Lyrics of the classic rock group Chicago, asked:
“Does anybody really know what
time it is?”
Time is the context of everything that happens.
So how we relate to time, how we experience time itself,
colors our
view of life.
Chicago said we are disconnected
from time and
that’s why we run
from place to
place not knowing where we are going.
In 1994, Hootie and the Blowfish
revisited the subject.
They regarded time as a corrosive, corrupting
agent of death
and loss, something to be defied,
so they sang,
“I don’t believe in time.”
Angst over time
appears in pop culture
from Paul
Simon to rapper Flava Flave;
and literary masters from Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot
have shared
their struggle.
People are not at ease with time.
That is why they spend so much energy and money killing it.
You can witness the brutal murder of time
at video poker machines,
in front of televisions,
or with
a little chemical help at bars.
Nothing wrong with any of that in itself.
The problem is that time is making people nervous,
so they are
killing it – even though their lives
are
made out of time,
so to kill
time is a form of slow suicide.
Back in my Buddhist days, I made a careful study of time.
I watched it pass with as much precision as I could muster,
watched each
moment, breath by breath.
I got to know what a moment looks like.
And that is why I find Paul so fascinating.
Paul had a unique perspective on time.
He believed we live in a kind of temporal paradox
called “the
already, not yet.”
In today’s lesson, he says to the Romans,
“you know what
time it is;
it is the time for you to wake
from sleep.”
Paul sensed in the “already/not yet” paradox of each moment
a spiritual urgency that rang
like an alarm clock.
If we can get Paul’s sense of time,
it may help us
wake up.
So please bear with me
as we go through
a little course in Time 101.
The Greek word for ordinary time is chronos.
Ordinary time consists of moments set between past and
future.
There are really only present moments.
As Jack Kornfield said,
“Everything
that ever happened to me,
happened in a present
moment.”
The only thing truly real is the actual situation at hand,
the now.
The past is an idea in our memory.
The future is an idea in our fantasy.
But the present moment is crisply and precisely real.
We can see it, touch it, taste it. It is and it is here,
now.
There is only the relentless now, then now, then now again.
But each moment contains within it memory.
The remembrance of things past is part of the present
experience.
Likewise the future we anticipate is part of the present
experience.
Each moment is exquisitely real in itself,
but it is
always on the brink between past and future.
Each moment is like that point in the river
at the precise
top of the cataract,
where the water first plunges
downward.
Paul found each moment to be fraught
with the grace already
accomplished.
Grace creates each moment, and allows us to live in it.
Each moment is an accomplished miracle.
That is the “already” part.
But the grace is incomplete.
We are on the brink of hope’s fulfillment.
We live in the light of God’s promise
to redeem us,
complete us, and perfect us,
to unite us
fully and finally to himself in light.
That is the “not yet” part.
So ordinary time, chronos, is flowing along horizontally
in the “already”
of remembered grace
and the “not
yet” hope for grace to be fulfilled.
It is flowing along horizontally, when God’s time breaks in.
God’s time is a vertical shaft, a lightning bolt from above,
a mountain
thrust up by seismic shifts from below.
God’s time is called kairos
in the Greek.
It means eternity.
But eternity isn’t just extending ordinary time
indefinitely.
It is a whole different order of reality
from our
mundane experience.
It is the depth and wonder of things.
Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich called the intersection
of ordinary time and eternity
“the eternal now.”
The Kingdom comes in each and every moment.
God happens in each and every moment.
The 17th Century Jesuit Spiritual Master, Jean-Pierre
de Causade
wrote about
“the sacrament of the present moment.”
He meant God is in such moments.
Ram Das wrote a modern spiritual classic in the 60’s.
It was called “Be Here Now.”
Maybe God read it because that’s what God does.
God is here now.
The point is for us to wake up and notice.
That’s what Paul invites us to do.
A moment is a point defined as the intersection
of ordinary
time and God’s time.
That is one of the often forgotten meanings of our Christian
symbol,
the cross, the
cruciform nature of time – history and eternity
crossing
paths at a 90 degree angle.
It happens now and now and now again.
So Paul keeps shouting “wake up and notice.”
But how? How shall we stop killing time and
start living time by encountering God in
each moment.
There is a general answer and there is a specific answer.
The general answer is agape – that amazing form of love
uniquely
prescribed, praised, and proclaimed
in
the New Testament.
Agape is the unconditional love
that delights
in reality just for being real.
Agape is an equal opportunity enjoyer.
It doesn’t discriminate. It just savors.
But you may fairly ask how we got to that point?
Or as another popular song asked,
“What’s love got to do with
it?”
The key is in the 1st Epistle of John,
which says
“God is agape.”
This remarkable kind of joy and wonder
is the very
soul of God.
It is the impetus that keeps God
generating
these moments.
When we practice agape too, we join God.
We share the sacrament of the present moment with God.
But that general answer is way too abstract.
Moments are not abstractions.
They are absolutely real.
Abstractions like love can actually separate us
from the
concrete situation.
So a general answer to the question “how do we wake up to
God
will not serve.
We need the specific answer.
The bad news is: I don’t know what it is.
The good news is that you do.
My part is to give you a clue.
The way to encounter God
is not by thinking about the
idea of God.
It is by looking at the reality at hand,
the reality of
your own life,
in a spirit of
compassionate, joyful, appreciation
-- then
do the right thing.
It doesn’t take a rule book of abstractions.
Paul says, “one who has loved another has fulfilled the
law.”
He calls that “putting on Jesus.”
That isn’t exactly imitating Jesus except in one respect.
Just look at your reality the way Jesus looked at his
reality,
with
compassionate joy, then do the right thing.
We are each invited to practice this awakened life
in our
individual situations.
And we are called to practice this awakened life
together as
the body of Christ in the world.
So I have to ask: what time is it in your life?
The polar ice caps are melting.
There is an epidemic of meth addiction.
Half the world has given up on Jesus
and the other
half has built a warmongering, bigoted
idol, named it
Jesus, and is worshiping him.
In the midst of this mess, grace abounds.
God persists in happening over and over,
in moment
after moment.
You know your situation better than I do.
You will know it even better if you look at it
with agape’s
eyes.
Then you will know what to do.
“You know what time it is.
It is time to
wake up” to God.
