avoid an old one?  How many times have you said, “This is the last time…”?  And yet there you are with another donut or another cigarette or streaming another episode.  There you are letting life slip by or doing the very things that are supposed to make life shorter.  There you are pretending (as we all often pretend) that God is not there, or if God is there, God doesn’t really matter.

                Yet often it is not a conscious choice, choosing things over God.  Things just seem to have a way of crowding the divine out of our minds.  There is some pretty strong biology that goes into this as well.  Most of the things we get obsessed about stimulate or over-stimulate the pleasure centers of our brains.  Part of the reason that people are drawn to fast food is that there is still a primitive part of us that sees the advantage of a meal with high levels of sugar and fat (cheap calories) with high levels of salt (easy electrolytes).  We are only about 10000 years from life on the savannah, where such a meal would be a prize. 

                And then there are the whole slew of things that are simple distractions from unpleasant tasks.  Why do your taxes when “Game of Thrones” is about to start?  I’ll do this after one more video, one more dog-shaming meme.  It’s not that any of these are necessarily bad in and of themselves.  I like a good dog-shaming picture as much as the next guy:  

He knew not what he did.

It is when we cannot stop, when time slips away as we sit there in a pixelated daze, when we cede control to the device in front us, that distraction becomes more problematic. 

                There are all sorts of strategies for developing good habits and controlling bad ones.  Sites like Habitica and SuperBetter try to gamify the work.  There are also plenty of tracking apps to help the process.  Recently, I have found it helpful to keep a journal tracking the time between lapses and simply trying to add an hour the next time.  I have always had a weakness for sweets.  So if I eat a cookie and then eat another 12 hours later, the next time I will try to wait 13 hours.  It’s not perfect, but I find once the gap is large enough, the thoughts are less obsessive and the time added gets longer.

                The process is not perfect because I am perfectly human and I live in a world with easy access to sweet treats.  For all the effort and for all the good intentions, sometimes I stumble.  Sometimes I want to scrap the whole process.  Sometimes I just need to start over.

                And the good news is that this whole process is undergirded by the grace of God.  It turns out that God doesn’t love me less because I eat a cookie.  It turns out that God doesn’t love me less because I make a mistake.  It turns out that God will continue to love me as I stumble over the path of discipleship, that God has made space for me even as I struggle to make space for God; that God remains with me as I struggle, as I give up, as I start over.  Remember that the path of discipleship itself is a gift, even the struggles on that path.  We walk together following Jesus, the one who loves us when we stand still and loves us as we stumble and loves us as we walk.

The Path of Discipleship - Organization as a Spiritual Discipline

I have always struggled with organization.  No matter how hard I try, my workspace eventually falls victim to entropy, devolving into a number of piles of papers and books.  The piles are not random but fall in categories.  This one is full of administrative documents.  That one is a stack for sermon preparation.  I currently work in a congregation that has minimal administrative support, so I am the one who sorts the mail each day, routing bills to the bookkeeper, checks to the counters and the huge monthly catalog of cleaning supplies to the property group mail slot.  But then a day comes when there is no time for sorting; another stack forms, papers waiting to disperse.

                I will be careful in talking about organization not only because I struggle with it but also because effective organization is subjective.  One mind looks at a busy table and sees clutter.  Another mind looks at the same table and sees connections.  One person can find nothing without a careful filing system.  Another can pull a necessary paper directly from the stacks without pause.

                This will not be an article about a particular system of organization, instead it will focus on organization as a form of spiritual discipline.  The idea is that as our lives and spaces become more organized we are able to open up more room to pay attention to God.  Think about a schedule, how you spend your time.   A common reason that people will cite for staying away from worship or other forms of spiritual practice is a lack of time.  There are so many things that have to be done, so many tasks and projects.  Yet if you were to break down the time available in sixteen waking hours, how much time could be recovered if we could just remove some unintentional clutter? 

Here I am making an important distinction between the intentional and the unintentional.  For instance, social media can be a great way to connect with friends and family.  I know of clergy who build Facebook time into their schedule as a way to connect with members of their congregation.  Yet social media can also be a deep rabbit hole of lost time, a trance of clicking and liking, only to wake realizing that after two hours you don’t really care about the fish tacos Larry in accounting had last night.  With intention, it is a helpful tool.  With a lack of intention, it becomes a waste of time.

The call to worship at the beginning of Zen meditation is, “Great is the meaning of birth and death.  Awake, awake each one.  Do not waste this life.”  Jesus is remembered several times saying simply, “Keep awake!”  The first step in seeing organization as a spiritual discipline is realizing that organization is about paying attention to the moment, treating it as holy, being stewards of the time and space we have been given by God.  It turns out that there is an hour or two a week for worship if we choose it.  It turns out that there is ample time sit with God, ample time to admire God’s good creation, ample time to show kindness, if we choose to have it which means intentionally choosing not to lose it.

The same can be said for the assorted stuff that piles up on desks and coffee tables, in basements and storage units.  Many of us have more space than we expect when we choose to remove things we don’t need, when we  stop treating “things” like treasure and start treating “things” like the stewards we are supposed to be: to be used, to be shared, to be disposed of or passed on when appropriate.

A discipline develops when we create a regular time to organize and sort.  It doesn’t have to be long, maybe 10 minutes at the beginning of the day and 10 minutes at the end, time to plan and time to evaluate.  Time to do the cleanup that Mrs. Brenner told me to do in first grade, “Putting things away is part of the play.”  Yet again, this is not just cleaning up, but rather it is creating time and space for the holy in our lives, and as such it becomes holy work.

I should add a final disclaimer, a reminder of the nature of grace, that the love of God is not dependent on a clean house, an organized desk or a well-executed action plan.  You will make plans, and life will happen in spite of them.  You will make space and the law of entropy will fill it.  The goal is not perfection, but intention.  As with all spiritual practices, we seek time and space to be turned toward God, remembering that God is already turned toward us in love.  I invite you try a discipline of organization, intentionally creating space and time to dwell in the love of God.

The Path of Discipleship - Why Less Is More

This week I wanted to reflect a little on ideas that have come out of the “Get Rid of It” challenge.  I have led this project in two congregations and heard similar themes as the process goes on.  One theme is the simple power of making a decision.  Often we hold onto things because we cannot decide what to do with them.  Looking through closets and bookshelves is a bit like a geologist looking at layers of sediment.  We can see the authors that have fascinated and entertained us at one time or another.  I have a collection of Hemingway novels and E.B. White essays all stemming from an 8^th grade English teacher who thought early exposure to what he considered good writing would refine my style. 

We can see the classes we took and the hobbies we tried over the years.  Letting go of such things can represent a failure of will and follow-through.  I was going to be a great artist until I ran out of time but I promised myself I would get back to it.  I once knew calculus and Latin and still have the textbooks to prove it.  Letting go of them means admitting that the knowledge was transitory.   My personal translation of Virgil remains unfinished and physics much past F=m*a remains beyond my grasp.

The process of letting go is a process of admitting that who you were is no longer who you are.  When I was a child I dreamed of great things and great achievements.  I could be an astronaut.  I could be famous, maybe the president.  I could be an Olympic champion.  As I grew older, the dreams changed and the goals changed.  I could be a musician.  I could be a scientist.  I could be an author.  None of these were bad dreams.  Perhaps some were deluded by a lack of knowledge, but none were inappropriate for that moment in my life.  Yet I look at the presidency today and wonder, “Who in their right mind would want that?”  I have met former athletes, now senior citizens, who in old age deal with the damage to their bodies from the youthful pursuit of excellence.  I am content now to try to keep myself in decent shape, but no longer hold Olympic dreams.  The person I was may shape the present, but I am not longer the person I was.

By removing some things, we give ourselves permission to move forward to the next dream and next passion.  We can acknowledge that most dreams and most passions are transitory.  It is all right to enjoy a hobby for a little while and it is all right to move on to something else.  It is all right to change, to explore, to backtrack.  Change is the nature of life.

In many versions of contemplative prayer and meditation, one of the goals is to acknowledge that thoughts are not permanent.  They are an ethereal sparking of connected neurons flickering in the background of consciousness until that moment we pay attention to them.  Then somehow they gain solidity and move into the foreground.  Contemplative prayer challenges us allow them to flow in the background, to bubble up and fade away.  One thought rises as another subsides.

Similar images can be used for the things in our lives, the physical possessions, the scheduled priorities.  What if we learn to loosen our grip on them, to give them less attention?  What if we learn that things are just things?  Could we live with less?  Could we share more?  Could we open more physical space around us?  Could we open more time in our lives?  Could we better handle the changes that are a natural part of life?

Like it or not, we change.  The world changes.  The things we own also change.  Cars dent and paints fade.  The new shirt becomes the stained shirt.  The enthralling mystery book loses its appeal when you find out whodunit. 

The good news is that God’s love is constant when the world is not.  God’s love surrounded the person you were.  It surrounds the person you are.  God’s love will surround and sustain the person you will be.  The path of discipleship is that path that reminds us of this truth, a path explained well by those words of Meister Eckhart that are shaping this Lenten season.  “To be full of things is to be empty of God.  To be empty of things is to be full of God.”