SURVIVAL IN THE FAST LANE

September 3, 1989, 8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Ezekiel 18:1-9
Luke 12:22-30

",..do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat, nor about your
body, what you shal] put on." ~Luke 12:22 (RSV)

It's exhilarating to be in the fast lane. There are people to see
and places to go. Life in the fast lane is lived fully: each hour of each
day is packed with intentional activity: feelings are intense: colors are
bright: food is rich: music is loud: there is passion and excitement and
laughter: no moment is wasted. Every time I am away for a while I.
conclude upon returning that there is something about a city that very
simply magnifies - multiplies, if you will - the volume of human experience
that comes at us every day. City people, I think, love it. We complain
about it, of course, but it's a ritualized lament. To complain about how
busy one is, how hurried, behind and stretched out is, I think, a kind of
urban modern litany. The ritual inquiry about one's well being with which

we greet each other — "How are you?" - is almost never answered with a
declaration of how one actually is. Rather we respond by describing the
pace at which we live. “How aré you?" "I'm busy, overloaded, late and
tired." it's a way of saying something about our sense of ourselves and

the importance of our activity, I suppose. Actually, I suspect we love it.
And even if we aren't in the fast lane we love being close to it.

It's exhilarating to be in the fast lane but we are learning that it
is also costly. We are suffering an epidemic of stress and stress-related
illness: we are learning that burn-out, hypertension, ulcers, heart
disease, chemical addiction - in fact a whole catalog of addictive behavior
results from too much stress.

Life may be exhilarating in the fast lane but it's also dangerous.
Philosopher Will Durant once observed that "no man who is in a hurry is

quite civilized." A-deliberate pace, measured, balanced, used to be the
model. But that was another age - another era. It's different today.
Today we'd put it: "No man who is not in a hurry is working hard enough.’

All of life, urban or rural, is quickening, hurrying,. accelerating.

“In 1922 Emily Post advised her readers that the proper mourning
period for.a mature widow was three years. Fifty years later Amy
Vanderbilt urged that the bereaved be about their normal business within a
week or so." That's acceleration!

Those vignettes were illustrations in a recent Time Magazine feuture
article, “How America Has Run Out of Time." [April 24, 1989]

The magazine began with the observation that people who had time to
read the article with their feet up, free of interruption, are in the
minority. For most Americans “time has become the most precious commodity
in the land."

It's not just your imagination. We are living faster. The pace in
the fast lane has accelerated. It's a fact that in these past 15 years the
average work week has jumped from 41 to 47 hours. For many lawyers,
physicians and other professionals, an 80 hour week is not unusual. At the
highest levels of big business and industry, there is a new reality which
has had enormous impact on all of life. The need to cut costs while
increasing efficiency in order to keep up with the demands of heavy debt
and very aggressive foreign competition has produced a new kind of hyper-
active management style and a new generation of go-go executives who expect
employees to be at work early, to stay late, seven days a week. People who
can't keep up, or whose personal values and commitments demand balance,
will not be around long. It is a fact, says Time that the amount of
leisure time enjoyed by the average American has shrunk by 37% in those
same 15 years. -

And so life in the fast lane is characterized by “gourmet take-out"
because even microwave dinners are too much trouble; a new line of Hallmark
cards for busy parents to leave behind for their children — “Have a super
day at school," says one for leaving with a bowl of cornflakes. “Wish I
were there to tuck you in," says another for putting under a child's
pillow; and a whole new genre of entreprneurship: “At Your Service" will
do anything you do not have time to do: pick up your laundry, shop, return
your videos, change light bulbs.

Now the irony is that we thought it was going to come out
differently. Twenty years ago we thought technology was going to save us
so much time that we would have a major cultural crisis with so much time
on our hands. How to deal with all the leisure Americans were going to
have in the future was the topic of serious academic inquiry. In 1967 a
Senate Hearing on technology and works concluded that by 1985 the average
work week would be reduced to 22 hours, we could all retire at 38, and we
would be hard pressed to find enough to de.

What in the world happened? Well for one thing, the technology that
was supposed to save us time did just that, but did something else as well.
It showed us how much more we could accomplish. So now we have car phones
to do business and make appointments while stuck in traffic, and lap top
computers to work while waiting for airplanes, and answering machines to
assure that no message is lost or delayed, and fax machines to fire
information across continents instantaneously.

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; “Technology is increasing the heartbeat" of civilization.
Technological advances saved time but accelerated the pace with the
ironical result that the very devices we invented to pive us more Lime have
driven us to work harder."

The concluding paragraph of the article is a provocative inlroduction
to the New Testament Lesson this morning.

Time said, “No combination of innovations, inventions or timely hints
will restore (us) to our imagined bygone tranquility. Only a dramatic
change in both attitudes and economics would offer a genuine respite... At
some point individuals must find the time to consider the price of their
preoccupation and the toll on the spirit enacted by exhaustion. With too
little sleep there are too few dreams.’

One time Jesus said:

"Do not be anxious about your life, what you
shall eat, nor about your body, what you
shall put on. For life is more than food,
and the body more than clothing... Consider
the ravens... consider the lilies."

Telling a human being not to be anxious about his or her life is like
telling a person with a head cold not to sniffle and sneeze, quips
Frederick Buechner. Or like telling an alcoholic not to want a drink. And
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship said about those words of
Jesus, "'Be not anxious for the morrow,' (that) either it is cruel mockery
for the poor and wretched, the very people Jesus is talking to who, humanly
speaking, really will starve if they do not make provisions today... or it
is the unique proclamation of the gospel of the glorious liberty of the
children of God." [p. 158]

It is either a word of radical liberation or an altogether silly
word. It is either a relevant response to the human dilemma described by
Time Magazine, or else it is one more example of religious foolishness,

So let's go in deeper. Is there a connection between the frenzied
pace of life in the fast lane and our Lord's deceptively simple admonition?
Is there a theological way to understand our own drivenness and therefore a
way to save us from it?

"Do not be anxious about your life" said Jesus. He did not say,
“Take no thought for your life" as the old translation has it. The Greek
really translates into "anxiety" - “worry” really isn't strong enough.
What he said was “don't be immobilized by anxiety over the future."

Nineteen centuries later our best thinkers were concluding that
something like that is exactly what happened to all of Western
Civilization. W. H. Avden wrote a poem, The Age of Anxiety and gave it a
name. Historians, psychologists, philosophers ayreed that the middle of
the twentieth century, with two ghastly world wars already fought, and a
prospect of a third looming under the mushroom clouds of the nuclear age,
was indeed, a time of new and universal anxiety.

G/2/RA -

Philosopher and psychologist, Rollo May wrote a standard text book,
The Meaning of Anxiety, and proposed that anxiety was the modern form of a
medieval plague, "the greatest destroyer of human health and wel]-being."
[p. 37}

Franz Kafka wrote a novel, The Castle, in which the main characler
spends his entire lifetime trying to get in touch with the authorities in
the castle, and fails and the motif is underlying, foreboding anxiety.

So maybe Jesus is on to something more profound than an individual
worrying about the next meal.

If you have been reading the reminiscences about the period prior to
the Second World War recently you may have noticed that most historians
relate the rise of Fascism to a deep-seated anxiety.

Paul Tillich was a refugee from Nazism. Here is how he described the
1930's in Germany:

"First of all a feeling of fear, or more exactly, of indefinite
anxiety was prevailing. Not only the economic and politicai, but also the
cultural and religious, security seemed to be lost. There was nothing on
which one could build: everything was without foundation. A catastrophic
breakdown was expected at every moment. Consequently, a longing for
security was growing in everybody. A freedom that leads to fear and
anxiety has lost its value; better authority with security than freedom
with fear." [The Protestant Era, p. 245]

The theologians of our century have proposed that anxiety, the human
propensity to be anxious is very near to the essence of our humanness. We
are God's worrying creatures. No one else in creation frets about
tomorrow. Consider the birds - indeed. They don't worry about the future.
Something like 80% of them die every winter precisely because they don't
provide food and shelter for the morrow. Alone in creation we know and are
worrying. Not only about what will happen if I get fired, or the plane
crashes, or the test comes back positive, or if she doesn't love me, of if
I flunk the exam, or if my enterprise fails. Not only are we quite capable
of and actually consunmately skilled at worrying about all the terrible
things that might happen, we alone in creation know about ultimate
nothingness, ultimate darkness. Even though we make jokes about it,
the philosophers, the truth-tellers, know that awareness of it — dread — is
off in a corner of every human soul.

And so we live out of it in a kind respectable but deadly serious
search for security and safety. And there are not enough nuclear weapons,
or Strategic Defense Initiatives or Stealth Bombers to resolve that one,
nor are there enough insurance policies or IRA's or tax-sheltered annuities
to deal with it.

My proposal is that there is an insidious and destructive
relationship between the frenzied, obsessive pace of life we live, and this
old notion of human anxiety. I propose that we live fast and frantically
because so long as we are running we know we are alive.

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Time Magazine almost became theological in the aiddle of the essay I

have been citing. "Some Lime in the 80s, “Americans came to worship
career status as a measure of individual worth, and many were willing to
sacrifice any amount of leisure time to get ahead.” The work ethic has

gone mad,

“Life is more than that" said Jesus. And you know that he spoke
truth. You and I know that life is more than that; that life in the fast
jane may be exhilarating, but it can also be very dangerous and lonely and
frightening and exhausting and depressing - and if it is a way of assur ing
our ultimate security it is, finally, hopeless. It is a good word, Jesus.
It's good to know what ails us and why we are the way we are, but is there
another word here? A saving word? A word that might help us survive?

Some have heard a word that leads to a radical alternative. Some
climb back down the career ladder, drop out, step off the track and walk on
the sidelines. Some have heard a word of radical trust and simplicity -
not all, but some have. St. Francis of Assissi for one. But for every
Francis who responds in trust, who sells all and simply and faithfully
decides to live today, trusting that God will provide tomorrow, there must
be a host of others, planning, working, breaking bread, earning a profit,
sewing the clothes - or St. Francis will starve or freeze tomorrow.

Is there, that is to say, a relevant word here for the most of us who
are going to learn to stay at it - somewhere near the fast lane?

There is. It comes at the end. It sounds so innocuous at first that
we are inclined to miss it. Jesus said, “Do not be anxious about your
life.” He also said "seek God's Kingdom and these things - all the things
you need, truly need, will be yours as well."

Now, God's Kingdom is not a Shangrila, a respite from this world of
care. God's Kingdom is where people live in peace; where there is justice
for ali; where individuals and structures are guided by kindness and
compassion. So it's a busy place and seeking it means a lot of work,

It's not simply theological analysis of the human condition and it's
not pop psychology or stress management cor relaxation technique. It's
Gospel. It's saving good news. Care about big matters. Fill your soul
with passion for God and God's Kingdom on earth. Worry about big matters
and you won't have time to worry about little ones.

The promise of Christianity is that when you give your heart to God's
Kingdom - when God's agenda of love and justice and peace and compassion
become your agenda ~ you are going to make a wonderful discovery. You are
safe... from everything that can do you ultimate harm. You have what you
need to live. And you are free.

But in the meantime we must go on living here, in what Dan Wakefield
called “the psychic guerrilla warfare of everyday life." And so we do
worry. We work very hard. We do our best, give our all and want simply
for our effort to count for something. We are anxious about our lives and
part of the reason we come here, 1 think, is because we can slow down for

an hour or su, and because for this one hour there is the opporlunity at
Jeast ef putting the whole business in some larger perspective.

} was struck by the words of the Psalm we read earlier:
“take me out of the net which is hidden for me.”

That's how life feels sometimes - a net - a web of obligations,
expectations, goals, objectives, performance reviews and full calendars
from which we cannot extricate ourselves.

“Into thy hands I commit my spirit: thou hast redeemed me, O Lord,
faithful God."

We bring a net of anxiety with us. But the gracious word of Jesus is
that we do not have to live in it. It is Labor Day weekend, the time for
many of us when the starting gun is about to go off again. It is a good
' time to hear Jesus' word of radical liberation.

If you are not St. Francis and do not and cannot plan te sell all and
live simply, then at least understand your driveness: take charge: make
difficult decisions: live honestly and - above all take a deep breath and
be reminded that the God who created you is faithful. You are not alone on
the fast track. There is one who stands with you and runs with you and
will uphold you. There is one in whose hands you are safe and in whose
love you are free.

The invitation of the Gospel is to trust him. He is the one who
said:

"Do not be anxious about your life... Instead, seek God's Kingdom and
these things will be yours as well."

Amen.

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