Beastly Time

Exodus 16:11-26
Matthew 6:24-34
Epiphany 5
February 16, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

What we have been calling “the beast” we can call by many names. Walter Brueggemann, my favorite Old Testament theologian, calls it “military, therapeutic, consumer capitalism.” Walter Wink, among my favorite New Testament theologians, calls it the “Domination System.”[1] John’s Gospel calls it “the world,” but he means the way that we experience the world because of the way power is at work. At least that’s what I think he means. Paul uses strange language like “powers and principalities” to describe it. I often call it simply “Empire.” We can see from the many ways of describing it, that it’s not a simple reality. Depending on where we stand and what we’re looking for we will see different aspects. If we take our stand with the poor, the weak, and the outsiders of the human community and with the wider community that makes up the tattered web of life, then this reality appears beastly indeed.

We’ve talked about some of the ways that the beast warps reality, mystifies our experience, and invites us to turn our backs on the weak. We have seen how the beast seeks to own everything, turning God’s good gifts that were meant to be shared by all and even human beings themselves into mere commodities, things to be used up and discarded for profit. We have seen how the beast in its folly and greed presses toward the destruction of all, including even itself.

So far, the worst of the beast’s assaults have fallen mostly on those the prophets called “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger,” that is, those who did not have what they needed to live human lives and had neither money, nor power, nor connections to get what they needed. Every society in our long sad history has had groups of people like that. Ours has them, certainly. And, mostly, we are not among them. We aren’t rich, but mostly we are not poor either. We, mostly, have what we need. We, mostly, have the connections that allow us some power in our community, some ability to change the rules, at least locally, to relieve our pain and discomfort.

So we might imagine that all this talk about the “evil, injustice, and oppression” that come in the form of the beast has little to do with us, directly. Oh, sure, we are concerned about those whom the beast has burdened. We want to help. And we do. But it is very easy to imagine that we can avoid the beast, at least if we stay away from Wal-Mart.

In the two weeks that are left in this series, I feel obliged to trouble the cozy idea that we are mostly immune. I want for us to turn our attention to a couple of the many ways that the beast has warped and distorted our lives. I have laid our course over a stony path, but I don’t do that because I enjoy suffering—yours or mine. I do it because that is the only way to get to the place to which I believe God is calling us.

Next week, we’ll look at the way that the violence of the beast has so soaked into our lives and saturated our thinking that we can hardly imagine any alternative.

But this week I invite us to think about time. We’ve talked about time before. In the New Testament, if you remember, there are two words that we translate as time. One of them chronos, refers to calendar time. This is time that can be measured and counted. The other word, kairos, has to do with “timeliness.” This is time that comes not in lengths but in moments, in instants, in turning points.

There is another kind of time, a kind that New Testament knows little about, the kind of time that we refer to in the phrase “24/7/365” or just “24/7.” At first glance this appears to be a kind of chronos, but I don’t think it is. Chronos is rhythmic. Chronos measures time periods like days, months and years. But each of these contains its own rhythm. A year is a rhythm of seasons. A month is a rhythm of full moon and new moon, of times of light nights and dark nights. A day is a rhythm light and dark.

These are rhythms that we live by. The day is for work and night for rest. Okay, there are lots of exceptions, but they are exceptions to a rule. To the ancients at least, women seemed attuned to the rhythm of months. The year brought its rhythm of seasonal work, of planting and harvest. We are rhythmic creatures. We might not have noticed this, because we are mostly white Midwesterners and white Midwesterners can’t dance. But this dancing inability is learned. Even white Midwestern babies are born knowing how to dance. Play music for a toddler and she will dance! If we can’t dance, we can at least notice that we breathe in and out, in and out; our hearts beat and rest, beat and rest. We live by rhythms of chronos.

There are no human rhythms in 24/7. 24/7 is a year with no seasons. 24/7 is day with no night. 24/7 is the slogan under which Empire tries to expand its territory. When we live by 24/7, we are unceasing and sleepless producers and consumers. 24/7 is machine time, the beast’s distorted and warped version of chronos.

24/7 is one of the forms in which “evil, injustice and oppression” present themselves in the first part of the twenty-first century. And we are its victims.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the average North American slept ten hours a night. In the middle part of the century that was down to eight hours a night. Now we average six and half hours.[2] Our lives are being pressed toward the machine existence of 24/7. Machines do not sleep. They function without needing sleep. They don’t get tired.

But we do. When we are short of sleep—aside from being tired—we don’t learn very well and we make poor decisions. We can’t concentrate. We (and everyone who shares the road with us) are at greater risk when we drive. We are more likely to suffer from depression, obesity, and high blood pressure. At very high levels sleep deprivation shatters human personalities, which is why it is used for torture.

The offer of 24/7 productivity and consumption is a death trap. We are not only walking into ourselves, but we—and this is the worst part—are bringing our children with us. We live under the delusion that our children must be consumers of so many various activities and the producers of so much homework. They live under the delusion that their lives will be over if they do not have hours a day with televisions, video games, texting and social media sites. Grade school children need ten or eleven hours of sleep each night and too many of them are not getting it.

An international study done by Boston College last year showed that 73 percent of our nine and ten year olds are sleep deprived to the point that it hurts their ability to do well in school. In middle school the number goes up to 80 percent.[3] 24/7 is a beastly way to live.

Oddly, maybe, the advice that the Bible seems to give is not very helpful. Jesus advises us frequently to stay awake, though he may not mean that literally.[4] But early Christians, especially early monastics, took him literally, practicing regular sleep deprivation as a spiritual discipline. When Benedict of Nursia passed along what he considered the best of the monastic tradition, he advised that his monastics get enough sleep. In fact, in his Rule, he provides for a nap in the afternoon in the summer time when the nights are shorter.[5] To meet the threat of the Beast with its bad news 24/7 message, the last thing in the world we should do is to stay awake.

The freedom and power that God gives us is the freedom and power to give up our collective nightmare of wishing to be machines and to get the rest that we need to be human. Jesus put it this way:

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”[6]

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