Hilton Head Island, SC – July 8, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 1:9-15; Galatians 3:23-4:7
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. – Galatians 4:4-5 (RSV)
Do you remember when you were a child how slowly time seemed to move in certain circumstances? You would be driven by your parents to your grandparents’ or cousins’ home, and you would ask, not once, but several times, “Are we there yet?” It seemed to take half of forever. Or on the days leading up to Christmas, but especially on Christmas Eve, time almost stopped altogether. Why couldn’t it move faster?
On the other hand, the older we get, the faster time seems to go. We just celebrated the Fourth of July, but it feels like only three or four months ago since we had our last Fourth of July. Birthdays fly by for septua- or octo- or nonagenarians. When we are very young, we want time to speed up, and when we’re old, we want it to slow down.
However, time only appears to go fast or slow for us. Every minute has 60 unvarying seconds, every hour 60 unvarying minutes, every day 24 unvarying hours, every week 7 days, every year 365 days. Time may seem to vary in its speed, but it is relentlessly accurate, just like an atomic clock.
The Greeks had two words for time. One was chronos, and the other was kairos. Chronos is measured time, the kind we calculate in seconds minutes, and hours. A chronometer is a clock. It measures time with a minute hand and an hour hand and perhaps also a second hand. There is a certain implacability to clocks. They keep moving at their own steady pace, regardless of what we might want them to do to alter their unalterable pattern. There are times when we would like to clock clocks. They deserved to be clocked on occasion, we think.
Kairos is a different concept of time. It isn’t an hour or day; it is the hour or day. It’s when God entered into your life in such a way that you knew it was God, and not just happenstance. Time stands still when kairos comes. Kairos is the time you first met the person who became your spouse. Either you knew in that moment that she or he was the one, or that realization slowly dawned on you as you passed through more kairos. You probably remember the circumstances under which you became engaged. That too was kairos. The women in the congregation who have given birth know that there was a time in that process when chronos passed very slowly, particularly the closer you go to your due date. And if you passed your due date, it was an absolute chronological and physiological travesty. A pregnancy is supposed to be nine months, and not a second longer. But when that baby finally arrived: well now, that was kairos. For many women the birth itself was painful beyond description, but the baby was worth every excruciating minute it took for that baby to arrive.
We have all known people who are obsessed with time, meaning chronos. They never waste a minute if they can help it. Most of us are not like that, which is probably a very good thing, because what you do when you waste time may be what I like most to do when I am using time to what I think is its best. Watching the waves lap up on the beach may be utterly pointless to some folks, but it is a necessary requisite to maintaining a semi-sane mind for other folks.
There is another understanding of time which has been given to us by one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries. His name is Woody Allen. It was Woody who once said, “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once.” Is that the truth, or what? Events have to be spaced out in both human history and personal life, or we couldn’t adequately deal with the reality and the importance of those events. If you think about your life as a long slow walk, various things happen as you move along through the years, most of which are inconsequential, or chronos. But some things are brim-full of kairos. However, whether chronos or kairos, no one could sufficiently sort out the meaning of time if all of it were telescoped into one climactic instant, into our own personal Big Bang.
Furthermore, finitude has to do with chronos, while infinity has to do with kairos. To be finite is to be limited by days, months, and years, but when we move into infinity, or perhaps more accurately, into eternity, then we shall be in constant kairos, with all chronos left behind.
“Well, yes, Preacher Man,” you may now be saying to yourself, if you haven’t said it quite some time back, “but why is any of this in a sermon, and how shall any of it apply to me at any point in my lifetime?” Excellent question. So let’s try to find a biblical answer.
Psalm 90 is called a Psalm of Moses. It is the only one of the 150 Psalms for which Moses is claimed to be the author. According to the last chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy, which presumably was the last book written by Moses, it says that Moses was 120 years old when he died. It makes sense that Psalm 90 should be ascribed to Moses, because its theme is time, and any way you slice it, 120 years is a long, long, long time. The number “40” in Hebrew doesn’t literally mean 40; instead, it means generally “a long time.” It rained 40 days and 40 nights in the flood. Moses was on Mt. Sinai 40 days. The Wilderness Wandering lasted 40 years. Jesus was in the desert for 40 days before he began his ministry. These numbers were not exact; they just meant “a long time.” So if Moses lived 120 years, that represents a long, long, long time.
In our responsive reading from Psalm 90 this morning, the opening verse said, “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.” The second verse went on to say, “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” Thus we learn that God is with each of us throughout our lifetimes, our chronology, and He is also with all of us in eternity, our kairos. But the writer of Psalm 90, whoever he was, noted sardonically, “The years of our life are three score and ten” (seventy years) “or by reason of strength fourscore” (eighty years); “yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away” (90:9-10).
The English poet, hymnodist, and Anglican priest Isaac Watts wrote a paraphrase of Psalm 90. It is called “O God, our Help in ages past,” and it is probably the second-best known of the sung Psalms, after the 23rd Psalm in any of its many tunes. We sang it as our second hymn this morning. “Time, like an ever-rolling stream/ Bears all its sons away/ They fly forgotten as a dream/ Dies at the opening day.”
Is that all time means? We have 70 or 80 or 90 years, and then we are gone? Is there any meaning to our lives, our time, our chronos or our kairos, if that’s the whole story? What kind of sorry story is that, anyway?
David Ford is a professor of divinity at Cambridge University in England. A friend of his has done considerable research among old people. He characterized their description of various times throughout their lives as being cyclical, pendular (like the pendulum of a clock), and static. Prof. Ford was so struck by the nature of his friend’s research that he asked him to e-mail it to his 90-year-old mother. They initiated a very active cyber-correspondence. She had been a piano teacher and an amateur gardener. To her, gardening represented cyclical time. Each spring she planted things, and tended them during the summer and fall, and then cut them back for the winter, only to begin all over again next year. Pendular time (chronos in the terminology of this sermon) was like the metronome she used to establish the proper timing of music for her piano students. Now, in her old age, she sees herself in static time, which she understands to mean that she is in the constant presence of God, waiting to discover most fully the true status of God Himself, the great I Am, which is what God’s name, Yahweh, means in Hebrew. I would call static time kairotic time, the time, the most important of all times. But I do not mean to suggest that kairos can be experienced only in eternity; we can experience it and luxuriate in it now.
Several weeks ago when Lois and I made a visit to Scotland, I told in a sermon after we returned of meeting a couple I knew fifty years ago when I was a student assistant minister in Scotland. Willie John Macdonald was then what was known as a home missionary, which was a position for laymen in the Church of Scotland. When Willie John was in his mid-30s, he heard an old minister friend preach a sermon on the famous text about the prophet Elijah from I Kings 19, verse 9. Elijah had fled from King Ahab, who wanted to kill him, and he went to Mt. Horeb, which is an alternative name for Mt. Sinai. God came to Elijah and said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” The point of the sermon was that God had work for Elijah to do, and he wanted him to get on with it. He must not go into hiding for the rest of his life.
When Willie John’s old friend preached that sermon, he said it was as though he was delivering it solely to him. Willie John decided it was God’s way of calling him into the ordained ministry. He had been thinking about it, but he needed a divine nudge, a moment of kairos. After the service he told the preacher how much he was moved by the sermon. Two days later he received the minister’s sermon notes in the mail. And two days after that the old minister died.
When Willie John and Jessie Macdonald heard that sermon, for them it was definitely kairos. It was the time, the proper moment, for a very fine man to hear the call of God. That sermon that day changed his life forever.
In the 19th century, a poor Scottish farmer named Fleming heard a boy crying for help in a bog near his home. The boy was up to his waist in black muck, and he had exhausted himself trying to get out of the bog. The farmer quickly rescued the boy. The next day a magnificent carriage pulled up by Mr. Fleming’s small cottage. A nobleman stepped out and offered to pay the farmer for saving his son’s life, but he refused. Just then Mr. Fleming’s son stepped out of the rude dwelling. “Is that your son?” the wealthy gentleman asked. “Yes, he is.” “Then here is what I propose to do. I will give your son the same excellent education I intend for my son, whom you saved.” And that is exactly what he did. He paid for the farm boy to go to university and then medical school. The name of the farmer’s son was Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin. And when, many years later, the nobleman’s son was afflicted by pneumonia, it was Fleming penicillin that saved his life a second time. By the way, the rich landowner’s name was Lord Randolph Churchill, and his son’s name was Winston Churchill. Alexander Fleming’s father seized his kairos that day by the bog, and the world was transformed, greatly for the better.
The Gospel of Mark has its own unique way of beginning the account of Jesus’ ministry. There is no birth narrative, as there is in both Matthew and Luke, nor is there is wonderfully written prologue, as in John. Instead, Mark briefly tells about John the Baptist, and then says that he baptized Jesus, and then he tells about the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness in just two verses, unlike Matthew, who takes eleven verses, giving much more detail. But then Mark says, in his typical clipped literary manner, “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel’” (Mark 1:14-15).
History was now ready for Jesus. Events had fallen into place in such a way that Jesus could begin his singular ministry of preaching, teaching, and healing. The time was right. Kairos was now in play. Let God’s great adventure begin!
Paul’s letter to the Galatians is what he thought was a necessary theological harangue. Somehow the Christians of that section of modern-day Turkey had concluded that following the Mosaic law was the only thing that could save them. Not so, said Paul; their faith in the saving grace of Jesus Christ was the single factor which alone could save them. You may find Paul’s arguments convincing or contorted, but that isn’t why I chose the scripture passage from Galatians 3 and 4. I did so because, after having insisted that following the religious law cannot help secure anyone’s salvation, Paul goes on to tell how God prepared the way for all of us. “But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal. 4:4-5).
Jesus was not born when he was born by chance. It was not pure happenstance by which a Galilean itinerant preacher began his ministry about the year 30 of the Common Era. The time was fulfilled. It came when the time had fully come. It isn’t chronos we’re talking about here; it is kairos! History had aligned itself; events were finally in their proper place.
If a would-be Messiah of the Jews were to become the Christ of the Christians, he could be born only between roughly 50 BCE and 25 CE. There was a 75-year “window of opportunity” for Christianity to spring into being. It couldn’t have happened before 50 BCE or after 25 CE.
Why? What determined that those were the years for the time to be fulfilled? Four factors had to be in place. The first is that the Jews, or at least some of the Jews, had to have strong messianic fervor. One of Julius Caesar’s generals, Pompey, conquered Judea for Rome in 55 BCE. When the Roman occupied Judea, the Jews felt an overpowering desire for a political and military Messiah. Only a few Jews perceived Jesus to be the Messiah, but they were enough. Secondly, the Romans destroyed the Jewish kingdom between 68 and 72 CE, and afterward most Jews were scattered to the four winds. If there was no Jewish kingdom, there could be no Jewish Messiah who could become a Christ for the Christians. Thirdly, Greek was the common language of educated people all over the Mediterranean region. After the death and resurrection of Jesus, early Christian missionaries could go anywhere and talk about Jesus in Greek and be understood by countless thousands of people. Finally, the Romans had built a great system of roads through the Empire. It was widely acknowledged that “all roads lead to Rome.” The missionaries used those roads to travel safely. Unless all four of those factors were in place, Christianity would never have come into existence, and they were in place for only 75 years.
When the time had fully come, God sent forth His Son. Chronos always goes on in its implacable manner, but kairos comes only when it comes. And the question is this: Are we ready for it when it arrives?