Important & Urgent!

In an attempt to bring some kind of order into my life I spent some months a while ago seeing what is called a ‘Life coach’.  It was a very valuable experience and I learned a lot about myself and the way I tick; the way I respond to things and the way I initiate things.  One particular area we concentrated on was the way I managed my day, my week.  My Life Coach talked to me about  ‘priorities’ – making deliberate choices in order that the important things took priority over the trivial.  In theory it is very good advice but much harder to put into practice.

It came home to me how hard this is when I was having a conversation with someone on Friday night.  Amongst the things we talked about was the matter of World religions and how all of them concentrate on knowing God. For Christians this is always a problem because we tend to insist that Christ is the only way to God and so how can Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews ever have the perfect religion we claim to have?  This is a subject for another day but what was fascinating about our conversation was that we talked entirely about God.  My fellow conversationalist seemed to think that this was something quite normal for me – understandably, but when I thought through my week I wondered how much I had talked about God. 

I have certainly talked a lot about Church in the past week – not least in a number of meetings which now come my way as Area Dean.  As I reflected on this on Friday night I wondered how some of the discussions on Church management had anything to do with God.  I feel sometimes a bit like the priest who accidentally dropped a baby into the font and as he fished around in the water was heard to exclaim, “I know he’s in there, somewhere.” – if only we knew where!  So, I’m wondering – How often have you spoken about God in the past week?

I suspect that, if you are honest, it will not be that often. You may well have spent more time discussing the weather or the latest antics of people in Emmerdale, Coronation Street or Albert Square!  Or even a street or road nearer home!  One of our problems in Society today is that it is easy to get embroiled in all sorts of things which present themselves for immediate action and which seem urgent but which if we examined them carefully are really rather trivial.  As a former devotee of the game ‘Trivial Pursuits’ I dare to suggest that it is a title which could be applied to a lot of the things we do in a week.

I have just started to read a new book by Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi – entitled To Heal a Fractured World. It is about the place of responsibility in our society in an age when we prefer individualism to corporate action.   In the part I have read I came across something which, in the light of what I have been saying, is significant.  Sacks wrote about funerals he had conducted and the things that people say about the deceased. He noted that rarely was there any mention of the kind of house they lived in, or car they drove, the exotic holidays they had, or the clothes they wore.  In the face of death these things are quite irrelevant. Yet in life they seem so important.  After death, however, what was important was the kind of life people led; the qualities they showed; the good things they shared in; the responsibilities they took within community life; who they were as people.  Jonathan Sacks concluded that this reinforced for him the crucial distinction between the urgent and the important.

In the cut and thrust of daily life there are many things which seem to be urgent but against the backcloth of the value and quality of life many of these seemingly urgent things are really quite irrelevant. It is easy to lose out on what is important.  Which brings me back to God.

If we are to rediscover what is important in our lives and put those lives into their rightful context, we have to measure ourselves, what we do, who we are, against God.  The moment we try to do this we are faced with a realisation that, actually, our urgent preoccupations have very little significance and that, perhaps it is time we concentrated a bit more on what is important.  To help us put this into some kind of context, old Isaiah comes to our rescue.

In the passage we heard this morning we are listening to the voice of God.  He is asking a series of questions about our part in his Creative activity. God wants to know what part we played in creating the earth. How much have we contributed to giving him wisdom, or instruction? Where we around when God fashioned justice and was it because of us that he learned knowledge?  Well, actually, no I’m afraid I wasn’t available because I am one of the results of the creative process and even had I been there the likelihood would be that I was tied up in a meeting about Church organisation.  The passage from Isaiah is concerned to show us the Majesty and grandeur of God and also the way he works in the world and in human lives.

We are constantly being called back to humility in the face of God’s greatness.  We are also reminded that, unlike us, God is constant and faithful – The LORD is the everlasting God who does not faint or grow weary and who strengthens the powerless and is by the side of those who need his understanding.

Against God’s activity as Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, where do we place our own so-called urgent concerns? And -  How do we measure our lives in comparison to His?  Or, turning to today’s Gospel, how do we communicate God to others in such a way that others will be attracted to Him and so place their lives under his care and guidance? For that is what Jesus asks of us in his command to Go...and make disciples of all the nations.  We can only do this by using the raw material God has given us, which is our lives.

These lives will only speak to others of God if they are themselves convinced of God’s supreme importance and celebrate Him for who He is.  One of the great joys of Trinity Sunday is that it is a Festival of God in his totality. I have been known to argue that this is the most important Festival in the Church’s year because it concentrates on God Himself – not so much on what He does for us.  The centre of Trinity Sunday is Worship – the humble coming before God to praise Him alongside the great Company of the Redeemed who, together with all other creations of God kneel before his throne. The central cry of Trinity Sunday is not a human one but an angelic one – “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord!”

We join in this, we sing it in hymns and in the Eucharist but do we recognise the tremendous cry that it is.  It is saying that God is centre. God is everything. God is the supreme being by whose gracious will we have our being and our life. Without God we cannot be. And so we bow before Him. That really does put us in our place  but it isn’t quite as lowly a place as it may seem. 

Humility before God is not, as is so often presented, about feeling a complete lack of worth. It is not about making us feel bad about ourselves.  It’s actually the reverse. It’s about recognising that all the potential we have, all the gifts we can offer, all the love we can share, all the joy we can bring, all the things we can achieve – owe their origin to God.  Humility is about recognising and celebrating that.  If we are good then that goodness comes from God. If we are loving then that love is also to be found, infinitely greater, in God.

When I used to work with Ordinands one of the questions I set them was to think of twenty (or more) things that was good about themselves. It was quite important, I felt, that if people are offering our lives to God we should know what we have to offer.  It was a hard exercise because we are more often used to people telling us what is wrong with us and that can build up into a powerfully negative self-image.  The excuse they would come up with to try and avoid doing this difficult exercise was that it would be boasting and lacking in humility.

So I told them that when they had completed their list (and interestingly, when they did they often got beyond twenty) – they should write To God be the Glory.

That is the important thing – that our lives and all about them – should be lived for God’s Glory.   To do less is an insult to God because he has gone to an awful lot of trouble to give us these qualities and gifts which turn us into true human beings who reflect His image. He created us; in Jesus Christ he showed us how to be like Him; and through the Holy Spirit he fills us with the power to grow more God-like. That’s a lot of activity just to make sure we are on the right track – which is to know that we are of infinite worth to Him.  Working to form the image of God within us may not seem a particularly urgent thing to be doing – when so many other things distract us and claim our attention – but the truth is that it is both urgent and important.  Not least  because the best way we can glorify God and show that He is Important to us, is, if when people meet us, they also meet Him.

Also, of course we need to recognise that when we meet them, we meet God in them so we also celebrate His glory when we treat others with the same sense that they too are of infinite worth. Precious in God’s sight, they ought to be precious in ours too. This says something about the quality of our relationships with each other.  We may not always succeed in avoiding being bogged down with trivial things but the more we try to keep God in the centre of our lives the more we shall find ourselves at the Centre of His Life. That is one of the most Important and Urgent things we will ever learn.