With the COVID-19 and coronavirus social distancing measures, we have all been home a lot more, refraining from public activities. My family had a vacation scheduled for this past week to Nashville TN for my parents’ 50th anniversary. However, with the new guidelines in place, the party was cancelled, our vacation was cancelled. With that cancelled vacation came a week with nothing scheduled on my calendar. Granted that changed drastically in a moment’s notice as we are in crisis mode here at the church and in our world. I feel like there is a different busyness now rather than the usual busyness. Yet, maybe some of you experienced a bit more freedom in your schedules this past week than you have in a long time due to being home more. However, for most us, even as we are home, we are all still so incredibly busy… busy with kids, busy with keeping up with the news, busy with working from home, busy with anxiety and worry. Busy.
Each week I feel like that week’s Lenten topic is the hardest for me to preach, but I think this one might be the pinnacle for me personally. Learning how to set down the baggage that is burdening us has been grueling. We first laid down our bag of guilt. Then, we set aside our luggage of want. And last week, we did that difficult task of letting go of contempt. Well, we aren’t going to be let off easy this morning either. Today, we have a bag that we are carrying with us that is buzzing aggressively with energy and anxiety. This bag has become such a part of our bodies that we don’t even know we are carrying it anymore. But even though this bag is a common part of the luggage we haul around, it has become prominent and pronounced. When we talk to people, this bag is often front and center, disrupting our peace and fracturing relationships. How do we know what this heavy bag is? It’s as simple as a common question. “How are you doing?” And the answer many of us are giving these days is, “I’m busy.”
“I am busy” is such a toxic phrase and I say it all the time. And, I don’t know about you, but I used to say that phrase as a badge of honor. “How’s it going, Mike?” And I would respond, “I’m so busy! Life is busy. Things are busy.” Replying with that statement made me feel important, productive, and useful. And truthfully, it still does on most days. But recently, I’ve felt embarrassed to say that. Being busy shouldn’t be a badge of honor. Busyness distracts us from the things that really matter, from loving God, loving ourselves, and loving others. Busyness is a prison, a prison that keeps us from investing in things that are truly healthy, and lovely, and worthwhile. And I’m ready to be out of that prison. I suspect many of you are ready to be out of that prison and ready to put down the bag of busyness so you can be free and travel light.
As we think about how to put down the bag of busyness, I’m reminded of an old poem. Hafiz, a Sufi poet from the 14th century wrote:
The small man
Builds cages for everyone
He
Knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck his head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.
Most of us aren’t free. We don’t feel free. We spend a lot of time building cages around ourselves and around others. What are those cages we create? When we think being caged and imprisoned, what do we think of? If you are like me, we all of a sense of dread and anger about captivity and what it means for ourselves and our communities. We react strongly because imprisonment happens in so many forms. Many people are imprisoned for making the wrong choices. Others are imprisoned because of the color of their skin. Others are imprisoned by debt and financial struggle. Others are imprisoned to their physical disabilities. Others are imprisoned in their mental illnesses. Others are imprisoned in toxic and abusive relationships. We are all imprisoned in body, in soul, or in the mind. And because of this, we all have a part to play in releasing one another and releasing ourselves.
You see, I find that I am enslaved to busyness. I often sacrifice my own body and my own family in order to be productive and get ahead. I am enslaved to my calendar, to other people’s expectations, to societal pressures. And the thing is, I like this kind of imprisonment. I take comfort in my accomplishments and pride in my busy schedule. I seem to willingly stay in bondage rather than be freed, live a free and authentic life.
So, what does it mean to be truly and authentically free? Is freedom doing whatever we want? I don’t think so, as the freedom to gain and keep power and money has led to the destruction of other peoples’ bodies and lives. For me, freedom appears in submission, submitting myself to the realm of God so I can be bound by the love, goodness, and inclusivity of the Gospel. Freedom in Christ allows us to see our lives in different ways, to be grateful for what we have, and to use our abundance to bless a world in need. That is authentic freedom and that’s what it means to drop our bags of busyness and find opportunities to bless the world.
I was struck recently by a quote from Søren Kierkegaard concerning the danger of living a fast-paced, hectic lifestyle. Over 150 years ago, he wrote: “Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy—to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work… What, I wonder, do these busy folks get done?” I have found his words to ring true in my life on many occasions. Being busy does not result in fulfillment and meaning and freedom. Being busy may mean more things are getting done and more items checked off the to-do list, but they are not always the things we should be doing every day.
Friends, I think Kierkegaard’s thoughts are so important as we drop the bag of busyness from our lives. Busyness may keep us rushing from place to place and appointment to appointment. Busyness may keep giving us the rush of checking off the next item on the to do list. Busyness may give us a sense of accomplishment and pride. But what are we really accomplishing with these hectic and busy schedules? Joshua Becker, an author on minimalism, said, “Rarely does busyness result in the most important work of our lives being completed. It most often just distracts us from it.”
You see, busyness keeps us imprisoned to what the world thinks we should be rather than what God has created us to be. This, you see, is what busyness does to us. It prevents us from remaining focused on the most important work that we need to do, the work of self-reflection and spiritual growth and community involvement, and listening to others. Busyness confines us to scurrying feet and scattered minds and never allows us to sit quietly and trust God’s influence in our lives. As Blaise Pascal once said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from [our] inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” It is in those heart spaces where we hear the voice of God and the cries of our community. Busyness is a trap and a prison and blocks our freedom with God and others. It creates cages.
Our work isn’t to be cage builders. When we are so busy and focused only on our own needs, we put cages around ourselves and others. When we make people small and imprison them, we do so because we want to feel bigger ourselves. Cage-building is often to protect ourselves and our own ambitions so we can look good and make others look bad. Gossiping about someone to change how people think of them. Taking credit for something while assigning blame to others. By feeling busy and important, nothing else matters and we become locked in prisons of arrogance, self-centeredness, and superiority. And that in turn makes us small and confined. Many of us are probably adept at building cages.
Key-dropping, on the other hand, that is our business. Key-dropping helps release us from the cages we’ve built around ourselves and others. Key-dropping makes other people look good and builds them up. Key-dropping shows that others are as important as we are. Key-dropping reveals where our priorities are, in setting ourselves free and in releasing others. Key-dropping is having enough time for meditation and prayer in order to set our minds and spirits free. Key-dropping is creating time to be creative. Key-dropping is having the freedom in our schedules to accompany an immigrant to their check-in, to sit with someone who has had a deeply hurtful tragedy, to hear someone’s story and walk alongside them. Key-dropping empowers us and it empowers others. When we are truly free, authentically free from meaningless pursuits and to-do list items, we begin to live differently and help others live differently.
Think about it for yourself. When have people placed keys on the ground in front of you, guiding you to break free from your prison cell and live more fully into your God-centered life? Were you able to see the keys? Did you reach down and pick them up? And, once we have the keys in our hands, do we actually unlock our cages? If we are overly busy and overly tired and overly distracted, we probably missed those keys and we probably didn’t drop keys for others. And that’s what we need in this world right now. We need more people who are willing to reach down in their wisdom and let us beautiful, rowdy prisoners out of our cages. We need to be people who build fewer cages and drop more keys.
I’m not sure what dropping keys looks like for you. For me, I want to drop the bag of busyness so that I can free up my schedule and be freer to drop the keys of life, love, and justice. I don’t want to be the small person building cages. I want to be the sage dropping keys. I want to be the one who has authentic freedom. I want to be the one who leads a life with less busyness. I want to drop keys for all of us, the rowdy and beautiful prisoners that we are, so we can all live our truly authentic lives. Together, the remainder of this Lenten season, and even after life returns to normal, let’s drop those bags of busyness. For we are going to need, now more than ever, to join together in dropping keys of authentic freedom.
Amen.