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This is the Day! Spencer C. Lawrence, Church of the Cross, Hoffman Estates, IL, September 24, 2006 In the movie Dead Poets Society Robin Williams plays a new English teacher at an East coast prep school from which he himself had graduated years before. The first day of class he quietly walks into the classroom where the boys are seated. He walks down and aisle and outside the back door into a hall. Seeing that none of the students had followed him, he sticks his head back inside the room and says, “Well, come on.” So up they get and dutifully follow their new, somewhat unorthodox teacher into a hall containing the school trophy case. He points out various people who had preceded them at the school. He notes the cheery eagerness on their faces, and then adds the somber comment, “They are all dead. Pushing up daffodils.” Williams’ character then says that what each of these young men, now long gone, would say to each of these new students was “Carpe diem.” Latin for “Seize the day.” The point of all this was to motivate his students to make their lives extraordinary. Not wait for a future time. But “seize the day” and seize it now. Psalm 118 says something like that. This psalm is called a “Song of Ascension” because it was typically sung as pilgrims were making their way up the mountain to Jerusalem to celebrate one of their many feasts. It is the psalm the people sang as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday. Just after the section I read are these lines: “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” (v.26) and “bind the festal procession with branches, up to the horns of the altars” (v.27). The verse I want to focus on today, however, is v. 24: “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Why was it a day to rejoice? It was the day the Lord had opened the gates of righteousness (v. 20). This was the day the Lord laid the marvelous chief cornerstone (v. 23). This is the day. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Today is the day to rejoice. John Ortberg in the fourth chapter of God is Closer than You Think draws from Jean Pierre de Caussade who wrote a little book entitled The Sacrament of the Present Moment. De Caussade wrote: “But what is the secret of how to find this treasure – this minute grain of mustard seed? There is none. It is available to us always everywhere. Like God, every creature, whether friend or foe, pours it out generously, making it flow through every part of our bodies and souls to the very centre of our being.” The main idea is that God is always reaching out to us. De Caussade invites us to meet God right now and not necessarily in a formal worship service, but in whatever we are doing. Every moment of our lives can be a sacrament. Every moment can be an avenue of God’s grace. Every moment is an opportunity to come in contact with the living Lord. How often we do just the opposite. Focus on the past or the future. Some people have had a wonderful experience with God in the past. They remember it fondly. It is one of the rainbow days they will never forget. But they spend way too much time hoping they can some day recover that experience, or have another one just like it. For them joy lies somewhere in the past, not in the present. Their relationship with God is bound up in a bit of history. Others look to the past as the place of missed opportunity. For them the past is but a bitter memory of failure and the loss of missed chances to make contact with God. After how they’ve lived, they wonder what God would want to do with them now. Still others imagine that God is in their future, but not right now. Maybe when they get older and have more time to study and think and pray. Or maybe when the need seems more pressing: when they become ill or near death. They will seek God earnestly then. But the present is all we have. The past is gone. The future doesn’t even exist yet. This is the day in which God is eager to meet us. As Paul, echoing the psalmist, says, “Today is the day of salvation.” Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. But right now. But what does it mean to meet God in the present moment? I have so much to do. I have to work or study or care for children. I can’t take time to spend hours praying. Ortberg makes this helpful comment: “Spending the day with God does not usually involve doing different things from what we already do. Mostly it involves learning to do what we already do in a new way – with God.” For instance, we can begin by meeting God when we go to bed at night. In the Bible the day begins in the evening. Genesis says in the creation story, “evening and morning – the first day.” In the Bible the day begins at sundown, when we are winding down. Presbyterian pastor/theologian Eugene Peterson says that this reminds us that everything doesn’t depend on us. “I go to sleep. God goes to work.” We can meet God before we go to sleep by reviewing our days, confessing any sins we may have left unconfessed, asking God’s forgiveness and then thanking God for the blessings of the day. The child’s prayer we either prayed or taught our children to pray – “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep . . .” -captures the idea of meeting God at nighttime really well. We can meet God when we wake up, too. Before we stagger out of bed feeling our way to the kitchen to make that first cup of morning elixir called coffee, we can take a few moments to acknowledge our dependence on God, and thank God for watching over us through the night. Talk to God about your worries and things you need to get done. Ask God to spend the day with you whatever you are doing. We can meet God in our work or at school. We can ask God to be with us as we start our work or school day. Ask God to join you and meet you in each new task or assignment you undertake. One of the hardest, but often the most helpful things is to listen to God speaking through other peoples’ feed back – be it praise or suggestions for change. At the end of the day, don’t focus so much on what you didn’t get done, but thank God for what you were able to accomplish. Then there are the miscellaneous activities of each day: errands, paying bills, doing laundry, cleaning the bathrooms, cooking meals. We can offer those activities to God, too. We can ask God to meet us as we do them. What about watching TV? I don’t know about you but when I get home at 9:00 P.M. after a meeting at church I don’t want to do anything. I kick off my shoes, sit down in my recliner, grab the remote and click on the TV. In that state of mind I’ll watch almost anything. I don’t have cable so my options are limited to network drivel, but I don’t usually care. Can God meet me when I watch TV? Can Jesus be present when I am sitting there “vegging out”? Yes. Ortberg suggests that we not feel guilty every time we turn on the TV, but instead ask Jesus to watch with us. If we end up watching too much or watching the wrong things we can count on him to tell us. The point here is that we can include Jesus in the little mundane activities of our lives. Robin Williams’ character urged his students to seize the day, to make their lives extraordinary. So can we. Today is the day to begin to make our lives with God extraordinary. As the psalm says, “This is the day the Lord has made [not yesterday or tomorrow], let us rejoice and be glad in it.” | |||||
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