In God's Good Time

Read: Matthew 24:36-44

 

First Sunday of Advent - December 1, 2013

The Rev. Kenneth R. Elkin

 

The clock, the humble clock.

With its regular tick, tick, as it marks off the seconds.

On the one hand, we can think of it as ominous: time running out, slipping through our fingers, the 11^th hour, etc.

On the other hand, we can think of it as comforting, with its very regularity and predictability.

We get up every morning and there it is ticking away just as it did yesterday, and we expect it will be tomorrow in exactly the same way.

 

Notice how many different time-designations are sprinkled through the gospel: the next day...it was about the third hour...immediately...on the Sabbath...it was night....and more.

Those time-designations are not merely incidental to the story-telling.

Rather, they mean to locate Jesus within time, within our time, and that is a vital part of the Good News.

We believe that God became flesh in Jesus Christ, thereby entering time, and lived and died.

Then Jesus was raised from the dead, and this act by God broke the stranglehold that time has on us.

Gone forever is the notion that everything is moving inexorably toward death.

The old Greek god of time, Chronos, does not have ultimate power over us anymore.

The resurrection is old Time's defeat.

 

What we thought of as comfortable and predictable about time is disrupted.

Time is now not what we make of it, but what God decides to make of it.

Several weeks ago we were talking about the old gods as being the guarantors and persistence of the past; but the Lord God Almighty is the openness and surprise of the future, because of the resurrection.

 

And even though we know that intellectually, we still try to fall back into the old patterns, the old ways.

What did those first witnesses to the resurrection do?

They went back home! They attempted to get back to “normal.”

They wanted things to be safe and predictable again.

Time under the illusion of normalcy is the world's time; but time eventful and disrupted is Jesus' time!

There is a 50-cent word for what the world wants – homeostasis – everything tied down, and maintained in a fixed order.

But it is the nature of the Trinity to disrupt time, so that in the Gospels, time seems to be super-heated and fast paced.

We remember that one of Mark's favorite words is “immediately”, which  he uses nine times in the first chapter alone!

One of the reasons we keep reading these Gospels week after week is to read ourselves into this peculiar and  intense gospel time.

God is taking what we thought was our time and making it his own time.

Not in today's reading, but in another spot in Isaiah [43:18-19] the Lord says through the prophet:

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

It is so tempting to believe that the present social order is more real, more normal and more eternal than the kingdom of God...but it is not.

So indicates the prophet; so lives out the Lord Jesus!

 

The modern world just has to banish God from time.

For many, God must be a serene, distant deity who never shows up anywhere, who never actually intrudes into our time.

So one of the results of that is that the miracle stories in the gospels are immediately dismissed precisely because they are that intrusion into our tick-tock ordered and predictable world.

God's choosing to do or not to do something gets twisted into God can't do anything in the world.

And when that is said, the whole point of Christmas has just been denied.

 

Advent just does not make much of an impact in the stores, does it?

Shop-keepers' concern is 24 shopping days until Christmas.

Advent's concerns are far larger;

--the reminder that in Jesus, human time was permanently disrupted, reorganized, and redirected.

--the reminder that the time that you thought was your own, to live as you please, really belongs to God.

--the reminder that at any moment this time could become a time for God's specific purposes in your life and mine.

There we are, thinking that it is another humdrum day, and then Jesus shows up.

 

One person told me recently, “I've been through a terrible time.

I could see no way out; the medicines were hurting more than helping.

After many months, Jesus interrupted this downward spiral and pointed me in a new direction.

I have a new career direction on which to focus, which will make use of the things that I learned through my travail.”

Time is transformed for that person.

 

Another person wrote about surviving dangerous open-heart surgery: “I'm not the same person I have been for the past 50 years.

It's as though God reached into my life and, through this illness, made me over, gave me a second chance, different, and capable of making a difference in the world.”

Time for that person is transformed.

 

May each of us whom Christ Jesus calls have such an Advent story!

May time be granted for each of us whom Jesus calls.

 

Some try to escape time, whether by Hindu philosophies or overdoing makeup.

In our lessons today we hear the good news that we need not flee from time, nor pretend that it does not affect us, but rather wake up and know that this is right now God's good time, the time in which he intends to do good things in and through us.

God moves into time, adopts our time, redeems us from bondage to time's ravages, and generates the “fullness of time,” Christ Jesus come to us.

 

Our hymn today captures the sense of God's movement in procession to us.

Adapting the psalmist's words now nearly 3,000 years old, the hymn is a grand statement of the truth that in spite of all the darkness we sense around us, all of the things wrong we know in ourselves and the world, this is God's time, and he will do what is needed.

Christ Jesus is coming; he is come; he will come.

It is, even now, God's good time. Hosanna! Rejoice and sing.  Amen.