The Tyranny of Time

A Sermon by Christopher Edmonston

Luke 12: 22 - 34

I.

The hot Costa Rican sun beat down upon us, a group of 20 or so Americans there to observe a coffee cooperative. We saw coffee plants being grown in an economically just and environmentally sustainable way.

Now I wish, I wish, I could tell you that we were kept rapt by the strength of the presentation. That the heavily accented English of the agronomist we were listening to was music to our ears.

But that’s not what happened that day. We were being eaten alive by the bugs that were swarming around us as we were being roasted by the aforementioned equatorial sun. Most of our group kept looking at our watches, over and over again, interested in the passage of time, in the remainder of time before the almighty schedule (praise it!) dictated to our group an exit from the coffee fields and a return to the relative protection of the bus.

Our watch, watching, eventually caught the attention of our speaker, and raised his concern. “What is it, with you Americans,” he asked with an aggressive bite in his voice, “why always in such a hurry? Where do you have to go?” Apologetically we answered – it’s the schedule. We are behind for the day, just in a hurry to get back on track. This did not satisfy him. He was not converted.

Next we said it’s the heat, the bugs, the long days and nights we were spending. No, this did not convert him either, and he began to tell us of the sickness of hurry and the sin of time consumption that he had observed in American culture.

“You want to know the difference between your country and mine?” he asked. “In America everybody has a watch, but in Costa Rica, in Latin America, we actually have time.”

II.

Let’s name it right now. Most Americans are obsessed with time. We are overrun by it. It controls us to the point that we feel as anxious when we have too much to do it. And we feel anxious when we have nothing to do and too much time on our hands. We love time and we are controlled by it at the same time.

Even our language is filled with time-talk: we have play-time, tummy time, time management, time outs, and quality time. We take time, spend time, carve time, and borrow time. We even say we can make time.

We are supposed to know how much time we have left on cell phones and internet accounts. We know about how long most of the things we do should take and when they go under or over our estimates then we are acutely aware of how long or short we were. To give an example each and every person here knows how much time there is supposed to be from the start of the worship service to the end – we know how long the preacher preaches (including me) and how far worship might just go over the allotted time for church on Sunday morning (technically the Sabbath).

Indeed, if we are to be really honest we all secretly suspect that that time and efficiency go hand in hand. We all seem to know that that productivity is the buzz word of our current generation. The mantra of our age has become: “Do more in less time and you are worth more to your family, your company, your community, and your church.”

And yet despite all this management and regulation of time, study after study shows that we, 21^st century Americans, get less sleep than we have at any time in our history. We are the most scheduled and least satisfied people on record. We have high levels of depression, anxiety, and we worry about everything.

Many of our children have schedules that would rival many municipalities. The adults are not much better.

And to top it all off, a whole bunch of us (including me) are always running late no matter if we have a Palm Pilot, Outlook Express, or personal assistants. We all have watches, and date books, and cell phones, and laptop computers, but none of us the time to live lives as full as the imago dei, image of God, lives that the Lord intends.

Friends, our scheduled lives are full, but full of what…exactly?

I myself once paid more than $500 to go to an executive time management and productivity seminar. Why? Because of the many unquestioned time-centered gospels of our age; world-views and ideas that say promote things like time is money; a full life is a life that is a busy life; to waste time is unthinkable and an error in the sight of God (“Time is a gift from God”); and thoughts like, “if I could only manage it all a little better, keep a better list, plan better then I could get it all done.” If you haven’t had one of these thoughts about time, then believe me, you will.

I have them all the time (pun intended!).

III.

What I am suggesting to you this morning is that Time itself and such thoughts about time take on a powerful role in our world – indeed they function like a power in our world and the worry that comes with time is a principality in our lives. Ironically, time, at least how we keep it and count it is an arbitrary entity. People invented the keeping of time, the counting of minutes, hours and days and years to help us order the world. It was made, in essence, to serve us. But as I suggest that this TIME thing is a power run amok, my question today is do we serve our calendars or do they serve us? Do we use time or does it use us?

Most of us I believe fall into the latter group – we intend to schedule and control our time and it runs away on its own as a force independent of us. Many of us don’t even know why our lives seem so hectic. It is just the momentum of the culture that carries us forward, and we follow, anxious and worrying, filling our calendars along the way.

That Bible in your pew understands better than we do that there are forces in the world that lord-over us and control us: these forces are the powers and principalities. No fewer than seven words are used in the New Testament to describe the powers in our world – words like: arcai, exousiai, dunamai. Translated these words carry deep and important meanings – rulers, officers, authorities, principalities, powers, lords, demons. These words can mean the way life is ordered, the forces that govern us, the way the world works, and they also can mean the way that we are captive to the powers like sin and death. Time and the way it so easily controls our lives, spinning us in endless cycle of worry, can be and is one of the overlords.

Sometimes the powers, like time, manifest themselves for good – this is true enough. A life with no scheduling, with no planning, can seem empty and out of control, and reality dictates that it takes time to do any job. Often, though, the powers take on a different role. Instead of ordering life they begin to direct life. And directing life, they begin to demand that we serve them in place of serving God.

IV.

Take these verses from Luke -- these verses about worry, about provisions, and possessions. These verses occur in Luke’s 12^th chapter, which is a chapter full of stories and parables and verses about what happens when our lives are controlled by the forces of the world, and not by our faith and devotion to God. These verses, as you just heard, are particularly concerned with the need to possess and the need to have.

Now, it is true enough that the word “time” is never directly mentioned in the verses I read today. But these verses focus entirely upon provisions and possessions, which are the very things we either spent our time trying to acquire or we are spending our time trying to acquire right now. We spend the balance of our time not in service to God, but in trying to acquire security and an easier and better life. That is why we worry, isn’t it? That is our great fear, is it not: having enough time to be happy and feel secure and render meaningful and predictable an uncertain future.

Jesus senses the worry and the anxiety in the crowd around him and his message is clear – “be like the lilies that worry not at all. The God who loves and claims you will still provide, worry or not. Worry cannot add an hour to your life.” Jesus knows that no time is gained through such worrisome obsession.

And this is his break with our culture, and the place where this text drives us. Jesus’ concern is for the life of faith and our concern is too often squeezing every moment we can from a day planner to live full and busy lives. As long as we are serving TIME, we will not be serving the Lord. If there is any one thing I know, it is that time spent in service to anything other than God, neighbor, and the people we love, is time that always feels empty and hollow. Time is tyrannical because we spend too much of our time doing the things of which Jesus warns us about. Time is tyrannical because it tempts us with promises it cannot keep, and before we know it, and before we even realize that it might be wrong, we have filled our time in pursuit of all the wrong ends.

Or to put this starkly: the calendar that we are always trying to fill can be as cold as the coldest day when spiritual storms are spawned. It is impossible to embrace a day planner.

V.

Here is the challenge of Jesus to the crowd in Luke 12, and it is our challenge today: go and look at your calendars from the last weeks – how did you spend your time?

What god did you serve as you bustled through your busy week, and was it a god who gives anything back besides anxiety and worry?

Did you even have enough time for prayer – to consider the lilies of the field and the grasses of the ground – the very vegetation that Jesus says has greater faith in God than we do?

If time is our most precious commodity, then why do we spend so much of it in service to that which is not divine?

What did you spend more time with your day planner – your appointment book, your Bible?

VI.

Jesus, in his genius, tells us that a full calendar does automatically equate to a happy life, and that our only real assurance is found with God.

We don’t really need a full calendar. A lazy Saturday is not terrible act of insolence.

What we need is the Lord. And if we fill our hearts, our lives, and our time with devotion to God, then there is heavenly treasure in store. This is the treasure we are to possess – the peace of mind, the assurance of eternal life, the love of Christ, the respect of neighbors, the richness of the Word, and the fellowship of the saints. Yes, that is what our calendars should be filled with. Living this way is resistance to the tyranny of the calendar; living like this is an act of faith.

Time is precious; and the first obligation that we should be giving our time to is to our devotion to God.

VII.

I think that is what the agronomist meant on that hillside in Costa Rica. That our time as Americans is filled with the details of what we have to do, with the intricacies of getting the multiple jobs that we have to get done, done, and that we don’t have the ability to contemplate, incarnate, embody, or pray about the things that we are doing. We just keep doing, and never wondering about how what we are doing glorifies God. There is after all, a difference between the time that we have, and the schedule that we keep.

To remember this important lesson, and perhaps as an act of resistance to the tyranny of time, I have not worn a watch since that day.

Please don’t get me wrong. Keep your schedule. Just don’t let it Lord over your lives. Understand that time is a gift from God, a gift that should be returned to God. The tough question is, when busyness tempts us, whether or not busyness, and the tyranny of the power of time, lord over our lives in the future as they so often do today? The question is whether or not we continue to believe that worry can ever add a stitch to our lives?

For His part Jesus says no. No to time, no to money, no to security, no to control, no to worry, and no to their power when these things want to be the lord. And why is His “No” so important? Well, because He is the Lord of the powers: dying upon the cross and leaving behind an empty tomb.

His breaking of the powers means that he has always has time on his schedule for us, even if our schedules get too full for him. He alone has all the time in the world to give us. And His time is for you, and for me, and for us all.

Amen.