Bibliography: Morning Has Broken, A Perfect World, Ladyhawk, Tootsie
How do you know when you’ve made it in life? What’s the icing on the cake in your life? For my grandmother, she considered her family successful when there was always a tablecloth on the dining room table. That tablecloth was very important to her.
For my mother, it was owning a piano. Her life was complete when she finally had a piano in the living room.
The icing on the cake for me has become the ability to retire to watch TV in bed before going to sleep.
I don’t know why. Its just the icing on the cake for me to be able to channel surf a few moments before lights out.
Somehow it means everything is OK in life.
We were doing that very thing a few nights ago when we happened across a Kevin Costner film I’d never seen before called A Perfect World, Costner plays an escaped Texas convict who kidnaps a little boy and then speeds across Texas while being pursued by sheriff Clint Eastwood.
Just as we turned the movie on, there’s a scene where Costner turns to the little boy he’s kidnapped who’s about 8 or so, and says, “You ever ridden in a time machine, kid?”
The little boy shook his head no to which Costner responded, “Sure you have. You’re in a 20th Century time machine right now.”
He points out the back window. “That right there is your past. Its where you’ve been.”
He points to the front windshield. “And that out there is your future. Its where you’re headed. And if you want to get to the future faster, you just step on this peddle here and you’ll get to your future faster.
“And if you want to take your time and get to your future slower, you just step on the break and you’ll go slower.”
Then Costner stops the car in the middle of the highway. He takes a long swig off a bottle of coke.
“This is the present kid. Enjoy it while it lasts.”
Then Costner and the kid speed off down the Texas highway.
Tonight our Bible lesson with Paul explores something that has fascinated us for centuries. One of the elements that humanity is bound by, cannot control, and that has no effect on God is time.
We’ve been fascinated with it for ages.
We know that God is timeless. God was with us in our past. God is present with us in the present, and God is waiting for us in our future.
The timelessness of God is a constant we rely on.
But as humans bound by time, we dream of the ability to reverse time, to escape the bonds of time.
H. G. Wells as well as many other authors wrote fictional stories that suggested the possibility of traveling forward and backward through time.
Einstein’s theory of relativity suggested to us that time is relevant to the speed of light. If we can travel faster than the speed of light - and we believe we will have the capability to do so some day - then we cause time to stop, and even go backwards through time.
Scientists have marvelled at the idea of being able to witness the Big Bang first hand, and see how the universe actually and truly came into being.
But did you know that quantum physics is proving that time travel is an incapability? As we approach the speed of light, time will not stand still, and it will never be possible to travel backwards through time.
Don’t ask me how it is so. I’m not a quantum physicist. I only know such scientists have now proven the incapability.
Time remains a binding aspect of human life. It is a limitation we cannot change, and is limitless to God.
But Paul provides us here with the key through the power of Jesus Christ of breaking the time barrier.
“...the time has come for you to wake from your sleep.” Paul writes, “For the moment when we will be saved is closer now than it was when we first believed. The night is nearly over, day is almost here.”
The night is nearly over, day is almost here.
There is a song in our hymn book written in the 1930’s and popularized by Cat Stevens in the 1970’s, Morning Has Broken.
Some of the words are these:
Morning has broken like the first morning;
blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Sweet the rain’s new fall sunlit from heaven,
like the first dewfall on the first grass.
Praise with elation, praise every morning,
God’s recreation of the new day.
You know, I wonder. Eleanor Farjeon, who wrote the song, when she speaks of morning coming like the first morning, what does she mean?
It seems obvious to me that th first morning is the morning of creation.
Is she speaking of the constant and faithfulness of time? Is it like the passage we read in Ecclesiastes where there is a time and rhythm to everything in life?
a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
God has made everything suitable for its time.
Is it knowing and trusting that no matter what today has brought our way, there is always a starting over, a new beginning tomorrow - the hope of a brighter future?
Or, is the morning breaking the resurrection morning, Easter morning - the day it is discovered Jesus has risen from the dead?
Is the new morning that comes whole and fresh a recreation of that very first morning, restored and complete because all of creation is saved and made new through Jesus?
Which morning does Eleanor Farjeon speak of? Perhaps there is a little of both in there.
The night is nearly over, day is almost here.
It reminds me of another movie from the 1980’s. Its a mythical fairy tale called Ladyhawk.
Set in medieval times, there is a knight and courtier lady which he loves.
A corrupt bishop who dallies in the dark arts - I guess he’s hedging his bets - anyway the corrupt bishop has placed a spell upon this couple because he too is in love with the lady.
He curses them to be forever together, but forever apart.
By night, the knight transforms into a wolf, and by day, the lady transforms into a hawk.
Never are they together in human form. Never are they able to talk and communicate with one another.
There is a scene in the movie, where the knight as a wolf lies sleeping next to the lady just before dawn - the same time Paul speaks of in our Bible lesson. The couple are lying in a hollowed-out spot, and so as day approaches, the wolf transforms back into the knight. Because of the hollowed-out spot in which they are laying, there is a split second, just an instant, where the knight and his lady are together in human form.
They reach out for one another just as the sun’s rays reach them and the lady transforms into a hawk before they can touch.
Its that moment before night turns into day that Paul speaks of.
You see, as Christians, we stand on the brink. We know of the darkness that encompasses our world, surrounds us all. But we also know of the light of life. We’ve heard the good news of Jesus Christ. We know there is a brighter tomorrow.
Paul calls us to live the life we believe in, and not to wait. Paul calls us to live as people who live in the light of day.
Its an understanding of time that the people of Paul’s day had. There were two time frames that existed. There was the present age, which was corrupt, which was full of sin and wickedness, which was full of pain and sorrow, deceitfulness and disease.
But there was also the time to come. This would be the time of the Redeemer. When the time to come, also known as the new age began, the Redeemer, the Savior, the Messiah,
would restore everything. The Redeemer brings peace. The Redeemer brings happiness. The Redeemer forgives, rights wrongs and wipes away tears, and we start fresh.
Many that Paul knew still waited for that day to come, that day of the beginning of the new age.
But Paul understood that the new age had already began. It began with the resurrection of Christ. And even people who were Christians were still waiting. They were waiting for Christ to come again.
In the book of Acts, Luke tells us as he describes the new beginnings of the church, how Jesus’ followers gathered together to watch his ascension into heaven.
Two men appeared dressed all in white who told the Jesus’ followers that one day, Jesus would return the same way they saw him go. Christians from that time on have been waiting, waiting for the return of Christ.
Our key, as Christians, to breaking the time barrier is to stop waiting,
stop waiting for resurrection,
stop waiting for Christ to return,
stop waiting for life to begin and start living,
living as resurrected people.
There’s another movie from the 1980’s about an out of work actor who can’t get a job because of his reputation for being hard to work with.
You know the film - Tootsie.
And you know that Dustin Hoffman’s character dresses as a woman in order to get work as an actor.
Dustin’s new identity causes him to do some things differently from his past. It causes him to move at a slower pace and to put more conscious attention into his relationships.
What he discovers when he does, is that he’s fallen in love with one of his new female co-stars.
There’s a theme song from the movie that summarizes Dustin’s realization of what he had been missing in life.
See if you remember these words from the theme song from Tootsie:
Time, I’ve been wasting time watching trains go by, all of my life...
Its this sense that life has been passing us by and we’ve been missing it, missing out on the good parts.
Its what Paul means when he tells us to wake up. Salvation is closer than we realize
We’ve been living like people groping around in the dark and Paul is telling us it doesn’t have to be that way.
We don’t have to waste time anymore. We can be living a life of salvation now.
We can break the time barrier. We can live as people who believe in Christ’s final victory, and because of our faith,
we can live as if that final victory has already happened,
as if Christ has already returned.
We can do this because we believe.
We don’t have to wait for it to happen.
We don’t have to waste anymore time.
We can live as resurrected people, as eternal people today.
And this is how we do that.
First, we stop doing those things that belong to the dark. We stop living immoral and indecent lives. We don’t engage in drunkenness or sexual immorality, in fighting or jealousy. We don’t commit murder or strike out in anger. We don’t steal or connive to take what others have that we want.
We don’t involve ourselves in those things that we would do in secrecy because they are shameful, illegal, deceitful acts we wouldn’t do where everyone could see them.
Instead, we live as people who live in the light of day. We live as people who belong to the light, the light of Christ.
Now how do we do that?
We began reading Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome where he summarizes all of the do’s and don’t’s we should do, all of God’s commandments into one- Love your neighbor as you love yourself.
Don’t be obligate, Paul writes. It means never putting yourself in a place where you have to say your sorry.
Paul explains how this works:
“If you love others, you will never do them wrong; to love, then, is to obey the whole law.”
One major theme Paul has had throughout this correspondence has been that its not about the things we do, its about our attitude. If we just have the right attitude - the attitude of love, then the things we do will take care of themselves.
Paul understands it very clearly. In the days in which I was in behavior management, we had a way of renforcing positive behaviors we wanted to happen rather than the negative ones we were trying to discourage. The premise was, if one was engaged in the prefered behaviors one couldn’t simultaneously engage in the negative behaviors. They are incompatable and cannot exist simulaneously.
Paul’s premise is essentially the same.
We can’t love others and hurt others at the same time. Because if we truly love others, we’re thinking about their needs, we’re concerned about their feelings, and when we do that,
then all the do’s and don’t’s take care of themselves.
So rather than keeping of with a list of rules and commandments to follow,
if we simply love others, we can’t help but follow the commandments. Remember from the 1970’s Precious Moments characters’ quote - Love means never having to say you’re sorry.
When we do this, its living as people who live constantly in bright light, constantly under scrutiny, because there is nothing about our behavior or actions, our thoughts or intentions we wouldn’t want anyone to see. Its about being proactive in our Christian walk, of preparing and getting ready to be God’s representative, of looking for ways to love our neighbor.
This is how we break the time barrier.
This is how we live as people who belong to another time, as eternal people in a terminal and temporal world.
In our Bible lesson, Paul shows us the darkness of the past, and he points to the brightness of the future.
His words place us on the brink of the dawning of all of our eternity.
If we want to, we can travel through time to live as eternity people right now, at this moment, as eternity dawns.
The question is, what will we do?
What will we do?
