They Always Make Us Switch The Clock On Sunday

It can’t be avoided. It’s Daylight Saving and that means the Usual Sunday Post bitterly recriminating this terribly evil human institution.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I am often struck by the contrast between the loveliness of people individually–you know, you happen to meet someone in the grocery aisle and you chat pleasantly while lining all your boxes of cookies and German chocolate onto the long conveyor belt, making small talk about the weather and the price of cauliflower, and then go away filled to the brim with the milk of human kindness–and the terrible evils that happen when you gather lots of people together to try to organize society.

I spent my whole week in Nairobi chewing on this thought. Every single person I met was so lovely, so interesting, so charming and friendly. I was sure that Kenya must be filled with the kindest and gentlest people in the world. But while I was being introduced and chatting and getting to know my parents’ friends, I had one eye on the television watching unfold the corrupt and broken second election (which is no where near as pleasant as a second breakfast). When all the individual lovely people come together to try to sort out a government, it’s not unusual to find that everything has broken catastrophically apart.

All politics is Babel, I said to myself. The gathering of people into systems and groups makes visibly manifest the deep wickedness at the core of every human person. You don’t see it over the counter at a shiny modern coffee bar, smiling pleasantly at the barista and feeling how truly good and charming the experience of being human is, you see it when you take a glance at Washington, or even at your local town hall.

As God said to himself just before he mercifully ruined that elegant tower, “This is only the beginning of what they will do…nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”

Amongst those things must surely be the absurdity of trying to ‘save’ Daylight.

I mean, how does it come about? You there alone on your meager farm, milking your cows and feeding your chickens, are never going to think, ‘You know what would be great? Shifting the clock around so that everyone is tired and confused and angry for several weeks of every year.’ But then, perversely, you decide to run for office and all your fellow neighbor farmers send you off to the state capital where you do well, inflicting hidden troubles on all the poor suckers out there still enduring the early morning milking. And then they send you to Washington, and there you get chatting with other interesting people and over drinks one night you concoct this terrible idea to scramble the clocks. You all agree together to pass a law. And now your will is enacted every fall and every spring to the detriment of all human kind, but most especially the mothers with the babies.

When you get together with other people, in other words, to try to organize and structure common life with systems and plans and organization and cooperation, when you leave your poor hovel to join with the village to build the well, that’s when the dark black portion of your fallen human nature comes into the full light of the sun. You and all the other villagers, or townspeople, or citizens of the nations, there’s no limit to the foolish ideas that will eventually be enacted by you.

The church, of course, is made up of people too. Church committees and functions and programs and ministries are what make my world go round. I don’t need to go to Washington to discover how bad I am and how bad everybody else is*. The Tower of Politics babbles all over coffee hour and into the vesting room. If you thought Albany was unpleasant, you should try spending six months arguing with eight or nine other people what to do about the unsightly dumpster across the church parking lot. You’re not going to come away bathed in ethereal light, filled with the joy of the Lord.

But unlike all the evil blossoming and flowering in the mighty halls of worldly power, in the church, when ordinary people get together to accomplish some kind of task, God uses the process itself to kill off the black core of sin. He uses your participation in the body of the church to curb, to limit, to sanctify, to lighten your dark wretched heart. That’s the promise. You go be with other Christians, and God will so knit you together into the mystical body of his Son, that even if you all together decided to do something as stupid as inventing Daylight Saving, he will still be able to forgive you and eventually cause you to repent and turn back towards a sane rational way of being.

What you intend for evil, God turns around and uses for good. Which truth the powers and principalities of the world must surely hate, else why do they, in perpetuity, insist on changing the hour on a Sunday?

We humans, we can’t avoid coming together. We can’t avoid politics. We are always trying to construct Babel right where we are. But God in his mercy uses the church to transform the politics and the ugliness by the heat and light of his Spirit. All our individual selves come to be forgiven, and then we are joined, not into a tower, but into a body.

*I am a great believer in church politics. I will probably very soon have a rather too long post articulating the joy and the delight of politics in the church.