Following is the text of a sermon delivered 03.06.11 at Tri-Lakes United Methodist Church. You can listen to it here.
Urban Meyer on Mike & Mike
Urban Meyer with Tim Tebow
Urban Meyer, former head football coach at the University of Florida, surprisingly retired from coaching several months ago (December 2010). He had been an incredibly successful coach, leading Florida to two National Championships with a player you may have heard of named Tim Tebow.
Earlier this week Meyer was interviewed on Mike & Mike in the Morning on ESPN where he was asked what it was like to be retired. He said this:
[It’s the] first time in my life I get a chance to reflect. It’s been 25 years of college coaching and college coaching is one of those things… It’s 6am and you’re going straight through.
He continued by talking about his three kids: two daughters, college volleyball players who he has never seen play, and how much he is enjoying being the assistant coach of his 12-year-old son’s baseball team.
Then the interviewers asked him if he left because of burnout, because of the demands on his time as a college football coach. Mike Greenberg asked, “It has become increasingly apparent just how overwhelming the demands in coaching are on a college level and on the NFL level… Do you think it has to be that way? I feel like it has become such a keeping up with the Joneses thing – well he’s working eleven hours, I gotta work twelve hours. Do you think that is really necessary? Could you win without it completely consuming your life like that?”
Meyer begins his response by saying, “It’s the conflict. It’s the warfare that goes on between family time you know you’re missing your kids grow up.” Then he tells this story:
I’ll never forget my daughter sitting there, [when] she signed a Division 1A scholarship. I almost got in an argument with my assistant, Nancy. She said, “you have to go to your daughter’s signing.”… I go, “I can’t go spend 15 minutes to leave this office,” because I’m worried we are going to fall behind.
So I go to the signing and she stands up and she’s a beautiful girl, senior in high school, and she says, “I’d like to thank God for all of our blessings, and I’d like to thank my mom, you’re always there.” And both of them are crying their eyes out. I’m sitting there worrying about third-down-and-six against whoever. And she says, “And dad you weren’t there but thanks.” And that was like someone took a knife and jammed it in.
What happens is your mind starts playing games with you. You start thinking, “Is it worth it?” Is that worth missing that? And that’s the warfare, I think. And its not just a coach. There’s executives, there’s people, there’s firemen, across the country dealing with that same dilemma. And I was fortunate enough to…walk away and then reevaluate it as time goes.
(Mike & Mike, ESPN radio, March 4, 2011)
We know that feeling
There are some of us this in this room this morning, including myself, who know exactly what he is talking about. What we have to do – in work, for our families, for our volunteer positions, whatever demands are put upon us by others or we put on ourselves – have become all-consuming. We can’t “leave this office” for 15 minutes, as Coach Meyer said, without feeling like we will fall irreparably behind. We are having trouble turning it off. We have trouble walking away.
We talked about this a couple of weeks ago when we were dealing with management of our time. We began to recognize that in order to get our private lives in order, we need to make conscious decisions about to what and to whom we are giving our time.
This morning, as we wrap up the series called Ordering Your Private World, I want to talk about one of those things we need to give our time to – REST. Real, holy, Sabbath rest.
Sleep Deprivation
Several years ago I found out that I have sleep apnea. Unknowingly I had not been getting the proper rest for years because my sleep was constantly interrupted when several times a night I would stop breathing. My snoring had been a bit of a family joke and even a source of some ribbing from fellow youth leaders who had been on mission trips and retreats with me. I never thought much of it. Lots of people snore. The doctor began to teach me what a lack of sleep can do to us.
This was a medical condition. But some of us are choosing to not sleep. An article in the Washington Post several years ago put it this way:
With a good night’s rest increasingly losing out to the Internet, e-mail, late-night cable and other distractions of modern life, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that too little or erratic sleep may be taking an unappreciated toll on Americans’ health.
Beyond leaving people bleary-eyed, clutching a Starbucks cup and dozing off at afternoon meetings, failing to get enough sleep or sleeping at odd hours heightens the risk for a variety of major illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, recent studies indicate (Stein, Rob. “Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body” The Washington Post. Sunday, October 9, 2005 as posted at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/08/AR2005100801405.html).
We are a sleep-deprived and rest-deprived people. We are so busy going, doing, achieving, creating, earning, learning, etc. that we seldom take time for rest. So much to our detriment that we are risking our health. You and I need to take some time for rest.
God built a day of rest into our routines. A day set aside for rest which he called the Sabbath.
Yesterday, I was catching up on some blogs I regularly read. Donald Miller, one of my favorite authors, opened a blog with this: “The classical violinist Stephen Nachmanovitch, in his book Free Play says that Perhaps the most radical sociopolitical invention of the past four thousand years was the sabbath” (Miller, Donald. “A Creator Makes Progress Through Rest” here: http://donmilleris.com/2011/02/23/a-creator-makes-progress-through-rest/).Funny that it was posted on February 23 and showed up in my Google Reader yesterday.
The day of rest is a “most radical sociopolitical invention.” Miller continues, “Walt Whitman spoke of the value of loafing. God rested. God told you to rest” (ibid).
Designed to live in the rhythm of rest
You and I were designed to live in a rhythm of work and rest. Not to be on, going, moving at all times and in all places. We need periods of Sabbath rest.
When we read the creation story, back in Genesis 1 of the Bible, we can easily overlook this rhythm, but it is integral to the story. At the end of every day of creating, several things happen. First, God evaluates his work, he declares it “good.” Secondly the author writes, “there was evening and there was morning,” and then the day is complete.
Most of us know that God rested on Day 7, the Sabbath, but every day there was a period of rest as well. Rhythm. God created to a rhythm of work and rest, and he calls us to do the same.
Gordon MacDonald in Ordering Your Private World puts it this way:
“Does God indeed need to rest? Of course not! But did God choose to rest? Yes. Why? Because God subjected creation to a rhythm of rest and work that He revealed by observing the rhythm Himself, as a precedent for everyone else. In this way, He showed us a key to order in our private world” (location 1865).
MacDonald continues by telling us that taking time to rest allows us to (a) reflect what we have done, (b) re-focus our work toward God, and (c) redirect if necessary as we plan for what lies ahead.
Reflect
First he says that taking time for Sabbath rest allow us to look back on completed work. Urban Meyer said that well when he said that after 25 years of coaching that in his retirement he was finally finding for the “first time in [his] life…a chance to reflect.” And you could hear the results of that reflection in the rest of his interview – time with his family and finding what he wants to do.
Gordon MacDonald says it this way, “the rest God instituted was meant first and foremost to cause us to interpret our work, to press meaning into it, and to make sure we know to who it is properly dedicated” (location 1881).
It is so easy to lose sight of what we are doing and simply keep moving from one thing to the next. We have many things to do. Many good thing that we are doing for the benefit of others. Much business to attend to that helps provide for our families. A mountain of work that keeps us ahead in business. A long list of tasks to do for the family, for the kids, for our church. But without a time of sabbath rest, we never get a chance to find out if what we are doing is the best use of our time, our talents, our abilities. We never take the time to see if what we are doing is the best use of our gifts and abilities to the glory of God.
Again, as we have throughout this series, we come back to week one and that sense of our God-given call. We need to decide if we are living out of a drive from demands that are put upon us by others, or ourselves; or if we are doing the things that God has called us to do and inviting God to be part of all of our work. A sabbath of reflection helps us do that.
Refocus
Second, MacDonald says, sabbath rest gives us the ability to realign with that to which Christ has called us. Real rest gives us a chance to get re-focused on Jesus. Again, it is all to easy for us so caught up in what we are doing to get our priorities out of whack. We understand how we can get so wrongly focused that we begin to think winning that football game is really more important that your daughter receiving a scholarship to play volleyball in college. That we get so off-centered that we cannot leave this office for 15 minutes.
MacDonald tells a story about William Wilberforce, who worked to end slavery in England and is the subject of the movie from several years ago called Amazing Grace. Biographers credit Wilberforce’s dedication to sabbath for giving him the perseverance to continue the long battle against slavery. In his journal after a long week of busyness and anxiety, Wilberforce wrote, “Blessed be to God for the day of rest and religious occupation wherein earthly things assume their true size. Ambition is stunted” (location 1845).
Things assume their true size. Perspective is restored as we allow ourselves to rest.
Redirect
Third, MacDonald says that sabbath rest helps us plan for what is ahead. He writes, “When we rest in the biblical sense, we affirm our intentions to pursue a Christ-centered tomorrow. We ponder where we are headed in the coming week, month, or year” (loc 1930).
We stop just doing the next thing and are able to actually set a plan, a path, a direction for where we feel led to go. We are no longer just following a trail of bread crumbs not knowing where it leads, but we are able to look up and see the goal that God has placed before us, and begin to set in motion our plans for getting there.
Rest is a necessity, not a luxury
You and I need to make rest, real Sabbath rest, a priority in our lives. To take time away from our work to be with the ones we love and with the God who loves us. This is not a luxury. God gave us the example of doing it every night, and then for a whole day every week.
I had a friend in a band a lifetime ago who used to morbidly say, “I’ll rest when I’m dead, there’s too much to do now.” He never seemed to be able to find that time to rest because the work was never done. Again, MacDonald says it so well when he writes, “We do not rest because our work is done; we rest because God commanded it and created us to have a need for it” (loc 1999). The counterintuitive truth is that stopping to rest will in the end make us more productive.
Our rest needs to be a priority in our lives. We shouldn’t work on our day off. We should put the phone down and away for set periods of time. We don’t have to be checking email on our phones 24-7. You and I we need a break.
Now, having said all of that, let me say that clergy, including me, are notoriously bad at practicing sabbath rest. Much of that comes from our inflated idea that somehow we are doing God’s work, and so we should make all of the sacrifices necessary to continue that work tirelessly. If someone needs us, we need to be available. If we are to grow the church, to share the Good News of Jesus with the world, we need to keep going. We have trouble turning it off. And so many of us have boundary issues, and we allow people to interrupt our sabbath rest.
I remember years ago, before I had kids of my own, hearing a pastor tell about dealing with his son’s anger toward his church. His family used to stand at the door of the church after the service, shaking hands as everyone was leaving. The pastor’s young son who had once really enjoyed this ritual was suddenly hiding in and behind his Dad’s robe every Sunday, refusing to shake hands. When asked the boy would say that he didn’t like the church and didn’t like the people in the church anymore. One day the pastor finally asked his son, “Why don’t you like the church anymore?” His son replied, “Because those are the people that keep you away from me.”
I’m happy to say that the church has gotten much better at making sure their clergy are taking time apart. Our annual reports often ask us to evaluate how well we have practiced sabbath in the midst of our “performance reviews.”
But I would guess that there are still pastors’ kids who harbor anger at the church. I’m guessing Urban Meyer’s kids might hate football. Is there something in your life that your family might be angry with because it keeps you away from them? With what are you pre-occupied? Is there anything you can do about that?
Ecclesiastes Bible Passage
I opened this series where we have been spending a great deal of time in Ecclesiastes by saying that in some ways Ecclesiastes is the most depressing book in the Bible. There are passages of it that I read and wonder whose idea it was to have this book about futility of life to be considered scripture. It is not one you are going to pull a lot of inspirational quotes from.
But there is a theme in the book that I think is important for us today. It’s about perspective. About how we can get so caught up in what we are doing that we lose track of what truly matters in our world.
To that end Qoheleth has some great advice for us today. He writes,
Seize life! Eat bread with gusto,
Drink wine with a robust heart.
Oh yes—God takes pleasure in your pleasure!
Dress festively every morning.
Don’t skimp on colors and scarves.
Relish life with the spouse you love
Each and every day of your precarious life.
Each day is God’s gift. It’s all you get in exchange
For the hard work of staying alive.
Make the most of each one!
Whatever turns up, grab it and do it. And heartily!
This is your last and only chance at it,
For there’s neither work to do nor thoughts to think
In the company of the dead, where you’re most certainly headed.
He repeats this theme over and over again in the book
Ecclesiastes 2:24: “A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil.”
Ecclesiastes 3:13: “That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.”
Ecclesiastes 5:18: “This is what I have observed to be good: that it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them—for this is their lot.
Ecclesiastes 8:15: “So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.”
Enjoy life, he writes. Take time to reflect, refocus, redirect, and enjoy.
May you and I make it a priority to get out from under our work from time to time, and enjoy what God has given.
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Bibliography
MacDonald, Gordon. Ordering Your Private World. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2003. (Kindle edition)
