"Now is the time"
Ayot St Peter Holy Communion, St Mary’s Evensong, 27 January 2008: Usha Hull
Ecclesiastes 3 1-11, Luke 4 14-21
If there is one thing we human beings crave throughout our lives, it is more
time. To many of us, in our busy lives, time is precious, time is fleeting,
time is something we would hoard like misers. And often in the hectic pace of
day to day life we tend to forget what time, that great gift of God to us, is
really all about. Here is a question, and an answer, about time, asked by the
poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, that we would do well to ponder. He asks:
‘What is time? The shadow on the dial, the striking of the clock, the running
of the sand, day and night, summer and winter, months, years, centuries – these
are but arbitrary and outward signs, the measure of time, not time itself.
‘Time,’ says Longfellow, ‘is the life of the soul.’
So is time the life of the soul? It is a subject of never ending fascination
and has been called many things by poets and philosophers down the ages. To
give just three examples, in more recent times, Benjamin Franklin called it the
stuff of which life was made, Michel Quoist claimed there was always time to do
what God wants us to do and Mother Teresa lamented the fact that the world was
lost for sweetness and kindness because people were always in such a great
rush.
The ancient Greeks had two words to describe time: chronos and kairos. Whereas
chronos referred more to the chronological sequence of events, the timeline as
we know it, kairos was a philosophical concept that expressed a special moment
in time, or a right or opportune moment. Kairos was known to be a passing
instant when an opening appeared which must be taken advantage of if success
was to be achieved.
The ancient Israelites also made distinctions between different types of time
but their view differed significantly from that of the Greeks because they
believed in a transcendent God, who made Himself present in time. Time and
eternity to them were not opposing concepts. Rather, the God of eternity, who
had created time, made Himself known through actual historical events that
pointed to a deeper and eternal reality.
Subsequently, in the New Testament kairos meant ‘the appointed time in the
purpose of God’, the time when God acted. Christians believed that with Jesus
the appointed time had come. As we read in our New Testament reading, Jesus
chooses a passage from Isaiah 61, and declares to those present that the moment
in history, when the eternal breaks into the present, in him had arrived. He is
the spirit appointed herald of good news to those who are without hope. He and
those who followed his ways would bring freedom to the oppressed. With him came
healing, exorcism and victory over the forces of darkness. The moment of kairos,
the appointed time in the purpose of God, when God chose to act, had arrived
and would continue to be present in the world through those who followed in his
footsteps.
The author of the book of Ecclesiastes, from the reading we heard earlier, was
in tune with the Hebraic way of thinking about time and would have understood
the idea of kairos. The book is said to be based on Solomon’s personal
experience and claims that life without God is a long and meaningless search
for fulfilment that is ultimately disappointing. The book claims that no
pleasure or happiness is possible without God and it is only in God that our
souls come to life.
In the poem we heard earlier, for it is poetry, ‘For everything there is a
season’, it is claimed that God has a plan for all people. Thus God provides
cycles of life and death, and through all the experiences listed in the poem,
the secret to peace and fulfilment for mankind is to discover, accept and
appreciate God’s perfect timing.
So how do Jesus’s teaching that the appointed time for God to act is now and
the Old Testament reading that we need to discover God’s perfect timing for
ourselves impact on our own lives? In reflecting on this, I would like to touch
briefly on three thoughts: time as the great teacher, time as the great healer
and time as we heard earlier, as the life of the soul.
Time, it is said, is the great teacher. How often, in our lives, do we fail to
learn by experience? How often do we make the same mistakes over and again? We
truly begin to grow, to mature, to develop wisdom when we take time to reflect
on the past, to ponder our mistakes, to realise with humility where we have
gone wrong and take erstwhile steps to set things right. Then again, time
teaches us that our God is ever at work in our lives. How often do we fail to
see His hand at work in the events that overtake us? A great gift of God is the
time to reflect, to look back and discern His workings in our lives, to
realise with gratitude that He has ever been with us, loving us and supporting
us, even though we may not have known it.
And with this thought grows the knowledge that time is indeed the great healer.
No matter what our trials in life, no matter what
sufferings we may have to endure, no matter how endless seem the problems that
beset us, as Christians we believe that a day will come when our God will
redeem us, that we will be able to look back on what we have endured without
bitterness, without pain, without the bewilderment so often present in our
pain, for our God is a God who loves us.
So time is indeed the life of the soul. Jesus teaches us that the time for God
is now, that God is present with us in every moment of our lives. We often tend
to wish time away, always thinking that some event in the future will bring us
greater happiness than we have now. We continually yearn for things we have not
got, believing that the secret of contentment lies in that which we do not
possess. We hurry, we jostle, we go through life running.
And in the process we ignore the joy that is given as a gift to us in the
present time, the time that is now, the great gift of God held out to us, not
in our past, not in our future, but here with us in this moment.
I remember reflecting on this not so long ago floating down the tranquil
backwaters of Kerala, in India. On our recent holiday to
India, Colin and I were privileged to have been able to rent a riceboat, a
kettuvallum as it is known, for 24 hours to explore
village life as it is lived at its most natural and best. They say it is one of
the one hundred things you must do before you die. And floating on those waters
I could understand why. Let me try and paint you a picture.
When the sun rises it is on a life that has been lived in a similar way for
hundreds of years. Early in the morning, from a distant mosque rings out the
Muslim call to prayer, breaking the silence of water and coconut palms that
give way to paddy fields and the occasional neat little village. A fisherman
sets out in a tiny boat that barely makes a ripple on the surface of the water.
On the shore, neat little school children dressed in uniform await the school
boat that will ferry them across the water, darting looks at us with curious
and laughing eyes as we gaze back at them. The blue flash of a kingfisher skims
over the surface. As the hours go by across the still waters, a bell peals
from a tiny village church.
We got out of the boat to explore a little, Colin and I. We met a woman who
told us proudly that she was a Christian. Not only a
Christian, said she, but an Anglican at that. Her face suffused in smiles when
we told her that yes, we were Anglicans too, or at least tried to be, and then
and there a bond was established.
It seems to me in all my travels, that wherever there is life lived simply,
wherever there is a genuine heartfelt reaching out to God, wherever there are
the values that we hold dear and which are the cement of our ordinary,
day-to-day life, there God lives and is present in our now. There is holiness
in simple things, in the things we take for granted, in the love that is all
around us, for we are surrounded by love.
When Jesus said ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,’ he was talking in the
present tense. The special time has come, God’s moment, His Kingdom, has
arrived with the coming of the ministry of Jesus. And so it is with us. As
those who follow in the footsteps of the Lord, this is the challenge for us to
be following in his ministry, for now is the time, now is our dawn.
Dawn on the backwaters of Kerala is indeed a special time as is the breaking of
dawn across the world. I leave you with this little poem from India, written
originally in the ancient language Sanskit.
‘Listen to the exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this day...
for yesterday is but a dream,
and tomorrow is only a vision:
but today, well lived, makes
every yesterday a dream of happiness
and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day!
Such is the salutation of the dawn!
Amen.