Mark Heard’s song “Nod Over Coffee” has been playing in my head since I read about the consequences of the invention of the minute hand in Adam Frank’s book, About Time. I clocked in for my nine hours at the computer store today and clocked out tired and worn and happy to come home. I will let the song be my melody for sleep this evening with this clip from Pierce Pettis, Grace Pettis, and Jonathan Kingham. First, Mark Heard’s lyric:
nod over coffee
all the unsaid words that I might be thinking
and all the little signs that I might give you
they would not be enough
no they would not be enough
so we nod over coffee and say goodbye
smile over coffee and turn to go
we know the drill and we do it well
we love it, we hate it
ain't that life
ain't that the curse of the second hand
ain't that the way of the hour and the day
if I weren't so alone and afraid
they might pay me what I am worth
but it would not be enough
you deserve better
so we nod over coffee and say goodbye
do whatever has to be done again today
get in the traffic and time will fly
look at the sun and pray for rain
ain't that the curse of the second hand
ain't that the way of the hour and the day
the dam of time cannot hold back
the dust that will surely come of these bones
and I'm sure I will not have loved enough
will not have loved enough
if we could see with wiser eyes
what is good and what is sad and what is true
still it would not be enough
could never be enough
so we nod over coffee and say goodbye
bolt the door it's time to go
into the car with the radio on
roll down the window and blow the horn
ain't that the curse of the second hand
ain't that the way of the hour and the day
First the news of Lazarus dying
before Jesus had time to get there --
Then the image of Jesus crying
must have giv’n the disciples a scare . . .
He got to the tomb and called out his friend,
with the others saying, “He stinketh” –
they had no idea death was no end,
Jesus said, “Death is not what you thinketh.”
God showed Ezekiel a valley of death
then gift wrapped bones in new life and skin –
God’s subversive pow’r in every breath:
in our endings is where God begins
When I was youth minister at University Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas many years ago, I started thinking about Youth Camp around this time of year, beginning to work on a theme for the week and to recruit adults who wanted to go hang out with the kids for a week. I loved going to camp. Still do. One year, some of the kids said the hardest thing about the week was having to get up so early. They wished we could flip the schedule around so that we were up all night and slept all day. So we did – at least figuratively. We reset all the clocks in the camp and rewrote the schedule so that breakfast was served around noon, according to the schedule, and the day went on from there. In actuality, things happened in the same part of the day as they always had, but we just decided what time it was. After a day or two, we believed the schedule we had created was true and we had a great week, until I got home and couldn’t figure out what time it was.
I think about that week most every year on this night because “springing forward” into Daylight Saving Time is basically doing what we did at camp on a national scale: we just decide what time we want it to be and go from there. Tomorrow the sun will go down an hour later than it did today not because the sun did anything different, but because we decided to make it an hour later. I heard parts of an interview on NPR with Howard Mansfield who has written a book called Turn and Jump: How Time & Place Fell Apart and thinks Daylight Saving Time undermines our understanding of time:
Daylight Saving Time is like sitting in a room and listening to that gap between the two clocks go. We've all agreed. We've all accepted the clock is the truth. We always just want to get on with our day. And all of sudden we're changing it back and forward. And it's like saying the inch is going to be one length in winter and the inch will be another length in the summer. So wait a minute. So now we're forced back to say, well, what is time? What is really time? And we don't know. And it's just as if we - OK - we all agreed that this is what 6 o'clock looks like and then we change that. It's unsettling.
does anybody really know what time it is does anybody really care
What Mansfield went on to say was we are at a loss because time has become disconnected from place. People used to know it was noon because the sun was overhead. Now, we don’t even walk to the window. We just look at our clocks or watches or smart phones. The clocks keep time and time holds us hostage.
One of the things I remember about growing up in Africa is how differently the people there thought about time. Take church, for instance. In most every church I’ve been a part of in America, worship is on the clock. If we go over an hour (or whatever the designated length is supposed to be), then we’ve shattered the sacred schedule. I remember one Sunday in high school when my father took some time at the end of the service to honor one of our youth sports teams. It was after twelve o’clock and people were restless. They were losing their place wherever they had planned to go for lunch. They were missing the first quarter of the football game. Dad recognized their disquietude and said, “Quit looking at your watches. Ten years from now you won’t remember what time we got out of church today but these kids will remember we took time to say we were proud of them.”
The people got quiet, but I don’t think he convinced them to change their perspective.
In the African churches, the service started when we all got there and it finished when, well, we were finished. The point was not to keep time, or even tell time, but to spend it. Together. If we sang for an hour while the crowd gathered, what mattered most was the singing and the gathering, not the ticking of the clock.
We do our best work with time in the church when we think in spans of time rather than in seconds. This season of Lent is a good example of finding the time that matters. We mark time by the events in Jesus’ life, by the places in scripture where he walked and talked and healed, and then we make of it a season, a time of year where we can expect thin places to encounter the Spirit much like we expect the blossoms on the fruit trees that are harbingers of harvest. Maybe we should give up clocks for Lent.
One of my favorite time phrases in the gospels speaks of Jesus’ birth and says he was born “when the days were accomplished,” which is a wonderful and poetic way to say when the moment was ripe. In these days, when a woman is pregnant beyond her “due date” (according to the calendar), we think the baby is late, as though the kid missed his or her birthday instead of seeing things happening all in good time.
Daylight Saving Time would make a good band name, but the true time of our lives is not marked in minutes or saved by daylight. Renaming the hours will not help the days accomplish anything. The apostle Paul talked about “redeeming the time” and making the most of our days. In that light, Lent becomes a way for us to save time from the arbitrary arrogance of the schedule and what Mark Heard so eloquently called “the curse of the second hand.”
so we nod over coffee and say goodbye bolt the door it's time to go into the car with the radio on roll down the window and blow the horn
ain't that the curse of the second hand ain't that the way of the hour and the day
Come, let us take time and spread it out like a blanket; let us make time like we make bread, giving it room to rise to its fullness; let us tell time we are here just as we would tell a friend we had arrived for dinner and had come to stay until it was time to go.
The town was Nairobi, Kenya and they were Up With People. Members of the American community provided host homes for the group and so a couple of them stayed at our house, and in the homes of my friends from Nairobi International School. It was the fall of 1969; most of us were ninth graders, had guitars, and were completely consumed with playing music together. We were completely taken with this traveling band trying so hard to tell the world we were all connected:
if more people were for people like people everywhere there’d be a lot less people to worry about and a lot more people who care
I still remember the songs. One of them came back this week as we celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing. (Of course, in a wonderful bit of technological irony, I couldn’t get web access in my hotel room last night to write.) Up With People had a song called “John Jacob Sebastian Smith” that was about a little baby born the day Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon.
John Jacob Sebastian Smith took his first breath today in a little river town in the middle of I-o-way the day the train came down the track the corn stood shoulder high and it was just as the whistle blew that papa first heard him cry . . .
The story line was the dad telling his new son he would see a world his father had hardly dreamed of, as he sang in the chorus:
John David it’s all yours it’s a new world you’ve found you can make it what you will nothing can hold you down
The astronauts appear in the last verse, both as a way of dreaming of the stars and coming to terms with our humanity at the same time:
John David as you took your first breath today others took the breath of life to a planet far away someday maybe you’ll do even more remember son it’s all about people people like the folks next door
Nothing happens in a vacuum, even in space. While Armstrong was planting a flag that couldn’t fly on the moon, the big blue ball below him was in turmoil: the Vietnam war waged on; Woodstock was not so far away; LBJ’s Great Society had given way to Nixon, and the Civil Rights movement continued in the aftermath of the deaths of both King and Malcolm X, among others. Even the dream of reaching the moon was fueled by the competition of the Cold War: we wanted to beat the Russians to show them who was Number One. I read in the Birmingham News yesterday that the amount NASA spent getting to the moon was equivalent to more money than we spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan last year. Long before Christopher Cross sang about it, we were caught between the moon and New York City.
I know it’s crazy, but it’s true.
Another teenager a little older than I who stared into the sky an ocean away from Nairobi, was Mark Heard. A little over twenty years after the moon landing and, unfortunately, in the same summer that he died, Mark released a song, “Satellite Sky,” that still speaks to both the possibility and ambiguity of what it means to be alive in these days.
why do I lie awake at night and think back just as far as I can to the sound of my father's laugh outdoors to the thought of Sputnik in free flight
before I could fashion my poverty before I distrusted the night I must've known something I must've known something those were the times I live for tonight
why, why, why, I say why, mama, why? why can't I sleep in peace tonight underneath the satellite sky
it can't be easy for my children I'm hollow before my time it looks like a desert here to me where is the promise of youth for my child
where are the faraway kingdoms of dreams we've been to the moon and there's trouble at home they vanished in the mist with Saint Nicholas they lie scattered to the ghettos and the war zones
why, why, why, I say why, mama, why? why can't I sleep in peace tonight underneath the satellite sky
I want to stand out in the middle of the street and listen to the stars I want to hear their sweet voices I want to feel a big bang rattle my bones I want to laugh for my children I want the spark to ignite before they find out what it means to be born into these times
why, why, why, I say why, mama, why? why can't I sleep in peace tonight underneath the satellite sky
In these days when we can “Google” our way to most anywhere in the world (except, of course, in my hotel room last night) and see YouTube videos from all across the planet, we are also the ones who see fewer stars from our porches and windows than any generation to have inhabited the planet. Since Armstrong’s steps, we have run rovers across Mars and we have yet to provide clean drinking water for over a quarter of the people on our planet. I’m not making an either/or case here by any means. My question is the same as those who have come before me: how do we look up at the stars and look out for one another at the same time?
The early astronomers studied the night skies, finding gods and bears and hunters, in order to find their way across lands and seas. The stars told them where they were and where they might be going. The psalmist pulled theological questions from the twinkling darkness:
I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous, your handmade sky-jewelry, Moon and stars mounted in their settings. Then I look at my micro-self and wonder, Why do you bother with us? Why take a second look our way? (The Message)
Forty years after Apollo 11, we have pictures of galaxies far, far, away; we know our own smells like raspberries; we have driven on Mars and have plans to go farther; my MacBook is a stronger computer than anything the Apollo astronauts understood; the Red Sox have won the World Series twice; there are twice as many people on the planet today than in the summer of ’69 (and Bryan Adams is still touring); we are in another unexplainable war; we have an African-American president; and our planet is plagued with poverty and need that cripples us all. Chet Raymo wondered on paper years ago how there could be darkness at all when there were so many stars in the sky. He answered his own question by saying it was because not all of the light has gotten here yet. It’s coming. But not yet. The stars give credence to our UCC credo that God has light “that has yet to break forth.” I believe, with all my heart, we can still sleep in peace underneath a satellite sky, not so much because we walked on the moon, but because that’s what the stars say.
and thinks Daylight Saving Time undermines our understanding of time: