What Time Is It?
Romans
13:11-14
1st Sunday of Advent - A
December 1, 2013
1st Sunday of Advent - A
December 1, 2013
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
Funny things happen
with time at this time of year. Time progresses
at the rate of twenty-four hours each day, sixty minutes each hour and sixty
seconds each minute, so in theory at least, it should move at the same rate for
everyone. But we know better than
that. Parents who are pressed for time
all the time will find that the days between now and Christmas will fly past while
too little progress will be made on their to do lists for Christmas. For young children on the other hand time has
almost stopped. It will be an eternity
between now and Christmas morning when they will discover which of their wishes
have been granted and which will have to be deferred, perhaps forever. I’ve given up waiting for my robot arm.
It has become a
common-place that ancient Greeks had two different words for time. One word, chronos, is time that comes
in periods, like hours or days or years.
This kind of time has duration. It
can be measured.
Various tools have
been used to measure time. As long ago
as 3500 bce, the Egyptians used
the shadows cast by tall towers to break a day down into something like
hours. Sun dials of various designs
followed. Sometime around 1500 bce, sundials were joined by water
clocks. Various mechanical clocks
followed, with the big breakthrough coming in 1656 ad, when Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch scientist, invented the
pendulum-regulated clock. In their turn
pendulum-regulated clocks were replaced by quartz crystal and atomic
clocks. The standard now is an atomic
fountain that uses the resonating frequency of cesium 133. 9,192,631,770 cycles of the cesium atom make
one second.[1]
The atomic fountain operated by the National Institute of Standards and
Technology is accurate to within one second every 30 million years. I would say that this is close enough, but
there is a mercury ion clock under development that will be so accurate that if
it had been started at the precise moment of the Big Bang it would be off now
by about two seconds.[2]
The time in our
lesson from Romans has nothing to do with this kind of time. This time is the other kind of time that the
Greeks had a word for. This time is kairos,
time that comes in moments. A moment has
no duration; it is not a period of time.
“Now” is a moment. So is “the
right time.” Kairos is about timeliness,
rather than length of time. It’s about timing.
“You know what time
it is,” writes Paul to the church at Rome.
That’s kairos, not chronos. “The hour”—that is to say, the moment—“has
already come for you to wake up from your sleep.” Dawn is coming. For Paul that means that the moment has come to
take up the demands of ethical life. Dawn
was the time when the ancient ninety-nine percent, that is, anyone who had to
work, would get up and prepare for the working day. The ancient one percent lived off the labor
of others, so they could get up whenever they woke up and that would be pretty
late in the day, because they would spend the evenings and nights attending symposia. This sounds very academic and high-minded, but
the word symposium means “drinking party.” This explains Paul’s reference to those who
do not “live in the day” but spend their time “in partying and getting drunk…in
sleeping around and obscene behavior…in fighting and obsession.”
For Paul’s readers a
timely moment has arrived: the moment to get up and get dressed. “Our salvation is nearer than when we first
had faith.” This sounds like chronos,
but it is not. We can’t ask, “How much
nearer? How many days or month or years
until our salvation—our health, our holiness, our wholeness—get here?” That would be the chronos question, but
Paul isn’t interested in that question or its answer. Paul is interested in what is appropriate to
this moment—now—and in what today demands of us. Paul tells us the meaning of the moment, and
the decisions that are appropriate to this moment, not the duration of the
period between now and some other time.
Our life as Christ’s
people takes place as a series of moments, not in periods of time. We live in a series of “now’s.” We live in kairos, not chronos.
And yet we all have
watches and we all look at clocks. In
fact, some congregations have clocks in the sanctuary. This signals that, however much we might know
that our life is to be lived in kairos, chronos will not go away
or leave us alone. The time of worship—which
is pointedly grounded in kairos—must be made to answer to chronos.
Kairos is confined to a piece of chronos
about an hour long each week. Kairos is
no longer able to wander freely, to erupt anywhere with its announcement that, regardless
of what the clock says, now is the time to wake up, now is the
time of our salvation, our healing, our wholeness, our holiness. Kairos has been rounded up and
confined by treaty to an hour-long reservation, from which it may not stray.
This is part of the
meaning of the encroachment of Black Friday into Thanksgiving Day. Chronos is time that can be measured, divided
and sub-divided. Anything that can be
counted or measured is already halfway to becoming a commodity that can be
bought and sold. When it is seized for
private use, the process is completed. Chronos
is time commodified. So it is that
Thanksgiving Day is passing, with hardly a grumbling complaint, from being a
part of the commons of time for the use of communities of various sizes, from
towns to families, to being the possession of the modern one percent who use it
to demand the labor of the ninety-nine percent so that even greater wealth may
be concentrated in their hands. We are
experiencing an encroaching tyranny of the private into our common life. We can reclaim some space for our commons of
time.
We can also reclaim
some space for kairos. Kairos,
finally, is the meaning of the Advent season.
Advent is not a countdown to anything.
Especially it is not a way of letting consumers know how much chronos
they have left until Christmas, when all their shopping must be completed. We can reclaim some space, but let no one
imagine that it will be easy. Advent
takes place during consumer capitalism’s High Holy Days. There is no place in that religion for kairos
and still less for community commons. If
we want a place in our own lives for these things, we will have to make that
space. And it will not be easy.
That’s why Paul lays
it out in such stark terms. It is time
to wake up. It is time to get dressed
for work, wrapping Jesus around us like clothing, setting aside the greed, impatience,
and the narrowly-defined interests that consumer capitalism fosters, the vices
that it calls virtues. If we go with the
flow this time of year we will not find ourselves drifting toward God. It is time to wake up.
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[1] “A
Walk Through Time,” http://www.nist.gov/pml/general/time/index.cfm,
accessed November 29, 2013.
[2]
“It’s About Time,” http://whyfiles.org/078time/index.php?g=2.txt,
accessed November 29, 2013.
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