Hilton Head Island, SC – January 22, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 9:35-38; Luke 9:51-62
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – When the days drew near for Jesus to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. – Luke 9:51 (RSV)
The title of this sermon is a partial quote from one of my all-time favorite movies. But before I give you the whole quote, I want briefly to fill in the background out of which the statement was made. The line is from Steel Magnolias, starring, among others, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, Sally Fields, Julia Roberts, and Daryl Hannah. The story was first a play, and later it was made into a movie. I saw the play a few years ago at the Arts Center of the Lowcountry. The play and movie are both excellent, but they are not exactly alike.
The Dolly Parton character operates a beauty parlor, and the other women come to it. Many of the scenes take place in the beauty shop, with Dolly and Daryl doing their thing. There are several sub-plots, one of which involves the tension between M’Lynn Eatenton (Sally Fields) and her daughter Shelby (Julia Roberts). Shelby was a diabetic from her youth. When she decided to marry, both her mother and her doctor strongly advised her not to have children because of the potentially disastrous effects. She did anyway, because she wanted to be both a wife and mother. Although she had complications, everything seemed to turn out all right.
After her second pregnancy, however, Shelby’s mother and doctor very pointedly suggested she should seek an abortion for medical reasons, but she refused. In one of her many discussions about the matter with her mother, Shelby said to M’Lynn, “I would rather have three minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.”
That is a poignant, pithy, pathos-filled, memorable line. I won’t tell you how the movie ends, but you can probably guess its conclusion. Suffice it to say that, in her own way, Shelby got her wish.
I would rather have three minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special. This philosophy is echoed in the old commercial for a certain kind of beer: “You only go around once in life, so you’d better grab all the gusto you can get.” It is the old Latin aphorism, spoken by the Robin Williams teacher-character in Dead Poets Society (another of my all time-favorites), Carpe Diem: Seize the Day. It is Robert Herrick’s advice to the young unmarried women of the seventeenth century, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may/ Old time is still a-flying/ The same fresh flower that blooms today/ Tomorrow will be dying.”
None of us knows beyond a doubt exactly how much time we shall have to live. Some have a better idea than others, but no one knows for certain. Therefore all of us are faced with a daily, yearly, and lifetime question: How shall I live my life? Shall I live it seeking three minutes of wonderful, shall I try to find three-hundred-sixty-five days of great, will I have thirty years of spectacular, or shall it be ninety years of nothing special? How shall I live my life?
There is a very brief episode in the Gospel of Matthew that is contained only in Matthew. Apparently this event occurred not too long after Jesus began his public ministry. It says of Jesus, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd.” Jesus sensed very early on that he would not be allowed to live very long, so he wanted to reach as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Therefore he said to the disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” The American agricultural expression for this notion is, “Make hay while the sun shines.” In other words, do what needs to be done when the time is right to do it. If you don’t do it then, you may not be able to do it at all.
In the language of biblical Greek, there were two words for our English word “time.” The first word was chronos. We are familiar with it, because we know the word “chronology.” Chronologies measure seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years. The chronos kind of time is very exact. Every second equals every other second, every year is the same length as every other year.
Kairos, on the other hand, is special time, one-of-a-kind time. Kairos was when you first met your husband or wife, when you were offered your first grown-up job, when your first child was born, when you were told you had a potentially terminal illness, which fortunately did not turn out to be terminal. Those minutes or hours or days are not like normal time. In kairos, time either stops, or it uniquely starts. Chronos is ordinary time, our ordinary time. Kairos ultimately is time God offers to us as both gift and challenge.
When Germany crossed the Polish border on September 1, 1939 to begin World War II, it was special time, singular time. When General Eisenhower decided on June 5, 1944 that the next day was to be D-Day, it was time-outside-time. Last Sunday evening, there were twelve seconds left in regulation time, with the Greek Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys tied. It was exciting time, but it was just time. However, when quarterback Aaron Rodgers took the ball and did his usual dance in the pocket, and then moved quickly to the left, throwing the football like a bullet while still running full tilt, and tight end Jared Cook caught it 35 yards down the field, leaning toward the sideline but with both feet just inside the sideline, and there were still three seconds left, leaving Mason Crosby three seconds in which to kick the winning field goal, chronos turned miraculously to kairos, and with a victory tonight and another two weeks from tonight, the Green Bay Packers will return the Superbowl trophy to Titletown USA. Well, that’s the way I prefer to perceive it anyhow.
The last half of last Sunday night’s game was thirty minutes of wonderful for both teams. What a game it was! And Shelby had far more than her three minutes of wonderful when she married and had two children. We too all have much more than three minutes of wonderful. But the question is this: have we ever meekly accepted a lifetime of nothing special to keep us from being granted our three minutes of wonderful? Have we let slip opportunities which come to us only once in a lifetime? Were we too involved in the mundane that we missed out on the truly extraordinary?
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; - - - then took the other.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
When Robert Frost wrote that splendid, short, four-verse poem, he was talking about more than merely a road which split into two roads somewhere in the autumnal forests of New Hampshire. He was talking about carpe diem. He was talking about seizing the kairotic moment with determination, intending to utilize that once-and-only-once opportunity to make a difference for oneself, for someone else, for the world, and/or for God. There can be so much more than just three minutes of wonderful, but there cannot be even three minutes if we allow kairos to retreat into mere chronos, and the moment is forever lost.
You have an elderly friend. She has been in remarkable health her whole life, but she is, after all, in her nineties. Give her a call. Go to see her. Tell her how much she means to you. Life for everyone is ultimately fragile, and if you don’t see her now, you might never see her again.
Call your grandchild. Don’t expect your grandchild to call you. Grandchildren appear not to know how to use a phone to call someone, but on occasion they may actually answer the phone, especially if they see on their Caller ID that you are the one who is calling. If you wait for that busy young person to contact you, contact might not be made for weeks or months, and your chronos shall negate your kairos.
You keep up with movie reviews. After Christmas there are always oodles of good movies in advance of the Oscars. Invite that person who doesn’t get out much to come with you to a movie. Give him or her three minutes, or better yet, two hours, of wonderful.
Life for too many people is perpetually nothing special. Make it wonderful for someone.
There are several people who come regularly to worship by means of this congregation who come because at one particular time, someone once invited them to go with them to church. Mainline Protestants would rather chomp on a cupful of broken glass than to ask someone if they are saved or if they have God in their life or if they have accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. But anybody can ask anybody to accompany them to church. There is no pressure in that; there is merely a friendly, heartfelt invitation.
All of you know people who don’t go to church anywhere. Ask them to come here with you. Bring them here, or meet them here. Introduce them to others who come here. We are such a captivating clump of Christians that anyone would be enthralled just to be in our saintly presence. But they can’t encounter us or be part of us if they never get here, and almost none of them will ever get here if they aren’t asked.
Going to church doesn’t automatically make everyone a Christian any more than going to the movies makes everyone a movie star, or going to a football game makes everyone an Aaron Rodgers. But being involved in a congregation where God is worshiped and all life is valued can give anybody at least three minutes of wonderful, maybe even once or more frequently per week. Chronos can become kairos if we give it a chance. When we worship God it is kairos in action.
The difference between chronos and kairos is often very slight. Wonderful and nothing special may be separated by no more than a kind word or an innocent invitation or a simple encouragement. We are the ones who determine what kind of time time is.
Many of us recognize our three minutes of wonderful only by looking back on our lives. At the time big things happen to us, we may not necessarily have perceived them to be big.
There are nine chapters in the Gospel of Luke which some biblical scholars call “The Travel Document.” They use that term because from Luke 9:51 to Luke 19:27, Jesus and the disciples were slowly traveling from the region of the Galilee in the north to Jerusalem in the south. They left Galilee because Jesus knew that “his time” had come, the time when he must go to the holy city, there to experience the ominous events Jesus strongly suspected lay ahead of him. Luke describes it this way: “When the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” It is not specified what “to be received up” means, but we assume it means to stride courageously into Holy Week and to be crucified and resurrected, and then to go to be with God.
When Jesus told the twelve they were going to Jerusalem, they were aware of none of those things. They could not have thought of their time with Jesus up to that point as being nothing special, but they could not know how wonderful it actually had been until it was all over. All four of the Gospels are written with the benefit of hindsight. All of the earliest Christians fully realized how blessed they were to have known Jesus only when he was no longer with them. Three minutes of nothing special can become a lifetime of wonderful if chronos becomes kairos.
Many spouses fully appreciate their spouse only after that person is gone. Then they may realize that what they thought was nothing special was actually very wonderful. It just didn’t appear that way at the time. But “at the time” might have been chronos, when it really could have been kairos.
St. Benedict was a fifth-century Italian monk who founded the Benedictine Order of Friars. It is the oldest of the large Roman Catholic religious orders. I have been to the cave south of Rome where Benedict started his monastery. It is a beautiful, mystical, magical place.
The motto of the Benedictines is Ora et Labora: Pray and Work. Virtually all monks of all religious orders do both, but Benedict inscribed it for history in the motto of the Benedictines.
Our last hymn is Come, labor on. Its tune is called Ora Labora. The first stanza harkens to our first scripture reading, when Jesus told the disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore for the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” “Come, labor on. Who dares stand idle on the harvest plain/ While all around him waves the golden grain?” The second stanza urges us to “Redeem the time; its hours too swiftly fly/ The night draws nigh.” To redeem the time is to transform ordinary time into God’s time. In the final stanza, if we help create three minutes of wonderful when there might merely have been a lifetime of nothing special, we shall hear, “And a glad sound comes with the setting sun/ Well done, well done!”