It's About Time

Advent 1A: Rom 13:11-14 & Matt 24:36-44

The modern world likes to imagine time in terms of space, as the measure between two points.  24 hours for the earth to circle the sun. 8 minutes for water to boil. 42 minutes to reach your destination, according to GPS. But the philosopher Henri Bergson noted that time, as people actually experience it, is not exact, objective, and precise, but relative and deeply influenced by our state of mind. Bergson points to how the time spent at your desk at work, waiting for the day to end, is experienced quite differently from the time you spend on a riverbank, holding hands with your beloved.

Our sense of time is influenced by how we think of the time we’re experiencing. “That concert ended way too soon,” we say. Or “I thought the sermon would never end.” “The sermon was only twenty minutes long,” I reply. “Really? It sure seemed longer than that.” Or say, you’re told you’ve got 5 years to live. It changes how you view time.

Time is a major concern in our lessons this morning from Paul and Matthew. “You know what time it is,” Paul writes to the church in Rome. The day is dawning, he tells them in so many words, salvation is near, each day only bringing us closer to Jesus’ return. In Mathew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples, just before he is led away to his trial and crucifixion, that the Son of Man will come on the clouds with power and great glory, but, he cautions, “nobody knows when that day or hour will come, not the heavenly angels and not the Son. Only the Father knows.” The two lessons pull somewhat in different directions—Paul anticipating Jesus’ imminent return, and Matthew’s Jesus more cagey about how soon it will happen. But the two are in agreement that time is not careless or random, but flows in one direction, towards its end, its destiny.

We rarely appreciate the distinctiveness of this view. We take linear, one-directional time for granted. But the idea was not common in the ancient world. From the earliest known religions to the more sophisticated societies of Greece and India, time, history was seen as fundamentally cyclical. As Henri-Charles Puech says of Greek thought, “No event is unique, nothing is enacted but once…every event has been enacted, is enacted, and will be enacted perpetually…at every turn of the circle.” The future will be the same as the past. No change, no advancement, nothing new under the sun, just a recycling of old events.

It was the Jews who were the first to break out of this cycle. With their sense of their people’s story, the history of their dealings with God, the Jews “invented” time, time as we know it anyway. Rather than time endlessly repeating, like the seasons, the Jews maintained a sense of time that recognized how things once were and offered a vision of where it is all going, a promised future when God will right the wrongs of this world and establish an eternal reign on earth. It wasn’t Christians who first held this view of the end of time. It was the Jews.

What Christians contributed was a belief that the end of time is focused on Jesus, that the righting of wrongs and eternal reign of God would happen when Christ returns. Christians made one other addition to the understanding of time—that it will be broken, that the steady march towards God’s promised future will be not be continuous with what has come before, but will constitute a fundamental disruption, a break in or breaking-in of time.

For a lot of people, this idea is shocking, even scandalous. And I’m not even talking about the doomsday imagery surrounding the event, the sun darkening and stars falling from heaven. Rather, it’s that for the last hundred, two hundred years, we’ve been living under the “myth of progress,” the belief that things are getting better and better all the time, that human society is steadily improving, that someday through technology and education and proper government we will make, if not a perfect world, then one that is better, cleaner, safer, fairer, greener, and more peaceful than ever before. Even in the church, many of us hold to this view—that by our actions, our service of others, our standing up for the poor and the downtrodden and the vulnerable, we can approximate paradise on earth, at which point Jesus will just have to come back.

But if the Scriptures, like the ones we read today, tell us anything about Jesus’ return, it’s that it won’t be because of anything we do. It won’t be because we made it happen, as if we can persuade Jesus to return by creating the perfect conditions, like one of those South American birds that attracts a mate by making the most attractive nest. Jesus will return when the Father decrees. And when it happens, it won’t be a measured, gradual thing. It’ll come as a shock, a disruption, and everyone will be caught unawares. People will be going about their business, eating and drinking, teaching and trading, doctoring and making deals, when the world will be thrown into crisis.

That’s the sense of time that Christianity presents, that the Church has given us. A sense that history is not just one darn thing after another, where events have no real meaning, but where time is the place of God’s interventions, of God’s active involvement. Ever since God brought time into existence, He’s been carrying it through to its culmination, towards its God-ordained end, which will nevertheless come as a shock, a crisis, a radical break with what has gone before.

I confess, it’s not entirely clear what we are supposed to do with this, though. Even if we were inclined towards Christian belief, the idea of Jesus’ dramatic, disruptive return seems too fantastical, too unreal, and too uncertain to be much of a motivating force today. I mean, it’s been nearly two thousand years since Jesus told us he’d be back! For all we know, he won’t return for another thousand years. A person can only maintain “any day now” for so long. We can’t stand on tiptoe forever. For us today, believing in Jesus’ return can feel like we are living in the Samuel Becket play I saw in college, Waiting for Godot, except that instead of waiting interminably for the character Godot who never arrives, we are left waiting for Jesus, who shows no sign of appearing.

But let’s say we don’t dismiss it out of hand, but take Jesus’ imminent return seriously. Human nature being what it is, we are likely to respond in one of two ways—with paranoia or with paralysis. We either go off in a tailspin of worry, becoming like the streetcorner preacher crying “The End is Nigh,” or, else we become paralyzed into inaction, retreating from the world, waiting piously and passively for our turn to come, all the while being of no good to anyone. But if obsession or idleness these two choices, it’s not clear which is better. Is there no third option for faithful people who are not fanatics but who nevertheless believe in Jesus?

It seems to me that the third option involves two faithful responses. The first is to “wake up.” That’s the instruction Jesus and Paul both give in today’s lessons: “Wake up!” Apparently, even in the early church, believers were prone to “spiritual sleepiness,” to hitting the metaphorical snooze button, rolling over and going back to sleep. But this is to forget the urgency of the moment, what time it is that we are living in. Paul likens the present time to the moments just before dawn: “The night is nearly over; the day is almost here.” We are on the cusp, in other words. The day has not yet arrived, but will come soon. Indeed, it is nearer to us now, Paul assures us, than when we first believed. Even closer, we might add, now some two thousand years after Paul wrote that! We live therefore with a sense of “practical immediacy” with regard to our future redemption, knowing that God is active in the world, and that His work is soon to be completed.

By telling believers to “wake up,” then, Paul is charging us to remember this, to “wake up” to our situation, to wake up to the fact that God has already acted, and to eagerly await the coming of the Lord, the completion of His work. Until that day, Paul insists, we can’t afford to waste a minute, mustn’t squander these precious morning hours in frivolity and indulgence, in sleeping around and dissipation, in bickering and grabbing everything in sight. It’s time to put those aside,

time to meet the new day! Don’t loiter and linger, waiting until the very last minute. Up and at ‘em.

Jesus’ return points to a second response—expectation. That may seem like a weird thing to say, given that the Church has been “expecting” for darn near two millennia. Only I don’t mean expecting as an action, but rather expecting as a practice. If we see expecting as singular, discrete act, it’s over when what we’re expecting arrives, or when we give up after it takes too long to arrive. But when we expect as a practice, our behavior isn’t dependent on whether what we expect comes or not. It’s something you keep on doing, more of an attitude than an activity, a disposition, a posture, if you will. To say that we practice expecting Jesus is to say that we are always looking for him, always open to Christ’s coming, whether that means his coming into our everyday lives or his coming at the end of time. This kind of expecting has a way of shaping our souls, making us more alert and awake to when God does show up.

In Anne Tyler’s novel, The Amateur Marriage, we witness a sad series of events. The book’s main characters are Michael and Pauline, a pair of World War II-era sweethearts who get married and eventually have three children. But then one day their oldest child, Lindy, just disappears. She runs away from home and promptly falls off the face of the earth. For the first days, weeks, and even months, they watch for her return. They seize on any and every clue as to her whereabouts. They pace, they peer out windows, they listen for a key scratching at the front door lock, they sit bolt upright in bed each time they think they hear footfalls on the driveway.

But Lindy does not return. Over the years, her absence becomes just another part of life. They never finally give up on the idea that they’d see her again, but they stop watching for her. At first, they were certain she’d be back soon. They would not have been at all surprised had she walked back through the front door. Years later, though, the surprise flipped: after a while, they would have been surprised if she had come back.

When Lindy does eventually return, her mother Pauline isn’t alive to see it. Yet Lindy’s father assures her, “Your mother never gave up hope, I could tell.” Of course, Pauline had gotten on with life. But she just had a way of glancing out the window that let you know the hope was still there. When she had the chance to take a cruise with a group of friends, she refused. She came up with a dozen excuses, but everyone knew that the real reason was that she didn’t want to be gone …in case Lindy came back.

Like Pauline with her daughter Lindy, we may not live to see our Lord’s return.  But as we go through our days, we certainly want it to be true that as people look at our lives, they can say of us, “Those Christians, they never give up hope. We can tell.” They lived and died expecting and expectant of God’s coming into their lives.

In the season of Advent, we are called to rediscover the grace of time, to experience time not as a finite resource we need to manage or squeeze everything into, but as the context in which we meet God, the backdrop against which we learn what it means to expect God. It is so easy to rush through the holidays. But the gift of this season is the opportunity to embrace expectation, as a mother does in expecting the birth of her child. And as with birth, we know not the day or the hour it’ll happen. But we know that our long-expected Jesus is coming and when he does, we will rejoice to behold his appearing. Thanks be to God!