Labor Day, and school is starting again. I wonder, do they still do the same things as when I was in school? Do they still have the same rituals? Maybe not. Things do change.
Dodgeball, for example. Now that was THE game in my day. You had the right to throw the ball as hard as you could and hit anybody you wanted to hit. What a tremendous way to get out your hostilities, and it was all legal! Dodgeball – except that I hear that because there is a fear of injuries – and of lawsuits -- it’s been stopped. One of the rituals of the school year is gone. What a shame!
And elections for patrol officers. Now that was one I always liked. I liked being a school patrol, in the first place. The white belt and the shiny badge – those made me feel important. And if they elected you lieutenant, you got to wear the blue badge; if they went all the way and elected you captain, you got to wear the red badge and walk all the way around the two blocks we patrolled at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Elementary School. Best of all, you got to boss around the other patrols. We had elections every month, and I finally got to be captain. Never mind that everybody else had already had a turn at being captain and I was the only one left. That doesn’t matter. Captain I was, and I strutted my stuff. Do they still do that? Or, have I heard that nowadays that’s considered politically incorrect, and so there are no patrol officers. Is another one of the rituals of the school year gone?
Well, I’ll bet I know one ritual that has not disappeared. I’ll wager I can find at least one thing that has not changed. I’m sure that teachers still do one thing. They must have a course on this in Colleges of Education. Teachers will start the first day of school with a ritual sentence, “Take out a clean sheet of paper.” Always has to be a clean sheet. Nobody ever says, “Take out a dirty sheet of paper.” No, take out a clean sheet of paper, and on it I want you to write a paragraph, “What I did on my summer vacation”. Is that still being done? Well, some places are doing school year round, so there won’t be any summer vacation, but I really hope that’s still a part of the school year ritual. “Take out a clean sheet of paper and write a paragraph on what you did on summer vacation.”
Do you remember? You thought and you scribbled; you dawdled and you jotted. You wrote feverishly until suddenly the teacher jolted you out of your smoldering summer slumber with the command, “Put your pencils down.” Put your pencils down – the signal that, finished or not, you were to stop. The sign that it was all over, ready or not. Your task is complete; or if it is not complete, there is no more time. You’ll have to turn it in, just as it is. Put your pencils down! There’s a good old school year ritual!
Oh, my stars, even that has changed? Now it’s click your mouse, save and name your file, and print it out? I give up! Let’s just stick with, “Put your pencils down.”
Whenever we undertake some task, it comes to a stopping point. We may be finished or we may not be, but it has to stop. We may be satisfied, or we may not feel ready, but never mind. The time to stop has come. And either we feel happy because we have done our best, or we feel ashamed because we just aren’t ready to hear, “Put your pencils down.”
All of life is like that. You don’t have to be in school to experience that. You can experience that at work. At the end of the workday, you can go home and feel that you have truly accomplished something, or you can just stop because it’s quitting time, although you haven’t really done very much.
If you’re retired, you can put your frazzled bones to bed at night and know that you’ve used your leisure time for something that matters; or you can end the day and wonder where the time went. You just didn’t get anything done.
At the end of anything, somebody will be saying, “Put your pencils down,” and you can’t do any more. If you’re in school, they will either graduate you or flunk you. If you’re working, they will retire you, and it won’t cut any ice if you say, “But I wasn’t finished yet. You are finished, like it or not. And most of all, that day will come when “the work of life is ended, the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more”, and life itself will end. I haven’t heard too much about anybody receiving an extension in order to finish some task he started! No, the Master will say to us on that day, “Put your pencils down.” Write no more. Come with me. Your life’s work is ended. And when that day comes, as with each passing day until then, either we will feel wonderful satisfaction, that we have done our best work; or we will feel profound shame, that we have failed to do what we were called to do.
“Put your pencils down”. Satisfaction or shame? Which will it be? What makes the difference?
One day Jesus heard the Father say, “Put your pencils down”. Your work is at its end. One day Jesus knew that there was no more time. And even though what came next would be incredibly painful, He felt satisfaction and not shame. He felt accomplishment and not agony. How did that work for Jesus? Is there anything for us there?
John 17:1-6
I
First, notice that when the Father said, “Put your pencils down,” Jesus responded, “The hour has come.” The hour has come. Jesus Himself knew that the deadline had arrived. He knew what time it was in His own life. “The hour has come”. No more teaching, no more healing. No more wandering about the villages of Galilee, no more encounters with the Pharisees. Jesus knew; He listened to His own heart, He heard the Father’s promptings, and He knew what time it was in His own life. Even before the Father said, “Put your pencils down”, Jesus knew what time it was.
Our problem is that we don’t know what time it is in our lives. We don’t listen to our own hearts; we deny them. We find it easier to keep on doing what we’ve always done than to imagine new possibilities or to see new directions. We don’t know what time it is in our own lives.
I was asked several years ago to speak to a Sunday School teachers’ banquet at another church. They warned me, however, that there was a special circumstance in this assignment. The church had decided to retire one of its long-term Sunday School teachers. She had taught a children’s class for many years, and most of those years had been very good. But in her later years she had become disoriented and hostile, and they had tried to tell her she needed to step down. But she wouldn’t quit. It was impossible to get her to see anything different. And so since she wouldn’t quit teaching, the church just took the children away and put them in another room with another teacher. You would have thought that would have taken care of the problem, but it didn’t. She went right on, lecturing to an empty room, Sunday after Sunday! So they were holding this banquet to “honor” her and to try to get through to her that she was finished. “Put your pencils down.” Yours truly was elected to deliver that message, thank you very much! But guess what? She figured it out and didn’t come to the banquet! If the Lord had not taken her home a few months after that, I guess she would still be lecturing to an empty room! She didn’t know what time it was in her life.
Do you know what time it is in your life? Jesus knew that “the hour had come”. Everything He had done up to that point was leading to the climactic moment in which He would go to the cross. It was a new place; a painful place; a hard row to hoe. But nonetheless it was the moment toward which He had been working, and now He knew that He was ready. He knew what time it was in His own heart. “The hour has come.”
How have you known when it was time, in your life, for the next step? How have you heard the Lord telling you, “Put your pencils down?” Get on to the next phase of your life. Get on to something more. How have you heard your own heart? How have you discerned the Lord’s call to change? Maybe it was to change jobs. Maybe it was to go back to school. Maybe it was to volunteer for something. Maybe it was to take a relationship to a different level. Maybe it was to buy a house. Maybe it was to come to Christ Himself. Can I get two or three to share briefly how you knew what time it was in your life, time to put your pencils down and make a change?
[RESPONSES FROM THE CONGREGATION]
II
When the Father said to Jesus, “Put your pencils down” – that is, when the Father told the Son to move on toward the cross, what did Jesus express? Satisfaction. Not disappointment, but satisfaction. Not a plea for a little more time to get it right, but satisfaction with what He had done. Jesus felt right about entering the home stretch, because He knew that the work He had been given to do was God’s work and that it glorified God. Jesus’ sense of satisfaction grew out of knowing that what He did, He did to bring honor to God. He felt right about moving on because He knew that what He had been about was Kingdom business, not human business, not self-centered business. Here’s how He said it: “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do.” I glorified you, Father; I honored you – by finishing the work that you gave me to do. I did it for you, it was what You called me to do.
Is it possible that you and I have trouble finishing things because we do not pursue what God has called us to do? Is it possible that the reason we have such a hard time getting anything accomplished is that we do whatever we do for all the wrong reasons? We have not learned to glorify God and express only what He has called us to do?
The spiritual says, “Don’t you get weary, children, don’t you get weary.” Did you know that there is a difference between being tired and being weary? A difference between being tired and being weary. If I am tired, it is because I have worked my body and my brain hard in order to accomplish something. I have stayed by the stuff to get it done, and of course, being flesh, I do get tired.
But being weary – that’s different. Being weary, that’s something else. Weary is being frustrated. Weary is being strung out. Weary is whacking away at a job and seeing little or nothing come out of it. Wary is flailing away at things to do, just because they are things to do. Weary in heart and in spirit, because it doesn’t mean anything. Worn out; exhausted, because spiritually you were disconnected.
There’s a difference between being tired and being weary. And it has to do with whether what you are doing is in the will of God. One person can work and work and work some more, day after day and year after year, and stay fresh. Another can dabble at his work and get bored and run down and just plain weary after only a little while. The difference is whether what you are doing glorifies God. If you can find in your work something that honors God and is a witness to Him, you’ll have plenty of energy to complete it. But if you are just working to be working, and it has nothing to do with the Lord’s claim on your life, you will be weary and frustrated long before you hear “put your pencils down”.
There’s an old story that you’ve surely heard before, but it illustrates the point. The story of is three stone masons, working on a large building. Someone, curious about what was going on there, stopped one of those masons and asked, “What are you doing here?” The mason answered, “I don’t know what we’re doing. I just cut stone and carry it, cut stone and carry it. I have no idea what it’s being used for.” So the traveler went on to ask the second stone mason, “Sir, what are you doing here? What is this work?” The second mason answered, “I think we are building a church, or something, but it doesn’t matter. All I know is that they pay me and I am trying to feed my family.” Still not satisfied, our curious traveler stopped the third mason and asked him the same question, “Sir, what are you doing here? What is all this work about?” And the answer was quite different, as the third mason stood up straight and tall, lifted his eyes toward the sky, and answered, “I am building here a great cathedral to the glory of God.”
All three did heavy-duty work. But which one do you think went home that night tired, but happy? All three ended their work at the dusk; but which went home weary and worn out? Work that is done for the glory of God satisfies when the call comes to stop. Work that is done for our own needs and for unworthy motives is never enough, even when it’s done.
How have you found ways to give glory to God in your work? Maybe you are a student; is it possible to study for God’s glory? Maybe you are a government worker; what is there about your work that honors the will of God? Maybe you are a homemaker; as you tend the household, is the call of God somewhere around in what you do? Maybe you are retired from paid employment; has your freed-up time given you a new sense of God’s call? Maybe you dig ditches, maybe you type documents, maybe you teach children, maybe you baby-sit the grandkids – what does it all mean? Is God in it, or is it just another thing to do? Do you have satisfaction? I need to hear two or three stories.
[RESPONSES FROM THE CONGREGATION]
III
Jesus knew what time it was in His own life; and so when the Father called Him, He was ready. “Put your pencils down”. No regrets, no mad scramble to do more.
And Jesus knew that what He had done was in the will of God, God’s call, and He had done His work to bring glory to God. “Put your pencils down” – that held no terror for Jesus. He was satisfied with His work.
In the end, all that any of us wants out of our work, indeed out of life, is love. In the last analysis, what we want is to have known love. I doubt very much that when we are at death’s door, any of us will say, “I wish I had worked a little harder.” No, we will probably say, “I wish I had spent more time with my family, my friends, my loved ones.” We want and need to be loved.
When I was a student, and the teacher said, “Put your pencils down,” the hard part was waiting two or three days until she graded those papers and handed them back. You see, I needed to see a good grade on that paper. I needed it not because I wanted to brag. I needed it because I wanted somebody to feel good about me. I needed so much to be affirmed and loved. Who of us does not need that?
And so the prayer of Jesus, as His life’s work is ending. He prays, “So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence …”. Glorify me in your own presence. Father, I just want you to love me. I want your presence. Jesus wanted above all things to abide in the Father’s love.
On this Labor Day, celebrating the opportunity to work, we are pretty conflicted about work. Some of us want a job and cannot find it. Others of us have a job and want out. Happily, a number of us see the hand of God and feel joyful hearts about what we do. But all of us need to know that while we work, we are in the presence of the Lord. All of us need to know that God is around us, and that we are in His presence. Ours is the prayer of Jesus, “glorify me in your own presence.”
On this Labor Day, I assure you, we are in the presence. At this table, we see the fruits of labor, and we know the presence. The bread is the result of labor – those who grew the grain and harvested it, those who milled it, those who baked it into bread. The wine is the result of labor – those who grew the grapes and harvested them, those who broke them down and bottled them. At some point, the bakers knew that the bread was risen. The vintners knew that the wine was at its time. They knew what time it was; they knew that what they had made was for the glory of God. All that remains is for us to spread this Table and know the presence of the Lord. His work is completed, but ours is not, not yet. Yet, for a moment, “put your pencils down”. For a moment, in the presence, finds completion and satisfaction, and, most of all, love.
