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.