I Don't Have Time

Sermon for Aug. 24, 2025
Isaiah 58:9b-14; Luke 13:10-17

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about time – mostly because I felt like I had so little of it.  On Monday, I was looking at a week ahead that included preparing for a Vestry meeting, planning a funeral, writing a different funeral’s homily, writing a newsletter column, preparing and leading a Thursday-night class, and, oh, writing Sunday’s sermon.  Now, Monday is my day off, though I’m not good at keeping it.  Usually, it includes some work; sometimes, it becomes a full workday.  And this particular Monday seemed like an especially bad candidate for a day off, given the week that lay ahead.  I was anxious that I just wouldn’t have time to finish all the things on that list.

That’s an interesting phrase we use, that we “have time,” or not – as if time were something we could hold and own.  You know, of all God’s creatures, only humans would have the hubris to think that time itself was our possession.

Perhaps that’s why God commanded us to observe sabbath.  In Hebrew, that noun is linked with a verb that means to stop, which puts a nice exclamation point on the fourth commandment, to “remember the sabbath day to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8).  It’s kind of crazy, if you think about it:  Right up there with not murdering and not worshiping idols is a commandment to stop and rest.

And that commandment has in mind a particular quality of rest, too.  This isn’t just getting a good night’s sleep; this is participating in the very life of God.  The commandment says sabbath rest is holy – so what does that mean exactly?  Well, something that’s been made holy has been set aside for godly use or purpose, differentiated from the mundane version of that thing.  So, a good night’s sleep is wonderful, but sabbath rest is an outward and visible sign of God’s own way of being because, after all, the Lord Almighty rested on the seventh day after declaring the newly created order to be “very good” (Genesis 1:31).  Now, our worldview would say that if you’re on a six-day winning streak, the last thing you do is get out of the game.  If six days gave us light and oceans and earth and plants and animals and humans, how much more fabulous might God’s creation have been on that seventh day?  But God said, “Nope.  It’s time to rest” – thereby sanctifying the pattern of holy stopping.  “All time is mine,” God says, “and I share it with you – along with the directive not to use it all to meet your needs.”

That seems pretty counterintuitive, right?  Wouldn’t God want us to steward the time God gives us as productively as possible?

Well, it turns out sabbath time is a funny thing.  It isn’t just for rest.  This holy stopping is for God’s version of R&R, which is actually three R’s – rest, re-creation, and reorientation.  Let’s look at this morning’s reading from Isaiah.  The prophet, speaking for God, isn’t just giving the people trouble for failing to feed the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.  Instead, the prophet is pointing to the underlying problem: our human temptation to serve our own interests, to go our own ways, to pursue our own affairs, even to the extent that doing so slips us past the holy stop of sabbath and ignores the rest our divine physician prescribed.  The irony that Isaiah identifies is that we’ll actually advance our interests by stopping.  If we take God’s offer and return a seventh of the week to our maker, the Lord will “make your bones strong” and make you “like a watered garden, like a spring … whose waters never fail,” Isaiah says (58:11).  God will bless us to “raise up the foundations of many generations” and “ride upon the heights of the earth” – if we’re willing to admit God is God and we are not, and then actually take a breath (58:12,14).

Fast-forward several centuries, and the religious leaders of Jesus’ day haven’t made a lot of progress.  They’re using the Law of Moses, including the sabbath regulations, not to restore and reorient the people but to lord it over them.  They watch Jesus lift an 18-year burden from a woman who wants nothing more than to stand straight and tall, to live into the fullness of who God made her to be.   But all the leaders can see is Jesus breaking their rules and challenging their power.  They’ve got the Law backwards:  Sabbath rest is about fostering the well-being of the people God loves, not about keeping them in line.  Jesus sees through the hypocrisy and tells the leaders, “Look, if you can untie your beast of burden to give him a drink of water on the sabbath, why can’t I heal a beloved child of God who’s bearing not just her physical burden but the burden of your self-interest, too?”

I think Jesus would see sabbath time not as a legal obligation but as a loving, holy gift.  Regardless of the day when it takes place, even if it’s measured in hours snatched here and there, sabbath time is a holy gift both because of the One who gives it and because of the ones who receive it.  When we follow God’s lead and set aside time to be and not to do, we honor both the God who created sabbath and the child of God for whom it was made.  That’s you.  Sabbath time is holy because it’s set aside for holy people – you and me.  Even though that’s so hard for many of us to say and even harder for us to live, God still commands us to follow the divine model and make sabbath our own.  It’s a little odd that we need to be commanded to receive a gift, but there you go.  God requires us to acknowledge the spark of divinity we bear and say, yes:  If a holy stop is good enough for the Creator, it’s good enough for me.

So, last Monday afternoon, I said yes to saying no.  I didn’t do anything Monday afternoon to get ready for Tuesday’s Vestry meeting, or Thursday’s class, or Friday’s funeral, or Sunday’s sermon.  Instead, Jesus and I went to the Nelson to enjoy a different facet of humanity’s divine spark.  We went to see an exhibition there called “Survival of the Fittest: Picturing Wildlife and Wilderness.”  The show featured late 19^th and early 20^th century paintings of wildlife in their habitats by four northern European painters, none of whom I’d ever heard of.  But this wasn’t about hunting for masterpieces to check off a list.  It was about drinking from a spring “whose waters never fail.”

Bruno Liljefors. Graylag Geese at Sunset, 1921.

          So, Jesus and I took our time Monday afternoon.  We looked at every painting in that exhibition and read every card.  We lingered, enjoying how some of the paintings were more realistic while others inched toward impressionism.  We marveled at the way artists can cast light with paint and brushstroke, and how the color of that light can vary from a blue-tinged snowscape, to a warm golden plain, to a faint orange sunset over a glistening wetland.  That last painting – the sunset over the wetland – especially stays with me because it seemed like an icon of our spiritual journey.  Against the setting sunlight, one group of geese flies effortlessly heavenward while another group stands in the mud, looking up longingly, aching to be set free.

It was good for me, that afternoon, to take Jesus up on the offer of some sabbath freedom.  It was very good to rise out of the mud and fly into the setting sun for just a bit.  Because, it turns out, the fourth commandment is on to something.  As wonderfully productive as God empowers us to be, we become mere shades of ourselves when the burden of obligation is the idol we worship.  God has not made us to be cogs in a machine of production and consumption, nor even a machine of service.  We bear the divine image and likeness.  And as God’s children, we inherit the gift of sanctified time to remind us both who we are and who we are not.  We are not God, not owners of time who can always take on one more thing.  Instead, we are God‘s beloved, to whom God wants to give the time of our life as a gift.

It’s kind of amazing how much better things go when we get those roles right.

Commands, Contracts, and Covenants

Sermon for Aug. 10, 2025 (Transfiguration, transferred)
Luke 9:28-36

We come together this morning to celebrate the feast of the Transfiguration and to welcome four new members into God’s family, the Church.  These two things may not seem to go together very well.  What does a story about Jesus glowing on a mountaintop have to do with faithfully following him 2,000 years later?

Well, the connection for us probably comes by way of the disciples, right? – Peter, James, and John, who’ve come up the mountain to pray and then find themselves much more “up close and personal” with God than they ever wanted to be.  Is that kind of confrontation what’s in store for us and the four new disciples who’ll be baptized today?  When they pass through the waters of baptism, what are they signing on for?  What will God expect of them – and what does God expect of us?

We hear answers to that question every time we have a baptism and recommit ourselves to God’s way of love.  It’s called the Baptismal Covenant, the job description for a follower of Jesus in our tradition.  First, we affirm the mystery of God’s nature: that the One in charge is actually One in Three, different facets of divinity existing in eternal relationship.  Then we make five promises about how we’ll live out that same spirit of relationship with God and the people around us.

But, you know, we hear these promises so often that they risk losing their punch.  So, let’s pull back from the specifics for a minute and ask not just “what do I have to do to get right with God?” but “what kind of relationship am I signing up for?”  Why is this the Baptismal Covenant?  And what would it be like if we made some other kind of agreement with God?

For example, what if it were the “Baptismal Commandments”?  After all, wouldn’t keeping the 10 Commandments be good enough for a follower of Jesus?  Well, honestly, no.  With the Law of Moses, we already tried a legalistic approach to living in right relationship with God, and that led Jesus and St. Paul to point us toward grace through faith instead.  Sure, humans need rules, but rules don’t bring us relationship.  So, a set of Baptismal Commandments wouldn’t get us very far in orienting our lives toward Love. 

Well, what if this commitment were the “Baptismal Contract”?  We understand contracts, right?  We make them all the time.  If I hire a company to replace the roof on my house, the roofer and I make a contract detailing what we expect from each other – the scope of the project, when it will happen, how much I’ll pay, how long the work will be warrantied.  If either one of us doesn’t hold up our end of the deal, we can take legal action to compel the other’s compliance.  And that’s really the point of a contract: to protect the interests of both parties.  And under that is an even deeper truth: Contracts try to cover all the contingencies because, deep down, the two parties aren’t really invested in each other.  I mean, I’m sure the roofer is a good guy, but if he installs a roof that leaks, I’m not going to pay him just to be kind.  My relationship with the roofer stops with getting the job done.  And that approach, too, doesn’t get us very far in orienting our lives toward Love.

So, instead, we affirm a Baptismal Covenant.  Covenants are less about people getting things done and more about people coming together.  A covenant creates a binding, enduring relationship of mutual loyalty.  It’s rooted in respect and affirms the inherent worth of both parties.  It emphasizes mutual responsibility and belonging that endures even when expectations aren’t met, even when promises aren’t kept.  Covenants are rooted in a deep commitment to trying again.  We vow to stand with our covenant partner to create something that hasn’t existed before, a relationship both parties commit to keep building stronger.¹

In my mind’s eye, I can see an icon of this kind of relationship.  It’s a tree in the front yard of the house where I grew up, and for me it’s the symbol of my parents’ marriage.  Their anniversary is this week, as is my anniversary with Ann; so, I guess I’ve got the covenant of marriage on my mind.

The tree in my parents’ front yard was a dogwood – actually, two dogwoods, one pink and one white.  They’d been planted side by side, so close together that, over the decades, the trunks fused.  The branches intertwined such that you couldn’t tell where one tree stopped and the other began – until spring came, and the pink and the white flowers testified that these were actually two trees that had become one.  That tree was an icon of my parents’ relationship – two people living in covenant, distinct but rooted side by side, some of the branches gnarled and twisted but still reaching toward the sun together.

I think that’s what the Baptismal Covenant is offering us – the chance to marry our life with the Source of Life.  When we come to the waters of baptism, we aren’t pledging blind obedience to a distant, heavenly ruler.  We aren’t signing on the dotted line to ensure that our needs will be met.  Instead, we’re saying “yes” to a relationship with the God who exists as a relationship – Father, Son, and Spirit, creating and redeeming and sustaining from before time and forever.  And here’s the truly amazing thing:  God loves you enough to want you to join that dance.  You don’t bear the burden of having to get all the answers right or do the work perfectly; instead, collaboration is baked into the system.  Our pledge to God is always, “I will – with God’s help.”

So, what does all that have to do with today’s crazy Gospel story?  It’s easy to get caught up in the drama of the Transfiguration, like the three disciples did.  One minute, you’re on the mountaintop with your friend and teacher; the next minute, he’s blazing with divine glory so brilliantly that looking at Jesus is like looking at the sun.  Peter wants to build a monument to capture the moment, something to mark their friend’s true nature and the fact they got to witness it.  But then, suddenly, God descends in a terrifying storm cloud to mark a heavenly intersection – past, present, and future come together as God names Jesus much like Peter had named Jesus just a few days earlier – as the Son, the Messiah, the Chosen One, the Lord who’s enacting God’s reign and rule on earth.

With all that drama, it’s easy to miss the theme that both begins and ends this story.  Wrapped around this experience of God’s overwhelming power and majesty is an invitation to go deep in relationship.  The story begins with Jesus bringing Peter, James, and John “up on the mountain to pray” (Luke 9:28), and it’s being in prayer that opens them to experience this unparalleled glory.  And then, at the story’s end, as the divine voice booms from the storm cloud, God doesn’t give the disciples an order to follow or an agreement to sign.  Instead, God says, do the one thing that every deep relationship requires:  “Listen to him,” God says.

If we did, what would we hear?  After all, in this reading, Jesus has precisely nothing to say.  So, if we listen to him, what will we hear?

Well, in Luke’s story, the last thing Jesus says before he heads up the mountain is this:  “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised” (9:22).  That’s his part of the covenant.  And what about the disciples, both then and now?  Jesus continues:  “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, and take up their cross daily, and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” (9:23-24)

All this really should come as no surprise, because that’s what covenants are all about:  If you pour yourself out for the relationship, you’ll find life like you never imagined.

1.      Childress, James F., and John Macquarrie, eds. The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986. 136-137.