Today’s message comes from a song which has been a favorite for several years now. I cannot legally quote you all the song lyrics without infringing on copyright laws, which I don’t want to do – first, because I am basically a law-abiding person, and secondly, because my husband is a songwriter, and several friends as well, and I know how copyright laws protect artistic creators from having their work just appropriated by others.
So – what I can do is tell you that the piece is titled “Holy as a Day is Spent” and it is written and performed by singer/songwriter Carrie Newcomer. You can Google it or find it on YouTube. I recommend you do. It absolutely is worth listening to.
I can describe her song as a litany of everyday activities – from washing dishes to putting on warm socks to conversations with the check-out girl to folding sheets to frying eggs. It all sounds quite boring when I list it out this way but in Newcomer’s lovely poetry it paints a beautiful life.
She wraps it up in my favorite line (which I can quote because it’s under 25 words) -- It's all a part of a sacrament as holy as a day is spent.
Her point – I believe – and mine in this message is that living is a holy activity and that living with an active awareness of that holiness is the best of all.
I learned the truth of this for myself years ago when my family was young and money was in short supply. I was a stay-at-home mom because, as with so many others, then and still, there were no jobs in our region that paid enough to offset the cost of child care. So I set my own job as chief nutritionist, finding ways to give my family the most healthy food on a tight budget.
I canned fruits that came my way. I made jam and yogurt and granola. One of the things I did was bake bread. We ate lots of bread – whole grains, nut bread, fruit breads – anything I could come up with -- and somewhere along the way I took all those foods that were going to feed my family, and I began to handle them with something like reverence and gratitude. It was a revelation to me.
My everyday tasks still include some of these things today – but they also include writing sermons and publishing newsletters, and leading worship, and making phone calls and all the odd things that pastors do. Your everyday tasks may involve driving a truck, or teaching children in a schoolroom, or waiting tables, or checking folks out at the grocery store, or writing computer code.
Whatever it is that is involved in your everyday tasks and your everyday things can still be holy if you open the eyes of your heart and soul and see them as such.
If you go back to the beginnings of our belief system you find that scripture suggests we were not created to be kings and queens lying around doing nothing. We were created to be caretakers for a garden. And then to care for creatures everywhere. That’s ordinary work – all different kinds. It’s not glamorous, but that’s what we are here for.
When I went to the scriptures to see what they had to say about everyday work, I didn’t find much. There was a lot about work to obey somebody’s rules, but not much about work for the sake of the work.
Jesus didn’t spend much (if any) time telling people what work to do – but almost every story, every parable he used to teach was set in the context of ordinary people doing ordinary work. Matthew 13 for instance has a bunch of these in just one chapter.
The Parable of the Seeds was a story about a farmer out doing what a farmer does – sowing seed for his next crop. The story of the One Lost Sheep was a story of a shepherd doing what a shepherd does – caring for all his sheep, even the one who had wandered off. The Parable of the Yeast that multiplies six times over when it is mixed with flour is a story of a woman making bread – a whole lot of bread if she really did use sixty pounds of flour as the story says.
The people in the stories we hear of Jesus are all ordinary people – fisherfolk, tax collectors, vineyard owners, working scribes, beggars, house-wives, even soldiers – all doing the ordinary things of their lives. All doing the holy things of their holy lives.
Probably the single biggest collection of ordinary people is found in the Beatitudes – again, Matthew, this time chapter 5. The poor in spirit, those who mourn, the hungry, the merciful, the peacemakers, the pure of heart – not heroes or national figures -- just people living their ordinary people lives. These ordinary people are the ones Jesus goes out to speak with, to teach, to convince that they – ordinary as they are – are loved deeply by the one Jesus calls Father.
We are not called to what the world calls greatness. We are called to what God calls goodness. I’m not saying we shouldn’t sometimes strive for something more. I am saying we should not scorn the simple things, the everyday things – the holy things that are, and Carrie Newcomer puts it, all a part of a sacrament as holy as a day is spent. We should, indeed recognize these things as our gift to God as we live out this sacrament we call our everyday lives – as we are called to be -- as God created us to be.
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