This week, our waiting for a return to “normal” took a hit. Several Canadian jurisdictions, including the lower mainland of British Columbia, have moved back into tighter public health orders to combat a spike in Covid-19 cases. All this at a moment where we have started to contemplate moving back to in-person worship. It means that we are likely to be waiting longer, and the question of “when” is up in the air once again, and all the anxieties that came with it. But the pressures of “when” is a question that Christians have been familiar with for a long time.
I need to be fair about something: Early Christians genuinely believed that Christ would return in their lifetime. It was a source of great worry amongst at least some of that tiny group of believers when fellow Christians --mothers, fathers, friends, brothers, sisters, and even children died.
They appealed to their church leaders; some were very specific in asking “when” will these things occur. Early on, Paul genuinely believed that Christ would return within his lifetime. There’s a good argument to be made that when he wrote his first letter to the church in Thessalonica, Paul reflected that in his writing, but we do know that as Paul continued his mission, that he came to understand this much differently than perhaps he once did. It shows that he matured in his understanding. But even in his younger eager days, he wasn’t prepared to make a declaration about knowing the mind of God. Even though he describes how he envisions Christ’s return earlier in the letter, he cautions the Thessalonians. He writes:
“Now, concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.”
He also reminds them that this is not something to fear or be preoccupied with anyway. We know that Paul’s perspective changed as he grew older, particularly after his imprisonment in Ephesus, when he wrote the letter to the Philippians. Even so, this theme of encouragement he offers to the Thessalonians remained consistent. God does not work on our timetable. Even the concept of a timeline is something we need to reconsider.
The gospel of Mark reports Jesus saying, “The time is near; the kingdom of God is at hand!” But for Jesus, it was about recognizing the kingdom of God right in our midst. It is fair to say that the time is as near to us now as it was to the early Christians.
I suspect that if I haven’t already, I’ve just lost you. So I want you to try and bear with me. This kind of understanding of time that both Paul and Jesus spoke of is a concept of time lost on us, especially today, when many of us wear watches or consult our smartphones every few minutes. Even in our language, the concept of minutes, hours, days, seconds are ways we measure linear time. But it’s a human invention to help us record the passing of time. It gives us a sense of structure, a sense of order, and offers at least some degree of predictability to our lives. It has value in providing that sense of order to our lives, but we have created it. We get into some serious trouble if we think that God understands time in the same way. Even physicists will tell you that the way in which we keep time is an illusion. It is pliable and passes differently depending on where one is in the universe. There was a fantastic program on the US Public Broadcasting Service as part of their “Nova” science series called “The Fabric of the Cosmos: the Illusion of Time” by Physicist Brian Greene.
This series explores this very subject from a scientific perspective, and it is tremendously eye-opening. So if even our perception of time varies from where we stand in the Universe, then again, how can we expect God to follow time in the same narrow, limited way in which we experience it here?
So let’s reconsider time and talk about God’s time: when Jesus says, “the time is near, the kingdom of God.” The word that Jesus uses is a concept that is almost completely lost on us. In the English language, we have no proper term for it. The word that Jesus uses, the word that Paul uses is “Kairos.” Sometimes we call it the “fullness of time” or “the right time.” But it is a concept of time that happens outside of or breaks into linear time. We get linear time. We can wrap our heads around it because we have a watch that keeps track of it for us and that we glance at if the sermon goes on too long! On the other hand, Kairos doesn’t fit into our idea of time. It is a glimpse into eternity, beyond linear time, where past, present and future come together. Periodically we get glimpses of it: the life and work of Jesus is an obvious example, but sometimes we might see it in our own lives, where we get a new perspective on our lives and our experiences. It’s an “aha” moment, where our reality changes because we’ve had time to reconsider and reflect and experience God working in our lives in a deeply profound way.
For the early Christians, they were in the midst of their own “aha” moment, but they hadn’t quite reached that “aha!” point. Paul was reminding them that God’s time is far different from our own and is squarely in God’s hands. Instead of trying to make God fit into our timetable, we need to be about building and living out the kingdom of God in the moments that we have, right here, right now, in the “now” we experience in our corner of the universe.
While we have sung it so many times, I wonder how many of us pay attention to the last verse of Amazing Grace, that says “when we've been there ten thousand years bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise, then when we'd first begun.” We have no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’ve first begun. The time is as near to us now as it was when Jesus proclaimed that the time is near, the kingdom of God is at hand. He was saying that God’s time becomes real when we live out the kingdom of God. The point Paul was making to the Thessalonians is that we should not be sitting on our hands waiting for something that is already in our midst and be about building the kingdom of God here, now. Maybe it is time for us to do the same.
Amen.
