In every sunrise . . .

In Every Sunrise Sleeps the Sunset . . .

Sermon: August 3, 1997

“To every thing there is a season," wrote the author of Ecclesiastes. While summer brings some things common to most of us -- heat, humidity, time off from work, and more time with family -- for me summer is a time to retreat with my wife and two children to the beaches of South Carolina. The last couple of years, it has also meant at least one solo walk on the beach to listen to the ocean’s guidance on what to say from this pulpit.

This year I took that walk on the last morning of our week there. It was like all last mornings at the beach, a sweet melancholy stroll to say good-bye and try in vain to glue into my brain the joy of that glorious view of sand, sea, and sky. Seldom is the impermanence of our earthly existence so palpable as when I bid farewell to the beach.

This year I even noticed the sadness of our departure on the day we arrived at the beach. Isn’t that rich -- I was experiencing my departure in the midst of my arrival! Ridiculous, don’t you think? It could be worse. Buddhist monk and best-selling author Thich Nhat Hanh has spoken about a group of Zen monks who start each day by reminding themselves that “everybody that is dear to me is of the nature to change, and to die.” And you thought your alarm clock was a harsh way to start your day. Good morning! Everybody I hold dear to me will die. How are you today?

I’ll return in a few minutes to why one would even think such thoughts at the beginning of a vacation, or at the dawn of a new day. For the moment I just want to hold up this question for your consideration:

If in every sunrise sleeps the sunset, in every Friday night, Monday morning, in every birth, death, what am I to do? What am I to do?

As I stared at the ocean, I thought about the brevity of my own life and the seeming insignificance of even the greatest human contribution in the face of the vast inevitability of our ultimate return to the ocean. Even the beach I was standing on would disappear in a couple of years. Even the vast and seemingly immortal ocean will, in a few billion years, be boiled off the surface of the planet as the sun begins to expand and devour first Mercury, then Venus. Then, as the sun will continue to expand, our Earth will first char, then disappear into the swollen, red star that will itself be in the first stages of its own death throes.

And, in one of a hundred billion galaxies, each populated by a hundred billion stars, who will notice the death of this rather unremarkable star on the edge of one spiral of this rather unremarkable galaxy?

In the midst of that kind of Universe, what am I to do? What am I to do?

How many of you have had this kind of thought and turned away from it, calling it “morbid” or “unproductive.” “No good can come from that kind of thinking,” one might reasonably say.

So what are we to do? What are we to do? What am I to do?

I give up.

Really, I mean it. I give up.

Frankly, there are a lot of us who have said, “I give up.” But the beauty and curse of the English language is its flexibility: those three words can mean different things to different people. For example, when some people say, “I give up,” they mean, “I don’t have a clue.” “I don’t know.” And then use that ignorance as an excuse to push these troubling questions aside, turn up the volume on the TV, and shut down a little more. The questions themselves cause too much pain and fear, and ignorance is their refuge from that pain and fear. “What I don’t understand, I won’t think about, and what I don’t think about can’t hurt me.” Has anyone you know done this? When was the last time you did it?

A slight variant on that approach is to have “I give up” mean “I am utterly helpless, so what’s the point?” For these folks, the experience is not confusion so much as the apparent knowledge that life is meaningless and there is nothing I can do about it. While a slightly different flavor, this is a close relative of the ignorance escape hatch from the fear of meaninglessness.

But neither of these is what I’m talking about when I say, “I give up.” I mean, “I surrender.” “I surrender.” Surrender to whom, or what? Not to the hopelessness, or to the meaninglessness, or to the ignorance.

No, I mean surrender to God.

But what does that mean, “surrender to God”?

I think part of it means opening up our grasping, clasping hands. The obvious and most talked about aspect of this clinging relates to our tendency to cling to our material possessions. Certainly, Christ and most other holy people are clear about their stand on our relationship to our possessions. We must let go. But it goes beyond that. Let’s take my walk on the beach the other day. I have no doubt my heart was clinging to that beach with all its might. If I had verbalized my heart’s prayer in that moment it would have sounded like “O God let me glue the salty smell of this air, the feeling of sea mist on my skin, the sound of the gentle waves lapping at the shore, and this glorious vision of ocean, beach, and palm tree, firmly in my brain so that I experience it even after I leave, even after I sit back down at my desk on Monday morning.”

I did not own that beach, yet I clung to it like a three-year-old to a toy. “Mine!” I protested. “Mine!” So it’s not just the ownership of treasure that Christ speaks of in Matthew when he says: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal. . . .” Notice that it is not the ownership of the treasure, but its location, that’s the problem. And I don’t take him literally when he says “earth”. I don’t think Mars is much safer. Or Alpha Centauri. The thieves are there, too. They can and will steal every one of the sextillion or so stars in our Universe. There is no place safe from the thieves. Or should I say thief.

The thief is time. The thief is time.

The thief is time?

Well, at one level, that seems quite obvious. Of course the thief is time. But what can we do about that? We can’t stop time.

Frankly, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to stop time. I don’t want time to end with me as far behind in my work and my chores as I am today. Time offers me the only hope I have of ever catching up. Time offers me the only hope I have of ever playing guitar better. Or of becoming a more proficient painter. Or of finishing school. Or of seeing my children grow into adults.

But how do we keep time from stealing what we treasure? The answer sounds like it should be obvious: Do not treasure that which time steals. Let me say it again: Do not treasure that which time steals. That’s the message of Christ. This involves a shift from what I call a mortal relationship to time to a divine relationship to time.

Let me show you what I mean. Here’s the mortal relationship to time. There is a point in time coming up in a few seconds . . . it’s about 15 seconds away . . . here it comes . . . 10 seconds . . . five, four, three, two, one . . .oops, there it goes. Gone for ever. Oh, man, I was looking forward to that moment. Couldn’t wait for it to get here. Now it’s gone. The thief took it.

In a sense, it’s a bit like I’ve always imagined what watching the Daytona 500 car race is like. Here comes Dale Earnhardt. He’ll be here in a couple of seconds. I can hear him. Whoosh! There he goes. Hmm. That’s it? This explains why I have never been to the Daytona 500. That doesn’t sound like much fun.

Sounds a bit ridiculous, this mortal relationship to time. But it sounds a bit familiar. You hear this mortal relationship to time most graphically on Mondays and, at least in my office, Thursdays. On Mondays, the elevator conversation sounds like, “Nice weekend, but it was WAAAY too short.” On Thursdays, people get a gleam in their eyes: “Only a couple more days, and then I’m outta here. Off to the beach, to the mountains, to home.” Then Friday, some people aren’t even really there. They are firmly planted in Saturday already. Don’t even try to tell them it’s a workday. They’re already happy that it’s the weekend, they are so absent from Friday.

Those same people, you know, are pretty down on Sunday night. Ridiculous. A bit like a tearful good-bye to the beach.

What, then, is the divine relationship to time? We’ve heard it many, many times right out of Christ’s mouth in the Gospel according to Matthew:

“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.”

Let’s see how this works in real life. I’m still focused upon a moment in time, but it’s the one I am experiencing right now. This one. I’ve got it right here. Hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still here. I keep it in my pocket.

To carry the Daytona analogy, I am Dale Earnhardt. In the car. It doesn’t go anywhere compared to where I am. It is right here all the time.

This is the Divine relationship to time.

So, now what was Christ saying about treasure? After he admonished us not to lay up for ourselves treasure on earth, he says “lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

So perhaps this Divine relationship to time -- the “I’m Dale Earnhardt in the car” approach to life -- is heaven itself. Heaven, then, is not up there in the sky, where physicists tell us that the stars are as transitory as the sands of the Carolina beaches. No, heaven is right here, right now.

Heaven is right here, right now.

You’ve got to be kidding. Just last night I was telling the little boy who lives across the street from us about this notion that heaven is not a place good people go when they die, but is where we are right now if we only recognized it. His look of incredulity was priceless. “Where?” he asked. “In the air? In your dining room?”

Christ told his disciples: “The Kingdom of Heaven is in your midst.” Heaven is not last weekend. Or next Friday night. Or your last trip to the beach. Or your next trip to the mountains.

It is now. To be attentive to this moment, to place your treasure, your heart, in this moment, is to surrender to God.

This is no small surrender. Who here is ready to give up the distinction between “good moment” and “bad moment”? Weekends and vacations at the beach have more good moments per hour than weekdays, according to most. Are you ready to come back from vacation and say to your colleagues, “I enjoyed myself thoroughly, and I’m thrilled to be here this Monday morning riding this elevator. My in-box is two feet tall, and I am thrilled for the opportunity to work on it.”

Are you ready to sit in traffic, destined to be late for your appointment, and surrender yourself to God and live this moment? Are you ready to take your portable moment of time with you in times of pain as well as joy? Because, you see, this portable moment of time passes through both times of pain and times of joy.

Well, that is asking a lot. I do treasure my judgments about good moments and bad moments. When I think about them, my judgments about moments are a bit presumptuous, given that God created both good and bad moments. “Nice work with that moment, Lord, but you could have done better with that one over there. If you had just made it more like this other moment. . . .”

These judgments of ours are very precious, yet Christ is quite firm about giving them up. He even warns about treasuring beach homes, again, in Matthew’s gospel:

“Every one who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it.”

No, He is quite clear -- value the transient moment and what you value will surely perish. Treasure the only moment you have, this one right here, and you are already in the kingdom of heaven. “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it,” Christ taught, “but whoever loses his life will preserve it.”

And what do we gain through this surrender of our lives to God? What is the value of heaven? Very simply, we gain everything. Though we have nothing, Paul said, we possess everything. We gain inestimable wealth, but only when we let go of it.

So, returning to the monks who daily remind themselves that all those whom they love will die, you can start to see why I might want to start my day this way. To shift my attention from transitory, doomed, earth to heaven. But not some distant heaven in another time and another place. This one, through which I am walking right now, the heaven I carry with me, if I would only notice.