A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

February 16, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Too Busy to Live

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 147:1–11
Isaiah 40:21–31
Mark 1:32–39

“In the morning, while it was still very dark,
he got up and went out to a deserted place,
and there he prayed.”

Mark 1:35 (NRSV)

Eternal God, grant us an ease to breathe deeply of this moment, this miracle of the now. Beneath the din and fury of harsh news and urgent crises, make us attentive and still before the presence of good news. Remind us again of the reality of the grace of what is possible, through Jesus Christ our Lord. ()1 Amen.

Last fall, a wonderful article by the very witty Adam Gopnik appeared in the New Yorker magazine. It was entitled “Bumping into Charlie Ravioli.” Who is Charlie Ravioli? you might wonder. Charlie Ravioli is the name of Gopnik’s three-year-old daughter Olivia’s imaginary friend. It seems that one day, the father walked into the room where Olivia was playing with her toy cell phone. She held the phone up to her ear and said, “Ravioli, Ravioli, are you there? It’s Olivia. Can you come and play? Well, call me.” Then she snapped the cell phone shut, shook her head, and said to her dad, “I always get Charlie’s answering machine.” (2)

Even worse, one day the father overheard Olivia speaking on the toy cell phone to a new person named Laurie. It turned out that Laurie was the imaginary assistant to Charlie Ravioli. She was answering his telephone and told Olivia that, unfortunately, Mr. Ravioli was in a meeting and would be unable to play that day. (3)

The father was concerned about his daughter, so he talked to his sister, a child psychologist, who assured him that there was nothing unusual about a three-, four-, or five-year-old’s having an imaginary friend. What then began to concern Gopnik was how his three-year-old had been able to capture so perfectly the tone and pace of their family life and of the society in which their family lives.

And so it is that we are busy, busy, busy, forever consulting our calendars and leaving voicemails and emails for one another but never really connecting person to person with our friends or our families, with ourselves or with God, whom Paul Tillich called the very ground of being. It is as if we have to negotiate two very demanding grids of human existence. One is the physical reality in which we live—of sidewalks, automobiles, and people in restaurants, encounters with actual living, breathing human beings. Then we go home, and we sit down at our desks, and there is that second world, that other grid, that swarming sea of emails, voicemails, and faxes. What is so frustrating about that world is that the communication loop rarely seems to close completely. You might write me a letter and I might answer it and that would be the end of it. But emails and such seem to be “devices of perpetual communication,” ending with such phrases as, “Give me a call and let’s discuss,” or “Let’s get together for lunch. Any suggestions about a day?” (4)

A case in point: Adam Gopnik’s wife reports receiving a telephone call one morning from a friend who was asking her to check her email regarding a phone message that she needed to listen to so that she could make a phone call about a fax that they had both received asking for more information about a purchase that they were considering that would require two companies to exchange phone calls, emails, and faxes of drafts of contracts.5 It is never ending, and how familiar it seems, this web of incompleteness, this tangle of busyness, this thick soup of interaction. It seems almost impossible to maintain an authentic life in God when we are so busy, when there is that little voice whispering in our ears, “You ought to answer your messages. You ought to do more. You need to go, go, go, and you need to do it faster and faster.”

Poor Charlie Ravioli. What is it that Barbara Walters says at the end of the broadcast? I can’t remember the exact words—“We’re in touch, so you be in touch.” What in the world that means, I don’t know, but I suspect that many of us have become downright obsessive about this being in touch business. I wonder if anyone in church this morning has clipped to his belt or stuffed in her purse a cell phone. I used to carry my cell phone often, but then it occurred to me that I was not a heart transplant surgeon, needing to be able to respond immediately when news came that the helicopter was hovering overhead with the new organ and I needed to rush to the hospital and scrub up. If you are not a transplant surgeon, you can probably make it through church without needing to be in touch. Isn’t that a sign that we are caught up in the endless traffic and busyness of life?

In the story we heard from Mark’s Gospel, even Jesus appeared to be caught up in it. He was very busy. Everyone in town wanted to be in touch with him. Just prior to the passage that we read in our New Testament lesson is a paragraph that begins with these breathless words: “As soon as they left the synagogue,” they went to Simon’s house, and when they reached Simon’s house, there was Simon’s mother-in-law who was ill with a fever. Jesus healed her. One of the Bible’s funniest verses comes next: “Jesus took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them” (Mark 1:31). Speaking of get up and go! Straight from the sickbed to the cookstove is what it sounds like to me.

Evening comes, and Jesus’ work still isn’t done. At sundown, they bring him everybody who has anything wrong with them—everybody was there. The whole city gathered at the door to watch. It just wears you out to think about it. Jesus, being the person of compassion he was, the Savior who embodied the power of God, walked right into the heart of the human need that surrounded him, but that was not the whole story. The next morning, “while it was still dark, he went out by himself to a deserted place and prayed” (Mark 1:35). Had the pressing needs gone anywhere? Of course not. Even while he was praying, the disciples were looking all over the place for him and when they found him, they were very exasperated. “Don’t you know everyone is looking for you? They need you.”

Of course, he knew they needed him. That was precisely the reason he had gone off, gotten out of touch with all that was around him—so that he could get back in touch with God, who was the source of his strength. How could he offer his healing touch, his compassionate concern, if he himself were disconnected from the source of his spiritual power?

Hanging over the desk in the study of my home for a number of years has been a commandment from the Bible. It is the commandment that has proven to be the hardest one for me to keep. It is a verse from the Forty-Sixth Psalm: “Be still and know that I am God.”

We have become 24/7 Charlie Raviolis. We have places to go and things to do and emails to answer, but we cannot be filled with new life, and we cannot have life and hope to share with anyone else, if we get out of touch with God. Jesus understood human life completely, and the great secret of his strength was his never once forgetting that his strength did not come from himself but from God, the Creator and Giver of life, the tireless Sovereign of all that is or ever will be. Jesus never allowed the demon of busyness to set up shop in his daily routine. How did he keep that demon at bay? He got up early and prayed. What a novel idea in the face of the challenges of our restless lives. What a novel idea in a time of great anxiety and fear.

The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has written recently of prayer in this most helpful way: “There comes a level of prayer where it is no longer a question of ‘are you OK’ [or getting somewhere with your own thoughts and words] but ‘are you being seen?’ . . . Are you sitting in the light and being and becoming who you really are? Usually our thoughts are all over the place, running after this and that and the other. . . . The process of prayer is the steady, quiet drawing in and settling of all those tentacles that are wriggling out to lay hold of the world. You gather them back in, you gather them into the heart in prayer. By this, we become what we are; we just sit there, being a creature in the hand of God.” (6) If Jesus found such an activity indispensable in his busy life, why in the world would it not also be indispensable to us?!

There have been ominous urgings in recent days from the Office of Homeland Security as to what we ought to do to prepare for disaster. It all seems a little overboard to me, but it did cause me to reflect on what I have control over and what I don’t. I cannot prevent a terrorist attack. I cannot do anything about nuclear weapons in North Korea or biological weapons in Iraq. I can do little to prevent war with Iraq, other than writing a letter to express my opposition to preemptive military action. What I can do is to sit, being a creature in the hand of God. I can remember that when it comes to power, there is another player on the field. I am speaking of spiritual power. I am speaking of strength from above. We are going to need a lot more than duct tape and flashlight batteries in the days and months ahead. We can’t be running all over the place with our anxieties. We must be still and remember that it is God who is the creator of the ends of the earth. As the prophet Isaiah said, it is God who is in charge of “the princes of the earth” (Isaiah 40:23). These are the realities with which we must connect, because they are the realities that undergird human life and human history.

Isaiah sent the fearful, discouraged exiles in Babylon a security alert. He reminded them that it was time to pay attention to the promises that had supported them since the foundations of the earth: God is Lord of all. God never faints or grows weary but gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless. “Those who wait on the Lord will renew their own strength. They will mount up with wings as eagles, they will run and not be weary, and at the very least, if they cannot soar, if they cannot run, at least they can walk and not faint.” (7) There is a great temptation at this particular moment in American and world history to fall into what someone has called “functional atheism,” that is the temptation to believe that there is no power in the world besides our own. (8)

The other day, I ran into a friend who is a psychologist. She said that several of her patients had made emergency appointments last week. Two were mothers of young children who had dutifully made their trip to the hardware store to lay in supplies but it hadn’t seemed to help. “What do I do?” she wanted to know. I wish that the young mother had asked me. I would have suggested that she pray with her family. Turn off the answering machine. Turn off the Internet. Sit at the table. Hold hands. Place the little community that is your family in the great and trustworthy hands of God.

What was it that Tom Ridge said a few days ago? Be in touch with your family and establish an emergency plan you hope you will never have to use? I think that you ought to establish an emergency plan and put the plan into action today. Get up early in the morning and pray together. Clear the dishes early in the evening and pray together.

What should you pray? Pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come. . . . Deliver us from evil. For thine is the power and the glory.”

Read the great strong words of the Twenty-Third Psalm: “I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”

“Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46)

“God takes pleasure not in the speed of the runner, . . . but in those who trust in God’s steadfast love.” (Psalm 147:10–11)

A few years ago, I took my harried, busy pastor self to the island of Iona, just off the coast of Scotland. I had been told that eagles often fly over Iona, and so I recited to myself the verse, “They will mount up with wings as eagles.” I looked for eagles but only sparrows and blackbirds appeared. But my, how they flew, flapping and trying with all their might when it was needful and also having the good sense to ride the currents of the air when they could.

Here is what I would say to you today: God’s grace is the air that holds you up. God’s strength lies deep within you. May God’s peace fill your spirit today and in all the days ahead. That is my prayer for you and for our nation and for our troubled world. Amen.

Notes

1. Paraphrase of Ted Loder’s “I Need to Breathe Deeply,” Guerrillas of Grace (1984), p. 22.
2. Adam Gopnik, “Bumping into Charlie Ravioli,” The New Yorker, September 2002, pp. 80-84.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Rowan Williams, quoted in Context, 15 November 2002.
7. John Claypool, Tracks of a Fellow Struggler (Word Books, 1974), p. 55.
8. Parker Palmer, Leading from Within (Servant Leadership School), p. 16.