Balance
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on Sunday, October 14, 2007
at The First Parish in Lincoln
To listen to this sermon click here.
“For every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”
– Ecclesiastes 3:1
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is from Yann Martel’s marvelous novel, The Life of Pi.
My zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. It is a highly intriguing creature. Its only real habit is indolence. It sleeps or rests on average twenty hours a day. The sloth is busiest at sunset, using the word busy here in the most relaxed sense.
The three-toed sloth is not well-informed about the outside world. It sees everything in a Magoo-like blur. As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound. How does it survive you might ask. Precisely by being so slow. Sleepiness and slothfulness keep it out of harm’s way, away from the notice of jaguars, ocelots, eagles and anacondas.
The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. “A good-natured smile is forever on its lips,” reported Tirler (1966). I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time, looking at sloths in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation, or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intensive imaginative lives were beyond the reach of my scientific probing. (p. 4-5)
2. Our second reading is from the 32nd chapter of the Book of Exodus. Moses has just spent several days in a summit meeting with God, and as a result, God has personally engraved two stone tablets with the ten commandments. But down below, the people of Israel have melted down their jewelry to create a molten calf which they have turned into an object of worship. This has thrown God into an ugly mood, and as Moses turns to walk down the mountain, we pick up the text; he is:
...carrying the two tablets of the covenant in his hands. The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the engraved writing of God. As soon as Moses came near the camp and saw the golden calf and the dancing, his anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets from his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf that they had made, burned it, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it.
On the next day Moses said to the people, “You have sinned a great sin. But now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.” So Moses returned to the Lord and said, “Oh, what a great sin these people have committed. They have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, please forgive their sin. But if you won’t, then blot me out of the book that you have written.”
The Lord said to Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book. But go, lead the people to the place I spoke of, and my angel will go before you. Nevertheless, when the day comes for punishment, I will punish them for their sin.” – Exodus 32:15ff, 30-35
My hope is that this will be a sermon about balance – and I think it is –
but it’s also a sermon with a split personality,
because it wants us to live a more balanced life, and it wants us to lose our balance now and then.
Balance is the ability to keep your center of gravity, your equilibrium, as you go through the day;
when you are in balance, you feel you’ve got the various parts of your life in order –
your work, family, friendships, volunteer commitments, play time, and spiritual life.
So being in balance is a good thing.
And there’s also something to be said for the value of being thrown off balance from time to time.
It’s when we’re off balance that we’re most likely to be open to learning something new.
So this sermon has a split personality, and here, first, is the well-adjusted side.
I think we all have a natural sense of balance – it’s built into us, part of our birthright.
And this is true in both nature and human nature.
The natural world has its own sense of balance – which we humans are only beginning to understand.
If you’ve ever visited Arizona, you know it’s dry down there.
Fire is a clear and ever-present danger.
Five years ago, in June, 2002,
the largest wildfire in the history of the state came close to destroying the town of Show Low
and many of the lovely homes that people had built in the pine forests around it.
After the fire was contained, NBC News interviewed one of the firefighters, who was also a naturalist.
I wrote down what he said, which was: “We have to make a space for fire.”
When we fall in love with the wilderness and start building our homes in the middle of it,
we try to eliminate fire from a landscape where fire has always been a reality
because, understandably, we don’t to lose our homes.
So fire policy in the west has been the total suppression of any forest fire.
But the result is a piling up of dead wood, and after a few years, the forests are like tinder boxes.
When a fire does get going, it’s unstoppable –
far more destructive that it otherwise would have been.
So “we have to make a space for fire” – for a controlled and cleansing fire.
In the same way, when our lives are out of balance because of a piling up of whatever,
we need to make a space for fire to get ourselves back into balance,
back into right relationship with all the elements of our life.
Because if we don’t do it, if we don’t do what we can to regain our balance,
then even a small spark can start a fire
that does far more damage than it ever should have.
The good news is that we usually know when we’re out of balance.
In fact, there are times when we are deliberately so – when we have a big project with a deadline.
But if you start working long hours expecting to cut back – and then let those hours become the norm –
a lack of balance creeps up on you: you don’t exercise as much,
you neglect family and friendships, and, dare I say it: you start skipping church –
and in all of these ways you start to lose touch with your own best self.
So we can lose our balance gradually – and we can also lose it in the blink of an eye.
When you go to the doctor for a routine annual exam,
the first thing they usually do is take your blood pressure –
someone who may be wearing a lab coat puts a cuff on your arm and pumps it up.
And guess what happens in that moment: your blood pressure spikes, and that first reading is unreliable.
Even though you’ve had your blood pressure taken dozens of times, you still get a little nervous.
It’s called “the lab coat effect.”
And it’s why the doctor, after a few minutes, takes your pressure again to find out what it really is.
We all have people and situations that may trigger the lab coat effect in us and throw us off balance.
And if we’re not careful, we can sink us into a lesser version of ourselves.
But those people and those situations can also challenge us to face a fear and rise above it,
and to see more than one side of the people who throw us off our stride.
When Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s rock musical, Jesus Christ, Superstar,
was performed in London years ago, the two actors who played Jesus and Judas
switched parts every few nights.
Because they found that if you kept playing Judas night after night,
the other members of the cast would start to ostracize you.
When we cast the people in our lives in a narrow way, we limit both their full humanity and our own.
And anything we say about those people will be off balance – because so are we.
How then, if you know you are off balance, do you get your groove back?
There are actually lots of good ways.
And some of the simplest ones have an immediate effect.
In the book This I Believe, a teacher named Norman Corwin
remembers watching Orel Hershiser pitch for the Dodgers –
he threw a fastball that hit the batter and the television camera zoomed in on Hershiser.
You could read his lips as he mouthed, “I’m sorry” to the batter.
The batter, trotting down to first base, nodded to Orel in a friendly way – and the game went on.
Looking back at that moment, Norman Corwin says:
It was “just two words, and I felt good about Hershiser and the batter and the game all at once.”
Because those two words restored the balance after that batter was hit.
A simple apology can put a mistake behind you instead of adding it to a pile of tinder in your life.
It also helps to slow down.
Not as slow as the three-toed sloth,
but whatever would qualify as a noticeable slowdown for you;
it’s hard to take stock of yourself if you don’t slow down enough to take a good look around.
Stephen Covey, who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, has said that
most people struggle with balance simply because they haven’t taken the time
to decide what is really important to them.
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”
Don’t overlook the power of prayer to restore balance – and the value of knowing a prayer by heart.
In the movie Master and Commander, based on Patrick O’Brian’s historical novels,
there is a fierce sea battle between two sailing ships, British and French –
the combat is hand-to-hand and many lives are lost on both sides.
When the fight is over and won, the British officers and sailors gather on deck to bury their dead.
The captain asks everyone to join him in the Lord’s Prayer,
and the camera moves slowly from face to face as the men, so far from home,
repeat the familiar words.
It is a beautiful and very moving scene.
They have all been thrown off balance by the battle and by the loss of their mates.
And somehow, saying the prayer together begins to restore their balance.
After the “Amen,” they commission the bodies of their lost mates to the deep.
So when you’ve been through it yourself,
and you’re looking to restore your balance, give prayer a chance –
memorize one that you like or keep it where you can easily find it.
Now let me switch sides and say just a few words on behalf of imbalance.
Five years ago, in 2002, Toyota was Japan’s #1 carmaker and it was #3 in the world.
It was a company with every reason to feel good about itself.
But that year, Toyota’s president, Fujio Cho, started a company-wide visioning process.
He said, “Any company not willing to take the risk of reinventing itself is doomed.”
With those words, the concept of “creative discomfort” became a part of daily life at Toyota.
The idea was to throw people off balance for a while so that new ideas could get a hearing.
Toyota was a good company, but as Jim Collins says in his book, Good to Great,
“Good is the enemy of great” – because we settle for good and don’t go for great.
Toyota is now #1 not only in Japan, but worldwide.
In the reading this morning from Exodus 32 about Moses, God, and the golden calf,
we see Moses when he is most off balance and then, the very next day, when he’s most on.
He walks down from Mount Sinai carrying two stone tablets
on which God has written the ten commandments, but when he comes into camp
he sees the golden calf and all the people dancing around it – and he totally loses it.
He’s so mad that he throws the tablets to the ground and when they hit, they break into pieces.
He grinds the golden calf into powder, mixes it with water, and makes the people drink it.
But by the next morning, he’s ready to go back up the mountain and ask God to forgive all of it.
He’s back in balance.
Back up on the mountain, he’s very clear.
“My people have committed a great sin,” he says, “they have made for themselves gods of gold.”
But he asks God to forgive them.
And he adds something quite remarkable: he says,
“But if you won’t forgive them, then blot me out of the book that you have written.”
In other words: if you can’t find it in yourself to forgive the people, then I’m through.
He put it all on the line.
That’s real balance.
And God is the one who off balance, consumed by the desire to punish.
In that moment, Moses is the grown up – and to keep from losing him,
God promises that an angel will go before his people the rest of the way to the promised land.
One last word about balance in light of that story.
Religion can help us keep or regain our balance –
and it also throws some people way off balance, and not in a good way –
we saw it on 9/11, and you hear it in fundamentalist Christian diatribes in this country.
Last May, in a column by my favorite conservative, David Brooks,
he suggested a balanced approach to religion: attend church regularly
but be skeptical of everything that you hear there.
Yes, religion can help us keep our balance.
And regular churchgoers are more engaged with their communities.
And according to a study at Princeton,
people who go to churches that encourage dissent are more successful, on average,
than people who go to churches that don’t.
So Mr. Brooks advises us to be “quasi-religious.”
Go, ideally, to a church that encourages dissent.
But if you attend one of the more observant churches, “try to be the least believing member” of it.
“Submit to the wisdom of the ages, but with one eye open.”
Amen.