September 18, 2011
Time Well Spent? - Romans 13:11-14:8
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadWhat time is it? Believe it or not, I am probably more concerned with that question than anybody else here. It’s not that I have anything particularly pressing this afternoon or any Sunday afternoon. But I do have this paranoid awareness that Church is supposed to start on time and end on time. People start getting really antsy at 11:30. It’s not the end of the world if the service is an hour and fifteen minutes, but if it’s an hour and thirty minutes, it probably is. So, I am more aware than probably anybody here of what time it is. But, the question is deeper than that. What time is it, really?
Time often slips up on us. Football season just started last week. Last year I remember thinking during the super bowl that the season was over before I had the chance to enjoy it. Last week was the ten year anniversary of September 11. I was 25 then. At the 20th anniversary, I’ll be 45, which is midlife, close to 50. Julia will be in high school. I remember very well when I signed up for the Army that the recruiter told me that my four year commitment was like a long weekend. He was right about that. Time flies, and we don’t get it back. Today is the only September 18, 2011 that we’ll ever have. So, in light of all of that, I ask again what time is it? In light of all of that, “what time is it” makes more sense, and it has more urgency, and demands more of our attention and intention.
Paul chastised the Romans in today’s Scripture reading that they were wasting their time. It’s confusing to me exactly how they wasted their time. Apparently, some Christians then thought that it was wrong to eat certain kinds of meat, and to drink certain kinds of drinks. I first thought that it was mainly a Jewish question, about how early Christian interpreted Jewish laws. But it’s not even that. It has to do with pagan rituals, and how they interact with Jewish rituals and Christian teaching, and if you are confused by all that, then you get the point. The whole point is that we, two thousand years later, wonder what the big deal was. Jesus Christ just rose from the dead and here they are arguing about food. “You know,” Paul insists, “what time it is.” We know that. And it’s more than 11:00. God has shown us what time it is, and whose time it is. So the question that we have to ask is, in light of the Gospel, are we spending that time well? Or, will people look back on us two thousand years later and accuse us of wasting time?
I remember exactly what I did on the morning of January 16, 1992. I was fifteen years old, in the tenth grade. It was unusually warm the previous couple of days, but a cold front came through that particular day and it was bitter cold. My grandmother died that morning. I was close to her and I was with her the night before. We all knew that she was dying. I told her goodbye that night, and that I would see her again after school the next day. My sister had this annoying habit of coming into my room and stealing my clothes, and she came in that particular morning, on the 16th, and took my shirt. I was furious, and I spent a good part of the morning of January 16, 1992, arguing about a shirt, at the exact same time that my beloved grandmother took her last breath. I obviously did a very poor job of discerning what time it was.
How do you spend your time? Given that you know what time it is, that you know whose time it is, how do you spend time? And, you know where time is going. We Christians have gotten a sneak peak at the future. We are future oriented people. Our best days are ahead of us, not because we’re all members of the optimist club, or because we choose to look on the sunny side of life, but because of what God has done. It’s God’s time, and that is incredibly good news. So, what little time that we have, that God has graciously given us, how are we spending it? I read an article lately by Tom Long about how sermons are boring, about how they’ve always been boring. Just go ask the next guy you run into at work tomorrow and ask him the first word that comes to mind when he hears the word “sermon.” Sermons have always been boring. According to Tom Long, however, it’s not so much that sermons are boring, but that people are boring. And maybe the greatest heresy in the Church today is that many Christians lead boring lives. We waste our time. Or consider this. A friend of mine who is a pastor, and who comes from a long line of pastors, asked his daughter as she graduated from college if she had ever considered church work. Not really, she replied. She didn’t want to spend her life arguing about things that didn’t matter. That hurts, doesn’t it? And it’s sadly true. I had a professor in college who called it “quiet desperation.” Most people, including most Christians, he said, live in quiet desperation. Why is that, and how is that possible for Christians?
Now consider this story. I saw the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” several years ago, and Charlie Wilson said in the story that when he was growing up in East Texas, he had this dog that he loved. Well one day, he came home from school and saw his dog writhing in pain. Somebody told him that the mayor of the town he was from had put shards of glass in the dog’s food to poison it because the dog had walked in his yard. Charlie Wilson said that he was too young to vote, but what he decided to do was to borrow an old pick-up truck, drive to the poor side of town, and get as many people in that truck to the voting booth as possible. Most of those people didn’t have transportation to vote, so he provided it. When he dropped them off, he told those people, “Now I’m not telling you who to vote for, but I think you ought to know what the mayor did to my dog.” The mayor lost that election by something like twenty votes, and from that point on, Charlie Wilson was addicted to politics.
Now that was purely secular. In fact, he did that specifically out of spite (even though I might have done the same thing). Well don’t you think that if we really believe what we say that we believe, if we really believe that time belongs to God and is leading towards God, that our lives should be just as purposeful? How is it possible for Christians to live boring lives? You can pick up any paper, any news magazine, any day of the week and read about something atrocious. You read today’s paper, and you can completely invest yourself in at least ten causes, at least. We know what time it is. And we know how the story is going to end. We’re in a struggle right now. The world is in a struggle. It’s a cosmic struggle, infinitely bigger than any of us. But, we know who wins in the end. We’ve had a sneak peak. Now don’t you want to get involved in that, and don’t you want to be on the winning team? How can we just sit on the sidelines? That’s why Jesus came, to get us on the winning team, to get us on God’s team.
And what about us? It’s not just an individual matter, is it? What about us? What about our Church? We as a Church know what time it is. We know whose time it is. So are we going to spend that time effectively, or will our children and grandchildren have to say that we just wasted it on meaningless stuff? 2011 is about shot. 2012 is right around the corner. What are we going to do in 2012? We are God’s Kingdom at the corner of S. Tryon and Westinghouse in 2012. Are we going to act like it? Are we going to pass judgment? Are we going to look back at the good old days? Are we going to look inward and naval gaze? Or, are we going to act like we are God’s people, in God’s time, doing God’s work, on God’s team, that just so happens to be on the winning side of history? What time is it? Whose time is it? Whose life is it? Whose Church is it? Whose breath is it? Whose future is it? We all nominally know the answer to all of those questions. But do we really know it? Because whatever we believe the answer is, our lives reflect it.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
