Facing The Unknown in Faith
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Exodus 20:1-17
A couple of weeks ago when I was on the subway heading south, the train came to a complete halt, just outside the Rosedale station, in the open air. There was an announcement that there was a technical problem on the line and that we would have to wait for a while until the train could start up again. At that very moment, I encountered the most amazing and bizarre experience.
All those around me on the train experienced what I call “Thumb Frenzy!” Every single one of them pulled out an iPad, a Blackberry, an iPhone and they started punching in numbers and texts. There was a cacophony of sound as there were warnings that e-mails had come in, that things were happening, that calls were being made and calls were being sent. I noticed that everyone around me on the subway was affected, with the exception of the young man sitting right next to me, who had his iPod headphones on and was oblivious to the fact that the train had even stopped at all.
Apart from him, everyone, and I mean everyone was accessing their text. Why? It was because we were not underground and could pick up a signal for a few minutes. All eyes were down, every single one of them. I felt isolated, alone, excluded. I sat there not knowing what to do with my eyes and my hands. I just sat there watching them in their ”thumb frenzy” and the cacophony of sounds that came my way. Oh, some of them might have been calling saying that they were going to be delayed for a meeting, but most of it was chit-chat about the weather and the grilled cheese sandwich they had that morning. It was really quite something!
Finally, the train started, and there was silence. Heads were up! The worship had ended! Everyone was continuing with their normal lives waiting for the next stop and moving forward. One of my friends this week suggested that in our society we live with what he calls “the tyranny of urgency.” The need to fill every moment of our lives with something that we have to do, some activity, some communication, some idea, that it becomes a tyrannical thing, because there is this insatiable need to fill every minute of every day with something.
I suppose my antenna was particularly acute that day, for I had just finished reading an article in The New York Times, on December 29th. I think it was one of the best articles that I have read in the Times in years! It was written by Pico Iyer. Iyer is a very well-known travel writer for The New York Times. His work has appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic, and many different magazines over the years. Because he is sort of part of my generation and approximately my age, I seem to have lived with his writings and have followed the development of his thoughts and ideas over the years.
He comes from a fascinating background: mixed religious traditions. He grew up in Oxford in England. His parents were professors. Eventually, they moved to California, and he had some more schooling in California, before going back to Eton College to finish his education, and eventually going on to get a double First at Oxford, and then going back to the United States to study at Harvard. An impeccable CV! Iyer has travelled all over the world. He has seen so much. Now, he is married, and living with his family in Japan.
What is fascinating is the article that he wrote: The Joy of Quiet. In this outstanding article, he makes two major affirmations, two great statements. The first is the scarcity of quiet. Iyer argues that in many ways luxury is a function of scarcity. Something is deemed luxurious when there is very little of it, very few of it around. That is why Rolls Royces are luxurious: it is because there are few of them.
He argues that the generation that we are in now have been bombarded with the demands of the screen, in many forms, from televisions to computers to iPads to iPods to online books. He says that we have a generation that has been and is being bombarded by the screen, and the luxury that this generation will crave is the freedom from that. This is because, he argues, it will be a scarce thing.
He then goes on to talk about the fact that you can already see the seeds of this concern about the scarcity of quiet in our own society. He writes about what he calls “Black Hole Ranches” in the United States in places like Big Sur, California, where you pay $2,800 a night to be in a room that has no television, no Internet, and no telephone. You pay for the privilege of not having it! I couldn't help but think that the monasteries of the eight century could have made a killing had word gone out about this today!
He suggests that people want to have a reason for not being bombarded by “stuff” and by ideas. He suggests there are what he calls “Internet Rescue Camps” in South Korea and in China and Japan where he lives. Young people who had become so addicted to the information overload that they needed to be rescued from it. The Asian world has always put a priority on peace and quiet and now it has to rescue young people to obtain it!
He even goes so far as to tell us that Intel, of all organizations, now demands that on Tuesdays that its executives and engineers spend four hours away from their computers in order “that they may think and imagine.” You see, he argues that in fact our world is starting to wake up to the fact that quiet is so scarce it is a luxury.
He goes on to suggest that not only is it scarce, but essential. He quotes Blaise Pascal. Interesting, two Sundays in a row I have quoted Pascal! Pascal wrote these words a long time ago in the seventeenth century, but they apply for all time: “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”
In other words, we want to be distracted. We want to not have to think about the state of our being. Yet, at the same time, those distractions and the bombardment in our lives actually become the source of our miseries.
Marshall McLuhan saw this happening. He said, “With the immense amount of speed that we are receiving information, we actually lose ourselves.” The more we are bombarded; the less of ourselves we actually contemplate and think about. Thoreau, the great philosopher in the nineteenth century, probably sitting by Walden Pond, concluded that: “we have more and more means to communicate, but we have less and less to say.” And, I think it is true! Thoreau would go bonkers today, wouldn't he, because we cannot stand quiet: we have to fill our days, fill our agendas, fill our thoughts, and then we become uneasy to silence?
Iyer's most telling interview came with a neuroscientist who said that empathy and deep thoughts are created and produced by neural transmissions that work slowly: those deep things require a process of slowness. So, if you have been wondering today why I have chosen as my sermon title “Blessed Are the Slow of Mind” now you know! It is not a reference to your intellect; it's not a comment of my own inabilities: it is simply about the fact that there is a blessing to a slower mind, a slower mind that can concentrate on deeper things.
Why should this be a surprise? Christians have known this since time immemorial. It is in fact an integral part of our faith. In our text this morning from The Ten Commandments there is this incredible statement about the Sabbath. The Sabbath is supposed to be a day of rest. Now, the Sabbath was based on the notion of the order of creation, namely that in six days, God created the world, and on the seventh day, God rested.
Whether you take that literally or metaphorically makes no difference: the belief, the faith has always been that the seventh day is to be a day of rest. Why? Why is that so? Well, the first five books of The Old Testament spend quite a lot of time on the Sabbath and its importance for the new emerging nation of Israel. The prophets spoke a lot about the Sabbath, although they were more concerned not with what we don't do, but what we should do with our time, that we should use it wisely.
Whether it is in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, or whether it is in the Prophets, there is still the emphasis on the need for the Sabbath. Why? Well, for two reasons. First of all, there is a need for the refreshment and the renewal of the human being. There is a need for us to be able to have time to be renewed. You can see that in the way in which the Sabbath was often referred to as a gift, just like manna from heaven. It is a way for humanity to have a break and to renew ourselves.
Even more than that, even today according to The Ten Commandments, the maid servants and the man servants and the labourers have a time of rest and renewal. It was so easy for people to be abused, for work to be abused, if people were dependent on their masters, if people were dependent on their employers and did not have enough time for rest. The Sabbath was a reason for them to renew themselves in body, mind and spirit. So, the Sabbath was for our good and our well being and our renewal.
It was even more than that: it was to be God's day. It was to be the day we think about God. Even Jesus, we are told in the Gospels, went and worshipped in the synagogue on the Sabbath. He knew that it was important for him to renew himself, and to be in his father's house, and to read the Torah, and to be with God's people. But, there were times when Jesus had strong things to say about the Sabbath.
He was very concerned that the Sabbath had become a law, that it was legalized in such a way that it was oppressive, particularly because of the details that were brought into the law through the Mishnah. In the time period between the end of The Old Testament and the beginning of The New Testament, there was this revival of interest in the Sabbath, but the problem was that it had gone into such minute details that it was oppressive.
That is why Jesus said that the Sabbath was made for humanity; not humanity for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for us! The purpose of it was for our rest and our renewal and to have time for God. Jesus, though critical of those minute laws, nevertheless upheld the Sabbath.
The earliest Christians almost immediately turned the Sabbath into the day that remembered the Resurrection of Jesus, and they celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus on the first day of the week, and Sunday is the first day of the week. It was the day then to have rest. But just because the day had changed, in no way had the concept changed. The Sabbath was for the renewal of God's people, for the good of society, particularly for the labourers, and for the glorification and the honouring of God.
So where are we today? And why does Pico Iyer write the article that he did in The Times? Why do we as Christians really need to be concerned about this issue, even passionate about this issue? I think it is because we are experiencing in our society as a whole a colossal spiritual problem. I think it is affecting almost every facet of our human existence and our behaviour with one another.
Do not misunderstand me. I am not being a Luddite this morning! You would have to take the Blackberry from my dying hands before I would hand it over to you! What I am saying is that we need to control it and the way we set our agendas.
I have great empathy for our young families these days. I am passionately concerned for them. I am passionately concerned because I think they want to have time with their children. I think parents genuinely want to have that peace and quiet with their children. Part of the problem is that even though they desire that, they are caught in this toxic combination of constant technology from which they feel almost constrained to attach themselves to. On the other hand, this insatiable need to plan everything in their lives is a problem, to have their schedule filled with activities and things that are going on, and they interpret that as peace and time away from the normal agenda by imposing another agenda. Herein is the crisis! The crisis is that often that agenda has no time for God. It might create refreshment and a renewal. It might even bring them together, and so be it, and all the power to them, but if it doesn't have a time for God, it is not the Sabbath and it is not sufficient.
David McMaster has been doing some interesting research into, for example, the availability of children coming to Church School. When you think about it, he argues there are about fifteen Sundays in a year when families are free to come and worship at Church School. Fifteen! When you take out summer vacations, winter breaks, holiday times, there are fifteen Sundays when the Church School actually has families attending.
If you assume that half an hour of that Sunday is spent on Christian education and Christian learning, it means that the average church child receives seven-and-a-half hours learning about the Christian faith in a year! How does one possibly, possibly develop a rich life of the faith and be formed in that if that is all there is?
What I am suggesting is that not only is it more important to have a curriculum that teaches the basics in the Church School when the children are there, but it is important for families in their lives to have built into their existence quiet times, time of study and reflection on deeper things, to slow their minds and their lives to the point that those very neuro-processors of which I spoke can actually start to take in the deeper things of life.
Our world, and that includes us, is just like a diabetic: the more and more you feed a diabetic sugar, the more and more you stimulate them with things, the more food you give them, the more weight they lose, and more and more they starve to death, because they cannot produce insulin and turn sugar into energy. They cannot turn food into a life force. In a sense, what we are doing in our society today is that we are feeding ourselves with more and more, but we are starving to death. Christians are starving today because they are not taking the time to be renewed.
Pico Iyer is absolutely correct! There is great joy in quiet, but there is great danger in treating it as if it is simply a luxury. Iyer concludes his article by talking about the fact that he travels all over the world. He talks to his children and his family, and he tries to spend time with them, but he says the following:
It is vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world and to know what is going on. I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai, but it is only, I said to my children, by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole and understand what you should be doing with it.
In other words, even to have knowledge of the needs of the world requires of us some degree of detachment from that world. And, that is why I am horrified to hear that in certain political circles there is a desire, for example, to treat Christmas Day as another shopping day, along with every other shopping day. The stupid argument is that this is so that there might be religious fairness. Yes, if your religion is materialism, if it is an insatiable need to buy, then yes, sure! But unless that becomes an official religion, as opposed to an unofficial one, this society, our people, our workers and labourers, our children and families need some time to rest. That is why I have applauded the government for having Family Day. But, For Christians, every Sunday should be Family Day: time away, a time to pray, God's day. The joy of quiet! Amen.