Sacred Time

Ecclesiastes 3:1-15, Ephesians 5:15-20

August 16, 2009

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

I am celebrating a birthday this week, an interesting week for me to think about sacred time. From the time we are small children, we mark time in our lives by birthdays and anniversaries, remembering the passage of time by what events happened in what years. “Oh, that was the year Scott got married” or “that was the year we moved to Hamden.” Or anticipating what will happen at what age “That’s the year I’ll learn how to drive!” Often I will talk about the year of my birth by referring to other things that happened that year: the launch of the satellite Sputnik, the publication of the The Cat in the Hat, the debut of the United Church of Christ. Or I’ll talk about other people born on my birthday, like Bill Clinton. There’s even a Facebook app that lets you see who else was born on your birthday. The marking of time is important to us.

“In the year that King Uzziah died” is when we are told the prophet Isaiah had a vision. “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent to a town in Galilee called Nazareth” and visited a young woman named Mary. “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed, this happened when Quirinius was governor of Syria” is when we are told Jesus was born. Again and again in the scriptures when something important happens we are often given some kind of marker to determine when in history or when on a yearly calendar this all took place. It’s sort of like all those dates and kings we had to memorize when we learned history in high school; it’s important to locate the events of human history in regard to specific dates and times because those are ways we tell what is true. This is not “once upon a time,” which is our childhood cue to know a fairy tale when it comes our way. Fairy tales may be true on one level, but we quickly learn they are not factual. So when the writers of the Bible want to signal that something really happened, they give us a historical marker to know it by.

It was and is very important to the Abrahamic faith traditions that God acted and acts in history in very specific times and places. Think about it. In most of the other religious traditions of the world past and present outside the three Abrahamic faiths, events and stories happen in some sort of time outside of human time. They are, as it were, “timeless” stories like the tales of the Greek gods and heroes. But for us and our Muslim and Jewish kin, one very important piece of the nature of God is that God acts with specificity in the lives of real people who can be located in human history at very specific times. Jesus is not some amorphous hero like Hercules or the offspring of capricious Gods like Helen of Troy. He was born when Augustus was the Roman Emperor and Quirinius the local Roman ruler. Each of the prophets is located in a historical context. The great and mighty God does not act only on a grand scale outside our time, but sees our time as sacred, too. We read the Bible so that we can discern how the Spirit might move in our specific lives and our times by discerning how people of the past saw God acting in their specific lives and times. We try to join our “chronos” (the Greek word for the human way of marking time with years, months, days and hours) with the stories of others in past times in the church not as a Facebook game, but as one way of connecting with a God who acts in the time we know.

Paul writes to the Ephesians that they are to “make the most of the time.” The Christian faith is not a religious tradition which primarily focuses on getting out of ourselves or having ecstatic experiences, but a tradition in which we are called to live as disciples of God in real time, specific time, chronos. The hours, days, weeks, months and years that are ours, no matter how long they are, no matter what period of human history they cover, are given to us as time for the Spirit to be at work in us, moving us to sing, to praise and worship God, to give thanks, and to build relationships of love, compassion, hospitality and peace with each other, making the most of whatever time we are in, whatever time we have. As Gandalf said to Frodo, “All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us.”

But now I want you to do something for me, for there is also another kind of time spoken of in Scripture and lived by God and those who love God. I want you to find any device you have which keeps time in any way and turn it off or put it where you can’t see it: watches, cell phones, IPods, Blackberries, whatever has a clock or calendar or both. Okay, now sit quiet for a bit and don’t think about what time it is or what you have to do when today.

There is another figure of speech throughout the scriptures that gets at what the writer of Ecclesiastes was trying to explain by saying “That which is already has been; that which is to be already is, and God seeks out what has gone by.” Often in the Bible you will hear something like “the time is fulfilled,” or “the time is at hand,” or “the year of the Lord is near,” or “at the right time.” The word for time in all those places in the Greek New Testament is not chronos, but kairos. Kairos is God’s time, time out of time, non-linear time, the kind of time expressed in the very name God gave Moses for God: a Hebrew verb that could mean “I am who I am,” or “I was who I was” or “I will be who I will be.” C. S. Lewis in the Narnia tales was trying to get at this kind of time, for when the children went to Narnia it seemed to them that hours or days or even years passed, but when they returned to England in the 1940’s, no chronological time had passed at all. God is not trapped by the limited way our brains and bodies experience time, and so, as the writer of Ecclesiastes says, we “cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” In fact when the writer of the book of Revelation envisions Jesus saying, “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” (the beginning and the end) he was getting at the same truth, for if Jesus encompasses all the alphabet (Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and Omega is the last), then he has no beginning or end, for letters combine endlessly to form words; each word or sentence we write does not start at A and stop at Z but the order of letters is an arbitrary list to help us remember them by. Imagine letters swirling above our head, joining into words like some cosmic Scrabble board or Bananagrams game, more words than we know in every language, swirling and moving and not bound by paper or screens or the time it takes to read or speak them.

We might equally say Jesus is 11pm and 12 am. Or Jesus is January and December. God acts in our time, but is not limited to it or by it. God does not act in time according to our ideas about what should happen when, something Jesus tried to get across to all of those folk who wanted a calendar date for his return. “At the right time” is when things will happen, in God’s kairos. In the meantime, we are to make the most of time, as Paul wrote, enjoying our work and worship and relationships, as the writer of Ecclesiastes wrote.

This can be frustrating in the extreme sometimes. Anyone who has ever waited to meet the one to be their life partner, or waited to discern the call for their life’s work or waited for the Spirit to make clear to them a sense of God’s guidance on anything knows what it means to wait in real time for the “right time” to be, waiting in chronos for the kairos. Once when one of our children asked why we were so much older than other parents when we adopted him, we told him that we were waiting for him to be born. Sounds easy now, but it wasn’t in those years of waiting.

So, friends, one of the gifts of a regular chronos time of worship for us is to practice living in kairos. We worship for lots of reasons, and one of them has to do with learning to step out of time. You do not need to learn Buddhist meditation practices to do this, though that has a similar result. In our lives, God meets us in our time, in the specificity of the work of the Spirit in history and in our stories. In worship we take time to meet God in God’s time, outside of our time. How do we do this? Listen to old words and new words and let them swirl like alpha and omega in your head and take you to another place and time to see how God was and is and will be. Lose yourself in music or a beautiful space and so be joined to the source and best example of all beauty. Let silences act as conduits to empty the anxieties and plans in your heads to make space/time for God. Let the building of relationships here, which takes time, lead you closer to God. Let it be one time in your week when you are not controlled by a clock or calendar or schedules or what other people say you should be doing with your time. In one of my favorite quotes, one that I use a lot because I’m still trying to learn what it means, the White Rabbit says to Alice in Wonderland, “Don’t just do something, stand there.” That is Sabbath: God’s time.

So, yes, Paul, we know we need to make the most of the sacred time we are given. We also know we need to step out of that time every once in a while in order to connect with God in another kind of sacred time long enough to know how to make the most of it. This is that time. Don’t get out your watches or turn on your various devices at least until you leave this place, and preferably not until the sun sets on this Sabbath, for connecting with God usually takes more than an hour and 15 minutes! Today, just stand there; tomorrow, make the most of the time God gives to you. Amen.