Matthew 6: 25, 26, 27; James 1: 22-26

Are you are a doer, or a be-er.  Not be-er as in the beverage.  Friends, are you always doing, doing and going going? Are you running around on vacation because you may not be back and that place and want to everything?  We’ve done that.  Do you prefer finishing a task over a long moment of reflection or a deep long conversation?  Are you more likely to clean the church kitchen to spend a lot of time in prayer daily? Is your work life balance out of balance on the side of work?  When you visit someone who is sick, are you more likely to be the one bringing the food or the one sitting there and being fully present with the person?   When we are doing, we are in the I, in the ego.  When we are just being, it is then easier to connect with God’s Spirit.  Qantum physicist Amit Goswami claims this is the case.  He seeks the connection between science and faith recommends that we “be” more.  Just to be sure you know what he means, meditation and mindfulness are ways to “be.”  I think this thinking is useful for Christians.  We connect with others through God’s Spirit. That is what happens when people feel lifted up by the prayer of others. By BEING in prayer we connect with a deeper energy that unites us all.  It’s just that we are not very good at this. Most of us in this fast moving society only know how to do.  It’s just nuns and monks and gurus and yoga experts that seem to be good at being.  We are not good at just being, being in the prayerful and mindful moment that is.

You may have heard the story of Larry Walters otherwise known as lawn chair Larry, a 33-year-old man who, in 1982,  decided he wanted to see his Los Angeles neighborhood from a new perspective. He went down to the local army surplus store one morning and bought forty-five used weather balloons. That afternoon he strapped himself into a lawn chair, to which several of his friends tied the now helium-filled balloons. He took along a six-pack of beer, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and a BB gun, figuring he could shoot the balloons one at a time when he was ready to land. Walters, who assumed the balloons would lift him about 100 feet in the air, was caught off guard when the chair soared more than 11,000 feet into the sky — smack into the middle of the air traffic pattern at Los Angeles International Airport. Too frightened to shoot any of the balloons, he stayed airborne for more than two hours, forcing the airport to shut down its runways for much of the afternoon, causing long delays in flights from across the country. Soon after he was safely grounded and cited by the police, reporters asked him three questions: “Where you scared?” “Yes.” “Would you do it again?” “No.” “Why did you do it?”  “Because,” he said, “you can’t just sit there.”  You could say that Larry wasn’t that comfortable just being, he wanted to do something.  His story was picked up by an Australian movie maker who made a movie called “Danny Deckchair.”  Cheated on by his girlfriend who wants to trade up, Danny decides he wants to be unusual, not just a beer drinking deadbeat, and float away from his everyday life in a common suburb of Sydney.  He ties helium balloons to his chair and floats away, only to crash into a eucalyptus tree (it is Australia after all) near a pretty woman nature ranger with troubles of her own.  Danny assumes a new life of love and identity and shaves his beard. He is able to invent himself completely in a small town where no one knows him until he is discovered by the media.  Then he has to face who he really is.

Really, friends, it’s all a matter of balance isn’t it?  Like Larry Walters, you can’t just sit there.  I think that as your pastor all I would do is listen, pray and meditate, you would toss me out after a while.  “He doesn’t do anything,” you would say: “he doesn’t go to the hospitals, he doesn’t take care of the budget or the building, during the worship hour he just sits there and we are just silent for an hour. He’s lazy.”  It wouldn’t work, would it?  On the other hand if our world was run by doers only, who just go from one thing to the other and never reflected on what they were doing and it sometimes looks like that, then we are in trouble also.   The birds in Matthew 6 kind of know how to be and to do in their small-bird like way: although they do not pray and reflect, they are completely present in the moment and are active in the moment without worrying about the future or dwelling on the past.  Of all the authors of the New Testament James asks us to be doers of the Word more than anyone.  But he knows it is because of our focus on God that we do.  We don’t become doers of the Word without knowing God’s Word. At least we shouldn’t.  So friends, it’s okay to be a doer, as long at that’s not all you do. Spent some time being, being fully aware, fully present with God, fully present with others, fully in prayer, fully in reflection, and your life and the lives of others will be fuller.  Sometimes, and this is a kind of riddle, being there can be the best doing. And as the quantum physicist reminds us, it’s not about “to be” OR “to do,” it’s about both, life is simply dobedobedo. Thanks be to God.