As most of you know by now, my daughter Blythe is spending her Spring semester at University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It was kind of difficult to send her off that far away for that long, but what has proven even more difficult is to try to figure out what time it is, for that matter, what day it is, for her at any given moment. I started out trying to add sixteen hours to Beverly time, but that proved too taxing for someone who last had a math class in high school. So what I do now is subtract eight hours and add a day: so if it is 10:00 am in Beverly on Sunday, then it is 2:00 am in Sydney on Monday. So in this sense, I’ve got the time all figured out; what I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that she left San Francisco last Saturday night and arrived in Sydney – fifteen hours later – Monday morning. Where did Sunday go? I suppose she’ll find it on her way home in July.
This is one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about the whole idea of time this week. How do we spend our time? In what ways have we put it to good use, and in what ways have we wasted it? I think it’s helpful every now and then to evaluate what we do with our time, since time is an entirely nonrenewable resource; once a moment is gone, we can’t get it back. Besides, so much of our efforts to manage our lives, and to make sense of the world around us, has to do with time. You might have seen the article in yesterday’s Globe about how eighteen busy Bostonians save time. And we do try to control our time, to understand it, in some cases to predict it, and in nearly every instance, to master it. We would prefer to make time serve us, instead of, as is so much more often the case, our serving it. Since earliest days, humanity has endeavored to divide time into increments, the better to orchestrate and manipulate it. The ancient Egyptians invented the Nileometer, a crude device for measuring time by gauging the rise and fall of the Nile River; medieval Europeans listened for the bells of the cathedral, which marked the hours - very much the same way our own church bells on Sunday morning awaken the small corner of our world at the junction of Conant and Cabot. And today the digital displays of our clocks wake us up, they brew our coffee, they reheat our leftovers, and ironically they have rendered the notions of “clockwise” and “counter-clockwise” virtually anachronistic!
So there is a tension here. For all the great ideas you and I, and in particular our merchandisers, conceive of to control time, to get the most out of our time, the reality too often turns out to be that our time is controlling us. Our experience is analogous to the football field and the basketball court where the team that is behind late in the contest is “playing against the clock.” We allow time to control us during the week so we can enjoy the weekend, or during the year to earn our vacation, or during our lifetimes to reach retirement. And yet for all our time-saving strategies and devices, it still seems, as every one of us has been heard to lament, that nobody has enough time. How many people cannot make a decision without consulting their calendar, or their Blackberry, or their iTouch? Even as we try to economize and streamline our time and juggle our responsibilities with our desires, we wind up filling in the few blank spaces we have, and discover to our chagrin that we have even less time than we started out with.
“Behold, now is the acceptable time,” the apostle Paul once wrote; “behold, now is the day of salvation.” The Bible makes much of the notion of time, so much, that there are actually multiple words for it. The time we have been talking about so far is called chronos, or chronological time, time which is measured by the hour, the day, the month and the year. There is another kind of time though, which, though less commonplace, is no less familiar to us. In Greek it is called kairos, kairos, or what we might call the “right time;” the favorable, propitious, opportune moment for doing something. An example of this might be the couple who decides that it is time to have a child; presumably, they have not come to this decision by consulting their watch, yet nonetheless, they believe the time is right to begin a family. This is what we mean by the kairos, the appropriate time. Another example might be the old commercials for Miller beer, which managed to squeeze both notions of time into its pitch. Chronologically speaking, after work let’s say, it’s “Miller Time,” time to crack open an ice cold Miller Beer; yet in the broader sense, the commercial also wants us to think that it is always “Miller Time;” that regardless of the hour or the day, the time is right to become a Miller beer drinker. For a Harpoon drinker, this is where the analogy breaks down.
The Bible has many examples of this kind of time, the right time, the appointed time, for every facet of human life, and there is no place where this is more evident than the well-known passage from Ecclesiastes chapter 3 which Brad read for us this morning. “I have seen the business that God has given to his children to be busy with,” the writer declares. “God has made everything beautiful in its time; God also has put eternity into the human mind, yet so that one cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” The right time, we learn, is divinely prescribed. God knows the time to be born and the time to die, the time to weep and the time to laugh, the time for war and the time for peace. “For everything there is a season,” we are told, “and a time for every matter under heaven.”
Even as a document, the Bible leans more toward the notion of the “right” time than it does chronological time. For while it is true that the scriptures are arranged from the creation of the world in Genesis, to the vision of the last days in Revelation, neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament is organized along a strict chronological pattern. The most ancient reference to the creation is found in the book of Jeremiah, which doesn’t appear until nearly two-thirds of the way through the Old Testament. Likewise, Jesus offers a vision of the last days as early as the gospel of Mark, which, although it is the first gospel, still doesn’t appear first in the New Testament. In fact the earliest New Testament book, I Thessalonians, doesn’t show up until nearly two thirds of the way through its particular part of the Bible. The Bible’s concern is not so much with chronological time. The most prevalent use of the notion of time in the scriptures is the kairos, the chairotic moment, the particular, decisive, definitive point in time. Indeed, the Bible betrays little abstract conception of time; in the Bible, time consists of what is contained within it, of what makes up those definitive and decisive times which comprise the important moments of life.
We talked a little about this kind of time at our staff meeting this week, for example, how there can be a time for both weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing together, and Bob Lague hit on a good illustration. Bob raised the idea of what takes place at a funeral, or a memorial service, perhaps because he attended two of them last week. A memorial service usually has its share of weeping and mourning – that’s what it’s for, after all. But a true memorial is also a celebration of life, and very often that celebration brings laughter in its wake. We had some good hearty laughs at Rose Brady’s service a few weeks ago, and one of the reasons is that Rose often brought a smile to our faces. There is a time for weeping and a time for laughing, and occasionally the time is right and ripe for both.
The notion of the chairotic moment can also be seen in what’s been going on in the Middle East of late. Every now and then, history seems to be telling us that the time is ripe for change. We’ve seen it in Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, and who knows where it will strike next? Wisconsin, perhaps. In one sense, we might say that revolution is in the air and its flames are being fanned by the internet. But it is also true that there are times in history when people rise up against oppression. Remember that at the same time the American Revolution was gearing down, the French Revolution was ginning up, and even though a third revolution, the Industrial Revolution, was taking shape at the same time, I don’t think the internet had much to do with any of them. Sometimes the time is simply right.
In John’s gospel Angie described Jesus’ brothers trying to encourage him to put his time to better use, to be bolder in displaying his works, to be more assertive and direct in declaring himself and his mission. They urged him, “Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing; for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world!” But Jesus replied, “My time has not yet come; but your time is always here.” Jesus was waiting for God’s time, for the “right time,” to be fulfilled, and that time had not yet arrived. For his brothers, though, Jesus admitted that their time had indeed come, that the moment was ripe for them to display their own convictions in what Jesus was saying and teaching about God.
And you and I often find ourselves waiting, and truth to tell, not always waiting patiently, for God to get to work. We are anxious for God to do something in our lives - or in someone else’s life. We are eager for God to heal, or to straighten out an unpleasant situation; we don’t see why God should wait to bring peace to our world and to fix broken or displaced lives. But part of this frustration, or impatience, if you will, is because we are dealing with the two different expressions of time we have been talking about this morning: our waiting for God consists of chronological, or measured time - it’s why we wish God would hurry up and do all those things we things God ought to be doing in our world, and in our lives. We feel as though we have waited long enough, and it is high time God acted. But as that well-known passage from Ecclesiastes reminds us, God works in God’s own time, knowing when the right time is to work; and remember that even when it comes to all those nasty things we especially wish God would remedy, things like war and hate and killing and death - Ecclesiastes reminds us that these, too have their time, as little as you or I may like it. There is a time for every matter under heaven. We need to remember that God will take God’s own time regardless of what our watches, analogue or digital, might want to tell us.
And like Jesus’ well-meaning companions in John’s gospel, if all we’re doing is sitting around waiting for God to do something, we may well be missing our own opportunity to seize the time. “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here.” While we’re waiting for God to do God’s good work, there is a lot of good work you and I can be doing in the meantime.
I think this is what Augustine meant, who wrote that the only significant time is the present, the “now.” The past does not exist except as we call it to memory, Augustine wrote, and the future exists only as we predict or envision it in the present. And it may be part of what Bertrand Russell said, when he later agreed that we may not confuse memory or envisioning with the past or the future themselves, since it is the present that really counts. And who knows, it may even be what the immortal Charlie Parker was trying to get at, whose signature tune, “Now’s The Time,” musically incorporates the chairotic with the chronological. And I think it is clear this is what Paul meant, who summed it all up when he wrote to the Corinthians, “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” Which in a sense means it doesn’t matter if the sermon goes over twenty minutes or the church service goes over an hour, because you can’t put a stopwatch on God’s Holy Spirit. What gives meaning to this moment, to any moment, is when you and I seize upon it because it is indeed the right time.
This is one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about the whole idea of time this week. How do we spend our time? In what ways have we put it to good use, and in what ways have we wasted it? I think it’s helpful every now and then to evaluate what we do with our time, since time is an entirely nonrenewable resource; once a moment is gone, we can’t get it back. Besides, so much of our efforts to manage our lives, and to make sense of the world around us, has to do with time. You might have seen the article in yesterday’s Globe about how eighteen busy Bostonians save time. And we do try to control our time, to understand it, in some cases to predict it, and in nearly every instance, to master it. We would prefer to make time serve us, instead of, as is so much more often the case, our serving it. Since earliest days, humanity has endeavored to divide time into increments, the better to orchestrate and manipulate it. The ancient Egyptians invented the Nileometer, a crude device for measuring time by gauging the rise and fall of the Nile River; medieval Europeans listened for the bells of the cathedral, which marked the hours - very much the same way our own church bells on Sunday morning awaken the small corner of our world at the junction of Conant and Cabot. And today the digital displays of our clocks wake us up, they brew our coffee, they reheat our leftovers, and ironically they have rendered the notions of “clockwise” and “counter-clockwise” virtually anachronistic!
So there is a tension here. For all the great ideas you and I, and in particular our merchandisers, conceive of to control time, to get the most out of our time, the reality too often turns out to be that our time is controlling us. Our experience is analogous to the football field and the basketball court where the team that is behind late in the contest is “playing against the clock.” We allow time to control us during the week so we can enjoy the weekend, or during the year to earn our vacation, or during our lifetimes to reach retirement. And yet for all our time-saving strategies and devices, it still seems, as every one of us has been heard to lament, that nobody has enough time. How many people cannot make a decision without consulting their calendar, or their Blackberry, or their iTouch? Even as we try to economize and streamline our time and juggle our responsibilities with our desires, we wind up filling in the few blank spaces we have, and discover to our chagrin that we have even less time than we started out with.
“Behold, now is the acceptable time,” the apostle Paul once wrote; “behold, now is the day of salvation.” The Bible makes much of the notion of time, so much, that there are actually multiple words for it. The time we have been talking about so far is called chronos, or chronological time, time which is measured by the hour, the day, the month and the year. There is another kind of time though, which, though less commonplace, is no less familiar to us. In Greek it is called kairos, kairos, or what we might call the “right time;” the favorable, propitious, opportune moment for doing something. An example of this might be the couple who decides that it is time to have a child; presumably, they have not come to this decision by consulting their watch, yet nonetheless, they believe the time is right to begin a family. This is what we mean by the kairos, the appropriate time. Another example might be the old commercials for Miller beer, which managed to squeeze both notions of time into its pitch. Chronologically speaking, after work let’s say, it’s “Miller Time,” time to crack open an ice cold Miller Beer; yet in the broader sense, the commercial also wants us to think that it is always “Miller Time;” that regardless of the hour or the day, the time is right to become a Miller beer drinker. For a Harpoon drinker, this is where the analogy breaks down.
The Bible has many examples of this kind of time, the right time, the appointed time, for every facet of human life, and there is no place where this is more evident than the well-known passage from Ecclesiastes chapter 3 which Brad read for us this morning. “I have seen the business that God has given to his children to be busy with,” the writer declares. “God has made everything beautiful in its time; God also has put eternity into the human mind, yet so that one cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” The right time, we learn, is divinely prescribed. God knows the time to be born and the time to die, the time to weep and the time to laugh, the time for war and the time for peace. “For everything there is a season,” we are told, “and a time for every matter under heaven.”
Even as a document, the Bible leans more toward the notion of the “right” time than it does chronological time. For while it is true that the scriptures are arranged from the creation of the world in Genesis, to the vision of the last days in Revelation, neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament is organized along a strict chronological pattern. The most ancient reference to the creation is found in the book of Jeremiah, which doesn’t appear until nearly two-thirds of the way through the Old Testament. Likewise, Jesus offers a vision of the last days as early as the gospel of Mark, which, although it is the first gospel, still doesn’t appear first in the New Testament. In fact the earliest New Testament book, I Thessalonians, doesn’t show up until nearly two thirds of the way through its particular part of the Bible. The Bible’s concern is not so much with chronological time. The most prevalent use of the notion of time in the scriptures is the kairos, the chairotic moment, the particular, decisive, definitive point in time. Indeed, the Bible betrays little abstract conception of time; in the Bible, time consists of what is contained within it, of what makes up those definitive and decisive times which comprise the important moments of life.
We talked a little about this kind of time at our staff meeting this week, for example, how there can be a time for both weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing together, and Bob Lague hit on a good illustration. Bob raised the idea of what takes place at a funeral, or a memorial service, perhaps because he attended two of them last week. A memorial service usually has its share of weeping and mourning – that’s what it’s for, after all. But a true memorial is also a celebration of life, and very often that celebration brings laughter in its wake. We had some good hearty laughs at Rose Brady’s service a few weeks ago, and one of the reasons is that Rose often brought a smile to our faces. There is a time for weeping and a time for laughing, and occasionally the time is right and ripe for both.
The notion of the chairotic moment can also be seen in what’s been going on in the Middle East of late. Every now and then, history seems to be telling us that the time is ripe for change. We’ve seen it in Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, and who knows where it will strike next? Wisconsin, perhaps. In one sense, we might say that revolution is in the air and its flames are being fanned by the internet. But it is also true that there are times in history when people rise up against oppression. Remember that at the same time the American Revolution was gearing down, the French Revolution was ginning up, and even though a third revolution, the Industrial Revolution, was taking shape at the same time, I don’t think the internet had much to do with any of them. Sometimes the time is simply right.
In John’s gospel Angie described Jesus’ brothers trying to encourage him to put his time to better use, to be bolder in displaying his works, to be more assertive and direct in declaring himself and his mission. They urged him, “Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing; for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world!” But Jesus replied, “My time has not yet come; but your time is always here.” Jesus was waiting for God’s time, for the “right time,” to be fulfilled, and that time had not yet arrived. For his brothers, though, Jesus admitted that their time had indeed come, that the moment was ripe for them to display their own convictions in what Jesus was saying and teaching about God.
And you and I often find ourselves waiting, and truth to tell, not always waiting patiently, for God to get to work. We are anxious for God to do something in our lives - or in someone else’s life. We are eager for God to heal, or to straighten out an unpleasant situation; we don’t see why God should wait to bring peace to our world and to fix broken or displaced lives. But part of this frustration, or impatience, if you will, is because we are dealing with the two different expressions of time we have been talking about this morning: our waiting for God consists of chronological, or measured time - it’s why we wish God would hurry up and do all those things we things God ought to be doing in our world, and in our lives. We feel as though we have waited long enough, and it is high time God acted. But as that well-known passage from Ecclesiastes reminds us, God works in God’s own time, knowing when the right time is to work; and remember that even when it comes to all those nasty things we especially wish God would remedy, things like war and hate and killing and death - Ecclesiastes reminds us that these, too have their time, as little as you or I may like it. There is a time for every matter under heaven. We need to remember that God will take God’s own time regardless of what our watches, analogue or digital, might want to tell us.
And like Jesus’ well-meaning companions in John’s gospel, if all we’re doing is sitting around waiting for God to do something, we may well be missing our own opportunity to seize the time. “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here.” While we’re waiting for God to do God’s good work, there is a lot of good work you and I can be doing in the meantime.
I think this is what Augustine meant, who wrote that the only significant time is the present, the “now.” The past does not exist except as we call it to memory, Augustine wrote, and the future exists only as we predict or envision it in the present. And it may be part of what Bertrand Russell said, when he later agreed that we may not confuse memory or envisioning with the past or the future themselves, since it is the present that really counts. And who knows, it may even be what the immortal Charlie Parker was trying to get at, whose signature tune, “Now’s The Time,” musically incorporates the chairotic with the chronological. And I think it is clear this is what Paul meant, who summed it all up when he wrote to the Corinthians, “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” Which in a sense means it doesn’t matter if the sermon goes over twenty minutes or the church service goes over an hour, because you can’t put a stopwatch on God’s Holy Spirit. What gives meaning to this moment, to any moment, is when you and I seize upon it because it is indeed the right time.
Let us pray.
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