It Goes On
A sermon by Revd Will Morris
I live my life at something of a rush, and often more in the future than the present. Even as I’m doing one thing at least half my mind is occupied with the next thing, or the one after that. But, occasionally, I get interrupted.
Several weeks ago I was sitting on a plane in Berlin when I got a text from someone I’ve known a very long time: “I need to talk to you,” they wrote, “it’s really bad again.” I wrote back that we were – quite literally – taking off. “Text me when you land,” they replied, “I really need you.” As the plane climbed and the signal disappeared, I was left alone to wonder what had happened this time, and to recall what had happened the times before.
We all have a past, a present and a future – but, as it turns out, not all in the same quantities. While my life is mostly future – plans, projects, possibilities – with an occasional nostalgic glance to the past, this person’s is different. The past is not always easy to recollect, and the future is hard to envisage because first they need to get through the present – a present that is marked by hospitals, and therapists, and medication. A present that is lived vividly, painfully, as a place from which it sometimes seems they can’t escape.
I landed in Paris, as, symbolically perhaps, a massive electrical storm lit up the sky. More texts appeared, and I called and got the story. It was bad … and they were back in hospital, back under care. I agreed to call again when I got to my hotel, and as we passed through empty, darkened streets in driving rain, I found myself – me for whom the present is that time to plan the future – I found myself slipping into the intensity of the present with this other person. And I felt – what? Depressed, I suppose; and just ever so slightly resentful that I had to put the future on hold for a moment.
Yet Jesus talks a lot – and very positively – about living in the present moment. Some of it is specific to the brevity of his earthly ministry. You don’t fast while the bridegroom is still with you, he tells his disciples on the way to his death in Jerusalem. There will be plenty of time for fasting once I’m gone. But some of the advice seems more generic, almost facile, especially in the Sermon on the Mount. Don’t worry about food or clothing: look what God does for the birds of the air and for the lilies of the valley. Can anyone among you add an hour to their life by worrying? Don’t worry about tomorrow.
Well, yes, but … What about the person I know who feels trapped, caged almost, in the present? And what for that matter about people like me who need to plan for a future that won’t completely look after itself?
While her story is different to the one I’ve just described, Kate Bowler, a former colleague of Sam’s at Duke, tries to answer some of those questions in her wonderful new book, as she talks about the moment her future ground to a halt. In her mid-30s with a very young son, an adored husband, with her dream job, and a brilliant future planned out and achievable, she was told she had Stage 4 colon cancer with possibly only months to live. Before that moment, she writes, “I rarely let my feet rest on solid ground, rooting me in the present. My eyes shifted to look for that thing just beyond, the next deadline, the next hurdle, the next plan. … I bec[ame] impervious to life itself. I failed to love what was present and decided to love what was possible instead.”
As she tries to come to terms with her illness – not particularly helped by the legion of people who tell her that “everything happens for a reason” – she also comes to peace with her new present and future. And the most helpful, hopeful, thing she hears is from a much older colleague who tells her: “Don’t skip to the end,” he says, “don’t skip to the end.” In other words don’t make it all about the plan, don’t seek false certainty, don’t ignore the present for the future. And so she lives more intensely in the present, “plodding along, and finding God” as she puts it. Making small plans: “crumbs scattered on the ground” for those she loves. But no longer are plans at the centre of her life. There is just today, and her son, and her husband, a beautiful morning, and the sound of the coffee grinder.
And that’s the point Jesus is trying to make. He acknowledges that today isn’t easy – in the words of the King James’ Version “sufficient unto the day is the evil (or trouble) thereof.” And Jesus lived plenty of difficult “todays”. But what he is saying – in the Sermon on the Mount, and elsewhere – is don’t get distracted. Don’t ignore the things that you can do now. Don’t ignore the present moment, because it’s only in the present that you can hug someone; only in the present moment that you can tell them you love them; only in the present moment that you can offer healing words, healing touch; only in the present moment that you can taste, smell, hear music, laugh, kiss, worship God. But if, Jesus says, you only see those things from the corner of your eye as they rush by on the way to your future, then you – quite simply – have got it wrong.
A few weeks ago, I went to visit this person I know at the hospital where they’re being treated. It was a beautiful afternoon, sun, a clear blue sky; and we sat on a shaded bench and talked about the present. Our conversation was free from plans about tomorrow, and also free from the shadow of the past. To be sure those were both there, the pain is still there, but they belonged to the doctors seen the day before and to be seen the day after. There was nothing I could do about past or future except to be there, intensely, sharing the present with them. Helping to make that present more tolerable, perhaps even for an hour enjoyable. And so we simply sat and talked.
But – and to be very clear – this was not me giving them a generous gift of my time and a sympathetic ear. It felt then, in fact, much more like a gift to me. Like Kate Bowler before her illness, in always looking to the future, to the next plan, to the next project, to a future meticulously planned, I often totally miss the present. I am the guy Jesus talks about, who watches that present rush by in a blur from the corner of my eye as I focus on the future. And yet it is only in the present that we can be with people, help them, laugh with them, cry with them … and truly love them. So that moment, that hour in that garden, entirely and completely in the present, was pure gift.
As we talked, they suddenly said: “Did you know I had a tattoo?” “No,” I said, slightly surprised. They rolled up their sleeve, and there on the inside of their elbow were three simple words: “it goes on”. I looked quizzically. “Robert Frost, the American poet,” they said. “When he was asked in old age what was the most important thing he’d learned about life, he replied that he could sum it up in those three words: ‘it goes on’.” Or, as Kate Bowler’s friend might have said: “don’t skip to the end.”
We often think about God as future hope. About the perfection that will occur at the end of time, the New Jerusalem. And that will happen. But we also have a God who is with us in the present. A God who came down to earth, was born in human form, and experienced what we experienced and learned from that. We have a God who, in real time, experienced emotion – joy laughter, tears, gratitude – and pain and anguish on a cross of wood. A God who helped and healed –and still helps and heals – in the present, not the future. And who gave us – still gives us – a new commandment that we love one another. A love that we can show in the present by being with others, and being with them fully and intensely.
It goes on, in the present, and God goes on, too – continuing to learn from us, continuing to love us, asking only that we love him and each other right here, right now, in the present. In the present, where we go on with God, and God goes on with us.
Amen
