Sunday Reflection: Only God Can Save the Daylight

I’m going to go ahead and be bitter, even though it’s the Lord’s Day. Want to know what time our Sundays start? Well, Matt gets up in the middle of the night to essentially memorize his sermon. I, being much lazier, wake up in the vicinity of five to flail around on the Internet. The children wake up between then and seven, one by one climbing into my bed to jostle and annoy me. Then, at 7am, I turn on WSKG’s With Heart and Voice–a single hour of sacred, choral and organ music–to both soothe my shattered soul and startle myself into actually getting up. I turn it up so that the children can hear that this is when they should get up, even though they are already up and kicking and fighting with each other and probably hitting with a wicked fist. By 7:30 they are all at church eating cookies and drinking chocolate milk for breakfast, provided by a really lovely grandmotherly lady who gets there just for them. 7:45 finds me rushing desperately into the church kitchen to try to get at least two full rounds of good coffee in heat preserving urns before 8:10 when I dash upstairs and sit in the back pew to hear the sermon. Matt, meanwhile, has walked the 23 seconds from our back door to the church back door at 7:58, shoved on his vestment, and walked out of the sacristy door at 8:00 to say the first lines of the service.

So….I’m going to go ahead and confess that losing an hour of sleep is so much the pits that my head is filled with all kind of words that should never be said aloud by someone like me. How did it come to pass that a whole precious hour could just be wrested from my grasp, causing me weeks of tired re-calibration of each whole day, and two mere weeks before Easter a that. It had to have been someone full to the brim with deep loathing for God and his people. I’m going to assume it was a man and that he woke up one day and thought, “You know what would be great? Making Sunday once a year Really Really miserable. And twice a year, embarrassing half of every congregation–those who arrive an hour early for church in the fall, and those who don’t arrive at all in the spring.”

Fortunately, being in the way of praying Morning Prayer a lot right now, I have embedded in my psyche along side of all this rage these necessary and primordial words.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. – Isaiah 55:8-11

The rain and the snow are in the hands of God to deliver them. The earth turns round and round not by any effort of mine, nor someone sitting in some dim, frightful office in DC, but by the hand of God who keeps it turning. Or rather by the Word of his mouth. We can fiddle with the clocks, we can struggle along in our own tiny spheres of crazy, but we cannot effect the number, ultimately, of even our own accumulation of days. We are born, we die, according to God, and not by any power in ourselves.

It is a great mercy that God’s ways are higher and better than ours. However pure or wicked our intentions, no matter the unforeseen catastrophes that we cause by mucking around with clever or foolish plans, God is not subject to us, he is not controlled by us, and he will not be ruined by us.

Except, of course, willingly, on the cross–interposing himself into our time to save us from ourselves and from each other and from our own bad ideas. If ever there was a need for saving, that day is today.

And consider how he saved us. He went willingly to death at a particular hour, arranged from before time, the hour when the lambs’ life blood was being spilled out in the temple, running down, lamb after lamb, all of them innocent, powerless. At that single hour Jesus laid aside his power and let his own blood flow down, for you, and me.

The powers and principalities that cause us to change our clocks, who order and plan and measure and decide, who enact the human will upon other humans, these are nothing compared to the power of God who sees and knows and measures, flawlessly. And when the moment is perfect, just as it was 2000 years ago, he will come again. And if he wanted to do that now, today, that would really be fine with me.