Eric's Sunday Sermon; The Manipulation of Time

This Sermon comes from the notion of daylight savings. We just did the “Fall Back” routine. In other words; setting the clock back one hour. If you think of it it is downright crazy. Let us see here is daylight savings the real time or is normal time the real time. Oops I assumed something there – is either time the correct time.

Creationists and Big bang theorists often get stymied in there arguments. One that we have 2 billion rocks on the earth and the other is that a big bang cannot be proven any more than God can be proven. For a authentic creationist this is not a problem. God simply made the rocks 2 billion years old. If God could make the earth God surely could have aged things as God saw fit.

And the Bible part called Genesis is a fantastic place to debate what a day was in that context. My understanding is that the word used in Hebrew has five different meanings. Just like today it can be the sunlit portion of the day or a 24 hour cycle. Combine this with a notion of daylight savings and probably it is best to walk away from such thinking unless you want to confuse the heck out of you and others.

But I think that the point is this to a large degree. Time for a human body is not really all that connected to time on a clock. What is one second to someone who dies at age 21 compared to someone who lives to 100? OK I admit that that really is not the point but sure makes you wonder.

Now to the real point. We cannot be certain of how much time we have. We cannot even be certain that our clocks are really measuring past, present and future time. I love the phrase “we had the time of our lives”. It is quite interesting that we use the rotation of the earth as our standard.

There is a growing acceptance of the concept of being in the moment. Of course the word now is often used as opposed to moment. But really now makes no sense because once you are in the now seconds go by and you are no longer in the now that you started with. And let us not forget that depending on what we are doing time either flies by or takes forever. I am such a bad dad that I have not taught my children how to tell time when age appropriate. Time is a nurture thing not an innate thing. Or is it? Nope I can guaranty that little ones gauge time different than those of us who are trained in the clock.

So we can now see that time is really what we make of it. For many people who are getting old they notice that they see themselves in their mind as still being twenty or so. Sometimes I wonder about the concept in the Bible of “coming to God as a child”. Is that a time thing, an age thing, a mental thing or a love thing?

Isn’t it interesting that we can basically manipulate time by making the most out of a moment or being oblivious to the moment?

So of all our precious things, and all our precious wisdoms, and all our precious money – nothing compares to the giving of our precious time. Do we spend our time completely on ourselves or acquiring things? Or do we spend our time giving love to others. Isn’t interesting that the concept of charity is often meant to mean love? Our time and our love are not often easy to give away. I do not think it is because we do not want to, it is simply that time flies by and we forget to. There is just no excuse for us not to take the time to give hugs on a routine basis. It is very near sinful for us to waste our time on the trivial and not that which is truly important and will last over time. We are wise to understand that our time is a gift we would not have it if we were not given the gift of being alive. Are we comfortable in realizing that in essence our time is not fully our own.

It is often pleasurable to think of a marriage in terms of time. It is just plain cool to be in that space for a decade and more. “I love you even more than when I fell in love with you”. Children are also great time markers. We say, wow where did the time go. And mothers quite often think of their young 8 year old as the toddler of 5 years prior which really is not so good. We probably should make the most of time for it flies by so fast.

Some mornings we fail to make the time to take the time to take care of ourselves. Sure a shower and breakfast are important but far more important are the notions of prayer, reading something uplifting and meditation. A hot beverage is normal, but we should take the time to drink a healthy dose of cold water with lemon to get our metabolism fired up and balance the PH in our bodies. It is important to do things that will increase our time here on earth.

If you are inclined to believe in an afterlife which a vast majority of people do. Then you are ready to take the time to be rewarded in that afterlife for how you spent your time here and now. How wonderful that we are given the opportunity to do so. Perhaps we should not waste that gift.

So how do you think love fits into our concept of time? It always interests me that most wedding vows have the concept of in sickness and in health until death do we part. Of course there is the survival notion through time – our life, but it also probably erroneously suggests a spiritual togetherness which is severed upon the passing of our physical from earth. Is that passing into an eternal life?

All of that to get us to look at time from a different perspective and that is through the lens of love. Perhaps love suspends time as far as our life on earth. It seems to me that while age may make a person cantankerous in quite old age. But it also seems to me that those who live long past the average age of death may well have suspended the aging by being in the love. Not just being loving but actually being in a state of love. In that state time actually has no meaning. Come out of love and the clock starts ticking again. We should want to remain in the moment of love.

(Let me throw in a fun note. When in college studying philosophy I had one clock that I took the battery of. It was meant to think of time as standing still. It did not work but it was seemingly worth the time to contemplate it.)