Sermon:  Phoenix Affirmation 11:  On Balance

Texts: Exodus 23:12; Matthew 11:28-30; 1 Corinthians 6:19; Philippians 4:11-13; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

Date: May 18, 2007

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

Phoenix Affirmation #11: Christian love our ourselves includes caring for our bodies, and insisting on taking time to enjoy the benefits of prayer, reflection, worship and recreation in addition to work.

            I have a little scrap of memory about taking my mom and dad to the movies once when they came to visit us.  They didn’t go out to many movies because, well, the Llano theater in Plains, Montana only shows one film a week and believe me, they aren’t the arty films, and anyway Dad always just liked to stay home.  Anyway, it’s probable they hadn’t been to a movie in 4 or 5 years when we took them to one.  The movie we chose: Koyaanisqatsi.  Someone must have recommended it to us.  Any of you remember seeing that?  Well, it’s a very interesting film.  No dialogue.  No plot.  Images and Phillip Glass music, and one word: “Koyaanisqatsi,” chanted in bass voice.

            I remember it because I grew increasingly uncomfortable during the movie as I wondered if anything was ever going to “happen” and wondered if the folks would ever forgive us for taking them to such a bizarre show.  But I also remember it because, although that was 25 years ago, I can still hear that voice in my head: “Koyaanisqatsi.”  It was a prophetic voice of warning.  Anyone know what the word means?  It’s a Hopi Indian word that means “life out of balance.”  The filmmaker contrasted images of nature with images of human cities and factories and expressways, suggesting wordlessly that human culture was getting increasingly out of touch with the earth and spinning out of control, out of balance.  I recall particularly a long speeded-up passage of film focused on a freeway as squillions of cars zoomed by, carrying their passengers to who knows where.  Speed, speed, speed: an image of humans zipping from one place to another, for what purpose?

            I heard the “Koyaanisqatsi” voice in my head again this week because the study guide for the 11th Phoenix Affirmation asked a series of questions about balance, like these: “Was there a time [in your life] when work, play, reflection, and worship became noticeably unbalanced?  How do you determine when one or more aspects of your life are not in balance with the others?  Sometimes it easer to recognize another whose life is out of balance than it is to recognize unbalance in ourselves.  How do you react to others who are eliminating an important part of their life?” 

            Nobody in the Bible study group had any trouble thinking of a time when their life seemed unbalanced.  I think it’s a pretty common human experience, at least in this neck of the woods.  We are living in pretty busy, even driven times, and it’s darn difficult to maintain balance between work, play, worship, and reflection.  “Life out of balance” seems pretty normal in our time and place.

            In part we do it to ourselves.  ForrestChurch writes in his excellent little book Lifecraft, “I’m seldom impressed when people tell me they are busy.  ‘Busy’ people are less likely to be engaged in meaningful work than trapped in a cycle of frenetic futility, like flies trying to get out of a closed window.”[1]  Flies trying to get out of a closed window—oftentimes in the summer you hear it before you see it.   Bzzz, bump bump, bzzz.  Is that ever the sound your life makes as you rush from one thing to the next, breathless from morning till night?  We can get to the point, Church suggests, that our life is living us rather than us living it.  I don’t know exactly what that means, but it has a ring of truth to it.  The various demands of a busy life can take on a life of their own, and before you can say “day planner” your life is way out of balance.

            I said that in part we do this to ourselves, but we should also acknowledge that our culture does not exactly support those who seek a life balanced in work, play, worship and reflection.  Our culture admires the image of healthy young bodies (in designer clothes or sitting astride some expensive piece of home-fitness equipment) but gives very little actual support to the maintenance of physical health.  In our time and place, the culture (the water we swim in and the air we breathe) values two things above all else: work and consumption.  If we did nothing but work, with just enough time off to shop and buy more stuff, we’d get a lot of affirmation from those who express our culture’s values.  Those who do little but work and buy stuff are our society’s models of success. 

            Economist Juliet Schor, author of The Overworked American, writes that one of the most striking features of American society is how much we work.  We are now “the world’s standout workaholic nation.”  We lead all other industrialized nations in terms of the proportion of the population holding jobs, the number of days spent on those jobs per year, and the hours worked per day.  Work hours and employment have been rising steadily for more than three decades.  Work hours have risen about half a percent a year since the 1980’s.  Technological advances, which some predicted would increase productivity so much that actual hours spent in labor would go down, have ended up contributing to the increase in work hours as firms have seized new opportunities to make money with new technologies and required even longer hours from employees, especially in high-tech sectors.  (Can I get an Amen from anyone who works at Microsoft?) 

            Schor notes that at the same time a booming economy has reinforced a powerful cycle of “work-and-spend,” in which consumer norms accelerated dramatically.  Schor writes, “People needed to work more to purchase all the new products being churned out by a globalizing consumer economy.  And they responded to their stressful working lives by participating in an orgy of consumer spending.  There was an upsurge in luxury goods consumption, but now the aspiration to own these status items had become widely shared.  Over the last thirty years, real consumption expenditures per person have doubled, from $11,171 to $22,152.”[2]  Koyaanisqatsi. 

            Does all this work and all this stuff we can acquire with the fruits of our labor make us happy or give our lives meaning?  Not especially.  I remember when Emma came back from Ometepe, our sister island in Nicaragua, the first time.  She was really struck by how much happier the people in the poor village she visited for a couple of weeks were.  They don’t have a lot of things, Emma told us, but in the evenings, they visit each other, they tell stories, sing songs, make music, and dance.  They enjoyed life more than many of the people she knew on BainbridgeIsland.  She wasn’t saying that poverty was a good thing, but she came back with fresh eyes for our community which can be, in the words of one of my favorite hymns, “rich in things and poor in soul.”

            The Christian faith offers some antidotes to the frenetic futility of endless cycles of work-and-spend in which our society is caught.  Did that statistic of consumer spending (in what economists call “real dollars,” that is, adjusted for inflation) doubling over the last 30 years shock you?  It did me, even though I have, now that I think about it, fully participated in that trend.  It’s almost like I did it in my sleep.  You know that scene in The Wizard of Oz where the Wicked Witch of the West puts Dorothy and the Lion to sleep with the sweet smell of poppies?  That’s what’s happened to a lot of us, even the most faithful Christians.  We must disenthrall ourselves from these values sold to us as if work-and-spend are the only things that matter.  We need St. Paul’s words to fall on our souls like the snow sent by Glinda the Good Witch: “I have learned to be content with whatever I have.”  Life back in balance.

            So, contentment, that’s one antidote to the craziness of endless work- and-spend.  Another antidote is the understanding in our tradition that we are supposed to be taking good care of the temple of the Holy Spirit, which is none other than our bodies.  Now, I realize that the Bible puts out some mixed messages about the value of our fleshy bodies.  You can read some passages that might make you think your flesh is nothing but a giant boat anchor for your soul and the sooner you are shed of it, the better.  Such texts might lead us, spiritually speaking, to become like a description from James Joyce’s Ulysses: “Mr. Duffy lived just a short distance away from his body.”  We might not have learned what I think of as the higher wisdom of the scriptures, that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, holy in themselves, and one aspect of our calling is to love and maintain these gifts from God.  We’re not going to be good for much of anything if we abuse or neglect our flesh.

            I got a giggle out of one of the stories ForrestChurch tells about himself as a young man, trying to find himself.  Hoping it would help him discover the meaning of life, he went through an ascetic period.  He writes, “I went to bed at one, awoke at five, and spent each morning drinking Lapsang souchong tea and reading Greek philosophy.  Every afternoon I served as a guru and guide to a few ragtag disciples.  Evenings I listened to Mahler and read Milton, which, together with the Vietnam War, were the primary sources for my eschatological vision.

            “Should you doubt that I was taking my life too seriously, for a week or two in the late spring of that year, I took off my glasses when walking around campus, so as not to lust after gorgeous half-dressed women.  Since I am almost blind, this proved impractical.  I lapsed and returned to lust.  But I maintained my other disciplines.  My goal was to learn Latin and Greek and to read all of Western philosophy in two years.  What better way to discover the truth!  I cut off all my hair, grew a foot-long beard, lost thirty pounds, made it to the Stoics, and collapsed.  Positive that I’d contracted consumption or some equally romantic 19th century disease, I went to the university health service.  My doctor was not impressed.  She said that I had been behaving like an idiot.  There was absolutely nothing wrong with me that a little more sleep and a little less tea wouldn’t cure.  She told me that she never wanted to see me again.  I never wanted to see her again either, so I abandoned my quest for perfection.”[3]   I don’t think his tale is all that unusual.  For some reason we humans, though none of us have ever spent a moment outside our bodies, delude ourselves into thinking we can pursue perfection or success or enlightenment or whatever we’re after without at the same time attending to the health of our bodies.  Undereating, overeating (a little more common), drinking, drugging, neglecting sleep, postponing exercise—pick your poison.  We need to hear anew the balance expressed in Paul’s closing words to the church in Thessalonika: “May your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Taking time to take care of our bodies—another antidote to the prevailing obsession with work-and-spend.  And here’s one more antidote to ponder: the Sabbath.  The Sabbath is a bedrock principle in the Hebrew scriptures especially that helps restore balance in human lives.  “Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest.”  It’s repeated over and over again in the Old Testament, even making it into the Top Ten (commandments, that is).  The reasons given for the establishment of the Sabbath vary a bit; the main one is that God wants it.  God rested after the wok of creation, the story tells us; rest is part of the goodness of creation.  Everyone deserves and needs rest; from day one even the slaves and the livestock are included in the practice of Sabbath rest.

Rest is key, but it’s not the only aspect of Sabbath.  The Sabbath is given as a gift so God’s people could enjoy God and enjoy God’s creation.  Worship is part of the rhythm of Sabbath for Jews and Christians, not as a grinding obligation, but as a time set aside to look up, recognize God’s work and all God’s gifts, and give thanks.  Gratitude and joy go together.  Keeping a Sabbath adds greatly to one’s joy as we are refreshed soul and body by reflection, worship, and rest. 

Worship doesn’t take up the whole Sabbath, and Sabbath time can certainly occur on days other than Sundays.  People experience refreshment and joy in different kinds of activities.  One person might be completely refreshed and soaked in gratitude after an afternoon in the garden, while her neighbor would find gardening to be the worst kind of work .  One person might find going to an art museum to be a dreadful obligation while another is fully re-charged by the beauty he glimpses there.  You know what refreshes your soul and body: make time to do it.   Taking time to enjoy life is part of God’s genius design for human life.

A country pastor was out fishing on his day off.  One of his parishioners spotted him and said, “You know, Pastor, the Devil doesn’t take a day off.”  “And if I didn’t take a day off,” the Pastor replied, “I’d be just like him.” 

[1] Church, Forrest  Lifecraft: The Art of Meaning in the Everyday  Boston: Beacon Press, 2000, p. 21

[2] Schor, Juliet “The (Even More) Overworked American” Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America  John de Graaf, ed.  San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003, p. 10

[3] Op cit. Church, p. 30-31