Making the Most of Our Time
Sermon preached by Rev. Larry Young
August 20, 2006

One thing that’s generally true about vacations is that they always seem too short! It’s just been over a month since Jean and I returned from our Colorado trip—and already I am thinking about the next one, which won’t be anytime soon. Time away like this always seems precious to us; and I’ll admit my temptation is to try to fill every moment of it with as much satisfying activity as possible. I don’t want to miss any chance to go or do—which, I can assure you, is not the mindset of the other party in our household! Relaxing and resting and enjoying the beauty of the Colorado mountains is of course an equally valid way of spending vacation time. But here we were with a wonderful Aspen Music Festival close at hand, plus a stimulating Ideas Festival going on with world-class movers and shakers, and close family members nearby to spend time with. How does one make the most of one’s time in such a situation? I’ll admit that my desire not to miss anything was in real tension with my need to relax and just let my soul be for a change. Finding the balance between my doing and my being often seems to be a challenge I face.

I wonder if we attach such importance to our vacation times partly because we often don’t have the same quality of concern for the other times of our lives. Do we see vacations as special because we fail to build enough meaning into our everyday living? Do we need to get more of a life on an everyday basis—a life that provides us the satisfaction and meaning and worthwhileness that we long for?

Our reading from Ephesians seems to be addressing the same basic issue. In fact, the writer uses the same phrase, “making the most of the time.” Now, we know the early Christians thought they might have significantly less time than we, depending on when Christ’s second coming would occur. But the writer has more than that in mind. He sees that when people are in sync with the Spirit and the leading of God, their lives will be qualitatively different, no matter how much time they are given. But that requires the exercise of wisdom and discernment. To just live like everybody else lives, without thought as to what makes life good, is foolishness; and the days are evil, he affirms, because so many people operate out of that kind of foolishness. The writer refers to drunkenness as one of the pitfalls of his time; and yes, we too know of people whose idea of a good time is a drunken party or getting high on drugs. We know also of people who resort to alcohol or drugs to escape from lives that otherwise seem so dismal and unrewarding.
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"Making the Most of Our Time" by Rev. Larry Young, August 20, 2006

But in our time the panorama of activities that Ephesians would call foolishness goes far beyond substance abuse, and often it’s a lot more subtle. Today one of the biggies seems to be entertainment. Life will be good if only we can find enough entertainment to fill our days; and by entertainment we usually mean passively sitting back while others put on a good show for us.

Many of life’s everyday activities seem intolerably boring to us unless some form of entertainment is part of the package. The polls tell us many more people are getting their news of the world from the television evening news productions than from newspapers; for, by comparison, newspapers seem boring alongside the drama that TV newscasts can conjure. I’m sure some of you saw the L.A. Times series a week ago about multi-tasking on the part of today’s youth generation. Cell phones, iPods, and computers of various configurations are all available to them; and often they’ll be using more than one of these at a time, while at the same time doing their homework! Why? Because they’re hungry for stimulation—and homework by itself seems so boring. (Doesn’t that give us an important clue why we’re producing so many poorly-educated members of society, if learning has so little meaning for many?)

And even the church is not exempt from this pressure to entertain. A lot of people measure a church by how good a show it puts on, as though worship were essentially one more form of entertainment. Many mega-churches are mega-churches because of how well they do this. Now there is no excuse for worship services to be poorly done; they ought to be of the best quality possible. But the purpose of worship is not to passively entertain us, or just to make us feel good, but to draw us into relationship with God in a way that shapes and changes our lives. That’s how the effectiveness of worship ought to be measured.

But, beyond the lure of “entertainment,” there’s no lack of other goals and approaches to life that can keep us from making the most of our time—the pursuit of status, a preoccupation with “getting ahead,” living vicariously through our idols, to name only three. But there’s another one that may be the most subtle of all. We can so easily make the assumption that making life work for us is a matter of just doing what we need to do, apart from what meaning it has for us. And of course our minds are constantly filled with those things we “need” to do—earning a living, handling our business affairs, taking care of our household duties, tending to our personal grooming and wardrobe, meeting our community and social commitments, etc., etc. If perchance your mind has drifted off at some point during the service so far, the chances are you’ve jumped ahead to things you need to take care of this afternoon or this coming week. And no doubt we could give an accounting for why we need to do each item on our lists. But, you see, there’s no guarantee that our keeping busy even with needful tasks is going to make our lives satisfying and worthwhile—only that we will be preoccupied and at times harried, even to the point that we fail to sense what has gone wrong. And what is most likely missing is a grasp of the direction and meaning at the center of our lives—a sense of who we are, and what matters most to us, and where, beyond everything else, we want to go with our days. If we’re going to make the most of our time, we need some answers to questions like these.
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