In Between Time 12.1.19

In Between Time

By Griff Martin

A Sermon on Isaiah 2:1-5 and Matthew 24:36-44 

For the First Sunday of Advent (Dec 1, 2019)

For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith

Incarnate and Coming Christ, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing new reality we can all together experience. Make us aware of your presence here in this space and in these words God, for if we are present to you then nothing else will matter, but if we are not present to you then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter. Amen.

Welcome to a weird Sunday when nothing is going to match up and everything seems a little out of place; or maybe to you that feels like most Sundays here at First. That is not the case for me, but it is today; everything does seem a bit off….

… Like the Christmas decor that suddenly surrounds us this morning. Because for most of us, we are in one of two camps this morning: we are in the process of unpacking our suitcases from the Thanksgiving trip we just returned from, or we are still washing dishes and getting bedrooms back in order after our Thanksgiving crowd finally left. And it seems like we need a pause to gather ourselves before the next big holiday, and yet here we are today in the midst of Christmas trees and Advent candles and big old wreaths. 

Or this greeting we used this morning, “Happy New Year.” Which makes you think that I must have gotten my holidays a bit confused. But I have not. The Christian Calendar begins on the first Sunday of Advent, when we begin telling the story of the coming Christ. It then continues as we tell the story of Jesus, building through Lent to Holy Week and Palm Sunday and Easter (our main event), and then a season when we celebrate the church, and then a season of Ordinary Time when the story becomes ours, and the whole year culminates in Christ the King Sunday (which we celebrated last week). We, the church, define our calendar differently because our central event is not a fiscal year or a harvesting period or Hallmark holidays, or even how we revolve around the sun. Our calendar is based on the Christ event – the center which holds us all. Our time is different.

So, Happy New Year, and welcome to the season of Advent, when things are about to get even weirder and wilder. Because as much as we think Advent is a season preparing us for the birth of Jesus, it actually starts off by reminding us to prepare for the Coming of Christ. And this particular Sunday is all about that; that topic we have tended to think of as a family secret because it’s pretty odd… think of it as the crazy aunt who shared some crazy theory she has about politics over Thanksgiving lunch and all you could think was, “I hope she does not say that in public to people who are not blood related.” That is how we have treated the coming of Christ, and today we are called to talk about this publicly. 

Let’s start with this text from Isaiah: “The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw…” Catch that –
“The word that Isaiah saw…” It’s not what you would expect; it’s not the way we talk. We say it’s the word we heard, not saw.

And that is not the only strange part of this text. If you put this text in the larger context of Isaiah as a whole, it seems as though this chapter itself has forgotten that the book already started. Go back to Isaiah 1 later this afternoon and read the first chapter which starts off with these words: “The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw.” Isaiah starts this book telling us what he sees, and it is not pretty. Just look at the subheadings we have added to Isaiah 1: The wickedness of Judah and The Unfaithful City, or just listen to one of the verses: “Oh sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, children who deal corruptly! They have forsaken the Lord, they have despised God, they are utterly estranged.”

It’s a hard chapter full of despair and destruction, and then we get to chapter 2 and it seems almost like we already need a do-over (and I don’t know who needs that, God or Isaiah or us or maybe all the above). Chapter 2: The Word Isaiah the son of Amoz saw….

And this word from the second chapter paints an entirely different world. It’s some of our best images in Scripture, hence the word Isaiah saw: all the people together as one headed up the mountain to the city of God to learn how to live, a world without argument and division, a world where our weapons of war are turned into garden tools. It’s a world with a new economy, a new community, new tools and a new curriculum where we don’t prepare for war and strife but for life and peace. 

It’s the world we all want to see, as well. However, if you are rolling your eyes this morning, I understand that response; that promised world seems so far away this day. But don’t worry, you are in good company this Advent season if you are rolling your eyes and questioning if this is even possible. Jesus’ own mother asks that question this season, “How can this be?” And then, see what happened to her. 

Of course, “How can this be?” might be a question than I am asking, because I hear that vision- of peace and life, of wholeness and humanity, and my question is, “How long God? When will this come to be?” Because we long for this and we want to know when.

I think this longing is very much part of the season in which we suddenly find ourselves. Pay attention to all the images we are bombarded with this Christmas season. Go shopping or look at the catalogues in the mail and you see advertisements of a perfect family all dressed in their matching pajamas, drinking hot chocolate, snuggled up by the fire. Or go to the grocery store and we see pictures of a perfectly dressed, stylish group of people sitting at a table with the best wine and food imaginable and they are chatting as if they actually all love each other. The Christmas season inherently holds a longing for unity and peace, and I truly believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that our world really wants that unity and peace. 

How long, oh Lord, until we get there? 

It’s as if the lectionary this morning knew the question that some of us would have. So, after this reading, which is pleasant, even comfortable, Jesus enters and is ready to disturb our comfort and upend our pleasant. And right off the bat he answers that nagging question about when will this come to be, “About that day and time and hour, no one knows, not the angels, not me, only God.” 

Thanks Jesus, you cleared that right up. 

It’s one of those texts that I want to argue with and dive right into with a host of questions that probably miss the point of what Jesus was truly saying. For instance, my immediate thought goes to how does God know something that you, Jesus don’t know? What does this say about Jesus and God being one in the same? And where is the Spirit? And angels… I have a whole host of questions there.

But I don’t think either of those questions is what Jesus wants me to grasp in this particular text. And typically, when I find myself asking questions about theology, that is probably not worthy of a sermon; it’s something that is more of a distraction or rabbit hole. I know I am missing the point. I am distracting myself because I don’t want to see an obvious truth that Jesus is trying to share and tell me (which, for me, almost always has to do with control). Truths like, “Griff, you don’t get to know this information. Your job is to live in faith and trust in a place where you can’t understand it all. Let me handle the whole issue of time.” 

Which God has been doing since the beginning, when time began. Time is not given to us to manage, but to live in, and if you look at the verbs we use about our calendars and our time – manage  handle, take care of, wasting, using, balance – we might not correctly understand our relationship to time. Our job is not to manage, handle, take care of, waste, use or balance time; our job is to live in time.

It’s probably worth reminding ourselves that the way we view time is different than many of the other religions. Eastern religions view time as an endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth. So, these ideas of time as a longer arc and not a cycle go against the grain of much of the world of those in Isaiah’s day and many in Jesus’ day. 

For a long time, time itself was understood as cyclical, and then God calls us to a new way of starting to understand… a time when what you believe and know is based on what has happened and what is going to happen in one story that is playing out over a long and extended arc. 

And if we are honest, we have to confess that time itself is one of those things that humans need to confess that we don’t understand quite as well as we would like to think. For example, did you know time passes at different speeds if you live in the mountains or if you live at sea level? Time is actually curved there. If you and a friend decided to try an experiment, and one of you went to live at the beach and the other in the mountains and then meet up years later… well, science will tell you that when you meet up, “the one who stayed down has lived less, aged less, the mechanism of his clock has oscillated fewer times… time passes more slowly in some places and more rapidly in others.” It can be even less extreme than that. A clock placed on the floor of your home runs just a bit slower than one placed on the mantle (although, it would take some time to see that difference, but it’s there).

As one physicist simply writes, “There is not one single time, there is a vast multitude of them.”

Or this story that I just love: the astronauts on one of our early spaceships spent a lovely afternoon listening to music, and later radioed NASA to say thanks for sending the music. This was a mystery to NASA, who had not sent music. What they figured was that somehow the spaceship system had linked to some various radio or TV program signal for that time period, thus the entertainment. Someone began to study this, and a few of the crew listed some of the songs that had played, all of which were out of date. Every TV and radio program around the globe that day was checked, and none featured these songs. Further research finally revealed the program they had listened to had originally been broadcast in the 1930s and somehow, they had tapped in and found it. 

Time is not ours and we don’t understand it. 

This should not be news to us as Jesus followers, and this would have been more evident if we had kept the spirit of the original Greek language for time, which in the New Testament has two words: chronos, which refers to “check your watch” time, and kairos, which refers to God’s time. 

It’s a time we don’t understand; a time when I think past and present and future overlap and innerlap in a bizarre way. It’s a time that is a lot like Advent. A time when everything we hope for is based on what has been promised and what happened when Jesus – when Love – came to us. And it’s a time, at the same time, when everything we hope for is based on the future and promises God has made to us about what this world should look like. A time when everything is past and is future, which means it’s now. Past, present and future all mixed together in this glorious space of nowness, this moment, this time to do our calling. 

This is the day the Lord has made. This is the moment. 

One of my favorite stories is about a small village where an old clockmaker lived. He kept every clock and watch in the village working, and then he died without an apprentice. Time died, too that day. Clocks and watches began to break; some ran too fast and others too slow. Soon one clock struck midnight when your wristwatch said 3:00 in the afternoon and your pocket watch read 10:00 in the morning. Everything was a mess.

And then one day, a clockmaker came through the village and the people stopped him to beg him to fix everything. He spent a few days looking at all the various clocks – cuckoo clocks, grandfather clocks, wrist watches, pocket watches – so many time pieces. Finally, he announced that he had some bad news: the only ones he could fix were the ones whose owners had kept them wound.

Keep your clock wound.

I don’t know what to think about time…. Maybe God is time itself or, at the very least, maybe all of time is held in God. What I know most about time is that it is God’s, not mine. But because I know God and because I know God is good and loving and I know where this story is headed, I can trust and I can wait.

And I know this: we are entering the busiest time of the year. And I don’t want to forget to keep kairos time and to keep my clock wound, which looks like trust and hope in the better world God has promised. It looks like prayer and silence and meditation. It looks like every small action done to create a more just world. 

To keep the clock wound so I can live into God’s time when all people together as one head up the mountain to the city of God to learn how to live, a world without argument and division, a world where our weapons of war are turned into garden tools. It’s a world with a new economy, a new community, new tools and a new curriculum where we don’t prepare for war and strife but for life and peace. 

Come Lord Jesus, Come. Amen and Amen.

*artwork: Advent, Painting by Mark Jennings, mark-jennings.pixels.com