Calgary First Mennonite Church

Keeping Track of the Time

Written by Ed Kauffman

Keeping Track of the Time

Advent I, November 28, 2010

Time!  We all wish we had more of it, or that it went by slower, or maybe we wish it would go by faster.  On one of my canoe trips we got into a little game where someone would mention a word, and we’d see how many songs we could name that had that word in the title or verse. 

Time, time, time, see what’s become of me

Time won’t let me

Time is on my side

No time left for me

Time has come today

To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven

For we know that when time and the world pass away

Or here’s another interesting exercise.  How many clocks do you have in your house?  Or maybe today we should say, time-keeping devices.  Just try counting them up.   I was at Rudy’s house the other day, and I don’t think he can even begin to count the number there.  But don’t forget the computers, and phones, and appliances that keep time.  As I thought about this I realized that when I’m in my office, there are five different ways I can tell the time.  The computer, the desk phone, a desk clock, as well as my wristwatch and my cell phone.  Of  course, we all know that the more clocks you have, the more likely you are to not know exactly what time it is.

And time carries various meanings for people.  Perhaps you know the story of the little boy who invited his friend to church.  The friend was interested in all the symbols of the church and the little boy was explaining what each thing meant.  Eventually the pastor got up to preach, and took his watch off and laid it on the pulpit.  “What does that mean?” asked the friend.  “Oh,” the little boy replied, “that doesn’t mean a thing!”

Since the beginning of time as we know it, humankind has been aware of time and has tried to come to terms with it.  Probably the earliest humans measured time simply the way it’s recorded in Genesis – morning and evening, a day.  Time related to the universe.  People began to notice the movement of the stars, the phases of the moon, the solstices.  Stonehenge, while probably not a calendar in and of itself, clearly was arranged to mark the summer and winter solstices.  By 4500 BC the Egyptians had developed a calendar that would help them know when the Nile would flood, and by 2770 BC they knew a year was 365 days long.

By 2000 BC the Babylonians had divided a day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes, and each minutes into 60 seconds.  Of course, measuring those units also created a challenge, and so sundials, water clocks, and sand hourglasses were devised to measure time.  Mechanical clocks were probably introduced in China, but it wasn’t until the 14^th century that clocks took a real leap in consistent measurement with the invention of the verge escapement and became as we know them.  The Strasbourg Cathedral clock, built first around 1352, was an example of such a clock.  It ran for 150 years before it wore out, and was then replaced by the current one in 1571. (One of the pictures you’ll see) It’s a marvel showing not only time, but the position of the planets, eclipses, constellations and so forth.  Time was seen as a property of the universe and the movement of the solar system.  We still retain some of that view.  Do you know when Easter is each year?  It’s the first Sunday after the first full moon that occurs on or after the vernal equinox.

Eventually Galileo, and then Newton, made claims that time was, in fact, a mathematical given, based on laws of the universe, separate from the movement of the stars, etc.  And so we have Newton’s laws of motion and thermodynamics.  Their ideas were not without controversy, and even the church fought some of them for a long time. But eventually their theories seemed to be proven right, and from that developed even more exact measures of time, and even smaller units – nanoseconds, etc., so that now we talk of atomic time, use crystals to measure time and so forth.  And with that, time went digital so there are people today who don’t really know what a clock face looks like, let alone knowing how to read one.  Of course, Einstein then blew Newton’s laws out of the water when he suggested that time is not a constant, but that time would actually slow down as one approached the speed of light.  E=mc² And if you want to know more about all that, I have a great book I’ll be glad to loan you.

And yet, for all the scientific advancement in measuring time, and for all the instruments we have to measure time, we are perhaps no further ahead in understanding exactly what time is.  We may feel a bit like St. Augustine at the end of the 4^th century who said, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.” 

Well, you may be asking, what does all this have to do with our Scriptures, or with Advent?  The writers of our Advent worship materials this year have asked us to focus on time. But they note, there are two kinds of time.  The time I have been talking about is often referred to as chronos time. The time we measure with clocks, sundials, and crystals – chronometers, like you see in the pictures.  We seem obsessed in some ways with chronos time.  We look at our watches, or cell phones to see if we’re late, or early, or how long the sermon might go yet.

But our Scripture passages speak of a different time, often called Kairos.  Isaiah says, “In the days to come…”  Matthew says, “of that day or hour, no one knows.”  Or again, “you do not know on what day your Lord is coming…for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”  Other Biblical writers speak of things happening in “the fullness of time”.  Perhaps visually that’s more like Salvador Dali’s paintings of watches. 

And then we’re told to “Be ready!”  How can we be ready when we don’t know for what time we’re supposed to be ready.  When we had our house on the market to sell, we had to constantly be ready to show it to prospective buyers, and we got really tired of that.  It seemed you could never get anything done, because you had to be ready.

And if that goes on too long, eventually you give up, become a bit sloppy or really don’t care any more.  So it feels like you’re either in a panic, or you dismiss it and ignore what’s coming.  How are we to be ready when the vision of Isaiah, of a world where justice and peace prevail seems like a pipe-dream, and Matthew just seems to be like one of those cartoon characters you see carrying a sign that says, “The world will end at 10 AM, 10:30 in Newfoundland.”   I recall people telling of how they heard this passage from Matthew as children and were scared to sleep in the same bed as their brother or sister, worried that they would be the one left. 

What does it mean to be ready? To wait?  How shall we view time during this Advent season?  We mark Advent as the four Sundays prior to Christmas, on December 25.  Those are dates set in chronos time, but how do we measure Kairos time?  How do we prepare for an unexpected hour?  One image that might be helpful is that of pregnancy.  After all, Advent is about the birth of a child.  We, Gay and I, are waiting for the birth of a granddaughter.  We know it will happen sometime around Christmas or New Years.  We know it will happen, at some point.  But exactly when we will get that call, we don’t know, nor do the parents.  Granted, as grandparents we don’t have much preparation to do, but our son and daughter-in-law have been preparing, getting a room ready, preparing the twins for a sister, making arrangements for when the time comes.   In some ways already acting as though the baby were already here.

And, indeed, that’s the way we are called to spend this time.  A time that is different than what we measure with our clocks.  One of the writers notes that the term “wait” actually derives from a German word that refers to a watchman, one who stays awake to keep an eye on things, to prepare for an arrival.  And so, the church is called to be a “wait”, a group of people who keep awake the hope of Christ’s return and who begin to live now as though the vision of Isaiah were already a reality.  For we do believe that this Jesus, the baby whose birth we await during this season did, indeed, usher in a new era, a new time when Isaiah’s vision is coming to pass.  And if we take the time, we can see those places where people are living in peace. 

The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.  Is that only something that will happen once at some future time, or does it also happen innumerable times every day?  Do we expect to see it, or do we have such a fixed idea of exactly how and when it will be that we will miss it?  Over the centuries many people have set dates and made predictions about Christ’s coming.  But those were all set in chronos time.  What if Christ only comes to us in Kairos time, in the fullness of time?  Are we willing to operate in God’s time?  And are we preparing?

One of the practices of Wilderness Wind, the camp I go canoeing with, is that when we go out into the wilderness on a canoe trip, we leave all our watches and timepieces behind.  (Unfortunately most digital cameras have built in clocks, so it’s hard to enforce this, but not everyone thinks of that.)  And it’s amazing to me how hard that is for many people.  How much we are tied to the clock, to keeping strict track of our time, even when it really doesn’t make any difference – like when you’re canoeing, or when you’re at church!

During this advent season, we are being encouraged to open our eyes to God’s time and to see those places where Christ is coming among us even now.  As you’ve already experienced, there will be times of silence ushered in by the ringing of a bell.  We are encouraged to relax the hold chronos time has on us, and experience what life is like without the tyranny of the clock.  Perhaps we can’t do that in everything, people still expect us to show up on time for work or at meetings, but perhaps we needn’t fill our whole day with things to do.  Or perhaps we can do some things that begin to show that Christ is present among us, calling us to be that “one people” of Isaiah’s vision.  We’ve asked a number of people to share their experiences of that during these weeks as well.

We live in the in-between time.  Jesus came proclaiming that the Kingdom of God has come near.  We believe that it came with the birth of the Messiah, fulfilling God’s promises through the prophets.  But it has not come in its fullness, in its entirety.  And so we wait.  We wait in preparation for that coming, and we wait as people already experiencing and putting into practice what we believe the Kingdom calls us to.  We wait, not only marking time on our watches and calendars, but also waiting in God’s time, for those “days to come”, for that unexpected hour when Christ will come, in ways we expect, and in ways that may take us by surprise.

I invite you to join in singing a song that expresses the idea of the both /and of Christ’s coming, number 135 in the green Sing and Rejoice book.  “When He Comes Back”