Come and See

Come and See The Dover Church
January 16, 2010 – Second Sunday of Epiphany
Scripture: Psalm 40, Isaiah 49:1-7, John 1:29-42

Yet when I read our lessons for this morning, two phrases just would not let me go. From Isaiah, I heard God speaking to the people of Israel and us, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation shall reach to the ends of the earth.”(49:6) And from John, we hear Jesus speaking to Nathanael and Andrew and us, “What are looking for?” They said, “Rabbi, where are you staying? Jesus said to them, “Come and see… and they remained with him for a day” (1:39). I went back in forth between these two words from God and our news this week, until our snow day made up my mind for me.
Ever since I came to Dover to be your pastor, I have been asking myself, “what is the biggest spiritual challenge these folks face? Where does the Good News of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ really intersect their lives in such a way that they might really latch onto it and rejoice?” I have listened to you tell talk about your lives for a year and a half. I have followed how our community acts and thinks, but it was when I finally realized that I was living your lives now that I had my answer. What do I mean by living your lives? I mean two parents with demanding professional careers, housework and leisure, friends, church, bills, and kids with conflicting and demanding schedules of school, extra-curricular activities, homework and play dates: the whole catastrophe. I think of it as trying to live a 30 hour day.
The greatest spiritual challenge the vast majority of us face, the place where the Good News of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ really does intersect our lives in a way that we cannot but rejoice if we live it, is one that challenges the very ethos of our community. Get ready. Hold onto your seats. We, you and I, need to practice Sabbath. We need to take regularly scheduled time out of our lives every week and just be with God in Jesus Christ, to come and see and just abide. In this town of Dover at this time, if we were to become a Sabbath keeping people we truly would be a light of salvation for our neighbors.
It’s a little shocking at first I bet. Sabbath keeping probably didn't occur to you, it's that far off our radar screens, it's that counter cultural. After all, you don't have to be a Christian to want to help the poor or work for peace. You may think that I am just another religious fanatic who wants to take the fun out of life and impose some rigid system of enforced God time on you and our community. You may think I am just another reactionary who wants to roll the clock back to the good old days. I can assure, Sabbath keeping is really the greatest gift God has to give us of all people: a regularly scheduled day off from all our striving and working and producing, a day to just enjoy God and life without having to accomplish anything. Sabbath keeping, while seemingly old fashioned, is actually revolutionary when you haven’t practiced it ever or for a while. It is just about the most counter cultural thing you and I can do in this place at this time. And, perhaps most to the point, Sabbath keeping is exactly what folks like us who live such hectic and frenetic lives need to savor if we really want to think and act faithfully on the Tucsons, Haitis, Middle Easts, and societal challenges all around us.
In my opinion, folks like us are caught in a big Catch 22. On the one hand, many of us tend to be high achievers who thrive in this environment of high achievement, high competition, and high consumption. Many of us strove mightily and excelled in our work, earning enough money to live in Dover, and found here exactly what we sought: a nice, quiet, aesthetically pleasing community that had good schools for our children and public safety for our families.
But then comes the catch, the tail wagging the dog as it were, or the tendency for our lives to live us rather than the other way around. I’m not sure if it has occurred to you but it has to me. We cannot lighten up if we want to keep the whole thing going. Even if we could relax, which most of us cannot because we have worked so hard for so long to arrive at where we are, but even if we could it would feel very hard to cut back, kick back, take time out and just enjoy life when our tax bills, mortgage bills, utility bills, company payrolls, our kid’s tuition bill, our credit card bill, insurance bill, and every other obligation we have out there is coming due. It’s the one thing our parents forget to mention when they taught to work hard and excel: success and achievement come with a high price. We actually have to get up in the morning and get in to work to make a little or a lot more money to cover our ever increasing overhead as well as plan for our own and our family’s future. Or at least that's what our hearts and minds keep telling us.
When I was a professor, I worked like a fiend. I loved my work and devoted myself wholly to my work. Any of you who have done start-ups will know exactly what I was like: always working, always planning, always thinking, sort of like the eye of a hurricane. But, and here's the big BUT, at least one day every weeekend and at least one weekend a month, I would leave it all behind and go flyfishing for trout in the Front Range, the High Rockies, the National Parks, Wyoming, New Mexico; you name it and I was gone in a little red Nissan pickup. I would just take off and fish, getting back to Boulder for church on Sunday morning and to prepare for work the next day. That may not sound like traditional Sabbath to you, but I assure you it had most of the traditional components, except for family and feasting.
How so? Once I had finished packing the truck, my mind had completely stopped thinking about everything I had to do for work and all the crises I had lived through and which faced me in the week ahead. The bills were in the mail and I never brought academic books or my laptop to work on my next project. I just ceased working and trusted that everything was done. Of course, if I had stayed at home I would have worked and worried and planned and strategized. But once I was out of town and blowing through the mountains at 70 mph with the windows down, all I could think about was the beauty of the scenery, the river I was headed for, and the trout which I was going to try to catch. I didn’t even worry about what I would eat or where I would stay. If worse came to worst, I could just pull off the road and sleep in the back of the truck. I had some cash and a credit card, my driving and fishing licenses, and nowhere to be and nothing to do for two whole days.
And what was that like? First, it allowed me to close the book on the week past. I can’t do anything about it out here anyway, so why think about it? And fly fishing is one of those things which pretty much consumes your mind when you’re doing it. If you’ve never done it, try it. You will be amazed at how a couple of hours of fly fishing for trout completely blocks out all the things which have been consuming your thoughts. I didn’t think theologically at the time, but I basically turned everything over to God and took a time out, trusting that God would provide, which was always the case.
And second, closing the book on the past week and enjoying a day or two reenergized me for the work I had to do and loved to do when I got back to it. I was able to greet each new week as just that, a new week with a new me. There is nothing worse than having a work, stress and activity filled weekend, only to have get up on Monday morning feeling drained and dry and have to begin again when you never really stopped in the first place.
These are gifts of Sabbath keeping. I don’t get to go fishing all that much these days with a family and small children, but I have found skiing to be the same thing. Sure, it is an enormous hassle to get everyone ready and packed, but once I am on the lift, I have ceased working. Now that I am a little older and am less sure of my muscles and bones, less sure that I will always negotiate my way down the slopes in one piece, I find the concentration and, let’s be honest, low grade to intense fear, to be cleansing. One of the first things I notice after a day of skiing is that I didn’t think once about work or responsibility. I just enjoyed: the beauty of the mountains, the physical feeling of intensely being alive, the chair lift riding talk with Marie-Laure about the fun, the heightened taste of meals and pleasure of relaxed companionship with friends. This, my friends, is just about all of Sabbath except the worshipping in a sacred gathering.
“Imagine a day-long spiritual fiction suspending ordinary time. There would be neither past nor future. Our worldwork would be finished. By closing the books on the past week and refusing the to think about the next one, we have nothing left to do. For this reason, on the seventh day there is only the present, simply being alive.
On this day everything we do, and the reasons for everything we do, can be only here and now. If our worldwork is done, we cannot do anything about making it better later. Indeed, there is no later.
We quit planning, preparing, investing, conniving, evaluating, fixing, manipulating, arranging, making, and all the other things we do every day. All these things began in the past and will end in the future. We do them, not for their own sake, in the present moment, but with an ulterior motive, for the sake of some time later.
We are obsessed with work. Six days each week we rest so we can go back to work. We play so that we can go back to work. We love so that we can go back to work. One ulterior motive after another. Worrying over the past, living in the future. We are either tied to the past through our uncompleted tasks or compulsively drawn to them through our need for completion in the future. But one day each week there is a day devoted to being present, the seventh day. On that day, we do not have to go anywhere or do anything. Everything is done and we are already here.” (pp. 23-24)