The 10:30 Mill Whistle
Matthew 6:9-13
Exodus 20:7
The Rev. Dr. W. Maynard Pittendreigh
Sunrise Presbyterian Church
Miami FL
I grew up in a small Southern mill town named Ware Shoals, SC.
The term mill-town doesn’t mean that you have a mill and a town; but rather that you have a mill and a town that co-exist in such a way that one cannot do very well without the other.
The town becomes the body of the community --its flesh and blood.
The mill becomes the community’s life -- its heart and soul.
I remember the gas station, owned by the mill. I remember the Big Friendly, the company store. I remember paying a quarter to go to the movies at the local theater, operated by the mill of course. In the summer, the swimming pool was opened, thanks to
the mill and Riegel Textile.
And late at night, when your house was quiet and everyone else was asleep; when you couldn’t hear the sound of a single truck out on the highway and even the crickets were silent -- you could still hear the sound of the weave room a mile away, with the
steady beating of hundreds of looms.
Even the time table of the town was regulated by the mill and its whistle.
The mill whistle would blow at 8:00 every morning. Time for the first shift to come on! Time for me to get out of the house and get to school!
At four in the afternoon, the mill whistle would blow again. Time for the second shift to go to work. Time for me to throw down the school books and do whatever teenagers do in small towns in the afternoon.
After going to bed, I’d be in my room and I could hear the whistle blow again. It was midnight and time for the third shift to start, and time for me to go to sleep.
Now that’s the way it was in every small Southern mill town, but in my town, there was one other time when the mill whistle would blow.
It would be during P.E. class, when I’d be down in the school stadium (the Riegel Stadium, named after the company). For those of us taking P.E., it meant that it was 10:30, reminding us that we had about 10 minutes to finish the softball or soccer game
and to get to our next class.
Occasionally, I would wonder what this 10:30 whistle meant for the folks at the mill. It wasn’t time for the shift change. Why blow the whistle?
I suppose I could have asked my father. After all, he was the General Manager of the mill. But like many teenagers, by the time Dad came home, those great questions of life would have been forgotten in favor of Star Trek reruns and so I never asked him.
It was during the summer when school was out that I finally got an answer about that 10:30 whistle. I’d not done well in math, and my father decided (on his own!) that I needed to be tutored in math. Everyday, I was to go to Miss Frank’s house to study math.
I tried to talk my father out of it, and after exhausting my better arguments, I pleaded with
my father, "Please, don’t send me to Miss Frank. She’s got to be the oldest living lady in town. What will I do if she drops dead of a heart attack?"
(While that had never happened to any of my teachers, I always felt that I had the potential for causing one to drop dead of frustration.)
"Don’t worry," my father said. "You want be so lucky."
"But why Miss Frank," I asked. "What does she know about math? She’s the Latin teacher."
"Oh I’m not talking about that Miss Frank," my father said. "I’m talking about her mother."
So there I was, spending my summer with the mother of the oldest living lady in town.
Each day I spent being tutored, I tried to make conversation with Miss Frank in an effort to change the subject away from math. This was a ploy that usually did not succeed, until one day when our tutoring session was changed from the afternoon to a morning session. Right in the middle of listening Mrs Frank explain how to approach calculate a square root (a skill I still haven’t put into practice in over 30 years of real life), I heard the 10:30 whistle.
"Hey, Miss Frank! Have you ever wondered why the mill whistle blows at 10:30?"
"I know why," she said.
"You do? Tell me," I asked.
"It is a call for prayer."
"Prayer?" I was mystified. "What do the folks at the mill pray for? Quittin’ time?"
"No," she said, "it is a call for the workers in the mill to pause for just a moment, and for the community to stop and to pray for peace and an end to the war."
"That’s wonderful," I said, with all sincerity, thinking of the daily television news
stories about the horrors of the then current war in South East Asia. "I think we all need to pray for the end of the Vietnam War."
"Oh no," Miss Frank said. "Not the Vietnam War. World War II."
"World War II! That ended ages ago! Hasn’t anybody ever told the man who blows the whistle that it ended?"
"Of course he knows," said Miss Frank. "I guess somebody told him to start it, nobody told him to stop, and somewhere along the way, he’s forgotten what it means."
Now, years later, I have decided that there is a 10:30 whistle in the worship services of most churches. There is an element of our worship service that somebody told us along the course of our church history ought to be in every worship service. And since
nobody has told us to stop, we keep on doing it. Unfortunately, like the 10:30 whistle back home, somewhere along the way, we have forgotten what it means.
For many of us, the most MEANINGLESS act of worship is the Lord’s Prayer.
Like the 10:30 whistle, we hear the Lord’s Prayer without being fully aware of what it means-- and without caring to stop and to ask why this prayer is so important.
We started using it.
Nobody told us to stop.
And along the way we have forgotten what it means.
There was a sense in which that 10: 30 whistle should have been the most meaningful of the day. It was a call for prayer for peace in a violent era of our nation’s history.
Likewise, there is a sense in which the Lord’s Prayer ought to be most meaningful of all the prayers we pray.
It is brief and to the point. It is clearly stated.
It was written by Jesus himself as an example of how we ought to pray. Within this handful of phrases are petitions that concern our attitude toward God, toward ourselves and toward our neighbors. The prayer deals with our physical needs and with our spiritual needs. It deals with our the debts of our past, the daily bread of our present and the hope of the future kingdom of God on earth.
Few prayers could be as meaningful as this. And yet few have become so tragically meaningless. We no longer even pray the Lord’s Prayer. We recite it. It is done without thinking. It is done automatically.
It is the 10:30 whistle.
This treatment of the Lord’s Prayer is a grave violation of one of the Ten Commandments.
We know the Commandment: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain." We often relate this commandment to profanity or to so called swear words. But the meaning of
thee commandment is broader than that. To use something in a vain way is to use it in an
empty, meaningless, insincere fashion. Since prayer uses the Lord’s name and calls upon the name of the Lord, to use prayer in a vain way is to use the Lord’s name in vain. Ironically, the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer is a request that we NOT take the name of
the Lord in vain.
We know that first petition well: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name."
"Hallowed be thy name." Hallowed is not a word we use much these days. It means to be kept holy, to be sanctified, to be set apart from common use, and to be respected.
We do not always treat with respect that which is holy.
In my first church, one of my members came to me and asked me if she could borrow the church’s flower vase. It was a big brass vase with handles on the side and an inscription on the front: "Given to the glory of God and in memory of F.R.Ferrelli." The church member said she wanted to borrow the church’s flower vase for a party.
"Got a big flower arrangement," I asked.
"Oh no," she said. "We need it to chill the champaign."
A vase, set apart for holy use, used instead for common use.
It was in another church in which I was the visiting minister that I conducted the Sacrament of Holy Communion. In this particular church, the Sacrament was distributed in those small personal cups rather than the common chalice, with each cup being left in a small rack on the backs of the pews. After the service several of the members were cleaning up the church and preparing the Communion Ware for the next service. There was still one tray full of little wine glasses left on the Communion Table, which we
appropriately call the Lord’s Table. Gathered around that Table were three children, innocently playing cowboys. With all innocence, and meaning no disrespect, they had their elbows propped up on the Table, taking swigs of wine out of these little shot glass size communion cups, after which they’d slam the empty glass onto the Table and say, "Gimme another whiskey, bartender."
The Table of the Lord and the wine which is His blood, used as a toy. What is set apart for holy use was instead being used for common use.
And it is not just those children, who in their innocence used the Lord in vain. All of God’s children, no matter what our age, are guilty in some fashion of misusing the name of the Lord and treating with disrespect that which we ought to treat with reverence.
Whenever we misuse that which is God’s we misuse His name.
And when we misuse God’s name, we misuse God Himself.
In the Bible, a person’s name represented the CHARACTER of the person. Thus Jacob’s name suited him fine as long as he tried to supplant and to control other people, because that is what the name meant. But when his character changed, his name had to be changed to "Israel."
Because the names of people were so important in the Bible it was a terrible violation of courtesy to use someone’s name in a disrespectful way, just as it would be today.
The name of God is holy because it represents God Himself and it reflects the character of God.
To treat the name of God disrespectfully is to treat God disrespectfully.
To treat the name of God flippantly or lightly is to treat God flippantly or lightly.
To recite the well known prayer we call the Lord’s Prayer without sincerity is to treat God
Himself insincerely.
But to treat the name of God reverently is to treat God with reverence. God is not a common, everyday household item for which we care little and which we can take for granted. God is holy.
God is not a useless thought or an empty phrase uttered without meaning or purpose. God is holy.
God is not the 10:30 whistle, which is outdated and for which nobody shows any interest. God is holy.
The way we treat the name of God reflects the way we relate to God. To treat the name of God as holy is to treat God Himself as holy.
And so we have this, the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer: "Hallowed be thy name-- may your name always be kept holy."
I went home after my morning tutoring session and shared my story with my family at our lunch table. We laughed about the empty meaning of the10:30 whistle.
"Don’t you think it’s time to stop blowing that 10:30 whistle," I asked my father.
"No," he answered. "I think its time for us to learn to pray."
The 10:30 whistle continued to blow for several more years. A few of us knew why, and we would stop and pray for the end of a the Vietnam War.
These days, all the mill whistles are silent in Ware Shoals. They have not blown since the textile mill shut down years ago. But I still hear that whistle blow deep inside my soul. Whenever anyone says, "Let us pray," I hear that 10:30 call to prayer, and I hear my father say, "It’s time we learned to pray."
Copyright, W. Maynard Pittendreigh, July 1990. All rights reserved. This sermon or portions of it may be used by other ministers in oral preaching, but it may not be published or printed without the permission of Dr. Pittendreigh.
