by Kim Thoday

Do you ever find that holidays just aren’t what their cracked up to be? Often I find holidays to be anything but holy, and indeed, anything but whole. Quite often in my holidays I seem to pick up a cold or at least feel very “run down.” I will really look forward to holidays and the closer they get the more I add to my list of things to do – both things that need doing and things that I want to do! But here’s my point, I end up filling my holidays with doing, rather than with being and taking time to restore my soul. The concept of a holiday is contained within the word itself: holy-day. The wisdom of the ancients is that human beings need regular holy days built into the year and indeed into every week. The ancient Israelites understood this and that is why they kept a Sabbath day each week for rest and restoration of the soul. Essentially the notion of the Sabbath is a holistic one for the health of individuals, families and communities. The Sabbath only became problematic for Jesus when it was either adhered to legalistically or when it was used in an oppressive manner. Ideally, a holiday is a time for relaxation and restoration. It is a time to recharge the spiritual and emotional “batteries;” a time to let the brain rest; a time perhaps to reflect upon the week or the year that has been – allowing one’s soul to finally catch up to one’s body and mind.

When my annual holidays emerge on my emotional horizon, I’m already going through the motions of thinking of things to do – there’s friends to see, repairs to make, lawns to mow, gutters to clean, a bathroom that needs fixing, that damn dripping tap, a little (not so little) restoration project to begin again for the fifth time; oh and yes I must take my wife out. And I tell people all along that I am surely going to have a relaxing holiday this year!

Do you fit this picture at all? Sometimes I think we have too high an expectation of holidays. And as I’ve mentioned it seems to me that it is the wrong expectation; we begin upon an unhelpful premise, namely, that holidays are merely a continuation of our frantic lifestyle only now with an even greater pace and with less structure. Have you ever come back from a holiday more drained than before you left? And if you have, aren’t the accompanying feelings quite awful: disappointment, frustration, and even depression. And to top it of now you’ve got less money and what have you got in return? You’ve become busier, more frantic and more fragmented. We need to make sure our holidays are at least substantially holy days. That we have in many ways lost the original holistic intention of the Sabbatical is I believe, deeply symptomatic of our secular and materialistic Western world.

The writer of the Epistle to the Christians in Ephesus, asserts that “the days are evil” (5:15). Those of us less pious might understandably reply “well tell us something we don’t know.” Yet I think Ephesians is a healthy reminder about human existence. I don’t think that what is meant here are the great evils of tyrannical dictatorships and demonic crimes against humanity. Rather, I think the author has in mind a “more ordinary” evil, ordinary in the sense of everyday evil in societies where there are relative freedoms and rights for the citizenry. The writer depicts those more banal, pedestrian and melancholy evils such as drunkenness, debauchery and fornication. Yet they are still described as evils. That is to say, they might be perceived as ordinary, but their source is still one of the diabolical and their affect is to break down and corrupt. These are the evils of self-abuse – such as, the hangover, the unhealthy diet, the so-called recreational drug use, the occasional so-called sexual indiscretion, the “white lies,” the gossiping, the malpractices, the tax evasions and lurks, the manipulations, the gambling, the selfish attitudes, the accumulation of unproductive personal wealth and so on. These are the evils that people fill up their time in order to find that elusive release or moment of fulfilment. Yet instead these are the evils that lead to misery and ruin.

Ephesians suggests that these evils are symptoms of a more fundamental malaise. And that problem, is our estrangement from God. Ehpesians offers a powerful of what it means to be Christian; that is, what being in relationship with God through Christ actually means and entails: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (5:1-2). Being in a spiritual relationship with God will in and of itself lead us to take on the characteristics of God (note though: imitators, we can never become God) and that means that evil of any kind, “ordinary” or otherwise has no place in our lives. The writer goes on to say: “Entirely out of place is obscene, silly and vulgar talk; but instead, let there be thanksgiving. Be sure of this, that no fornicator or impure person, or one who is greedy (that is, an idolator), has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God” (5:4-5). Therefore, these evils can only have a strong hold over our lives if there is estrangement from God. A life that is in an organic relationship with God and is constantly being fertilised and imbued by his love can only be one characterised by joy and gratitude.

Ephesians challenges us to “make the most of our time” (5:16) and be wise in the ways that we live. Life is not just about quantity. Of far more importance is the quality of our time. Ephesians gives content to that quality: it is to comprehend and appropriate the will of God, to live in the way of his Spirit, to be in tune with God’s cosmic symphony and to live a life of abiding gratitude to Jesus Christ (5:17-20). To spend a day this way with God each week would be a wonderful discipline for most Western Christians in that it would counter our crowded and seductive culture that causes us to be estranged from God. Such a day would truly be a holy day, a Sabbath day.

As for me, I know I get drunk. What about you? I get drunk with busyness, activities, meetings, goals, deadlines, phone calls, and so the endless cycle of idolatry can go on. This is what we do with our time. Time becomes a quantity rather than a quality. We fill up time, we measure time, we process time, we predict time, we sell time, we pay for time, we use time, we live on borrowed time, we kill time, its always time to move on to the next thing … what is that? And so we’ve just moved on to another time. In our culture we are mostly concerned about future time. We find it hard to live in present time. We kill it. We abuse it with ordinary evil. We displace the present because we are not comfortable with who we are. And so we distract ourselves from our/selves with the allusions of time.

Henri Nouwen once said that when we are fully attentive to the present moment, participants in the now, we are able to attend to the great beam of timber in our own eye, before attending to the splinter in our neighbour’s eye.

We Westerners need to create time to experience our experiences.

In his book, The Discovery of the Amazon, John Adams tells of a time when he forced his indigenous porters to double their walking pace in order to reach the source of a river before the coming rains made progress impossible. Then one morning he found that the porters were unwilling to continue the journey that day. There they were squatting outside their tents, immobile, immovable. “We have been moving too fast,” they explained. “We must now wait for our souls to catch up with our bodies.”

Ephesians calls us to be fully engaged with the present, to be alive to God who is with us in the here and now. That is not to say that we should not also be interested in the future and be involved in long-term visions and plans. Nor does it imply that we should be ignorant of the past. But these should never distract us from our focus upon living in the present. This according to Ephesians, is to live wisely. This is to be in tune with the “will of God” (5:17), and to “live as children of the light” (5:8) and to be able to discern what is “true and right” (5:9). Otherwise, we are always on the run, never satisfied, and intent on escaping where we are and who we are and the presence (present-ness, pre-essence) of God. Now is the time. Not to be somewhere else, not to be some one else. This is somewhere. This time, now, in this church, in this community, in this family, in this situation is the time and space of God’s redemptive presence. So for now, Ephesians challenges us with the Spirit of God, to join with each other to counter the foolishness of our age and to sing praises for God’s saving presence in our midst. Eternal and abundant life is available for all of us, right now, because God is here with us. The writer says to us: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light” (5:14). So let us indeed be filled with joy, for our worship and service this day will be as a fragrant offering to God and each other. Let us arise, be wise, be light and be filled. Our time is redeemed and the eternal has become present. Let us declare this day a holy day! Thanks be to God.

Blessings in Jesus’ name,

Kim Thoday, Hewett Community Church of Christ

http://www.hewett.org.au