The Rev. Suzanne Wille, preaching
Create in us a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within us. Amen. These days, when you ask someone how they’re doing, the most likely answer you’ll get is not “good” or “well” or, even, “none of your business,” but “busy.” That is now the most common response to inquiries into our well-being: Busy. “I’m busy—so busy!” And for good reason. We are busier than ever. An analysis of Christmas letters sent since the 1960s indicates that “references to ‘crazy schedules’ has risen dramatically”; another study “found that the percentage of employed Americans reporting that they ‘never had enough time’ rose from 70% in 2011 to 80% in 2018.” I can only imagine what the percentage is now! I know all these things Because I read an article in the Harvard Business Review: “Beware a Culture of Busyness” the title warns, reminding us that mere activity does not indicate we’re actually achieving anything in our workplaces. Obviously, the same can be said of schools and, gulp, churches. The author offers suggestions to employers about how to reduce this frantic pace, reminding the reader that humans need down time to be creative and space and time for “deep work,” which is very different from The multitasking most of us spend our lives on. This is all important, of course, but in the middle of the article is a nugget that makes clear that all the top-down strategies to create calm and give employees space face a daunting truth: We LIKE being crazy busy. Well, at least we HATE being idle. We get anxious when left alone with our own thoughts. A famous experiment “found that 67% of men and 25% of women chose to press a button to electrically shock themselves rather than sit still with their own thoughts in a lab room.” And don’t we resemble that remark? We who can’t stand in a line or, tell the truth, go to the bathroom without pulling out our phones? There is something in us that resists calm, being alone with our thoughts, not being distracted, and, well, it goes all the way back to Adam and Eve, at least metaphorically. The reading we have today from Genesis is the second creation story in the Bible and while most of don’t read this literally, it does reveal some truths. This story is often used as a way to explain the origin of sin but I think rather that it gets at the mystery of sin, how even when we are in a perfect situation, as Adam and Eve are here— a garden with all they need, made in the image of God, given good work to care for the garden, surrounded by lush fruit trees, from which they may eat freely— yet even here, we humans demonstrate anxiety, insecurity, even suspicion. They can’t be quiet and peaceful, there is already something in them that can be played upon, and it is the crafty serpent who provides the shock, the distraction, by insinuating that all isn’t as lovely as it seems in Eden. Now, this serpent may not have been a snake, and it definitely wasn’t Satan. Here we just have a chatty creature who is also crafty and knows how to stir up the paranoia of the already anxious, insecure humans: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from ANY tree in the garden?’” “Well, no,” answers Eve, “just not from that tree, the one in the middle; if we do, we’ll die.” “You won’t DIE!” says the serpent. “You’ll become like God, knowing good and evil.” The woman and the man, forgetting that they are ALREADY like God, being made in God’s image, and suddenly desirous of that ONE tree, ignoring all the other beautiful fruit trees in the garden, threw away the peace and confidence of living in Eden to try out something new. And they were shocked when they found they were naked, and, suddenly, that that was a bad thing. Somehow we humans have built within us a strong longing for something . . . else, something other than what we already have. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal called this a “God-shaped hole,” echoing St. Augustine’s words: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” That longing is not a bad thing, and it appears to be part of being human— there from the very beginning. But longing can sometimes become anxiety, insecurity, worry. When we feel that God-shaped hole open in our chests, and we are restless and worried, insecure, feeling incomplete, well, an electric shock can seem like a good idea. Suggestions that the One you had trusted isn’t actually trustworthy sound about right. The very thing that you know will NOT turn out well for you suddenly seems like the exact right thing to do. I used to think our inability, MY inability, to turn to God when that “God-shaped hole” opens up, when the restlessness sets in, I used to think that was sin and the age-old temptation to idolatry, to put ourselves in the place of God— to pluck the fruit from the tree we wanted rather than receiving the gift of the fruit God is giving us. That’s probably true, but perhaps it’s even a little more worrisome: we are hard-wired NOT to be still, hard-wired to be suspicious, to be anxious and jittery. I mean, Adam and Eve jumped ship pretty quickly, and evolution tells us that being on high-alert and anxious is probably what kept we smart but pathetically puny humans alive out on the savannah, surrounded by wild beasts. But if that’s the case, well, then we’re bound to try to fill that God-shaped hole, that restlessness with whatever shows up first: donuts and defensiveness, scrolling cat videos on Instagram and self-reliance, being a control freak. Well, at least those are mine. What do you turn to to calm your restless spirit? What presents itself to you as being the right shape to fill that God-shaped abyss in your life? If you’re hoping that, like the Harvard Business Review, I have a solution to offer, I’m going to let you down. I don’t have one. But what I do have is a model: Jesus in the wilderness. After 40 days of fasting. he’s hungry, alone, vulnerable. We hear this story every first Sunday in Lent, and it’s so well-known that we probably can’t see it anymore. Yeah, yeah, we think. It’s Jesus. This isn’t a real temptation. But that’s not true. Jesus isn’t superman. Jesus was human, feeling the same things we do, tempted in all the ways we are. And the great Tempter arrives when Jesus is most vulnerable— unlike Adam and Eve, by the way, who were cozy in a garden with a God who was always wandering by wanting to chat with them in the cool of the evening. No, Jesus was in the desert— Freezing at night, Hot during the day, Famished, lonely. At any rate, the Tempter comes and offers Jesus all the things that would assuage his gnawing hunger, his fears—and he had them, his anxieties—and he had those, too— inviting him to revel in his power, to show off so that the whole world would know that he is the Son of God. The tempter tells Jesus, “You never have to be alone again, Never doubt again. You can be surrounded by adoring crowds, Can make the world the way YOU want it to be. You don’t have to wait on God to fill that aching need inside. But Jesus turns back again and again to God— trusting God’s word, Trusting God’s love, Whole in his identity As God’s child, beloved. He is truly tempted, And he’ll be tempted again, But Jesus shows us that when you’ve got a God-shaped hole in your life— and we all do— there is only One who can fill it.
1. Waytz, Adam. “Beware a Culture of Busyness: Organizations must stop conflating activity with achievement.” Harvard Business Review. March-April 2023. p. 60.