It is January! Praise the Lord! Can''t you feel the excitement and energy as we tear off the last page of the 2006 calendar and began the year of 2007?
Did I hear someone say, "Baloney? Big deal! So what! Did the preacher come back again from one of those New Life Missions or Spiritual Retreats? Didn''t anybody tell the preacher just because we changed the calendar, we didn''t change the circumstances that existed on December 31?"
Greek mythology has the image of "Time" being likened to a person, with long hair in the front and bald in the back. The picture is of one you must catch coming towards you because once it has passed nothing is left to grab hold of.
The January, 1992, edition of the Daily Bread Devotional guide says, "The month of January is named after JANUS, the Roman God of BEGINNINGS. He was symbolized as a man with two faces--one looking back and the other LOOKING AHEAD."
When you get home today, take your new calendar and look at it; the pages are fresh and unused. This new year provides everyone with the possibility of a NEW BEGINNING. Everyone has the same amount of days and time to accomplish something in this new year.
Horace Whittel, a dock worker in Gillingham, England, hated his alarm clock. Every working day for forty-seven years, its bell jarred him awake. Each day he had longed to ignore it.
Finally, Whittel got his revenge. On the day he retired, he took his alarm clock to the dockyards. He placed it under an 80-ton hydraulic press. Then, with great delight, he pushed the button, releasing the press down on the clock. It was totally flattened. "What a lovely feeling!" Whittel said.
Many of us can empathize. We have a love-hate relationship with alarm clocks, watches, and timepieces. But even if we were to spend the rest of our lives destroying them to express our exasperation with the pressure of time, we would not escape the persistent swing of the pendulum or the tick of the clock or the quartz movements of registered time. (1)
One day I wrote down some of the ways in which I used the word time or heard it expressed by others:
"This is not a good time for you to call, could you call back at another time?"
"I had the time of my life."
"I can''t remember another time when I have been so angry."
"Our timing was a little off today."
Time can be many things: a time of triumph; a time of tragedy; a time of torture; a time of tenderness.
The concept of time that is so often mentioned in the Bible usually falls into two categories. The first category usually is the word CHRONOS, from which we get the word chronology. The second category is the word KAIROS. "Chronos" describes time solely measured by the ticking of the clock. This type of time is best expressed in the word drudgery. Each second is exactly like the one which went before it. Recently a member of our church family remarked that he "was just marking time at his job." "Chronos" time is empty time, meaningless time, humdrum time. It is a void which must be filled. I remember once "killing time" as we waited to get through the Lincoln Tunnel. It was something that had to be endured.
However, the other Biblical example for time is, thankfully, KAIROS time. KAIROS time represents those rich, extra-special, significant, dramatic moments in life which are packed with meaning. Those moments that stand out and stay with us for a lifetime, forever inspiring and instructing us. KAIROS time is full time, vital time, decision time, God''s time--those moments when God seems to be speaking directly to you. That is KAIROS time. I believe one of my favorite theologians, H. Richard Nieburb, would call it a moment of revelation.
When Jesus came preaching, he said, "The time is fulfilled." Jesus was born in the "fullness of time," exclaimed Galatians 4:4.
Today in our Gospel lesson from Luke 10:38-42, we see that Chronos and Kairos are each represented in the Biblical characters of Martha and Mary. We know the Biblical story of Martha and Mary and the special time Jesus comes to visit with them. Mary sits at the feet of Jesus and listens to his every word. Martha, however, clatters about the kitchen doing what must be done when an unexpected guest shows up who will probably stay for dinner. The meeting between Mary and Jesus becomes a KAIROS moment for her. It is assumed by most scholars that Jesus was probably teaching part of the Torah to her.
It was almost unthinkable for Mary and Martha, women without any male relationships apparent, to have invited a man into their house in the first place! And it was even more revolutionary for Jesus, a Rabbi, to teach a mere woman about the ways of God. The law said: "Women cannot speak with scholars, even on the streets." Moreover, the law said: "May the words of the Torah be burned, if they be handed over to a woman." As you can see, the Women''s Movement had not organized as of yet.
Once again, as so happens in the New Testament, Jesus is breaking with conventional religious wisdom and thinking of his time. He is bringing a KAIROS moment in a CHRONOS world. He must do this in order to bring life and hope to these desperate conditions. Inside the house of Mary and Martha something startling and strange is going on. Jesus is treating Mary with dignity and honor unknown to that moment in the life of Israel. However, Martha missed out completely on this special time. She was so caught up in her normal routine, she was so bogged down, that this special moment passed her right by. She hadn''t chosen the good portion. Sound familiar? I know it is that way for me at times. How many life-giving moments do we lose because we are too busy fretting about what the future might bring? Do we also put God aside and miss out on church activities when a guest arrives at our homes? Are we also so busy making a living that we fail to nurture and cultivate a Christian lifestyle that is in harmony with the word of God? How often does the possibility of a God-shaped moment slip by in our preoccupation with the future?
Martha was anxious, and she was also distracted when Jesus offered Mary the gift of life as a woman. However, Martha was busy with cooking the lamb and rice, the wine and cheese, folding napkins and setting the table, and she became very angry that Mary was not doing the same.
I am convinced that the greatest problem facing people today is not that we are so necessarily evil or intentionally evil, but that we are so busy. Thus, we become so busy that we block God out of our lives and out of the religious institutions that can nurture and instruct us in the tension we have in discerning God''s times in our journeys of faith.
I want to share three insights for your consideration as we open the new calendar year.
FIRST, TIME IS GOD''S GIFT TO US--REJOICE IN IT FULLY.
If you had a bank that credited your account each morning with $86,400 that carried over no balance from day to day and allowed you to keep no cash in your account, and every evening cancelled whatever part of the amount you had failed to use during the day, what would you do? Draw out every cent, of course! Well, you have a bank and its name is "Time". Every morning it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it rules off as lost whatever of this you have failed to invest to good purpose. It carries over no balances. It allows no overdrafts.
That means the way in which you deal with time affects how much wealth you discover in human existence. If you greet each new day as a treasure house to be invested wisely, the journey from Sunday to Saturday turns into an exciting and exhilarating experience. By the same token, if you do not use time, it will end up using you. No matter who you are, where you live or what you do, life is impacted most drastically by what you do with time and what it does with you. Will Rogers was once asked: "If you had only 48 hours to live, how would you spend them?" The Oklahoma cowboy philosopher replied: "One at a time." Such is the reality of time. Every day gives us 86,400 seconds and we must use every one of them as they come, for they will never be seen again.
But ironically, there is another side to this crucial issue for each of us. There is an altogether different dimension of time which only people of faith can ever know. There is a time which no wrist watch can measure, but which itself measures how much abundance people find in life. Beyond the world''s time there is God''s time. The basic issue is in learning how to tell one kind of time from the other. We must know when to wait and we must know when to move. Only when we are connected to God can we know the difference.
SECONDLY, OUR TIME IS LIMITED--USE IT WISELY.
An awareness of time should cause us to place a proper value on the use of time in our lives. We must be careful to choose what we are going to do, for time does not allow us to do everything.
A distinguished professor at one of America''s leading seminaries tells of a man who said to him, "I spent twenty-two years trying to come to terms with my doubts. Then one day it dawned on me that I had better come to terms with my faith. Now, I have transferred from the agony of questions I cannot answer to the challenge of answers I cannot escape." Nourish and nurture the part of you which does believe and trade CHRONOS time for KAIROS time. This alone will open your life to a new perspective, new attitudes and a deeper source of power.
I believe that nothing ever happens in this world until someone gets an idea and stays with it until it prevails. The Apostle Paul, writing in Philippians 3:13 said, "This one thing I do."
Bruce Larson, now co-pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, tells the story of a man who retired from forty years of work and catching the 7:30 a.m. bus every morning. The first morning after his retirement, his dear wife served him breakfast, and he said, "Honey, I don''t like eggs fixed this way." She was shocked and declared, "But I''ve been serving you eggs over-easy for forty years." He said, "I never had time to tell you." Imagine enduring forty years of less than desirable eggs (Chronos) because of the lack of a few seconds of sharing with your spouse. We can only imagine how many other important items were missed in that relationship because of the distraction of catching a bus.
Jesus shares with Martha, "Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her." Only one thing is necessary. Martha was worried about the "menu" when Jesus wanted to teach about a meaningful life.
David Gooding, in his book ACCORDING TO LUKE, writes:
"In those circumstances there is no doubt what Christ would have preferred. He would have preferred Martha''s fellowship to her service. But Martha''s idea of what had to be done was different from Christ''s, and as we can now see, it was false. She meant well, she loved the Lord, and she thought she was serving him, but her sense of proportion with regard to what was necessary was in fact depriving the Lord of what he most wished for and depriving her of what was most necessary. And it had come about precisely because she had not first sat at his feet and listened to him long enough to find out what he regarded as the paramount necessity."
This insight clearly teaches us that work that is not connected to the worship and praise of Christ will wind up being a distraction rather than part of our devotion to Christ. It will be a drudgery rather than a delight.
LASTLY, TIME IS HOW GOD GIVES US THE OPPORTUNITY TO DISCOVER HIS PRESENCE TO CONVERT OUR CHRONOS TIME TO KAIROS.
Dr. John Killinger tells of a story he found in GUIDEPOSTS Magazine about a woman who was turning forty. She was feeling very unhappy about growing older. She took her daughter for her first horseback riding lesson. As a girl, she had always wanted to learn to ride, but had been unable to do so. At least her daughter would learn, she thought. But taking the daughter added to her sense of depression. Her own life was nearly over, she felt, and it would always be incomplete because she had not fulfilled her childhood desires.
Back at home, she ran across a little booklet her daughter had made when she was eight years old and in the third grade. It was titled "The ME Book." It was about the daughter''s life up to that point. There were eight pages, one for each year of her life, and on each page there was a photograph of the daughter at that age.
Slowly, the mother turned the pages, looking at her daughter''s pictures. It made her sadder than ever. Her daughter was so young, and she felt so old. Then she came to the last page. She expected it to say "The End." But it didn''t. It said, "The Beginning."
The mother shook her head. It took a moment for the meaning to sink in. The teacher had had the students write "The Beginning" on the last page instead of "The End" because their lives were only beginning at that point.
Suddenly, the sunshine broke into the mother''s life again. Her own life wasn''t at the end, it was at the beginning! Her whole attitude changed.
She decided it wasn''t too late to learn to ride a horse. She asked her daughter''s teacher and soon she too was sitting on a horse, riding around a track.
She had learned an important lesson. Never think of any time as the end of your life, for every time is only the beginning of the rest of it. Even death itself, when we are in Christ Jesus, is the beginning of eternal life. (2)
As you open the year of this year, regardless of your age, may you realize that it is not the end, but the BEGINNING.
It is January! The beginning of a New Year and a new you. Praise the Lord!
Do you know what time it is?
