Sermon Dec 31, 2006 Jim Burklo
Eternity Now
Meditate with me, if you will, on the sensation of the passing of time.
It takes a year for the earth to make a stupendously long journey around the sun. A journey so long that the idea of walking it, or driving it, or even flying it is just beyond our comprehension. The earth moves around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour. That’s a journey of 587 million miles in 365 days. Yet we don’t have any sensation of that speed. Our limited perspective as little beings on a huge planet is such that we never notice how fast the earth is moving.
Time is relative. Einstein said so. The mind says so. We don’t feel the dizzying speed of the earth upon which we live. Nor do we feel the dizzying speed with which the cells of our bodies are born and dying and born and dying. We don’t sense the frenetic activity that goes on in our brains. Even when we are at our most peaceful and meditative, the neurons in our grey matter are firing and pulsing at a fantastic rate. But we seldom feel that speedy activity going on inside our heads.
Yet most of us in this culture feel that time passes by far too quickly. We sense a nostalgia at thinking that another year has gone by, so quickly, too fast.
It’s possible to slow time down. To make the passage of time seem much longer.
Years ago I went on a trip in Mexico to the middle of nowhere. A dental hygienist friend of mine invited me along to help a team of dentists serving Indians in a remote area of Jalisco state. We flew in a small plane into the Sierra Huichol. One day we landed on top of a mesa surrounded by a landscape a lot like the Grand Canyon. After we landed the pilot said that if we couldn’t get the plane started again for some reason, it would take six days on the backs of mules to get to a dirt road where some vehicle might pass by to take us to a town that had a telephone. That spot was the farthest away from the First World that I’ve ever been. Pretty soon, our plane was surrounded by Huichol Indians. These are people who were never conquered by the Spanish. The Catholic Church had missions up there, but their influence was weak – the churches were also shrines to the native deities of the Huicholes. The Huicholes came out of their village of round stone huts with thatched roofs, and sat by the plane to wait and watch. Some came to get rotted teeth pulled, others just to see what was going on. They came and they sat. They didn’t say anything to each other, much less to us. Only a few of them even knew the Spanish language. They just sat there and stared at us on that windswept mesa. They did not appear to be in any kind of hurry about anything. And as I looked at these people, who had been living on this mesa for the better part of ten thousand years, people who had no plans other than what they were already doing, no goals other than the ones their forefathers and mothers had pursued before them for as long as any of them could remember, people who had no intention of going anywhere else but where they were, people who didn’t have much to say to each other because so much of their lives was so obvious to them – I was overwhelmed by the sensation of that time stood still. For a few hours on that mesa, time didn’t exist. And I loved the feeling.
Simplify life enough, take lots of time to linger for each activity, shed distractions that totally consume your attention but have no real substance, and time will indeed slow to a crawl, and a year will seem like a lifetime, and you’ll get extra lifetimes that way.
Keep up this practice, refine it, and you’ll experience eternal life right here on earth.
Jesus said that his mission was that we might have life, and have it abundantly. He also invited us to consider the lilies of the field. If we consider the lilies a lot, if we give them our full focus and attention, if we are thoroughly amazed and entranced with simple things, time will slow down so much that it will become much more abundant. There will be more of life to enjoy.
The great irony of Western society is that we have greater health and wealth but less life, because we’ve put ourselves on fast-forward in order to get all these material benefits. Somehow we must find the balance, finding a way to live in relative comfort, and help others do the same, while decelerating our sense of the passage of time. There is a way to do it. This is one of the missions of the church: to slow down time so that we feel its abundance. To get what Jesus offered, to consider what Jesus considered, to live the in eternity he promised we could enjoy here and now.
A couple of weeks ago I had lunch with a minister friend of mine. It was kind of a time warp to eat lunch with him. We’ve known each other a long time but it seemed like no time had passed. He was a young pastor in Hayward when I was a seminary intern there, being a community organizer, 29 years ago. We’ve kept track of each other ever since. He was reminding me of who I was back then. I had forgotten who I was. You know how it is. The changes in our lives are sometimes so slow as to be imperceptible. Yet it is the very speediness of the way we live that makes these changes harder to notice and appreciate. My friend Ken was pointing out that when I was a seminarian intern in Hayward, I was notorious for being a workaholic. He said that his biggest criticism of me in those days was my seeming inability to say no when asked to do something. He said I’d just get enthusiastic and eager and say yes and go for it.
I’m still like that, but I’ve slowed down a lot, and I’m glad about it.
Meeting with him jogged my memory of those days, and I realized that in that era of my life, I missed a lot. I wasn’t taking enough time to consider the lilies. Or to consider much else at any depth. In those days I developed a great reputation in that town, in a short time, as a community leader. I had a lot of fun doing what I was doing. But I wasn’t very good at developing intimate relationships with others, with myself, or with God. I’m still catching up on all fronts, as a matter of fact. I did wide and shallow and not narrow and deep. It took a long time to begin to catch on to what happens when you take on less of the world, but take it on with much more intentionality. I’m still working at this. I have a long way to go in making time have a long way to go.
But there’s still time to slow time down. Eternity is forever even if it lasts only a few minutes according to the clock.
Ever sat in a waiting room? What’s it like? Like an eternity? But not a good one? Let me ask you this. What would it feel like if it had a completely different name? If it was a living room instead of a waiting room? Then you’d live there, really enjoy the time, enjoy the break from activity, consider the magazines if not the lilies, and savor the slow passage of the time between your arrival and the time when your name gets called. It’s the difference between hell and heaven. Both are experiences of eternity: one is negative, the other positive. The clock measures them the same. But the soul knows a world of difference. Let us live our time fully, rather than waiting impatiently for it to end.
Consider death. What is it, really? I will never know that I’m dead. I’ll only know life. And when it comes very close to the end, as my body stops working, it stops sending signals to my brain that could help me mark the passage of time. I lose a sense of the rhythms that enable me to keep track of time, so time begins to slow down tremendously, so that I have an intense experience of eternity. Maybe it lasts but a minute, or several minutes, as I am dying, but I’ll never know how much time went by – it will be eternity to me. Will it be positive eternity or negative eternity? I think I have a choice about it, at least to some degree. Now is the time to practice for death. Now is the time to be in heaven, enjoying eternal life in the here and now, so that as we go through the dying process, we are already in the habit of being in heaven, so we can enjoy it to the fullest. Subjectively, death doesn’t really exist. You won’t know you are dead. I won’t know I’m dead. I can look at a person and say, he’s dead. But him – he has no idea he’s dead. Same with life. I can look at you and say, you’re alive. And maybe you are really alive. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe you are stuck in some kind of negative eternity, or maybe you are so totally distracted that your own life is passing you by. Your lights are on but nobody’s home. Your heart is beating, your lungs are breathing, but you are missing life. Like Jesus says, you have eyes, but do you see? You have ears, but do you hear? You aren’t blind or deaf, but are you alive and awake enough to really see or hear anything? When you get down to it, subjective reality is supremely important. How we experience life, not how we are told we are experiencing it, or what others tell us we ought to experience – how we actually feel it and taste it, that’s what life really is. The job of the church is to help people take their own subjective reality very, very seriously, so they can have life, and have it abundantly.
So Happy New Year, 2006. Yeah, I said that right. May the next 13 hours feel like they last a whole year, and a happy one, too. 13 hours at 67,000 miles an hour, but 13 hours that feel like the whole 8,760 hours that it takes this planet to spin around the sun. 8,760 hours of eternal bliss. Pick a lily and consider it, and see how time drifts to a stop, and heaven comes to earth. Amen!