“It’s About Time”
Romans 13:8-14
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
11/27/16 – Advent 1
In my limited
travels around the globe, one thing I’ve learned is that when First-Worlders
pack our bags, we tend to stuff our neuroses in with our underwear, toiletries,
and anything else we try to keep hidden, but without which we feel lost. When
traveling to less-developed nations, one neurosis that creates lots of headache
is our addiction to timeliness. And I am not judging. I have never met anyone
as enslaved to punctuality as myself. If I am supposed to be at someone’s house
at 2:00pm, and I’m late, I’ll risk a speeding ticket to get there on time. If I’m early, I’ll ride a half
mile, a mile, even two miles down the road and back so I don’t knock on the
door at, God forbid, 1:56.
Time is much
more fluid in places like Mexico and Malawi. In cultures that thrive on
relationships rather than business deals, telling folks that something begins
at 7pm is like us telling a friend, “We should get together next spring.” The
target is wide, and when everyone arrives, whenever that may be, that’s when the
game, or the meeting, or the celebration begins.
The Greeks
held two understandings of time. First, they recognized chronos – time as determined by the position of the hands on the
clock, or the sun in the sky, or the earth in its seasons.
In Romans 13, Paul writes, “You
know what time is; it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep,” The word
Paul uses is not chronos but Kairos.
Chronos measures periods of progressive
and observable change. Kairos refers
to the quality of time – a fullness or even an emptiness. That’s why Paul’s
image of awakening fits so appropriately. At the threshold between night and
day, between darkness and light, at the continual confluence of past, present,
and future, we awaken to the mystic realm of Kairos. Advent calls us to live in a state of perpetual awakening
to the Good News of God delivering Kairos
into chronos. Advent prepares us
for the timeliness of Agape Love taking on flesh and blood, consciousness and
clothing, a particular face and personality.
According to
Paul, Love is the character and substance of our preparation. “Love does no
wrong to a neighbor,” he says, “therefore, love is the fulfilling of the Law.”
Knowing that many
of his readers will need something more concrete than “love your neighbor,”
Paul says to “live honorably as in the day.” He clarifies that by contrasting
daytime honor to night time dishonor. The common thread among dishonorable
things is a short-sighted and selfish disregard for our neighbors, for the
wider human community, and for our own bodies and selves.
Paul mentions
drunkenness, and I suppose he means pretty much what it sounds like. I also think
he’s referring to more than the pathology of alcoholism. I think he means willfully
losing self-control and defiantly labeling it “autonomy.” I do this because I want to, and I can. And if you don’t like it, leave.
When we don’t cherish and care for
the unique and immediate chronos
realities of who we are in our own physical bodies, we cannot cherish and care
for the people next to us – or the earth itself, without which we do not exist.
Failing in the call to love as we are loved by God, we will use our bodies and
those of others, either through exploitation or annihilation, as means to superficial
pleasures and momentary diversions. Paul calls such darkness “drunkenness, debauchery,
and licentiousness.”
“Quarreling and jealousy” also expose
a preference for chronos to the
exclusion of Kairos. When enslaved to
chronos, we create cultures of suspicion
and resentment. We mark time by counting victories over competitors. We judge other
people’s worth by calculating their potential benefit or threat to us rather
than working gratefully to know them for who they are and to cooperate with
them.
Advent reminds us that we live in
an in-between time. We have one foot in chronos
and the other in Kairos. Kairos is our true home, but we cannot
ignore chronos. We live here, too.
And right now, increasingly, people are suffering the effects of rampant “drunkenness,
debauchery, and jealousy.” Trying to proclaim Kairos in the midst of our chronos-fixated
culture can be wearisome. It creates a dissonance that can be easily dismissed.
Traveling home yesterday evening,
Marianne and I stopped at the rest stop on I-26 between Hendersonville and
Asheville. As we walked into the restrooms, Travis Tritt was on the radio belting
out the final chorus of his 1991 hit: “Call someone who’ll listen and might
give a damn/Maybe one of your sordid affairs/But don’t you come ‘round here
handin’ me none of your lines/Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares/Yeah,
here’s a quarter, call someone who cares.”1
The very next song to play on that
country radio station, another major hit, this one from 1818, ends with this
verse: “Silent night, holy night, Son of God, love’s pure light; radiant beams from
thy holy face with the dawn of redeeming grace, Jesus, Lord, at thy birth, Jesus,
Lord, at thy birth.”
The Incarnation of God in Jesus of
Nazareth is God’s embodied, spirited, and profoundly beautiful way of telling
us that the created order is not some profane purgatory where souls are incarcerated
in bodies and have to prove their worth before moving on to higher and holier things.
For all its chronic brokenness and violent imperfection, the Creation does more
than bear witness to God. It offers a tangible expression of God’s own Self. The
Creation, humankind included, is the ongoing invitation to an organic experience
of the Creator. As God’s spiritual act of physically kneading Kairos into chronos, the Incarnation affirms the fundamental goodness and the
eternal holiness of all that God, in Love, has made.
While we walk this earth, our purpose
is to wake up to “the dawn of redeeming grace.” We are here to be “someone who
cares.”
Now, we need each other for Kairos living. No one of us can do it
alone. So, when human beings and human institutions seem to go awry, hindering
the way of Love with fear and loathing, that becomes our call. Paul says that
we “owe” it to one another and to all creation to gather in communities of compassion
to do the hard work of living all the more deliberately and visibly as
incarnations of Love, Justice, and Peace.
This Advent, it is time to wake up
from whatever dreams we’ve been having, and renew our commitment to being that
community.
