Don Friesen
"Time like an ever-rolling stream soon bears us all away." So wrote Isaac Watts (1674-1748) three centuries ago. (1719; "O God, Our Help in Ages Past," Hymnal: A Worship Book, #328)
It's almost a decade since my father passed on, and although he enjoyed ninety-some years on this earth, it was his sincere hope that there was more to come. He expected more and he expected it to be better! One of his favourite passages of Scripture was the promise in the Gospel of John, "In my Father's house are many mansions: ...I go to prepare a place for you" (John 14:2, KJV), but my father was quite annoyed when modern translations downgraded the promise of mansions to mere "rooms". (14:2, RSV; NIV; PHL)
As a youth, I dismissed my father's expectant hope as nothing but "pie-in-the-sky," but when I think about it, I like pie! And after several reminders of my own mortality, I too would like to think that there's more to existence than this brief sojourn on earth.
My father was born when radio was in its infancy, and he may have heard Fred Allen (1894-1956), one of the reigning wits of radio when he said, "You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough." Perhaps but the Scriptures say otherwise and the word I have chosen for the letter, "E," is the word, "eternal life".
The Bible's E-list: E is not for Evil, Enemies, or Envy
It's time to get back to my series of alphabetical sermons after the Christmas break and speaking of Christmas, do you know the difference between the Christmas alphabet and the ordinary alphabet? The Christmas alphabet has No "L" Noel!
There are a lot of E-words in the Bible, and among its negative words is one of the most negative of all biblical words, the word, "evil," and its derivatives evil-tongued, evil-doing, evildoers! The Scriptures also feature "enemies," "earthquakes," "error," "excess," "enmity," "estrangement," and "envy". And, of course, no Old Testament Hebrew could forget the word, "exile".
Some of the interesting words of the Bible's E-list is its long, long list of names. It appears that in biblical times you were nothing if your name didn't start with an E! Other interesting E-words include "earrings," "eggs," "embarrass(ing)," and "embalming".
I could have chosen words like "exodus" or "election" or "encouragement," but one of the more frequent, positive E-words is the word translated as "eternal life". The Greek and Hebrew words for "eternal life," "eternal," and "eternity" occur about 150 times in the Scriptures.
Biblical References to Eternity and Time
All three synoptic Gospels tell the story of the man who came to Jesus and asked, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" (Mark 10:17; Matthew 19:16; Luke 10:25) There are references to "eternal life" throughout the New Testament, but the Gospel of John is especially fond of the word. Most of us know the verse from John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." (John 3:16) Those were Jesus' words to Nicodemus. To a Samaritan woman he met at a well he said, "those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." (John 4:14)
The disciple, Peter, said to Jesus, "You have the words of eternal life." (John 6:68) And Jesus said of those who followed him, ""I give them eternal life, and they will never perish." (John 10:28), or as another translation renders it, "I give them eternal life, and they shall never die." (TEV)
In our reading from the New Testament book of Titus, Paul speaks of our "hope of eternal life that God, who never lies, promised before the ages began...." (Titus 1:2) Or, again, as another translation has it, "the hope of eternal life, which God ...promised before the beginning of time...." (NIV)
I don't know about you, but when I think too long about concepts like eternity and time, my mind begins to boggle! If "eternity" is a biblical word for baffling times, I find the word itself baffling! When I looked up "eternal life" in my Bible Dictionary, it said, "See Life,'" which seems an even vaguer concept. It may be that poets, physicists, and others with a talent for abstraction can wrap their minds around the concept of eternity, but despite Ruth Wilson's uncle's best efforts to teach me high school physics, my facility for abstraction is limited. I was much more taken with the young woman sitting two seats down from me in physics class.
I find the biblical concepts of eternity and time difficult to understand. When the psalmist says that "a thousand years in (God's) sight are like yesterday when it is past" (Psalm 90:4), I think I know what is meant, but I'm not altogether sure. It's a little like disappearing down a rabbit-hole!
If I want to learn the language of the Bible, however, I need to think about biblical expressions of time, like the New Testament's talk about God's "plan for the fullness of time" (Ephesians 1:10) or the notion of Jesus existing prior to the beginning of time. (John 1) "Prior to the beginning of time" now, there's something to keep your mind circling itself for a while! To which the New Testament adds another layer of bafflement, that Jesus "is the same yesterday and today and forever." (Hebrews 13:8) I think that means that Jesus is unchanging, but's it's a curious mixture of allusions to time the present time, and "forever" time.
The New Testament refers to God as the "King of the ages" (1 Timothy 1:17), similar to the reference in one of our hymns to Christ as the potentate of time". ("Crown him with many Crowns," Hymnal: A Worship Book, #116) The prophet Isaiah talks of God as "the First and Last" (Isaiah 41:4; 44:6; 48:12), and our reading from Revelation speaks of God as "the Alpha and the Omega, ...who is and who was and who is to come," (Revelation 1:8; 21:6), "the beginning and the end". (Revelation 21:6)
I'm very fond of Frederick Buechner's writings, but when he tries to explain eternity, it just may take me that long to understand what he is saying. Buechner says that "eternity is not endless time or the opposite of time. It is the essence of time." He says that if you "spin a pinwheel fast enough, all its colours blend into a single colour white which is the essence of all the colours of the spectrum combined." And that if you "spin time fast enough, time-past, time-present, and time-to-come all blend into a single timelessness or eternity, which is the essence of all times combined." ("Eternity," Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith, page 100) If you understand that and no doubt some of you do then one of you should be preaching this sermon.
The Wrecks and Wrinkles of Time
I'll tell you what I do understand, and that is the casualties of time. One of our hymns uses a similar expression, saying:
("In the Cross of Christ I Glory," Hymnal: A Worship Book, #566)
If you've read Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, you will remember that when Gulliver was washed ashore in the land of Lilliput, the king of Lilliput sent his little Lilliputian investigators to search Gulliver's pockets. They found three items of particular interest. One was a huge carpet, large enough to cover the floor of the Lilliputian royal hall, which turned out to be Gulliver's handkerchief. The second item was described as a mighty beam with poles distended from it; this was Gulliver's comb. The third item, however, was the most baffling. The diminutive investigators reported a great engine that made a noise like a waterfall and had an invisible partition which kept them from examining the monstrous figures on its face. It was Gulliver's pocket watch, but in their report they called it Gulliver's god because he checked it often for guidance.
The tyranny of time. I read of an author who is reputed to have written one article with his right hand, another with his left, while dictating a third to his secretary, and in order to make the most of his time he rocked his child's cradle with his foot! I have my doubts about the story's authenticity, but it illustrates our struggle to get everything done within a set time.
We are much given to measuring time and marking time, but time has wrinkles. 12 o'clock in Ottawa is not 12 o'clock in Hong Kong, and we have one of our fellow citizens to thank for dividing the world into the twenty-four time zones we use today. His name was Sir Sandford Fleming (1827-1915), and in 1879 he recommended the establishment of Universal Standard Time to the Royal Canadian Institute; it was adopted universally only five years later (1884). Quite an achievement in itself, but Sir Sandford also found time to design a prototype of an in-line skate and Canada's first adhesive postage stamp (Threepenny Beaver, 1851)! Perhaps he also rocked his child's cradle with his foot!
Many, many people have found their life's work in marking time, and to that end we have no less than about 400 calendars, some more precise than others, but all trying to mark in some way the irregularities of the earth's rotation on its axis, the moon's rotation around the earth, the earth around sun, and so on. Calendars are as interesting as alphabets, and measuring the passage of time has challenged human civilizations for thousands of years. ("Friday the 13th and the Mathematics of the Gregorian Calendar," by Richard W. Beveridge, University of Maine, 2003)
Quantities, and a Quality of Time
The Scriptures recognize that human beings are subject to time. We are limited by time in the cycle of birth, life, and death. We bear the marks of time in the aging process; I had many reminders of that over the Christmas holidays as my children chided me for being so deaf! The Scriptures recognize that the span of life is brief and passing. "What are human beings that you regard them, or mortals that you think of them? They are like a breath; their days are like a passing shadow." (Psalm 144:3-4) "The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then ...they are soon gone," says the psalmist. (Psalm 90:10)
But the promise of our faith is that into this passing shadowy life God brings the perspective and the reality of eternity! The Scriptures recognize that we are bound by quantities of time, but it also suggests that there are different qualities of time. We experience time differently at different times. Engraved on a clock in the North Transept of England's Chester Cathedral, itself a place of worship for over a thousand years, is the poem:
(Attributed to Henry Twells, 1823-1900)
Time is subject to interpretation and perspective, like the country-and-western singer who sings, "You're not the has-been you used to be." Stephen Hawking, the brilliant physicist who wrote A Brief History of Time, is an avid fan of The Simpsons and has made appearances on the show. He likes to attend table readings the cartoon equivalent of a dress rehearsal and one day was upwards of thirty minutes late to the rehearsal. As the other actors were sitting around waiting for Hawking, one of the actors looked at his watch and said: "Does the man have no concept of time?"
Madeleine L'Engle wrote a children's story entitled, A Wrinkle in Time, about a scientist working on an invention that could bend time, suggesting that there is a spiritual dimension in which time is not held hostage by the human mind. It calls upon the imagination to glimpse another dimension of reality.
The Scriptures, in fact, use two different Greek words to speak of time the word, chronos, from which we derive the word, "chronology," and the word, "kairos," for which no English words were ever coined! Chronos is wristwatch time; kairos is God's time. Chronos is measurable, quantitative time, whereas kairos could be thought of as timely time, or timeliness.
The Bible recognizes chronos-time. "Teach us to number our days, ...that we may gain a heart of wisdom," says our psalm. (Psalm 90:12, NIV) And Jesus himself asked, "Are there not twelve hours in the day?" (John 11:9, RSV) The Bible recognizes chronos-time, but kairos-time is different. It refers to a decisive moment in time, when God breaks into the mundane sequence of minutes and hours and affects it at a deep and profound level. In that moment you know that something has changed, something has been learned, something is new, something happened that infused that moment with a touch of the eternal. In other words, there's ordinary time, and then there are extraordinary times, holy moments in time.
Chronos-time wrist-watch time is a time to which we can attach a date: October 11, 1959 but kairos-time has to do with the meaning of that date, in this case the day that a handful of families decided to start this church.
Kairos-time takes place in chronos-time, but it calls for being in the present with an awareness of God, who is timeless, who is eternal, who transcends measurable time and is the Lord of time.
Our reading from the book of Titus is an example of using both words, both concepts; it reads: "Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, ...in the hope of eternal life that God ...promised before the ages began" where Paul uses the word, "chronos" "in due time" and here he uses the word, "kairos" "he revealed his word...." (Titus 1:1-3)
In other words, kairos is an opportune time, what the Scriptures also refer to as the "fullness of time" (Galatians 4:4; Ephesians 1:10), or what theologian Paul Tillich refers to as existential time: "a breakthrough of one time into the other ...the irruption of eternity into time, ...an addition to and a fulfilment of time."
Kairos-time is a special time, the right time. We can spend a lot of chronological time together, but when God finally gets through to us, it becomes a kairos moment, kairos-time, prime time. For C.S. Lewis, the creator of the Narnia tales, prime time was a carriage ride from one end of a campus to the other end. And by the time the carriage reached the other end, C.S. Lewis believed in Christ. A breakthrough! A kairos moment.
William Willimon tells of lecturing in West Germany in 1989 and meeting a Duke University student who was spending the year in Germany. They talked about the situation in East Germany and the student said, "I was talking with this girl I met in a bar in Leipzig who told me that she expects East Germany to fall within the next few weeks."
"What?" asked Willimon in astonishment. He told her that he had been meeting with professors in two distinguished German universities and they were unanimous in thinking that nothing was going to change in Germany within the next decade! The young woman persisted, but Willimon told her, "By your Junior Year I hope that you will get more accurate information than that to be derived from random people in bars." Willimon tells this story with some self-deprecation, for two weeks later he turned on the news and the Berlin wall had fallen!
Some moments are pregnant with change and paradigm shifts and all sorts of other deep and profound stuff. It is the type of moment of which Shakespeare wrote:
(Julius Caesar)
Believers Share a Quality of the Eternal
Why is the concept of eternity and eternal life important to us? It is a very lofty idea for which there may be no immediate application, but it is an important idea. The early centuries of Christianity witnessed a series of bad emperors who chose to focus their fury on Christians. The emperor Domitian (51-96) tried his best to annihilate the Christian Church, but he failed. In time, in fact, he came to marvel at Christians and noted that they probably could never be extinguished because "they have in them a quality of the eternal."
That's a wonderful tribute to Christian faith, but then we follow one who is eternal, yet who emptied himself and came among us as one of us. In Jesus God gave us a glimpse of eternity eternity-in-time. He is the one who broke down the barrier between time and eternity, the one over whom the limits of time death and decay had no power.
To have "a quality of the eternal" means that we are not mere victims of passing time; we are participants in God's purpose, contributing to the well-being of others, ourselves, and all of God's creation. This is why we belong to a community of faith; it's a place and a time to nurture a perspective that transcends the "wrecks of time". It's a time and place where we learn to look beyond the immediate, where we learn to identify that which transcends the trends and fancies of this month, this year, or this decade. We come together in worship and study in order to attune ourselves to the eternal purpose of God and claim the promise of eternal life.
"In the cross of Christ I glory,
Yet another hymn asks, "O where are kings and empires now of old that went and came?" (Mennonite Hymnal, #378) There are the wrecks of civilizations past on the larger landscape of time, and there are also wrecks and casualties strewn about on smaller units of time. All of us feel the limits and pressures of time. I don't have enough time to do this or that. I ran out of time to finish my assignment. It's about time, we say to someone who probably already missed the deadline. We have all sorts of books and gurus advising us to use time wisely time management and all that so as to find relief from the tyranny of time.
Tow'ring o'er the wrecks of time."
"When, as a child, I laughed and wept, Time crept.
Saint Augustine said, "If nobody asks me what time is, I know; if I want to explain it to anyone who asks me, I am at a loss." Even aside from all the problems of measurement and such, there is a subjective dimension to time. For example, if you say to your loved one, Your face makes time stand still, he or she will take it as a compliment; but if you say, Your face could stop a clock, it's not at all the same thing!
When, as a youth, I dreamed and talked, Time walked.
When I became a full-grown man, Time ran.
And later, as I older grew, Time flew.
Soon I shall find, while traveling on, Time gone.
Will Christ have saved my soul by then?"
"There comes a tide in the affairs of men,
Kairos is the name of one of the Greek gods the god of opportunity and according to Greek mythology this god was completely bald except for one lock of hair on his forehead. The importance of his forelock was that the only way a human being could lay hold of Kairos was to grab him by that lock of hair! You had to be ready for him alert to his presence and ready to seize the moment!
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune...."
All quotations of Scripture, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.