[A sermon preached to Hinckley Unitarians on Sunday 17th of July 2022]
(Readings: Luke 10:38-42 and Thoughts On The Slogan “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” by Timothy Leary)
Our reading from the Gospel of Luke today is one that causes many people to get cheesed off with Jesus. Here are two women, one leaves all the work for the other to do and when she has the nerve to finally ask Jesus to tell her lazy sister to finally get up and do some work, what does he do? Criticises hard working Martha and praises lazy Mary! Where is the justice in that?
That was certainly my first rection on reading that passage. Surely those who work should be shown gratitude and those who put in a fair day’s work be commended for doing so?
Well, on one level, yes. But on another, maybe our reaction to this story tells us more about ourselves and our society then we might at first recognise. Laziness may well be a sin, in the form of sloth, but so is pride – and it is amazing how many people take pride, not just in their work, but in working themselves to death. In many professional circles it is hard to avoid talk of people boating about how many hours they work in a week, about how few days off they have. Is it not telling that one of the most effective forms of industrial action short of a strike is “work to rule” where workers do no more than what is set out in their contract and, suddenly, the entire organisation that employees them begins to collapse. Emails go unanswered until working hours resume, workers stop hanging back after hours to finish one particular task, phones go unanswered unless people are contractually obliged to answer them. It turns out that the world relies on the unpaid labour of thousands or even millions of workers in order to function. Yet most of the time, we are happy to provide that unpaid labour and even boast about doing so.
When this happens, seeing people who we feel do not work as hard as us getting the breaks that we are denied makes us feel angry. “Lazy scroungers” or “entitled youths who don’t even know they’re born” get it in the neck from the popular press and that is because we regularly buy those headlines.
Our society has turned productivity into a virtue so much that we judge the quality of a day by how much we feel we have accomplished. Cleared your inbox – great day! Didn’t manage to reply to a single email – awful day!
Yet is all productivity really so virtuous and praiseworthy? An NHS surgeon boasting about how they never get a true day off and are left constantly answering emails from patients and colleagues on their days off is one thing, but how about an arms dealer boating about how they never truly get a day off and are constantly answering emails from dictators trying to buy arms and colleagues doing their best to sell them? Clearly praising work for work’s sake, or being productive for the sake of being productive might not be the way to go.
Also, is productivity not the worst way to measure a day when we look at the alternatives? One spiritual practice that I try to keep to is the Ignatian daily examen, there are many ways to do it but the central part of the way that I was taught to do it was to look back on my day and discern when in my day I felt closest to God and when I felt furthest away. Days when we feel close to God or the Divine are surely good days? No matter how “productive” they are. Or how about we measure our days by the quality of time we spend with our family, friends, and those we love? It seems to be this that most people look back on with gratitude when we get to the end of our lives, in my experience very few people near death have confided in me that they regret not having answered more emails or getting though more workplace correspondence. Many have told me that they loved the time they spent with their family and wished that they had sacrificed a few of those late nights in the office in order to have experienced more time with those who they love the most.
In our story from Luke today Mary spends the time with someone she loves listening to him in contemplation, Martha spends the time visibly being busy with and getting distracted by many things in front of him. How will have the best memories of that day to look back on? Who will think they have spent their time wisely?
Jesus has often been compared to a hippy, that stereotypical figure of 1960’s counterculture. In the BBC sci-fi comedy series Red Dwarf the second technician Arnold Rimmer, a neurotic jobsworth, access Jesus of having been a hippy, when his crew mates push back at the suggestion, he snaps back at them, “He had long hair and didn’t have a job! What more do you want?”
A slightly more reliable candidate for the title of ‘Original Hippy’ would be Timothy Leary. Leary was a clinical phycologist at Harvard in the early 60s who researched the effects of psychedelic drugs on the human mind. A lot of phycological research that took place in the 60s is ethically questionable by the standards of today and debate still rages on about the value of Leary’s experiments. However, the subject matter of these experiments did rather set the tone for the decade that was to come! Some of the experiments that Leary helped to run touched on the interplay between the human mind and the sacred and these studies are still referenced work concerning the philosophy of religion. I can say that with some certainty as I have referenced those studies while writing on the philosophy of religion! The experiment I referenced was the Marsh Chapel Experiment that Leary was a supervisor of. This experiment was conducted under the auspices of the Harvard Divinity School and sort to determine whether profound religious experiences could be induced through the administration of drugs. This research sounds rather far out but it has been returned to in recent years as a way of treating military veterans who experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
After leaving Harvard (under something of a cloud – he was fired), Leary became something of a public philosopher and coined the phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out.” This became one of the key rallying crises of the hippy movement. Leary grew to resent, however, how this phrase was generally taken to mean “smoke dope and no nothing productive”. Leary was all for productive work that could change the world and bring meaning to people’s lives – he just did not want people to work and accept that meaning uncritically. Working a 9-5 job to make someone else rich while the industry that provides them with wealth pollutes our planet – and this work automatically being seen as a good thing – was the sort of thing hippy movement sought to critique. If work is meaningless for the person who dose it, dose not help create peace and harmony, and endangers life and the planet – then it is pointless. For encouraging this movement, Leary was once referred to by the then American President, Richard Nixon, as “the most dangerous man in America”.
In the Gospel of Luke, I do not think the overall message is one of Jesus saying, “quit your job and take lots of drugs”. However, he does call for us to change our mindsets. We should not sweet the small stuff. The little things, the household chores, excess work, can always wait. Instead, we should redefine what is “productive” a walk in nature is productive for our own health, self-discovery, and awareness of the planet. Prayer and other spiritual practices are very productive for building our own spiritualities and religious communities. Spending time with our families is “productive” towards us experiencing a happy life that is well lived.
Let us be productive in ways that truly matter.
Amen.
