Christmas Midnight 2006
Well here we are again. Christmas Eve. Another year. It hardly seems possible does it? Have you noticed how the pace of life seems to be accelerating? Why, as we grow older, does time seem to speed up and elude us? Douwe Draaisma is author of a new book Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older. He explains the scientific theories that explain this perplexing phenomena.
1. Proportional Time: Time is perceived as a proportion of time lived. That is, to a five-year-old, a year is 20% of his entire existence. To a 60 year-old, one year is only about 1% of his life.
2. Complex Time: As we get older, life gets busier and with more things to do, there is less downtime so life speeds by.
3. Stupid Time: Memory weakens as the years pass and because we can’t remember what we did yesterday, let alone last week or last month, time flies.
4. Routine Time: As we age, our time is taken up with increasing numbers of practiced pleasures and predictable tasks that provide little intellectual stimulation.
5. Tense Time: Time is perceived at different rates of speed depending on whether you live in the past, present or future tense. Children generally are future tense types. They can’t wait to be big enough to ride a bicycle or stay up later or go to the cinema alone.
Their anticipation of holidays, birthdays and summer holidays in addition to the constantly moving target of age-related privileges guarantees that each wait will feel like eternity. Young adults live mainly in the future tense too, looking forward anxiously to that promotion, finding the perfect wife or husband, affording a fancier car or bigger house. Older folk, however, tend to live in the past tense, recalling triumphs and tragedies from their younger years, sometimes complaining about new-fangled ways of doing things and lamenting the loss of the “good old days.” Living in the past tense may speed up time perception because the anticipation of the new is missing.[i]
Well, if that is what is happening
on the inside of our mind, what about the world out there? Think about it, how did Kwik-Fit get to be
the world’s leading tyre, exhaust and brake specialist? By promising to fit
quickly. How did Proctor and Gamble become the number one seller of shampoo?
One reason - by putting shampoo and conditioner in the same bottle. Remember
all those years when you had to shampoo and then rinse, then condition and
rinse. Now it's just all in one bottle. "Wash and go" is their
slogan. Number one. And if you are old enough to remember, it was 1974 when a
new kind of restaurant became very popular in the UK, a restaurant that for the
first time in human history sold food not on the basis of its quality, not on
the basis even of its price, but on the basis of the speed with which it is
served. And we coined a phrase for those kinds of restaurants. We called them
"fast food." Fast food. Not good food, not even cheap food. Just
fast. But even with fast food restaurants, you still had to park the car and
get out and walk all the way inside and order the food and sit down and eat it.
And all of that took time. So we invented drive-through lanes, so that
families could eat in cars as God intended them to. And the beautiful thing
about this arrangement is when you're in the car and you haven't got time to go
to the fast food restaurant, the children can just scrounge around in the
cracks underneath the seats for cold potato chips and gummy bears. I know its
true - I’ve seen the back of some of your cars…
Now do things get any better, any slower, more peaceful at Christmas time? Well,
its confession time. In a Times newspaper article last week, Ruth
Gledhill revealed something clergy wives and Church Wardens have known for a
very, very long time. Increasing numbers of ministers are going down with a
newly identified disease at this time of year. Its called Irritable Clergy
Syndrome. Research conducted by Cambridge University has revealed that clergy
are torn by the pressure of having to be nice all the time to everyone. If you
work in the retail business, or hospitality or entertainment then you can
probably identify with a variation of ICS. And if we are honest, and hey, why
not, we would probably all admit to experiencing this disease in some shape or
form at this time of year. Christmas is probably the most stressful time of
year for us all.[ii]
Why is it hard to be ‘nice’ at such a joyful time? Having to socialise with
people we work with, or meet relatives we hardly see during the rest of the
year can be very stressful if we have little in common. True, the shopping
arcades are more crowded, airports are busier, and the traffic on the roads
gets worse.
Add to that, lack of sunlight, shorter days, and your daily routines disrupted by shopping expeditions, extended family times and over extended credit cards and you have all the ingredients for a disaster waiting to happen. But these are still more the symptoms rather than the causes of our malaise. Christmas merely exposes what is going on under the surface that remains largely hidden for the rest of the year. The most common symptom of this disease has been identified as "hurry sickness” - the inability to slow down and be at peace with ourselves.
If you suffer from this sickness, this hurry sickness, you will be able to identify with one or other of these scenarios.
When you come to the traffic lights at the Wheatsheaf or the A30 crossroads to Wentworth and Ascot, where there are two lanes and there is a car in each lane, which do you choose?
If you have this sickness, as you are slowing down, you find yourself checking the make and model of the cars ahead of you. You also look for signs of the age and gender of the drivers. On the basis of that data you calculate who is most likely to pull away the fastest, and that's who you get behind, if you have this disease. Any confessions? Here’s a second scenario.
When you go to the supermarket
and you are ready to check out, you count how many people are in the lines. You
look for the shortest line. But its not as simple as that is it? You find
yourself calibrating how much stuff is in all the trolleys ahead of you.
Who is going to get through the quickest? Is it the elderly lady with five
items or the young business man with fifteen? And then there is also the age of
the check-out staff to factor in. And if you're really sick, when you have
chosen your line, you keep an eye on where you would have been you in the line
on either side of you. And if the person who would have been you in one of the
other two lines gets through before you and is out the door first, you feel
depressed for the rest of the day.
If you have this sickness, you are what's called "polyphasic." Polyphasic means you have to be doing more that one thing at the same time or it feels like you are wasting time. You're driving a car, drinking coffee, listening to the radio, talking on the mobile phone, signaling and making emotionally cathartic gestures, all at the same time. And if you are a lady, you can also apply lipstick and mascara with one hand at the same time. And if you have this condition, you are probably making your Christmas ‘thank you’ list at this very moment.
All right now, mass confession time, show of hands. How many of you would say, "I suffer from hurry sickness. I've got this disease."? Raise your hands, would you? You sick people. I want to ask you this evening to consider the possibility that your greatest need in life might not be for someone to come along and say, "We can help you move faster." But the very reverse.
I want to invite you this Christmas to do a rather radical thing, to consider the possibility that maybe you need to slow down. Try living for the next week of the holidays without a watch. Better still, try living without the mobile phone and without email. Try choosing to drive in the slow lane of the motorway. Join the longest line in the supermarket and start a conversation with those around you. If Jesus could, why can’t you? - Just for a week... Slow down and enjoy the taste of each mouthful of the Christmas story.
Hurry sickness, and all the stress we experience around Christmas time, is just a symptom of lives built on two illusions.[iii] The first is “Someday things will settle down.” We think, “when things settle down, I’ll get round to what matters... when things settle down I’ll spend more time with my family. The fact is there is only one time in your life when things will settle down. When you die. You’ll be amazed at how life slows down then. Until then things will probably never slow down. A friend of mine, starting out at a new church asked a wise old friend for some advice,
"If you had to give me one piece of advice, what would it be?" And
this is what he said. "You must eliminate hurry from your life." And
there was a long pause. Then my friend said, "Okay, yeah. I got that. I
wrote that down. What else? "Nothing else. You must ruthlessly eliminate
hurry from your life."
If you look at the life of Jesus, you will see a person who was busy but never
hurried. He had many things to do. But as He went through life, He was always
able to love the people that came into His life. He was never hurried. You
cannot love in a hurry. That’s the first illusion - Someday things will settle
down. The second illusion is this - Someday ‘more’ will be enough. Have you
ever found yourself thinking “If I just buy this one outfit, I will finally
have enough clothes.” Or, “If I just replace this carpet, our house will be
complete” or, “If I can buy this car or this house, I’ll be satisfied.” We live
in a world of advertising that says “Use me, buy me, wear me, drink me, drive
me, own me, put me in your hair… and you will be content.
Now if you don't take anything else away this evening, I want you to take away those four words: “It could be worse”. I want you to remember those words, so I'm going to ask you to do kind of an unusual thing. I'm going to ask you to say those four words out loud, together with me, so that you'll remember them. All right? Lets say them together - "It could be worse."
Now when you leave here and get in your car in the car park or if you were late, a mile down the road, you're going to look at all the other cars and be tempted to think, "If I had --a bigger car, a nicer car, a newer car, a more expensive car for Christmas -- then I would be content." But tonight at least, you're not going to think that, because tonight when you get into your car you're going to say to yourself with great passion, "It could be worse." With great passion, "It could be worse." And when you drive to your home tonight, it is going to appear in your headlights and you're going to be tempted to think about somebody else's home. You're going to be tempted to think, "You know, if I lived in a bigger house, a newer, more expensive house, then I would be content. Then I would have enough."
But tonight at least, you're not going to do that. Tonight when you walk through the door you're going to say to yourself with great passion, "It could be worse." And then tomorrow morning, if you are married, when you wake up and you roll over and you look at your spouse, you're going to say... No, don't do it. Don't do it. But do remember the temptation to build your life on these two illusions. Things will probably never slow down. More will probably never be enough.
James Dobson tells this story about how he learnt this lesson. “I learned how to play Monopoly from my grandmother. She was a wonderful person. She raised six children. She was a widow by the time that I knew her. But she was the most ruthless Monopoly player I have ever known in my life. She understood that the name of the game was to acquire. When she played and I got my initial money from the bank, I would just try to hold onto it, because I didn't want to lose any of it. She spent everything, bought stuff she landed on as soon as she could, and she'd mortgage it to buy more stuff. And eventually, of course, the way the game goes, eventually she would accumulate everything. She would be the master of the board. She understood that money was how you keep score in that game, that possessions were a matter of survival. And she beat me every time. And at the end of the game she would look at me and she'd say, "One day you'll learn how to play the game."
She was kind of cocky, my grandmother. "One day you'll learn how to play the game." When I was about ten, I played every day with a kid that lived in our neighborhood, and it dawned on me as we were playing every day all through that summer the only way to beat somebody in Monopoly was a total commitment to acquisition. That summer I learned how to play the game. And by the time autumn rolled around, I was more ruthless by far than even my grandmother. I went to play her, and I was willing to do anything to win. I was willing to bend the rules. I played with sweaty palms. Slowly, cunningly I exposed the soft underbelly of my grandmother's weakness. Relentlessly, inexorably I drove her off the board. The game does strange things to you. I can still remember like yesterday. I looked at my grandmother.
This is the person who taught me how to play. She was an old woman by now. She was a widow. She had raised my mother. She loved me. And I took everything she had. I destroyed her financially and psychologically. I watched her give her last dollar and quit in utter defeat. This was the greatest moment of my life. And then she had one more thing to teach me, my grandmother. Then she said to me, "Now it all goes back in the box.”
It all goes back in the box. All of the houses and hotels, Mayfair and Park Lane, all of those railway stations and utilities, all of that wonderful money. It all goes back in the box," she said. But I didn't want it all to go back in the box. I wanted to leave the board out permanently -- bronze it maybe, as a memorial to what I had achieved. See, when she said, "It all goes back in the box," it was kind of a way of saying to me, "None of it's really yours.
It doesn't belong to you. You don't own any of it. You just used it for a little while, and now it all goes back in the box. And next time it'll all go to somebody else. That's the way the game works. So when you play the game, don't forget this one lesson. When the game comes to an end, and the game always comes to an end, the stuff all goes back in the box."
Christmas Day is minutes away. Sometime tomorrow, before dawn if you have small children or after the Queen’s speech if you are civilised, you're going to be unwrapping some presents. They maybe from yourself, maybe from others. Some may be predictable. Some may be a surprise. Some of them may be hand made and some may even say "Harrods" on the outside.
But remember when you open them, someday they will all go back in the box. You see, all of this rushing and accumulating that our lives become oriented around involve a form of denial. And the fundamental reality that we all deny is that we're going to die. There is a simple, two-word question people tend not to ask. The question is, "Then what?"
That's the question that most
people never ask. When I finally have enough, when I am financially secure,
then what? When you finally get the ultimate promotion, when you've made the
ultimate purchase, when you've got the ultimate home, when you've ultimately
secure, when you have climbed the ladder of success to the highest rung and the
thrill wears off--and it will wear off--you've got to ask yourself, "Then
what?"
What do you do with a cold marriage or one that has failed altogether? What do
you do with children that learned early on that they're not as important as a
briefcase and a meeting and a barn full of stuff? What do you do with people
who should be your close friends who don't even know you? What do you do when
you discover that your life has had no meaning and ultimate purpose that will
outlast you? How important will all that stuff be then? "Don't you
know," God asks, "how quickly life passes? Don't you understand that
it all goes back in the box?"
I want to ask you, if tonight was your night, if Christmas Eve was the night that your soul was going to be demanded of you, like Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which it will one day - if God were going to write a single word or sentence to summarize your life, what would it be? Fool or friend? Lazy servant or faithful servant? The ultimate tragedy must surely be to get to that point and realise that you have wasted your life on stuff that doesn’t matter.
This Christmas I encourage you to reflect upon these two symptoms of our corporate malaise. "Things are not going to settle down.” “More will never be enough.” And then remember what tonight is really all about. Take time to savour the incredible truth that God sent His Son, to live and die for the forgiveness of your sins, to fill the void in our lives that time and money cannot satisfy and give you the one gift that will last forever. Eternal life. I invite you to make room for Jesus in your life this Christmas. And may God bless you and those you love. Let's close in prayer.
“Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for the gift of your Son. We are rich in so many ways, but we too are foolish in so many ways. Help us, Father, not to trivialize our lives by running after what does not count and cannot last. Help us, Lord, to invest our lives this Christmas and every day, in becoming rich towards you and generous toward others. We pray in Jesus' name. And they all said “Amen”.
[ii] Ruth Gledhill, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2494814.html
[iii] John Ortberg. Much of this sermon is developed from material developed by John Ortberg in An Ordinary Day with Jesus (Willow Creek and Zondervan)