"Live, NOW!"

"Live, NOW"
Matthew 6:34


Do you remember the movie, “Dead Poet’s Society”?  It came out back in 1989.  Maybe it wasn’t your kind of movie.  It starred Robin Williams--one of his first serious roles.  He played Mr. Keating, who was a new teacher at an East Coast prep school for boys.  He had been a student at the same school when he was a boy.  He came back to the school as the English Literature teacher.

Soon after he arrives at the school, he takes his class to the school’s Honor’s Room.  Trophies filled the cases won by past classmates in exceptional times.  Pictures of teams and individual students from the school’s past were also in the display cases.  Some were 75 years old, dating back to the school’s beginning.

As the students were looking at all the pictures and awards, Mr. Keating reads them a poem by Robert Herrick.  The poem is titled, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.”

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
(Robert Herrick)
 
GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he 's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he 's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.

The people in the pictures that Mr. Keating’s class were looking at are all dead.  Mr. Keating uses the poem he just recited and asks questions of his students about the people in those pictures:
Did they realize their dreams?
Did they squander their opportunities?

Then Mr. Keating gathers all his students in a huddle and tells them, “Carpe Diem.”  He tells them it’s a Latin term that means, “Seize the day,” or, “Seize the moment.”  Which is what the poem is all about.

It is what Jesus’s statement is all about.  This is how the Message Bible has it:
Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow.  God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up, when the time comes.

To seize the day, to live in the moment, to concentrate on the here and now, is not a new thought.  We hear words like Jesus’ and we say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”  We acknowledge the wisdom behind Carpe Diem, but we still live lives filled with anxiety and fear, either focused on the past or the future, missing what’s right in front of our noses.

We hear the three words, Seize the Day, but what we really hear in our anxious minds is, Seize the future.  Even if that future is only the next day.  Talk to people who have faced cancer.  Talk to people who have had a sudden and frightening brush with near death.  A car accident or whatever.  Living with those kinds of experiences, those people will tell you, makes each day precious.  But why do we have to face cancer, or almost die in an accident to wake us up to that truth?

Our anxious minds create so many fears about the future.  We are afraid the future will be just a repeat of the past.  That’s the conclusion the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes came to:  There’s noting new under the sun.  Everything that happened before, will happen all over again.  It’s all one big circle of experience, over and over again.  Blah, blah, blah.

OR we’re afraid that the future won’t happen like we hope it will.  We get this mental picture, or a detailed road map of what we want our future to be.  We get all anxious that it might just not turn out like we expect.  We might lose our job.  The stock market may go in the sewer and your retirement is gone.  You might get some form of dementia and you won’t remember anything and get to enjoy the future you planned.

OR we may be afraid that the future is going to unfold without us.  That was one of my father’s fears.  That he would die before he got to enjoy what he had ahead of him.  And then, in a weird tragic way, his fear came true.  At 67, soon after he retired, he dropped dead of a heart attack while playing golf.  Time, and the future he thought he’d get to have, rolled on without him.

OR, one of the more prevalent fears of the future is the misguided notion that your real life is somewhere out there in the future.  Author, Stephen Leacock, once wrote:
The child says, “When I’m bigger...”   But what is that?  The big child says, “When I grow up...,” and then, grown up, says, “When I get married...”  The thought changes to, “When I get a job...” then, “When I retire...”  And when retirement comes, there is the looking back over the landscape of time.  Somehow he missed it all, and it is gone.”

That’s our anxiety about the future.  The opposite is also just as true.  Notice that Jesus didn’t say, “So do not be anxious about yesterday,” either.  If Jesus would have said that, I, for one, would have understood that.  That’s the direction my anxiety usually takes.

Here’s what looking back, all the time, did to me.  It resurfaced my guilt and anger.  But what does guilt and anger do for us?  You remember the story of Lot’s wife.  The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are being destroyed by God.  God, before the destruction takes place, tells Lot to take his family and get out of there.  DON’T LOOK BACK, God tells Lot.

What does Lot’s wife do?  She looks back.  And at that moment of looking back, and ruminating over what lay behind her, instead of being conscious that at that moment she’s alive--instead, she looks back and get’s paralyzed.  She turns into a pillar of salt.  She is forever frozen in that backward gaze.  I did that, and then I’d get mad at myself for looking back and allowing myself to get bogged down with things of the past.

Do you remember the story, “A Christmas Carol,” by Charles Dickens?  It’s been made into many movies, my favorite was done by the Muppets.  If you haven’t seen “A Muppet Christmas Carol,” rent it.  It’s hilarious.

Anyway, remember Scrooge is visited by three different ghosts on Christmas Eve.  One is the ghost of Christmas past.  Do you remember what that ghost looked like?  It was covered with chains.  The chains represented all the bad choices that were forged in his past, that now he felt he couldn’t escape.  Isn’t that a great picture of what happens when we won’t let go of the past--the past wraps us up in these chain-created-memories that drag us down, and make us live much smaller lives.

Here’s the thing.  A side truth to what Jesus is telling us is that we can’t control time.  We do not have influence on time, whatsoever.  Only God can control time.  For us, time just is.  That’s it.  We can’t make time go away.  We can’t make it go backwards.  We can’t make it speed up.  And contrary to popular belief, we can’t even waste time.

What we waste is not time, but ourselves.  We waste ourselves in the time we have.  The tragedy doesn’t have to do with time at all.  The tragedy has more to do with wasting what we could do, right now, but do not; what we could become, right now, but do not.

We waste ourselves in time by thinking our real life is in the future and never living in the now.  We waste ourselves in time by thinking we will never be free of the chains of the past, and rob ourselves of living today.

In the book of Exodus, the pivotal story of salvation is the Hebrew people escaping slavery from Egypt.  Moses and Aaron get the people, in a mass Exodus, out of Egypt.  They head out into the unknown, towards the land God promised they would have for their very own.

But once out in the Sinai peninsula, while they’re wandering around, they run out of food.  They get anxious.  They start grumbling to Moses, asking him why he brought them out in the desert to die.  Why weren’t they back in Egypt?  At least as slaves, they got fed.

So God hears their grumbling and rains down the manna from heaven.  It’s a flakey bread like substance, that they pick up each day so they won’t starve.  That’s their instruction:  to pick up only what they need for that day, and trust God to give them more on the next day, when they need it.  But some don’t listen.  Their anxiety and lack of trust causes them to hoard a couple of extra baskets of the stuff.  Only to wake up the next day and discover what they hoarded has rotten and putrid.

In the article, “The Sacrament of Time,” using the experience of the manna as a symbol, author Kristen Ingram wrote, “Time is like manna, and must be plucked up every day or it rots.”  But you can only pick up enough time for today; you don’t get to pick up any time for tomorrow.

In “The Muppet Christmas Carol,” the room-sized shaggy muppet who is the ghost of Christmas present, tells Scrooge, “Have you ever noticed how everything seems wonderful right now?”  But that presumes that you have a consciousness of the present moment, and noticing what’s going on that moment is what makes it holy.  What makes all of living holy.

Nothing else exists except for what is right now.  That is what makes right now holy.  The past is gone.  The future hasn’t even happened yet.  Acting coach and movie star, Lee Strasberg tells actors he’s dealing with:
Go from moment to moment; each and every second is precious on the screen and on the stage.  Don’t waste a single moment by thinking about what will happen in the next scene.

Strasberg is only echoing Jesus’ words.  A misguided life is one that gets bogged down in yesterday’s, “If only...”  Or, shoulda, coulda, woulda’s.  A misguided life gets too enchanted by the “what if...” of the future.

Carpe Deum!  Seize the day!  Live NOW!  Fill yourselves with the here and now.  Because our God is a God of this present, wondrous moment.  This is where God is--in the right now.