Sermons

“Pausing to Notice”

Psalm 100; Ephesians 15-23 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – November 23, 2014

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might grow in trust and learn to slow down so that we can fully appreciate your blessings. We pray it in the name of Jesus, Amen.

There are a lot of words in that passage I just read from Ephesians. A lot of words and a lot of commas, and not very many periods. But in the midst of this punctuational catastrophe of run-on sentences, there are some pretty inspirational phrases that imply some wonderful promises. What would it mean to have “the eyes of your heart enlightened”? What would it feel like to receive “a spirit of wisdom and revelation”? What is required for that to happen?

It’s such an appealing invitation, to have “the eyes of your heart enlightened.” Can you imagine how that works? It’s not automatic, of course. There are certain conditions that would need to be in place first for this to happen. Namely, if we want to have the eyes of our hearts enlightened, we have to take a break from being so occupied by what we’re seeing with the eyes in our heads. We are so busy, so distracted, so much more familiar with living on the surface than with feeling deeply, sometimes it’s hard to even believe our hearts have eyes. If we seek this kind of enlightenment, we have to slow down. And slowing down isn’t easy. Modern life has so many banal details that require our attention, from whether the cable is working or not to scheduling the plumber to come fix the thing to finding time to call the insurance company when they’re actually open just to be put on hold for 23 minutes. Then you have to add in all the visual and auditory stimuli we’re bombarded with all day long, most of it trying to part us from our money. And on top of that, we still have to figure out something to eat every single day. Finding a moment to catch our breath can be quite a challenge.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if the barriers to reflection aren’t just situational, but emotional. We get uneasy when things are quiet. We’re restless and easily bored because we’ve lost our capacity to just sit. Slowing down makes us anxious, like we must be forgetting something we’re supposed to be doing. Now if this isn’t you, if your life has already slowed down to the point that you don’t do much other than sit quietly, know that there are others in this room who need your wisdom. There are seasons in our lives – the season of slowness following the season of busy-ness – and making the transition from the one to the other isn’t easy. It may be that the eyes of your heart have been basking in enlightenment for some time, because life has slowed you down, whether you were ready or not. If that is the case, please help the rest of us get there. Slowing down can be a disquieting process.

It turns out that one of the requirements for slowing down, for pausing long enough to have the eyes of our hearts enlightened, is trusting in God. We have to be able to place the world, and specifically our lives, in God’s hands long enough to catch our breath and reflect on it all. We have to be willing to trust that we are indeed the sheep of God’s pasture. If we want to have the eyes of our hearts enlightened, we have to be willing to learn how to turn to God in good times and in bad. (Baaaa-d?) We have to learn to trust. If we’re honest about it, I think we may discover that we’re not any better at trusting God in good times than we are in bad times. When things are bad, we turn to God because we don’t have any other choice. But when things are going well, we tend to start believing it’s because we’ve got it all under control ourselves, just so long as we don’t let any of those balls drop. It’s in those moments that we are least likely to feel like we can take a break and let God handle things for a bit while we take a breath.

How many of you feel like you have Psalm 23 more or less memorized? It’s a good psalm to know by heart, especially when things aren’t going well. But what about Psalm 100? I wonder how our lives might be different if we started each day reciting Psalm 100. Would you like to practice with me now? Will you repeat after me? Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth. | Worship the LORD with gladness; | come into his presence with singing. | Know that the LORD is God. | It is he that made us, and we are his; | we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. | Enter his gates with thanksgiving, | and his courts with praise. | Give thanks to him, bless his name. | For the LORD is good; | his steadfast love endures forever, | and his faithfulness to all generations.

Amen. Can you imagine building that into your daily routine? Can you imagine knowing that invitation to thanksgiving by heart and using it to remind yourself to pause to notice God’s blessings? Could it help us grow the trust necessary to slow down and give the eyes of our hearts the time to seek enlightenment?

We are entering into a season of gratitude, when we’re called to spend more time noticing all our blessings and giving thanks for them. In fact, we set a day aside, sometimes even two or three, to do this. We must think it’s important, if we stop the other stuff we normally do to give attention to this. We know that we’re not very good at being aware of our blessings on a regular basis. And so we’ve made this holiday, this time apart, to gather together and give thanks. But why only once a year? Why only for a day?

I had the privilege of attending a meeting yesterday of dedicated leaders who work with youth. I’m not sure you all realize this, but the kids who participate in our camping program have discovered something that most of us have let ourselves forget: it’s vital to our spiritual health to take time apart. Those annual weeks at Loch Leven serve to re-charge and re-invigorate their faith and their emotional resources. If you’ve ever wondered why an adult would do something as crazy as sleep in a cabin full of kids for a week straight, it’s because they are the ones who haven’t forgotten how important it is to take that time, to slow down, to pause to notice God’s blessings, to give the eyes of our hearts a chance to open up and look around. The thing is, much as those kids love camp, they will freely tell you that once a year isn’t enough. That’s why we have winter camping weekends, though even that is an imperfect solution.

Once a year at Thanksgiving is not enough. Once or even twice a year at Loch Leven is not enough. For the eyes of our hearts to be enlightened, they need more practice than that. We often hear about how God rested on the seventh day, after spending the first six days working hard at creating the universe and everything in it. But we don’t remember often enough is that God didn’t just work madly straight through those first six days. Throughout that beautiful and rich story, we are told that at a rate of more than once a day, God paused to notice, to consider what had been created, and to see that it was good, that it was very good. Honoring the Sabbath is a wonderful practice, but why wait for the seventh day? We are called to live with the eyes of our hearts open to see the goodness all around us, every single day. This is how we begin to receive that “spirit of wisdom and revelation” that Paul wrote about to the Ephesians. This is how we begin to become aware of “the hope to which God has called us.”

What is beyond gratitude? It’s important to ask. It’s all very well and good to sit down with our families, whether at home or at church, and count our blessings, naming them one by one. But what does that accomplish? Is it just about cultivating a warm, fuzzy feeling? The invitation in Ephesians promises us more than simply loveliness. By pausing to notice all that God has given us, we begin to open the eyes of our hearts to that spirit of wisdom and revelation. We become aware of what God is calling us into. We open ourselves to the hope and purpose of the gospel. We are called to action. Pausing to notice that what God has given us is very good puts us in a different place. We are no longer trapped in an anxious cycle of busy-ness, but rather given the chance to “be still and know that God is God”. Slowing down helps us learn to trust, which in turn cultivates courage to act, and to act in ways that extend God’s blessings beyond ourselves. The purpose of our feasting is celebration, but it’s more than that too. The purpose of our feasting is to give us the energy and the passion to make sure that all are fed. The purpose of our gathering together is to inspire us to seek out those who are lonely and forgotten. The purpose of our celebration is to remind us, as Paul wrote so breathlessly, that the power of love is stronger than the power of death, as God showed us through Christ Jesus, and to help us share that great good news with all who need to hear. Let us rejoice and give thanks for all God’s blessings, that we might in turn become blessings for others. Alleluia and Amen!