A WHOLE NEW WORLD

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LUKE 5:1-11

ANTHONY E.ACHESON, M.DIV.

Patterns and routines are essential elements of a well lived life. Our biological life, certainly, is organized around physiological systems performing repetitive functions. The beating of our hearts and breathing of our lungs are examples. We all need to maintain personal hygiene habits such as brushing our teeth, eating regular meals and getting good sleep and exercise. Our social and psychological lives are structured around the routines of language; the rules of grammar and sound have to be learned through enormous repetition to be useful to us. In no small part, it is through behavioral repetitions that we build up structures and patterns of body and mind to maintain efficiency, well-being and even survival. Most of our patterns are not consciously examined. Most of the time they simply are. They simply take place.

The automatic nature of our patterns sometimes serves us well. Anyone who pursues an activity at a high level of performance or skill knows about this. If you want to become very good at sports, for example, the most foundational element of practicing lies in repeating certain basic motions involved in that sport many times over. In football, coaches and players routinely talk about going through as many ‘reps’ in as possible during any week prior to a game. This means, in particular, running, as often as possible, certain plays as that are highlighted in the game plan for the next opponent. In football repeating the play numerous times is considered so important that if a player coming back from an injury doesn’t take part in those ‘reps’-those repetitions of the key plays-he will often not start or even play much in the game, even if he is healthy enough to do so by game time. That is how important those ‘reps’ are considered to be.

When you repeat a function beyond a certain number of times, it can become so much a part of you that it becomes automatic. That kind of automaticity and regularity, that process whereby an activity becomes reflexive, can build up patterns and routines that serve us in a positive way.

But then, on the other hand, there are also important times when our patterns and routines do not serve us so well. There are times when our patterns and routines need to be taken out of the realm of the automatic and the regular and need to be examined. There are times when our patterns and routines need to be brought into the realm of conscious awareness, and then conscious choice. There are times when our patterns and routines need to be examined and brought into conscious awareness so we can either change them, or create new routines.

This is a live topic for me because I’m realizing the importance in my life of creating a higher level of organization and efficiency and structure, most especially in my work space, but also in my living space. There are several reasons for this, including increased demands on my time this year from our music program, as well as from our church school and youth groups. I am increasingly aware that I can only be as effective as I want to be on these jobs if there’s more structure and efficiency in my life. So one of the things that I have been doing is giving conscious attention to what my patterns and routines are. I am not an easily or naturally well-organized person. But I also recognize my need for organization, simplicity and structure, and I know that I am certainly capable of creating organization, simplicity and structure in my life. But in order to achieve higher levels of those things, I have to consciously attend to it. I have had to consciously foster those things and consciously focus on them, and have been giving a high priority to doing that.

I have been helped in my commitment to doing this by a book I’ve been reading in recent weeks. It is called, ‘The Power of Less.’ With the encouragement of this book, one goal I have been working on this week is to reduce my email inbox to zero - and, hopefully, keep it at zero. I’m getting close to my goal. Last week I deleted over 4,000 emails. So I’m working toward getting the inbox down to zero on a daily basis, which will mean doing my best to respond to each email on the day it comes in, or put it in the appropriate folder. So that’s one particular goal I’m working on that feels important to me. But I know that in order to achieve it, I am going to have to change some of my patterns. I am going to have to change the pattern of putting off answering or disposing some of my emails. And I am going to have to add a new pattern: that if answering emails as they come in on a daily basis, or at least, much closer to that basis as I’ve been doing up till now. Making this change is a conscious process. And the conscious process begins with looking honestly and carefully at myself. I need to ask myself: what are my strengths and weaknesses? I need to be able to look at myself and acknowledge that my organization patters need improvement. And then I need to be willing to make the conscious choice of setting specific goals and being clear about those goals and then consciously acting on them.

This week you might want to take some time and make use of this reflection by thinking  carefully about the habits and routines in your life. Since that is a large subject, I will suggest two bite-sized ways to approach that in a manageable way. One is to identify one habit or pattern or routine that you have in your life that serves you well, that is positive and that helps you. Identify it and see if there is one specific or tangible way you can enhance or expand or grow or develop that positive routine in your life. It might have to do with the physical exercise that you get. If you are someone who exercises, say, two or three times a week, you may want to add a day and exercise 3 or 4 times this week. This first approach, then, is to take an already existing positive habit in your life and add to it.

The second approach I suggest is to identify one additional habit, pattern or routine in your life that does not serve you well. We all have them. Choose one the effects of which you want to lessen in your life. Choose a pattern or routine that you want and need to work with and change. Ask yourself, ‘Why do I have this negative habit?’ Take some time to reflect on why that negative pattern is there, or why it developed in you. Then ask yourself if there is something you can do this week to change that negative habit.  See if you can introduce a new habit, a new routine, a new approach that might put you in position to let your bad habit, your negative routine, go at some point. Most of the time, we can’t and don’t let go of our negative routines in an instant. But we can let go of them progressively and in stages. But if we can identify what the negative pattern and routine is, if we can identify what a positive life-affirming healthy replacement would be, if we can start acting on that healthy replacement, then we can put ourselves in a position where, over time, we can make progress in letting go of that negative habit. Ask yourself how you can strengthen your new ‘replacement routine.’ Identify one negative habit in your routine and ask yourself how you can identify a new approach that would serve you better, and eventually what will allow you to let go of that more negative and life denying pattern and routine.

Those are some hints and suggestions can be constructive ways to move ourselves forward to new patterns of thought and action that are more self-loving and more loving toward those around us.

I offer these considerations this morning trusting in the availability of the resources of the Spirit to guide us to see ourselves more clearly, to do so gently, generously and lovingly, and to identify those aspects of our lives we may be able to change and develop in loving and life-giving ways.

We ask and offer all these things today in the name of the living Christ. Amen.

A SHIFT IN PERCEPTION

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ANTHONY E.ACHESON, M.DIV.

We come to church today with our usual sense of hope from the start of the Epiphany season tempered by the great pain the people of Haiti are undergoing after the earthquake last Tuesday. Recovering from it will involve much more than major provisions of water, food, sanitation, tents and medical help, important as those things surely are. It will involve more than housing and infrastructure reconstruction, necessary as those things surely will be. In addition to all these form of help, this disaster will also test us spiritually. Great as the tragedy is, it nonetheless holds a seed of possibility in that it gives us a chance to enlarge our collective perceptions about what is important. Beyond the dollars we give, it will also give us an opportunity to remind ourselves of the need for ongoing and sustained generosity over a long time frame.

My predecessor, Leslie Simonson, who was Pastor here from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, sent me an email on Friday which was addressed not only to me but to the whole congregation. She wrote: ‘Here in Rhode Island we are all trying to hold our collective breath and still pray boldly at the same time. The Rhode Island Conference of UCC churches, which has only 23 congregations, has a long-term relationship with partners in Haiti which has dug wells, built clinics and schools,  underwritten teachers’ salaries through scholarship aid for the kids. Many of our families are in the Fontamara neighborhood of Port Au Prince. Just last year we completed a three story multi-purpose edifice there: it had clinic on the ground floor, an elementary school on the second floor, and a church sanctuary on the 3rd floor. [That sanctuary also functions as community room and overflow space for the 6th/7th/8th graders.]   But now we are all still awaiting word about how many of ’our children’ have died or are now orphaned and/or homeless. To date we know that Enjelique is no longer with us. He was one of the graduates who went all the way through high school and served as a very effective interpreter for our medical and teaching teams who go from Rhode Island to Haiti about 4 times per year.  He was downtown when the quake hit and his body has been identified.

Our friend Sem, who is another ’local boy made good’  was scholarship-ped all the way through medical school at McGill in Canada and returned home several years ago to run our Fontamara Clinic. He and his wife and two children are all alive. They were visiting relatives on the outskirts of town at the time of the quake.  Their home is destroyed and they are now living in the woods nearby. They have had neither water nor food for several days, but they have the shade of the trees and are hoping to make it through.  He has not been able to get back to the Fontamara neighborhood in order to report on the situation there but was able to get this much cell phone information through to Rhode Island yesterday morning. We still have no word about Elvie, the clinic nurse, or any of the teachers / children / parents / or neighbors.

But all of these people have names, faces, histories and relationships, including relationships with us, names and faces and histories we know. So the photos of the 11 children which my local congregation of the Rhode Island Conference sponsors for scholarships still smile out at us from the church bulletin board. ’My girl,’ Charlie’s and mine, grade 6, remains on our refrigerator door with the rest of the family photos received with the Christmas mail. Her name is Nathalie Dumerus. But we don’t know yet whether she and her siblings and her parents are alive or dead.

The Rhode Island group, which had been scheduled to depart on January 28th for the winter mission trip may or may not be able to go, depending upon the situation at the airport and safe water supplies more than anything else. Planes which are not carrying earth movers, 400 tents, or diesel-operated generators may not be permitted to land. We await word on that as well as everything else. [signed] Leslie Simonson.’

I am sharing that letter with you because what we hear in it presents us with an important model of how a congregation can work out something of its mission in a tangible way. It provides a model of a church engaging itself in a relationship with real people, with real faces and stories and souls. It provides a model by which members of a congregation can enter into a long-term relationship with another church–or family or group of people in need–and to create tangible ways to help. As I have read and reread Leslie’s letter it has struck me that perhaps we as a church might learn something from this, and consider entering into such a partnership with another church, perhaps, or other group of people, whether it be in Haiti or in some other place. This possibility of engaging in such a project is one that I plan to discuss with our Mission Board as a possible way for our own church to express and expand our work of service in the days ahead.

Tragic as Tuesday’s earthquake was, it nonetheless has the potential to help lead us to higher spiritual ground. It could do this by stimulating us to a higher level of service, as we just discussed. In addition, it could do this by stimulating us to a higher level of gratitude for what we ourselves are accustomed to enjoying as a matter of course. On most days we barely notice the life-giving water that flows from our faucets. This earthquake in Haiti has given us an opportunity to newly see this flow from our faucets as the precious commodity that it most assuredly is.

Consider also our supply of food. On most days we consume meals with the unquestioned assumption that our dinner plates will never be empty. But the events of this week give us a chance to remember that each and every morsel we eat is a priceless and life-giving gift. Seeing the effects of this earthquake has helped us feel in our gut how horrible it is to be deprived of such basic things. The empathy it has triggered in us is a first, crucial step in reevaluating our priorities to ensure that the basic human needs of all people are met.

So in the days ahead, as your Pastor, I ask and urge that you not only give of your funds, which many, if not most of us have already done, but that you be prepared to do so several times: to write several checks, or go online and make several contributions as time goes on. It is apparent that the needs of that country will take months if not years to be adequately met. I ask and urge, secondly, that all of us keep both the people of Haiti and those from outside who are trying to help them, in our ongoing prayers on a continual, daily basis. And, finally, I look forward to one or more ways in which this tragedy might have at least the small silver lining of showing us here at Greensboro Church at least one new way that we can extend the helping hand of our Christian mission in new, and more direct, and more personal ways to those among us in our human community, whether it be in Haiti or some other place of great need.

I ask and offer all these things, trusting that the compassion of Christ may be made more real to the people of Haiti in the days ahead, including through the assistance that we ourselves lend. In the name of the living Christ we ask it. Amen.