Do you know what time it is?
Trick question. Because I’m not just asking if you can read
your watch. Time has a very different meaning depending on the situation and
the people.
Today, for example. It’s the first Sunday of Advent. Which is
the first Sunday of the new liturgical year. HAPPY NEW YEAR! Now, in the
church, we know this. But if we were to run in the streets yelling happy new
year, a good number of people in town might wonder just how much communion wine
we go through… so the way we as the church mark the time of a year’s start and
finish is different from what we might consider ‘normal’ based on the Gregorian,
or Western, calendar, when New Year is January first. But this is also
different from our Jewish brothers and sisters, who this year (which is 5773,
not 2012) started on 17 September. And our Chinese brothers and sisters will
have their New Year begin on 10 February. Hmm.
Different traditions break up time into different categories.
We’re used to 12 months fitting in a year of 365.25 days (yes, a quarter day –
hence leap years). The months are 28, 30, or 31 days long. Our calendar, however, used to follow a year
of 13 months, each of 28 days. Other traditions have months of varying lengths –
the Jewish calendar follows a lunar schedule, which means that some years have
12 months and others have 13. It’s a complicated system that follows a 19-year
cycle – interesting, and different.
How we consider a simple day is also different – we have our
24 hours, each of 60 minutes, and the day starts at midnight. Yet our ancestors
considered the day to begin at Sundown. Some communities consider sunrise to be
the start of the day.
You get the idea. “What time is it?” can be a fairly loaded
question.
How we mark the passing of time can be also confusing and
complex. Yes, we could define time as the numbered qualities that we assign to
them. The hand on the clock ticks sixty times in one minute, the minute hand
sixty times in one hour, the hour hand 24 times in one day. Easy. But we of
course know that while these numbers may be the same, how we use them is
variable.
Sometimes time will pass by very slowly –time is crawling, we
might say. It’s as though those clock hands aren’t moving at all. Times when we’re in the dentist’s chair. When
we’re watching that pot waiting for it to boil. When the car hits a patch of
ice and we’re not sure what will happen next. Ugh; time slows right down.
At other occasions, our perception is that time is moving
that slowly but in a good way – as though the entire universe is being captured
in a perfect moment and we try to draw it out as long as possible. Times like
seeing earth for the first time from space, hearing the first laugh of a
newborn baby, watching the sun set in the field on a summers’ day.
At certain moments, time seems to be doing exactly the
opposite – it seems to speed up and almost race out of control – I heard a film
character once suggest that time is a fire in which we burn – fast,
uncontrollable. A great day out with a
friend that is over too soon; a field needing to be plowed even after the sun
has gone down, last moments with a loved one as they are nearing death.
Time. It’s a temporal measurement. It’s history and
perspective. It’s “a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us
to cherish every moment, because it will never come again.”[1] It’s
confusing. It’s not always a straight line.
One of my favourite clips from a TV show demonstrates that even an
expert has trouble defining time: “People assume that time is a strict
progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear,
non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y
wimey... stuff.”[2]
I like to think that it’s that time-y wimey stuff that proves
that not all time can be measured on a watch or a calendar. Because, I believe
there are some times that move from the CHRONOS – that linear time – to the
KAIROS – the divine time. This signifies
the right or opportune moment. This makes time qualitative, not
quantitative.
And this is the type of time that we’re invited to consider
during Advent. Our reading today tells us to get ready for the time is near. The
signs are here, we just need to keep watching and interpreting them. But that’s
hard to do – it’s hard enough sometimes to recognise the signs in the physical,
chronological sense, with our day timers and watches – this is why we have
alarm clocks and egg timers and books to write down appointment times. So how
are we supposed to be alert and prepared for something without a set date? How do we interpret into the Kairos, the God-time?
Jesus is coming, we know this – and we’re meant to be ready – but how do we
prepare?
This is the challenge. When we are caught in the chronos, we
can get ready. We can do the cooking and cleaning and grooming and all that,
because we plan in reverse time: if a guest is coming at 5, we need the supper
in the oven at 4, the house cleaned at 3, etc. But we don’t know the arrival
time for the second coming of Christ. And so we have to prepare without the
counting back. We have to try to realise that our preparations are not meant to
be specially done for one occasion, but rather an ongoing process so that we
are alert at all times. This doesn’t mean preparing a physical space at all
times – no one could continually be dusting or vacuuming. But it means
preparing our hearts and souls at all times – through prayer and meditation and
living out our faith. It means that our spiritual journey is one that is meant
to go on, until the second coming.
It’s not easy to continue to do something – even something
that we love to do. We get distracted, we get bored, we move on to other
things. When we get called back to the task at hand we can eagerly return, but
it takes time and practice to stay at it. Yet so long as we are consistently
trying to return, we are consistently showing our commitment to the
process. And we will struggle as we try
to interpret how God will break forth into our world, into our understanding of
time, knowing that our understanding of time – long times, short times, time
that flew by or stood still – is no longer of consequence as the world enters
the reality of God’s time. It’s humbling to realise that our time is but a speck
in the vast expanse of eternity – as John Donne said in our recent bible study:
“eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short
parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though
time had never been.” Eternity is not just a collection of pieces of time, it
is too vast. Time is a section that embraces the tiniest moment of eternity. Our
time, chronos, is that tiny speck in God’s time, Kairos; we are privileged to
be a part of it but we don’t control how it will progress.
So we are challenged to be ready in this moment. Ready to be
embraced by the Kairos moment when God breaks into our time. Ready when we are
invited to celebrate that the Kingdom is not just near, but here. Ready to move
from time to eternity, from darkness to light, from the worries of this life to
the glories of the next.
So this Advent, I invite you to ponder – do you know what
time it is? For me, it’s time to get ready.
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