Sermon: Passing Through Time

One of the key events in the calendar of my diocesan role as Director of Ministry is the annual clergy summer gathering.  This year's took place last week from Tuesday to Thursday and had as its theme: Time Matters.  We took on board a lot of issues - on the first day looking at issues as diverse as the psychology of our attitudes to time, the times and seasons of the liturgical year and the big questions of the physics of time.  The second day was no les intense with a Bible study led by the Bishop on the theme of the Sabbath in Judaism and Christianity, a massively engaging presentation and discussion on the whole question of nostalgia in the parish and (what happens when the nostalgic congregation meet the progressive vicar?) and then a lecture on the massive subject of ageing from Tom Kirkwood, Head of the Institute of Health and Ageing in Newcastle and Reith Lecturer in 2001. Needless to say this was all very stimulating and I have come back even more alert than ever to question as and issues of time.  So I was not so much fascinated as arrested, stopped in my tracks, when I looked at the collect for today's service.  For in it we prayed that ‘we may so pass through things temporal that we lose not our hold on the things eternal'.

Things temporal - it is a strange and antique phrase and it might just put people off. But for me it means ‘time'.  In essence the prayer is that ‘we might live through time in such a way that we that we don't lose our grip on eternity'.   

It is a good and topical prayer.  One of the reasons why we chose that theme for the conference was out of concern for how busy people are getting. As the preacher reminded us at the ordination service last week, the signs on the Motorway have a message for us all ‘speed kills'.  There is truth in that but the deeper truth might be that by living fast we not only risk our mortal lives we also risk our spiritual lives.  It is the very pace of life, the domination of time and deadlines that begin to loosen out grip on eternity.

So we pray that ‘we might live through time in such a way that we that we don't lose our grip on eternity'.   I wonder if you will know what I mean if I suggest that this is a boomerang prayer: the sort that you send out to God only to find it coming back to you. Quite a lot of prayers are like that.  We pray for Mrs Jones down the road who is lonely ... comes the answer - knock on her door then.  We pray for those who are poor - comes the answer - how about a donation to Christian Aid? We pray for those affected by violence - comes the answer - maybe you should be thinking about the times when you are a bit impatient and hurtful in the way you go about things.

I don't have a lot of experience in boomerang throwing but I guess that one of the things is that if you are throwing a boomerang it is as well to know that that is what you are doing. If you think it is just an ordinary stick you might throw it and forget about it only to find it coming back and clouting your head.  Bang.  The spiritual equivalent of this is perhaps the guilty conscience.  We pray that God will hold and respond to the pain of the world - but our conscience tells us that we have a part to play too.  Well it's just as true with this question of time, of the way we pass through ‘things temporal'. If we pray the prayer seriously we will realise that we have a responsibility to make the decisions and the honour the priorities that give God at least a chance of helping us stay connected with eternity.

So, how is it is be done?  What's the recipe, the method for staying in touch with eternity?

Those are nice sounding questions but I fear that if I now set about answering them you might just wander off in your thoughts, dulled by the predictability of my suggestions and thinking ‘he would say that wouldn't he'. Go to church, say your prayers, try to love your neighbours, try harder to  love your enemies, when people hurt you forgive them and so on.  There is nothing wrong with such advice - these suggestions come straight out of the New Testament and constitute the Christian attempt to live a good life, one that is not merely a matter of filling in the seconds and minutes between our birth and our death with diverting pastimes...  But the problem is that you are perfectly well aware of this and you don't need me to remind you.    

One of the other things we considered at our clergy gathering was time management, or as I prefer to call it, the stewardship of time. I organised the clergy in small groups, gave them a bundle of resources and asked them to help each other to make a couple of decisions that would improve the way they make the best use of their time.  What I did not do was arrange for someone to lecture them on the subject. Why? Because, as someone said to me, ‘most of the stuff written about time management seems to have been dreamt up at the university of the very obvious'. Actually, he didn't say 'very obvious' but that's more or less what he meant.  The problem is not that people don't know about drawing up to do lists and then prioritising them and so on. The problem is actually doing it.' ‘Exactly,' I replied, ‘it's Romans 7 all over again. Paul's problem is always our problem, my problem.'

Paul's problem is this: I know what I should do... I even want to do it. But I always seem to find myself doing something else. In other words the problem is not the theory. The problem is practice.  Which is why I am not going to waste any time telling you what to do if you want to pass through time in such a way as to not lose your hold, on eternity. 

For the real question is not: ‘if I wanted to do this, how would I do it' but, ‘do I want to do it?' Do I really want to keep something of a finger-hold on eternity, a toe-hold on the rock face which is God? Or am I happy to let myself drop into the ever-rolling stream of time and simply be washed along by it; to go with the flow of exciting modern life?

Looking around at our world today, and indeed at the Church, I feel that the evidence is that there is far more abandonment to the flow of time and the pressures of ‘things temporal' than are healthy, wise or, frankly, Christian.  Human beings have never lived at such a pace. Everything is speeding up.  This is quite peculiar really; given that we have so many labour and time saving devices and that we are all living much longer lives than human being in even the recent past.  Did you know, for instance, that every day you live your life expectancy increases by five hours? As one of the speakers at our conference put it, each day is now 29 hours long. You have 24 hours today and another five hours in the future.  This means that you are probably going to have quite a long old age. It also means that our population is ageing rapidly. In the conference someone said, ‘yes but that is only in the western world.' But that's not true. The reality is that life expectancy in some parts of the developing world is increasing far more quickly than it is here.  For poor people the days are more than 29 hours long.  The impact on this on our world going to be massive.  And unlike international terrorism or global warming which are results of us making a hash of things, this is all the result of success. One thing we as a species have achieved is the ability to live longer and longer.  Does that make you want to cheer the human race? Or does it make you wonder, as it does me, why we are not giving much more thought and attention to the question of what all this length of living, all this increased experience of ageing and being elderly is all about?

One thing that is coming clear I think, is that as our lives get longer it is no longer possible to judge the value of living by its magnitiude. Greater quantity of life leads us to raise questions of quality of life.  But this is not only a question about the quality of life in a residential care home or an ICU.   The question is as relevant for a baby, a toddler, a child, a teenager, a young adult, a middle aged person, a younger older person and an older older person - the first, second third and fourth ages of life all have their different needs and bring different challenges.  But the question of quality needs always to be asked. For it is a spiritual question.

‘A poor life this, if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.'

That's a poetic answer.  And it takes us a step in the right direction.  The point of life, the meaning of time, cannot be fathomed from the relentless rush of the ever-flowing stream.  Indeed the greatest danger, the greatest absurdity, for us today that we are so concerned to live life to the full that time itself becomes a pressure, a problem. When it does so we will be wise if we make the spiritual effort to say the prayer at the heart of today's collect and let it boomerang back to us, and startle us into a different kind of action, a different way of living, a different way of keeping, using spending, enjoying, exploring time.

Quite how we do this is not a complicated matter, as I have said. On the contrary, it is a matter of complete simplicity, clearly outlined in the New Testament.  But one word of advice needs to be heeded if we are ever to develop an appropriate spirituality for modern times.  And it is this.

You can not do spirituality fast.  It takes time to prevent time taking us over.  Spirituality demands time each and every day.  If you are not prepared to give some of your 24 hours to it today, you will, I predict, be struggling to know what to do with the five extra hours which you will inherit at some point in the future. 

Time is a wonderful gift from God. It is a fundamental dimension of the creation. But like many aspects of creation it can seduce us and distract us from the kind of living for which God created us.  Time exists to be our friend. When we understand this in our hearts we will find that we are using time well but that our experiences in time tend to strengthen rather than weaken our hold on the things of eternity.