The Three ‘I’s

You’ve had a couple of weeks to adjust. How are you doing . . . fighting back against falling back? Spring forward; fall back. These past couple of weeks your bio-rhythms have been batty, fighting back after “falling back” or maybe even “falling flat.”

Retreating one hour in order to get back to “Standard Time” is supposed to make our mid-winter mornings less dark and dismal. Unfortunately, as anyone who lives above the 45th parallel knows, those brighter “a.m.’s” come attached to distinctly darker and longer “p.m.’s.” And even that extra morning light really only lasts for a couple of weeks, at best.  Can’t we just stay on one time year ’round?  Please?

It isn’t easy to readjust the “circadian” rhythms of our bodies. Not even by just an hour. And if you are not afflicted with SAD, “seasonal affective disorder, where the lack of daylight hours brings on depression, lethargy, and genuine “SADness,” losing the light still brings all of us physical challenges and changes.

Scientists prescribe doses of specific wave lengths of light, available in special light bulbs, to help our bodies fight off the SAD-slump fall-back. And nutritionists have recommended we up our intake of Omega-3 oils – those “good” fats found especially in oily fish. Salmon, the fish with the most unchangeable body rhythm of any scaly swimmer, is especially high in these Omega-3 fatty acids. Apparently it takes a crazy, obsessed-by-tides-and-rhythms fish to help our bodies combat the changing tides and rhythms that the turning world has unleashed upon us.

The dark days make us want to hunker down and veg out. The feeling that all there is ahead of us is a cold, dark future can bring on a kind of human “root vegetable” behavior.

The concluding commands made to the Thessalonian community in today’s epistle addressed the threat of “idleness” to the life of the faithful. This “idleness” was not just a sitting-around-watching-TV all day- kind of inactivity. It was the idleness that took on the activity of despair, disorder, and disobedience.

Those obsessed with the eschatological end-times despaired of ever doing anything in this world. Those who looked to the Greco-Roman culture of patronage and political favoritism rejected the order of “work-to-make-things-better” world for the disorder of a social system based on brown-nosing and glad-handing. Those who thought their faith entitled them to a life of support and special treatment disobeyed the apostolic examples of daily toil and labor Paul and his companions had demonstrated personally.

To all these wrong-headed notions there was one simple apostolic answer: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” Paul rejected the world of patronage and privilege. Instead he advanced a new ethic of labor as love — love for Christ, love for each other, love for the unlovely, and love for the future.

We can’t look back at the first century and find the popular system of patronage and idleness an antique oddity. It’s a culture alive and well today, wafting over the electronic airwaves of our twenty-first century world.

Years ago the media was transformed by a quirky British import that was renamed “American Idol.” The quest to find the next big pop star became a national obsession and a billion dollar industry.

As other “reality” based programs have spun off “Idol’s” success, it has become more and more obvious that the true “American Idol” is a quest for the ultimate “American Idle.” This is the very “idleness” warned against in our epistle this morning. This is not the “idleness” of simple couch-potato sloth, the 7th deadly sin. No, this is our American Idle quest for a life and lifestyle that has no purpose, no goal, no commitment to “doing what is right” or doing what is good, what is true, what is beautiful.

The American Idle obsession is easy to find and define. We validate it endlessly. It’s the “work of being the busybody” instead of the “work” of doing any genuine “work.” We glorify and glamorize the idleness of busybody work.

For example, our kids are offered “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” “Jersey Shore,” and “The Real Housewives of . . . . (L.A., D.C., N.Y.C.–-you pick) as the new social pathways to patronage and privilege, as the alternative to working for your bread and working for Christ’s righteousness and love.

All the hottest electronic advances seem to share one common thing: a vowel. “I” as in i-pod, i-phone, i-pad, i-Tunes, I-messages. The “I” of course stands for “individual.” Our electronic culture is all about maximizing the power of the individual. Do your own thing, on your own time, for your own advantage. All those “i” creations, even the ones that seem to make your life crazy with MORE work and obligations, are far too often expressions of American Idleness.

What if instead of connecting our individuality to the world’s social network of power and privilege, Christ’s followers found some other “i-tunes” to play? What if instead of Idleness we chose Individual Initiative? What if instead of Inertia we chose Individual Industry? What if instead of Excess we chose Individual Integrity?

Initiative. Industry. Integrity. You can even call them the Alpha-3 fight-backs to fall-backs. They go with the Omega-3 supplements.

First, initiative: Idleness leads to a life of no consequence. But disciples of Jesus are people of consequence. For Jesus is able to “keep you from falling” (Jude 24) and “make you stand” (Rom.14:4). The reason why initiative is so important is that the distance from 0 to 1 is greater than the distance from 1 to any other number. One of the hardest things in this world is to go from nothing to something. It takes initiative. And a key method of fighting back against fall back is to exercise some initiative to move something from 0 to 1.

Second, industry: the battle of good vs. evil is partly the battle of industry over inertia. One of the greatest intellectual achievements of the Christian tradition is the notion of original sin. People will make a mess of anything, of everything, and it takes major industry, ladled and laddered with showers of God’s grace, for us to climb out of old pits and to keep us from falling into new pits.

Third, integrity: A certain music critic, covering a performance of a Beethoven concerto, played by a master pianist, set down his highest praise in a one-sentence review: “Beethoven would have liked it.” Integrity is living in such a way that Jesus will like it. Integrity is hearing Jesus say of us what his Father said of him: “Well done. Your life, your ministry, brings me great pleasure.”

This doesn’t mean that a life of integrity won’t have falls and failures. Fine Oriental rugs can be distinguished from machine-made rugs by their curious variations in patterns. In Middle Eastern villages, where each Oriental rug is hand-woven under the direction of a master-weaver, it often happens that a weaver makes a mistake. But when a mistake is made, instead of pulling the work out to correct the error, the master-weaver finds some way to incorporate the error into the pattern. Experts say that the exceptional beauty of complex design in the rugs often is due to the skill of master-weavers in turning mistakes into works of art.

That’s integrity. Each of us has the God-given potential to become a uniquely beautiful masterwork of God’s creative art. We are apprentices to the master weaver, who inspires the design and who helps us redeem our faults and finish the patterns. We lose integrity and run into snags when we try to do it alone.

The “work” of being a “busybody,” the “work” of being an “American Idle,” is exhausting. But the Alpha-3 work of initiative, industry and integrity, the “work” of being the beloved and laboring for “doing what is right” – that’s exhilarating.