The Gift of Time
Psalm 118:24, Luke 13:10-17 and Ephesians 4:17-24, 5:15-20
Since the year 2000 – when the Sydney Harbour Bridge was lit up with the word ‘Eternity’ – most Australians have become familiar with the story of Arthur Stace.
Born in 1884 Arthur Stace grew up in Sydney’s underbelly. He was a metho alcoholic in his teens and grew up as a petty criminal, until one night, in his late 40’s, at St Barnabas Broadway, when he became a Christian.
Two years later at Burton Street Baptist Church, he heard John G. Ridley preach on ‘Eternity’. He
left the church with the word ringing in his head. In his own words he said, "I began crying and I felt a powerful call from the Lord to write "Eternity". I had a piece of chalk in my pocket and I bent down there and wrote it."Barely able to write his own name Stace found that he could write ‘Eternity’, smoothly, in beautiful copperplate script, 60 centimeters wide on the pavement. Over the next 35 years it is estimated that he wrote the word 500,000 times - for many years without anyone knowing who the writer was.
There are three places where the word ‘Eternity’ can still be seen in Sydney.
In Town Hall Square, between St Andrews Cathedral and the Town Hall, a wrought aluminium replica of the word in Stace's handwriting is embedded in the footpath.
I was nine when my father took me to see it. In the midst of the hustle and bustle, the business people and the bargain hunters, the dads and their daughters having ‘a big day in the city’ it is a quiet, unobtrusive reminder that time is a gift - not a thing we can possess or a commodity we can trade.
A reminder we often ignore.
Mark Twain wrote: Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and it was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide.
The writer of The Sabbath Abraham Joshua Heschel states that:
Technical civilisation is man’s conquest of space. It is a triumph frequently achieved by sacrificing an essential ingredient of existence, namely, time. [Yet all the space we gain and the power we attain] terminates abruptly at the borderline of time....Time is the heart of existence.
We need to take ‘time out’ for God. Christianity, founded on the Judasitic tradition, is a religion of time. In the account of creation found in Genesis - the first thing to be blessed and declared ‘quadosh’ or ‘holy’ is not a mountain or an altar, but the seventh day’.
According to Heschel:
This is a radical departure from accustomed religious thinking. The mythical mind would expect that, after heaven and earth have been established, God would create a holy place – a holy mountain or a holy spring – whereupon a sanctuary is to be established. Yet it seems as if to the Bible it is holiness in time, the Sabbath, which comes first.
Amidst the days which are evil, we must ‘hallow’ time. We must take times of sacred rest – remembering time’s capacity to be sacred.
The American poet, Emily Dickinson, wrote: To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
I am sure we will find the time we need for other things, but those priorities are ordered when we take ‘time out’ to remember who gave us life.
The word ‘Eternity’ is apparently also visible inside the bell of the Sydney GPO tower. During World War II the tower was dismantled and in the 1960s when it was rebuilt the workers noticed the word, ‘Eternity’ inside the bell in Stace's chalk. No one ever found out how Stace got to the bell, which had been sealed up.
The bell must have seemed a most appropriate place to write ‘Eternity’ to Arthur. Here, in a sense, ‘Eternity’ was ringing out, on the hour, every hour, over Sydney.
We need to take time after time after time... to be with God.
Pulsing all around us is the rhythm of life; day and night, the seventh day rest in the Jewish tradition and the change of the seasons. We ignore these creation patterns at the expense of our productivity, health and relationships. Examples abound in modern-day work places of so-called ‘managed intensity’ resulting in stress and burnout and breakdown.
Our reading from Ephesians talks about the continuous process of clothing ourselves with the new self – appropriate clothes for our identity in Christ - and Christianity has a long tradition of models for incorporating ‘time with God’ into the rhythm of our lives. One example is the rule of St Benedict; a cycle of prayer, work and study. Calvin Miller writes, "Learn to obey. Only he who obeys a rhythm superior to his own is free.’
For those of you – like me – brought up as evangelicals this boiled down to ‘daily devotions’ or ‘quiet times’. I must confess an uneasy relationship with this practice, but two things I have found life-giving:
Reflecting on this this week I have wondered if I could use the cycles of the timer on our central heating; wake, leave, return, sleep to bring each part of my life into the presence of God.
One of my favorite films is Strictly Ballroom. ‘Time after time’ is the soundtrack in the scene where Scot and Fran twirl about on the roof of the dance studio. (I have a personal connection with that scene because that roof was about 100m from the house I lived in at the time in Marrickville - though the Vietnamese Restaurant. sign has been magically replaced by a Coca Cola one.) It is also personal because the image of the dancers (separating and coming together) speaks to me of the rhythm of a life lived with God. And the words help:
There’s a fourth ‘Eternity’ sign – here in Canberra. The National Museum holds a piece of cardboard on which Arthur Stace chalked the word for a fellow parishioner one Sunday morning.
We, too, this Sunday morning, are involved in sketching out ‘Eternity’ for each other; as we gather to worship, hear from God’s word and – in a few moments – pray for (and encourage) each other. We, with our Christian forbears, ‘hallow’ the first – rather than the seventh – day of the week because this was the day Jesus rose.
It is our weekly practice of taking ‘time off’ with God.
Last term in Sunday School we looked at the life of Eric Liddel and his remarkable testimony of not running in the 100m at the 1924 Paris Olympics because it was on a Sunday. I explained to the kids that ‘not playing sport on Sunday’ doesn’t seem a big issue to us, but it was important to Eric Liddel to set this day apart for God.
Do we use any criteria to evaluate how we spent our day of spiritual rest?
In Luke 13 Jesus is in conflict with a synagogue leader over healing on the sabbath. Healing was work, to be done during the week, in eyes of the religious establishment. "You hypocrites! " says Jesus, "Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey...to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for 18 long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?"
Jesus takes an example from the Rabbinic law code providing care for animals to reveal an appalling lack of care for people. His interpretation is based on Mosaic law:
Six days do your work, but on the seventh day do not work, so that your ox and your donkey may rest and the slave born in your household, and the alien as well, may be refreshed. (Ex 23:12)
The Sabbath is to be a day of refreshing. ‘Ought not...this woman...be set free’ says our translation, but ‘must’ is a better reading. This woman must be set free says free. We must use the sabbath to refresh ourselves from the daily tyranny of our lives and set free others free from tyranny.
Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic worker movement, wrote about the importance of sowing time in order to reap it. Spending time in prayer and worship and rest gives us more time because we spend what we have in clarity – not urgency. Particularly she advises that we ‘lavishly spend time by truly listening to the poor’.
We must take ‘time off’ with God.
Time out with God.
Time after time after time... to be with God.
Time off with God.
There is obviously much more that could said about having an awareness of God in everyday life, about adopting a rule for life and about ‘hallowing’ the Sabbath and I would encourage you to follow up anything God may be prompting you about...perhaps now is the moment to see if there is chalk in your pocket!
One of my favorite quotes about time comes from Hector Louis Berlioz. "Time is a great teacher," he said, "But unfortunately it kills all its pupils."
The third location of the word ‘Eternity’ in Sydney is on Arthur Stace's gravestone in Botany Cemetery.
One day our time (of it was ever ours) – well spent or ill spent – comes to an end. We are to be careful then as we live and make the most of the time.
But eternity is our promise – just as it was Arthur Stace’s – that the time we have spent with God – and the freedom we have sowed into the lives of others – will come to fruition.