Delivered to the United Church of Jaffrey
January 8th, 2017
Readings: John 8:1-11 | Mark 1:9-13
I was driving down Federal Street in Greenfield, when I saw the Tire Warehouse sign.
Now the Tire Warehouse sign in Greenfield is famous because Lenny, the owner of the Tire Warehouse, is a bit of a character, and instead of using his sign to advertise sales on snow tires, he uses his sign as a way to spread his quirky, but always thought provoking world view.
For example, after the Newtown shooting a few years ago, the Tire Warehouse sign read “Protecting children is the mark of a civilized society.”
Yes, I agree with that. “Protecting children is the mark of a civilized society.”
I like the Tire Warehouse sign.
I like Lenny.
And so, when I need to get new snow tires, I go to Lenny.
So I suppose the sign works.
He gets my business.
But he gets more than my business. He gets my respect too.
Anyway, as I was driving down Federal Street in Greenfield last week, I looked up and read the Tire Warehouse sign, and this is what it said
“If time is infinite, how come we’re always running out of it?”
It’s a good question!
What is time anyway?
Saint Augustine dedicated a whole chapter of his “confessions” to this question, and after humming and hawing about it for many pages he famously throws up his hands and says:
What is time?
If no one asks me, I know what it is.
But if I try to explain it,
I have no idea.
I know how he feels.
This is a very familiar feeling for someone who spends his or her life talking about God.
I, in fact, am in the very silly predicament of having two master’s degrees that proclaim to the world that I have spent many years studying about something – God – that I willing admit to knowing almost nothing about.
Almost nothing.
I guess I do know something — I know about what you know…
That there was a person who lived a long time ago, whose life has given us some clues about the great mystery.
The great mystery of all time.
The mystery of God.
*
The Greeks had an interesting way of talking about time.
And since our reading, this morning, from the book of Mark, was originally written in Greek, I think it’s worth considering the Greek understanding of time.
The Greeks, it turns out, had two words for time.
One word was Chronos.
And the other word was Kairos.
What is the difference?
Consider the moon.
It starts out as a shard of light in the sky.
And then, as the month progresses, it grows.
And as its grows, we measure time by it.
And this growing moon time is chronos time.
We live within the moon’s growing time.
It grows and grows and then, suddenly…
The moon is full.
How radiant it is!
This is the moment.
This is when chronos time changes to moment time.
Moment time is called kairos.
There are two kinds of time – chronos and kairos.
You can think of it like this – like the moon:
(opening arms)
Chronos, chronos, chronos, chronos… chronos, chronos… kairos!
*
In our minds, Kairos and Chronos have a natural habitat.
This habitat is story.
For example, watch what happens in today’s lectionary reading from Mark’s gospel–
The story begins with the phrase: “In those days…”
“In those days…” is chronos language.
The first sentence of today’s lesson is filled with chronos information:
In those days Jesus came
Where did he come from?
From Nazareth of Galilee
Why did he come up?
To be baptized
Who baptized him?
John baptized him
And where was he baptized?
In the Jordan.
See how Mark’s narrative zooms in?
And then, suddenly, in the next sentence, we switch from chronos to Kairos: we are,
“and just as he was coming up out of the water…”
We have zoomed in so much that now we are underwater with Jesus… and then we break up through the surface of the water…
…just as he was coming up out of the water…
he saw the heavens torn apart
he saw the heavens torn apart
There are two kinds of time…
You can think of it like this – like the baptism of Jesus…
(zooming in)
Chronos, chronos, chronos, chronos… chronos, chronos… kairos!
*
A kairos moment is a critical juncture.
Like when Mary said
“let it be to me according to your word.”
Or a moment of full radiance –
As when the shepherds were awed with angelic light and song.
It could be an intimate moment—
Like when old Simeon held the child in his arms…
Or it could be a prayerful moment,
As when a carpenter whispered
“yet, not my will but thine, be done.”
These biblical kairos moments all involve an interaction with the divine.
The great theologian Paul Tillich claims, in his book “Interpretation of History” that human history is peppered with Kairos moments like the baptism of Jesus – moments when God intervenes and demands a response from humanity.
Kairos comes from the ultimate.
It is different from chronos time because it comes from outside time.
That’s why the Heavens were torn open.
Jesus is the inbreaking of the divine into the human world.
This is the sacramental kairos.
*
After Christ’s baptism
…The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness…
We’re zooming out again.
Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness
And when he returns he says:
Repent!
Repent?
This word has a lot of dust on it. It has not aged well. It’s one of those crusty words that makes people think we Christians are all uptight and intolerant.
What does that mean anyway?
My Oxford English Dictionary defines “repent” as
“to affect oneself with contrition and regret for something done.”
But here the Greek is helpful too.
The Greek word that has long been translated as “repent” is “metanoia.”
But Biblical scholars have long balked at this translation.
So if “repent” is a poor translation of Metanoia – what is a good one?
Rather than hazard a translation, allow me to tell another story:
*
Early one morning (chronos time) Jesus came down to the temple
Some Pharisees brought an adulterous woman to him
and asked him to proclaim judgment on her.
Now if Jesus complied with the law, she would be stoned to death…
We can see a group of people (probably all men) poised with rocks in their hands,
(lift a rock)
ready to throw.
It’s a charged, kairos moment.
There is a question in the air.
“Does this women’s life matter?”
The divine response to this question with a challenge:
“Let any among you who is without sin caste the first stone.”
And as the arms begin to sink under the weight of the stones…
Something happens.
The ethical imagination is awakened.
Transformation occurs.
God’s kairos comes along and reverses everything, turning judgment into compassion.
The stones fall back onto the earth.
Our sin – something we have been taught to regard with regret—
now becomes the starting place of forgiveness!
An awareness of our own brokenness takes away what had seemed, a moment before, a necessary violence.
Knowledge of our own sin, in this story, does not separate us from God, instead, it opens us to compassion, which is the fullness of God’s grace.
When Kairos breaks in
it finds a place in our soul to work out its purpose.
An ethical place.
Metanoia!
This is the Spirit’s scrutiny – unblinking, honest – that is radically aware
of the complex, competing realities – the sins — of our chronos life.
Radical self-awareness, here, is the transformation of sin into…
compassion.
Think of it like it like this
(Opening)
Chronos, chronos, chronos, Kairos! ….Metanoia … transformation!
*
Before dawn on his 70th birthday, my father sat down at his computer and began to write a letter. The letter was addressed to his grandchildren.
The letter begins in a disarmingly loving tone “You are my dear grandchildren,” he wrote. “I thought you might want to know about your grandpa…”
Soon though, the tone changes, and the letter starts to relate many painful and difficult things. As a child in Tokyo during the second world war – my father experienced terrible hunger and hardship. In 1945, when he was only fourteen years old, Tokyo was laid waste by Allied incendiary bombing. My father did not spare his grandchildren any of this difficult history.
He was also quite frank about the atrocities committed by the Japanese military during the war. He wrote about the cruel subjugation and wanton slaughter perpetrated by the Japanese upon millions of Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese, and South East Asians.
My father’s letter seems to me to be a good example of metanoia. He wanted this grandchildren’s eyes to be open to the complex story of their heritage. He wanted them to be appalled by the awful folly of war. He wanted their upbringing to involve a forthright awareness of the terrible sin he had witnessed.
Metanoia, in this context, is an ethical imagination that has its “eyes-open.”
Grandchildren with eyes-open ethics, let stones fall onto the ground.
God’s inbreaking moment (kairos), is transformed by this eyes-open-ethics,
So that our chronos – (with all its scars) begins to reflect God’s love.
*
The moon is full tonight!
How radiant it is!
Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?
And yet…
See how scarred it is!
Amen.