What Time Is It?
Rev. Samuel Schaal
Nov. 28, 2004
First Sunday in Advent

Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44

I remember as a small child that it was frustrating not being able to tell time.  I would hear adults ask each other what hour it was, and this seemed to be such an important thing, but I couldn’t yet grasp the logic of such an abstract subject.   I had a toy watch and I remember sitting in my grandmother’s living room one evening with the whole family there and someone asked me what time it was – a gentle tease perhaps since I was wearing my toy watch.  I made up some pretend answer, probably feeling pretty grown up, and everyone in the room laughed at my attempt of pretending to tell time.

I did eventually learn how to really tell time so that by the start of my first job in the corporate world years later I could navigate a strict daily schedule – up in time for the commute on the freeway, arriving at my small cubicle by 8 a.m. each morning and leaving at 4:30 p.m. to try to avoid the worst of the traffic as I reversed my commute.  I remember at the time of being a little depressed by the monotony of it all, that after 16 years of school and preparation for adulthood, this is what it all leads up to?

Yes, the clock and the calendar structure our lives and provide us a framework for the orderly progression of tasks.  Today we are aware that time has shifted forward once more, for the season of Advent is upon us.  As we walked into the Nave this morning the scent of pine and the vision of the greenery punctuated by red bows, all tell us that we are in a new season of the church calendar.

This first Sunday of Advent marks the beginning of the church year, a reminder perhaps that we live amid a reality not captured by our secular calendar, that our year begins a month earlier; a time of waiting and preparing for the birth of Christ.

In today’s New Testament lesson in his letter to the Romans, Paul speaks of the in-breaking of a new time.  Previously in that letter, he has been giving some ethical teachings, how Christians should live in the secular state by obeying its laws, but retain their moral independence, how Christians pay every debt so there is no obligation except to love, that Christians should follow the commandments by loving neighbor as self.

Then, he says, “Besides this, you know what hour it is.” The New Revised Standard Version renders it, “you know what time it is.”  Besides these ethical standards you should be meeting, Paul says, besides these things you should be doing, let me remind you of what time it is. Paul refers to the eschatological time of being between the first and second advents of Christ.  A new day dawned with the birth of Christ and ever since his resurrection the world has been caught in the overlap between the old and the new worlds. So here Paul reminds the faithful that the new age is dawning, and that all should be awake and living according to that new age.

The Greek word used here for “hour” or “time” is the word kairos.  Kairos is not clock time or the human measurement of time.  Kairos is time that is particularly significant or meaningful – a time of great opportunity, of eternal importance.  The other Greek word for time is chronos that describes temporal time, the linear progression of time.  This is the root word for our term chronology or chronicle.

Kairos is a description of eternal time, so a kairos moment is when eternity breaks into temporal time.  It is a time to indicate turning points or times that demand a particular response.  So here, Paul has suggested that the time of which he speaks is kairos, an in-breaking of a new reality; the beginning of a new age.

Paul says this kairos has only begun to dawn.  It may be nearer than it was when we first believed, but it is visible now only as the first glimmers of dawn, when light begins to peek across a dark eastern sky.

For the Christian, the supreme kairos event is the birth and later resurrection of Christ, this time that Paul speaks of.    Kairos can also be used to describe other events besides that primary Christ event – other times when God intercedes in human history.    Paul Tillich, the 20th century theologian, made great use of the idea of kairos in laying out his philosophy of history by saying that there were certain events in history that constituted turning points and demanded a response.  He had escaped Nazi Germany and that greatly influenced his thinking of how the demonic needed to be confronted.

Other events in our own nation could be said to be moments of kairos, when the divine enters into human destiny.  I think the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s which brought political equality to African Americans could be said to be this kind of event.  As could, several decades later, the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of communism.  There comes, here and there, events in our national and global life where the evolution of human history comes to a turning point that seems to be of a divine decree.  

Likewise, I think that individuals can experience kairos events, events that so altar one’s life that they provide a new framework.  Events when one feels the hand of God working in one’s life.

In my own life, there have been a few of these moments and these usually have been difficult times for me, when the darkness seemed more dense and frightening, when the loneliness was more profound, when my confusion provided no easy answers, when it seemed as if I could not continue on my own resources.  It is at that moment, at times, that the light has penetrated my darkness, that God has broken through the hard shell that I have constructed. 

This is when kairos intersects with chronos.  When God’s time intersects with human time and human history, when the eternal touches the temporal; when something shifts and our world is no longer the same.

So these times can be difficult times.  I like the way the Revised English Bible translates the first verse of today’s New Testament lection.  It renders Paul as saying in the first verse: “Always remember that this is the hour of crisis…” So kairos suggests that this time of the eternal entering the temporal will not be a bed of roses necessarily.  You’ve heard the old saying that the Chinese symbol for opportunity is also the symbol for danger.  The same could be said of kairos; it suggests both.

As we enter this Advent season, as we approach the Christmas season, some of us might be feeling less than exuberant. The holidays are supposed to be a happy time and yet for some they are tinged with sadness.  Holidays can be difficult if you’ve lost someone in the last year.  Holidays can be difficult if you’re separated from those you love.  Holidays can be difficult because they put your life in relief against the lights and festivities and joy we are supposed to feel and yet sometimes don’t.

And so it is that in this season our God was born amid this darkness, amid this scarcity, amid this hunger and amid this depravity of the world.  We have heard the story of the birth of the baby in the manger so often that our ears miss how radical of a story it is; that the holy would find birth in a vulnerable infant who already was an enemy of the state, born to a wandering and poor family on the margins of society.  In the mythologies of so many other world religions, the holy one or prophet is often from among the society’s higher echelons.  In the Christian story, we dare to assert that God is born among the commonness and squalor of a barn, among the most lowly of society.

So this is where the holy is born; in the most common and even vulgar places.  And this is when the holy is born—the holy in born in kairos, in holy time; when God interrupts human history to do something new.

It has long struck me that the cross is a symbol of this.  The horizontal beam can symbolize our human lives and the human tasks we are engaged upon for our survival; those practical things we have to do to live – the gathering of food, the building of society, the propagation of our people—all the things we have to do to tend to the practical aspects of human life – these are on the horizontal plane. 

The vertical suggests the holy, that which comes from above and intersects the commonness of our lives and gives our lives depth and grounding and meaning and truth.  A vertical dimension that, symbolically speaking, comes from heaven and goes to the depths of sheol – a true God who knows both.   That point of intersection of the vertical and the horizontal; that point of intersection of the human and the holy is that intersection of kairos and chronos; when holy time intersected human time and Christ was born.

This means that ever since the time of Christ’s birth, we have been living between two ages.  Living between two ages, though, means living in the current age.  Some focus with a fetish on the second coming, but it is not clear exactly what that is nor when that will be, as the text from Matthew suggests:  “But of that day and hour no one knows.”  What’s important is not to fret about the time of the second coming, but to live in this in-between time as Paul suggests. The symbols and the language of the Matthew text do invoke the urgency of God’s future breaking into our human history and, like Paul suggests, urges the reader to stay awake. 

And so now it is time to once again await that birth.  It is a ritual we go through.  We hang wreaths, we light candles, we sing songs, we shop and shop (and shop!) and wrap these commodities in colorful paper, we eat and we drink and we socialize and we greet each other…all amid the encroaching darkness of the season, as the season draws down to the longest and darkest and coldest night of the year, at the time when we are most aware of our finitude and our fragility.  It is in that spot, in that most unlikely of places where, we hope, Christ will be born. 

But this light that we wait upon is, paradoxically, already here. Christ is born.  We are living in the time of the first coming.  We ritualize his birth at this time every year so as to open ourselves up to the truth, to awaken ourselves to the reality, that Christ is among us. There is nothing we must do to invoke the presence of Christ; we must simply awake to that divine reality; to that reality that is invisible and not always apparent but is perceived through the senses of faith.

To say we must do nothing to invoke Christ, however, is not to say there is nothing to do.  Paul is quite clear that we should live in a certain way, not in reveling, not in quarreling, not in giving in to our more base selves, but that we should put on Jesus Christ.

When I was a kid I thought, among other things, that to be able to tell time was to be a grown up.  In Roman times the sign of taking on the responsibilities of adulthood was putting on the toga.  Paul suggests we put on the armor of light; put on the Lord Jesus Christ; that we order our lives, not so much around the clock and the calendar, but that we might make primary our allegiance to Christ; that we respond to the divine kairos in the living of our lives with love for each other and God.

What time is it?  It is time to awaken to the new day; to the in-breaking of the dayspring upon our darkness—of new life, light and love that regenerates the tired structures of our lives.  It is time to await the birth of holiness, in the Bethlehem of our hearts, once again.

Amen.