Text: Romans 12: 1-3
In Praise of Steadiness
A few months ago I had the experience of returning to the church in New Haven where Rachael and I attended for many years. It had been a place that had nurtured and formed us during some crucial years in our lives. It was where we formed several long and meaningful friendships. It was where our children were baptized. It’s where I was encouraged to consider ministry as a vocation. It’s the place that sponsored, and then hosted, my ordination when the time was right. And it’s one of the places that I was allowed to practice this vocation called ministry when I finally was ordained. It’s a place that meant a lot to me over the years, and it felt good and right to sit in those pews again.
There were a few notable differences – some new artwork had found its way onto the walls, some older artwork had been removed, but for the most part, the place felt unchanged. And I just sat there for a while taking it all in. It was a strange but not unwelcome sensation, one that most of you have probably experienced at one point or another, when you’ve returned to a familiar place after a long absence. Things I had never given much thought suddenly seemed significant – the pattern of the carpet and the texture of the walls, the way light spilled in through the large glass windows and the shape of the trees outside those windows. It was all part of an ambience that was always present but seldom noticed, until I stepped away, and then returned.
And then I looked at the people in that space, many in their appointed places, a little older, a little greyer, but still in that second pew, or there in the choir, or there in the back and off to the side. It’s where they had been during our sojourn through New Haven, and there they were now, still at it, still showing up, still contributing to the place in small and sometimes much larger ways. When it came time to sing a hymn, I had to let my voice drop out of the singing, because I felt powerfully moved by the sight of those people, who had quietly, consistently, and steadily been contributing to the life of that place for so many years. They’re not especially glamorous. Many are introverts. They all have their private reasons for being there, reasons mostly unknown to me. And yet their very presence helped to create a place that shaped my own life, and the lives of others, in subtle but profound ways. Above all, it was a sense of gratitude and admiration that I felt, for all of those who practiced the virtue of a long and steady application of faith, found in a repetition that to the untrained eye might look monotonous, or even boring. It might be a sign of middle age, I don’t know, but I don’t mind telling you that in that moment, that’s the company I most wished to keep: among those who slowly and steadily hold the line, doing what must be done, even if others fall away.
What I’d like to propose this morning is that it is worth it to risk the mundane, the boring, the repetitive, and the ordinary. I’d like to suggest that it’s in those very qualities that life itself is found, and where the deepest and the best parts of our humanity are forged. I’d like to suggest that it’s in the repetitive and routine motions of our lives that faith itself develops and is tested. In essence, what I’m mounting this morning is a defense of boredom and the dull as some of the most salient features of our collective existence, which might not be a good way to grow a church or to increase pledges, but it might get us closer to discovering the goodness, the sacredness, the sheer aliveness shimmering beneath or around that which we deem repetitive, or “boring.”
But before going farther, let me offer this confession: repetition is not, by and large, an approach to life that I’m especially good at. I tend to prize the new, the different, the novel, and the swerve far more than I do repetition and routines. One of the reasons parenting has at times felt confining to me is that sense of endless repetitions that make up the life of a parent – every day and every week is more or less the same, with only minor variations in schedule. I often get by by imagining the next big thing that’s coming. During the long winter months, it’s Jazz Fest that I look forward to, and then the Maryland Challenge in late May. After that, summer travels are almost here, and when that’s over, there’s Thanksgiving and pie to look forward to, and after that there’s Christmas, and then it’s time to start waiting for Jazz Fest again. Are any of you like that too? Do you live for the big moments, while sometimes having to endure the ordinary routines that make up 95% of human existence? It’s not that those ordinary routines are bad. It’s just that they’re ordinary. It’s just that they’re…repetitive routines.
It’s not a new condition, to crave novelty. It might be a condition that’s been heightened in modernity, but it’s not new. In the 19th century, Kierkegaard spent a lot of time thinking about precisely these issues – repetition, boredom, and the willingness to forge ahead into the furnace of existence, even when it meant toiling in the mundane. In 1843, he published a book of philosophy called Repetition in which he imagines a young man caught in the throes of romantic love. But it soon becomes clear that he’s not in love with his beloved. He’s in love with being in love. The young man prizes the rapture, the joy, the intoxication, of those first heightened moments in a relationship, when everything is charged as if by lightning – the flirtation, the glances, the brushing touch, that first passionate kiss, the bedroom. But then it wears off. Ordinary existence proves itself too burdensome, and so the young man moves on to another romantic interest. The young man lives for the passionate moment, but he’s incapable of remaining present throughout the course of ordinary time.
Eventually, an older and wiser friend proposes that the young man consider the prospect of marriage with his current beloved. For it is in marriage that one learns the value of a long steadiness over time. It is in marriage that one descends from an abstract ideality into the daily work of making a relationship last. But the young man dreads the prospect of marriage. And he dreads it because of a defective understanding of time. He prefers the time which leads up to something, and then is over and done with. He knows nothing of what we can call ethical time, which is that toilsome process in which something is built up and then comes into the fullness of being. He doesn’t know that as often as not, the ethical battles we face in life are not waged against lions and dragons, but against the most difficult antagonist of all – time. The young man hasn’t learned to hold steady in time, by finding constancy in the midst of the chaotic swirl of events, but also by finding novelty in the mist of the everyday and the ordinary. The young man doesn’t understand such things. And so while he initially consents to the prospect of marriage – proposing, setting a date, and planning a ceremony – at the last minute he absconds from Copenhagen to Stockholm. The hard work of the ordinary isn’t for him.
The Bible speaks of two aspects of time. There is, on one hand, kairos time, which means the fullness of time. Kairos has to do with those big powerful moments that we all tend to love so well, where time feels full and meaningful, like at Christmas or Easter, like when we have an overarching project that’s carrying us, as we did last summer when we were at the height of our sanctuary work. We have them together, but we have them in our personal lives too, when our senses are heightened by something, like first love. But there is in the Bible another kind of time, which is chronos time, clock time, ordinary time, when things just are. If you’re anything like me, you tend to privilege kairos time, because it brings with it the glow of purpose and resolution. But then conversely, chronos time, chronological time, is underappreciated because it feels empty and dull, because it involves repetition.
Our spiritual ancestors, the Puritans, knew something about the dilemma of ordinary time. They’ve gotten a worse rap than they deserve, the Puritans, largely because Hawthorne was such a vivid interpreter of their worst tendencies. But on the question of time, they were on to something. They refused to celebrate holidays, any holidays, precisely because of their understanding of time. They believed that to elevate certain days as somehow more sacred, more worthy of celebration, was to devalue the remainder of days as less than holy. And so they sought to reverse the distinction, trying to understand every single day as charged with significance, as possessing the secrets of life. They sought to find meaning, and God, in the routine and the banal, in the mundane and the repetitive. Though they predate Kierkegaard’s Repetition, they’re early heroes of the ordinary, forging ahead into the flux of everyday life, trusting that it was in that steady repetition that their humanity would be constructed. They trusted that it was in that steady repetition that the world would be preserved, saved even.
In that, they were following the words of the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans, words we heard earlier. “Here’s what I want you to do,” Paul says. “Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.” And then he says this: “Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” Developing well formed maturity: that takes time – chronos time, not kairos time. It takes repetition. It means slogging through the mundane chores that we’re confronted with everyday and understanding it all as a gift, charged with significance. It means no less than that the world is, perhaps, held together by the accumulation of steady habits of grace and care, forged in the repetition of time.
I’m not saying we don’t need novelty. I’m not saying that every project or endeavor or even marriage should go on forever, just because. Sometimes there are good reasons to abscond to Stockholm. Nor am I saying we need to be Puritans. I, for one, would never last. But I am saying that there’s something praiseworthy about steadiness, about repetition, something that shouldn’t be overlooked or ignored. I’m saying there’s something to be gained by pressing ahead within chronological time, allowing ourselves to be shaped by slow, steady habits of being.
For all of you parents out there that sometimes chafe at the repetitions of parental life, maybe there’s something positively heroic about your willingness to do what needs to be done, day after day. Maybe it’s those tiny repetitions that hold a small part of the world together. For all of you who toil in jobs that feel monotonous, maybe in some ways it’s your dedication to the small things that hold your part of the world together. For those of you engaged in the care of another person – an aging spouse or parent, say – maybe it’s your work that keeps the bottom from dropping out of another human life. For all of you who take care of a garden, daily providing the water and pulling the weeds, maybe it’s your labor that in some small way builds up the world. For all of you who feel the tedium of your everyday relationships – with your spouse or with your parents, with your associates or with your friends – maybe it’s in the cultivation of those very ordinary relationships that your most profound growth will occur. For all of you who do what I do, looking forward to the next big thing, maybe there’s something important about the practice of pausing, and being grateful for the ordinary moments of goodness that pervade our routines and our repetitions. Maybe there’s even something like a holiness that undergirds it all.
And then there’s this thing called church, which is about as repetitive an activity as I can imagine. We meet on the same day and time, and when we arrive, we follow a pattern that doesn’t vary a great deal. I would dare say that very few of you show up on Sundays in search of novelty. Those that do tend to burn out fairly quickly. Because you know, we sing songs that we’ve been singing for centuries – and when we don’t, some among us tell me that we should! We hear stories that we’ve probably heard before, and use language that feels slightly out of time, out of joint, as if we’re repeating an earlier era. For some people that familiarity is comforting, a sign of stability when everything else feels shaky. For others, well, it just feels repetitive, stifling, more than a little dull. I know – I’ve been there too.
And yet I come back to that moment in New Haven, when I was so moved by the steadiness of all those people, arriving in that place week by week by week. Maybe there are times in life when we need to be the ones out in the world gathering vast experience, sucking the marrow out of life, searching out new experiences, seeking adventures. I think we all need that if we are to stay vibrant. But I also think there are times to stay put, times to build, times to risk repetition and the mundane as a means of exercising faith, as a means of creating a steadying and stabilizing force in the world, as a means of growing something with deep roots. And that’s what we’re doing in all the repetitions flowing through our service. Do you ever wonder why we repeat the Lord’s Prayer week after week? It’s because those are words that should be a part of our very marrow. Do you ever wonder why I repeat the words “it’s good to be together” every Sunday? It’s because it is, and it bears saying. Do you ever wonder why we return so often to Psalm 23, or to Amazing Grace, or to the words of Micah, “let justice roll down like streams of living water…?” It’s because through those repetitions, we learn week by week who we are, and why we do what we do. It’s because it’s in those repetitions that our identities, our souls, are being formed. It’s because it’s in those repetitions, as mundane as they may seem, that God comes to be in the world.
When young people come back to this place after they’ve been away, I’m sure they have an experience not unlike the one I had in New Haven a few months ago: there they all are, doing the same thing they were doing before I went away. But these days I’m glad to be in that number, glad to be among those creating the kind of place that’s worth coming back to, the kind of place that enters your soul in profound ways without you even being fully conscious that it’s happening. I think it’s valuable to be such a people. I think it’s valuable to create such a place.
There are times that require bold declarations and newsworthy actions. Kairos time is necessary. But in a shaky and unsteady historical moment, when leaders govern according to passions, and when heated words have the capacity to alter hundreds of millions of lives, I think there’s something praiseworthy, heroic even, in the steadiness of faithful lives, unfolding across chronological time in all of its ordinariness, through all of its repetitions.
I thank God for those faithful people in that church in New Haven, steadily going about their work. But I thank God for the faithful people here in Old Lyme, all of you, steadily doing the same. Amen.
