GOD IN THE MARGINS My guess is that whether you are seven or seventy years old, you re probably pretty busy. My sense is that if we could survey every woman, man, boy and girl, living in the United States of America today, most would say that they re really, really busy. When you run into a friend in the Fellowship Hall after worship today and you ask how s it going? I m 99% sure that their response (regardless of their age, gender, work or study status) will be I ve been so busy! I often wonder what happened to us Is busyness a cultural phenomenon or an epidemic? I don t remember life being so busy when I was in elementary school during the 60 s. I went to school; played Little League Baseball; hung around with my friends. Life seemed pretty simple What happened? What s made everyone so darned busy today? My 93 year old father lived with us for more than a decade. I remember noticing how technology had become a major part of even his life. He grew up without so much that we consider absolutely vital to our lives today. But To communicate with others, Dad had a land-line telephone [with the same phone number that he s had since 1957]; a digital answering machine and a cell phone. He has an assortment of radios and CD players so that he could listen to music, to the news and to NOAA s Emergency Broadcast Channel, in case we loose our electricity in a storm. Dad s always prepared! When he was young, he used to listen to the radio for entertainment, but when living with us he had to chose from the hundreds of TV channels that our satellite provider made available. Things had supposedly changed for the better With all of these modern conveniences in our lives, we should have more free time. Right? This increased efficiency should definitely make our lives better. Then, why are we so stressed out? Why are we always out of time?
We all live in a hectic world, where everyone around us seems to be moving faster and faster every day. I can t believe the time that it takes just to be the administrator of our lives. Instead of improving, life in the last one hundred years has clearly become more complicated. My father s mother, my grandmother, was born around 1900. She never drove a car. Even when cars became commonplace, Nannie Ricketts relied on a relative, a friend or the bus, if she needed a ride. She lived in the New Town section of Portsmouth where she could walk to the neighborhood market or catch a bus to go downtown to Woolworth s Department Store. While she passed away in the 70 s, I wonder about the vast changes that she saw in her lifetime. For example, look at one small thing that we take for granted: keeping the house warm in the winter. My grandmother grew up in a house without central heat. They survived winters by keeping fires burning in a fireplace or a large stove in the kitchen. To stay warm at night, they either used hot water bottles or she and one or more of her sisters shared a bed for the sake of warmth. Then, the home that she raised my father in advanced to include a coal furnace. My grandparents bought their coal from a coal man who came to their house. The coal man did not tele-market or send junk e-mail. He knocked on the door of their home [where unlike us, they were usually there] and they bought their coal right then and there. Back then, if you had enough money to buy coal, you had heat. You couldn t put it on your credit card! If you didn t have the money for coal, you burned what you could and warmed yourself at the cookstove, where you used the heat for both warming your family and making meals. By comparison, in our home, each week - we receive offers suggesting ways to change our heating arrangements so that we can take advantage
of prices as low as $1.50 per therm. I m assuming that a therm is a unit of measurement. However, the reality is that I have absolutely no clue of what it means. And I m also in the dark as to whether $1.50 is a bargain or highway robbery. Nonetheless, I m afraid that the rate could go up if we don t lock in now! We have central heat, for which I am grateful. However, the paperwork that my already busy wife has to maintain on this one topic and the decisions that are required to keep the heat on (and to avoid feeling like we re being ripped off) are far from simple. We re told that the best way to keep costs low on anything is to keep changing suppliers, be it car insurance or cell phone service. All of this involves us receiving more paper in a month than my grandmother s family burned heating the house on the coldest day back in 1915. It also involves our time with commonplace interruptions for things like telemarketing calls. Just handling the details of life takes an inordinate amount of time and adds to our sense of hurry and distraction. We feel burdened by the e-mail, snail mail and paper that piles up and we re stressed because we don t know whether AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile or some brand new company that we ve never heard of is really the best deal. We re bombarded with information and choices and on top of that, we do indeed also choose to be too busy. When you really think about it, you can begin to see some of the things that have happened to make our lives so complicated. Back in school, I remember having to write papers. I used to love to write unless I wasn t so enthused about an assigned topic. Then, I would try to fill the assigned number of pages by writing very largely and leaving these very generous margins.
Wider margins meant fewer words per page [which allowed me to fill the required number of pages with less work]. Of course, this also allowed the teacher plenty of white space along the edges to write about how you didn t fully develop the point in red ink! Do any of you remember airmail letters? If you don t, ask your grandparents if they have one that they could show you. In the days before e-mail, you had to send a letter overseas by airmail. You had to go to the Post Office where you could buy this special stationery. It was a one-page, tissue-thin blue paper that folded into an envelope. In order to get as much information as possible onto this one page [and to avoid any extra postage charges], you could write very small, filling every available space on the stationery s page. It seems that our lives have started to feel a lot more like an airmail letter than a school assignment. Sometimes it seems like there s information, thoughts, tasks, and obligations crammed into every available space. Sometimes, just looking at my life - stresses me out. Years ago, Andy Stanley wrote a book that changed my life called Choosing to Cheat. Andy s contention is that we all juggle busy lives that include our spouses, children, work, friends, hobbies and faith. At some time, someone or something will feel cheated. I think that we d all agree that this is a major problem for every single one of us. There are rare times when we re able to keep the margins of our lives generous. We purposely don t allow our lives to be cluttered. We ruthlessly prune our schedules and commitments. But unless we keep after it, we tend to forget and we begin to think that the empty space is there to be filled with hectic activity. So we fill it again, sometimes consciously, often unconsciously. Sometimes, our lives get so full even with good things like family, work and church that the margins become exceedingly narrow. God gets the tiny leftover spaces or he gets gently shoved off the page entirely. A hurried life is not just stressful; it pushes God out from the center of our lives and puts him in the margins, which are usually airmail paper thin.
What would happen to our lives if we put God in the center of the page? What would happen if his influence and presence were seen in every sentence and in every note that we jot down to ourselves? Many of us have read Jesus teachings on how to live. Jesus often issued an invitation to simply do life with him. One such invitation was found in Matthew 11: Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Is it even possible to find real rest in today s world? Could the life that he invites us into actually be light and easy? Is it possible to take Jesus up on his invitation? Believe it or not, I do think that it s possible if we just change the way we think especially about the image of the yoke. When Jesus spoke about his yoke, his listeners in that day and culture would understand it a bit differently than we do today. A rabbi like Jesus would tell his followers how he interpreted the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and the Prophets. His interpretation of how to apply God s law, how to live it out, was called his yoke. For example, a rabbi s yoke was simply his teaching on what it really means, to love your neighbor or honor your parents. What specific things does one need to do to comply with those rules? Which were the most important? That s what a rabbi s yoke addressed. A rabbi s disciples would take on his yoke, and try to emulate their master by living out God s law (using the rabbi as a role model). That s one of the reasons that in the gospel, you often find people asking Jesus questions such as Which is the most important commandment? or Who is my neighbor? What they were really often asking was Jesus, what s your yoke?
I d always envisioned a yoke as a heavy burden. I was confused about how a yoke could be easy or light. Years ago, I read a wonderful book by Keri Wyatt Kent called Breathe: Creating a Space for God in a Hectic Life. I picked it up and immediately became intrigued by the first few chapters. It s where I discovered that if a yoke is simply a way of life; a lifestyle that Jesus modeled; a way of life that says love God and love each other, then it s entirely possible that a yoke could be something light. This metaphor also reminds us that we re not working by ourselves. Instead, we re yoked to Christ where he shares equally in the burden of our transformation and our lives. He s at our side. He s always there for us. We re not carrying the burden of living the Christian life alone. Jesus isn t the farmer driving the ox; he s the other ox pulling with us. We simply need to slow down enough to notice that he s there and work with him, not against him. I find it so amazing that our culture the one that constantly complains about being so busy - has such a huge problem keeping the Sabbath holy. The Sabbath is a great gift from God that allows us to take a day every week to just breathe. It s a gift that we all so desperately need. Yet, we so often refuse it. Reading Exodus 16, we learn about how God provided the Israelites with enough manna on the sixth day to last for two days. Isn t it ironic that while the Israelites didn t have to go out and gather more manna on the seventh day the Sabbath - just like us, at first - they refused to accept God s gift, too. It s such a paradox God s concerned enough about us and cares enough to give us a day to just worship and rest. But honestly, how many of us end up working at home or in the office - on Sunday afternoons? How many of us overbook our families and leave no time to breathe on Sundays? For many, it s just another day filled with things that we absolutely have to do. I love the saying that life is not a sprint it s a marathon. Truer words have never been spoken! Before unconsciously filling up our weekly
calendars and especially our Sundays, maybe we should remember that God s provided us with all that we need to be able to breathe and to keep the Sabbath holy. We just have to chose to accept the gift While God is clearly in control of things, we do all have choices. We get to decide what to do with our time. When we re deciding, it s good to remember Paul s words from Colossians 3: And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. When you leave this place today, remember that we ve been given the amazing gift of time by God. Choose what to do with it wisely, my friends. Amen.