On Super Tuesday in Lafayette, Tennessee, James Kruger was watching the election results. Suddenly a warning appeared on his tv screen: A tornado was headed toward Lafayette, Tennessee. As soon as he read those words, the lights went out.
[You can Google an image of James Kruger, who appears disheveled, confused, and with a huge shiner.]
He put on sweat pants, grabbed a flashlight, “and then I heard this noise," Kruger said. He headed for a door, "and all of a sudden I heard the glass breaking and it was sucking," he said. "When I tried to shut the door, [it] seemed like the door was lifting up. So I just dove and I lay flat on the floor." Lying there, time stood still as everything in the house flew over him, scraping and banging his back, Kruger said. Then the chaos stopped. "I was laying in the dirt. There was no floor. No nothing."
The house was gone. But Kruger says he knows why he survived. "I think God was holding my leg, teaching me that I hadn't been doing everything he wanted me to do," he said.
There is an old saying that declares, “Nothing concentrates the mind quite like a hanging at dawn” (Often attributed to Samuel Johnson). In other words, when faced with the very real possibility of death, our typical multi-tasking, “scatter brain” consciousness both “zooms in” and “zones out.” We “zoom in” to a finely tuned focus on what is most important, what our lives have meant, whom we truly love, and what we ultimately believe in.
We “zone out” of the temporal count-down we usually inhabit. The life threatening experience—whether it is a tornado landing on your house, your car careening off a cliff, or a bullet piercing your body—-is not experienced in “real time.” We can review and relive thousands of events as the crisis whirls about us. Seconds and minutes are no longer part of the count-down when we are accounting the meaning of our life.
Just as the few moments that make up a crisis situation can seem to move in slow motion, so also hours and hours can pass without our noticing them when we get “in the zone.” Surgeons performing lengthy, complex procedures, athletes focused on the game, musicians practicing and composing, all regularly experience a surprising “time war” feeling that occurs when they finally step back outside “the zone.” A twelve hour heart surgery, a three hour contest, a six hour jam session—-none are recalled as a passage of minutes or hours. They are recalled instead as whole events, experiences in which mind, body, and spirit were working together so seamlessly, so harmoniously, that there was no real separate cognizance of “time.”
Even if you are not a heart surgeon you know the feeling. Its also the same “out of time” togetherness that makes vacation days both stretch out forever, yet slip away so fast. Two days spent working, running errands, keeping up with “life as usual” move at a completely different pace than two days spent climbing a mountain, or two days relaxing at a seaside resort with your spouse, or two days spent entirely alone. All these experiences are momentary glimpses of what today’s gospel reading defines as “eternal life.”
John 3:16 may well be the most familiar verse in the Bible. Many of you can recite it by heart. Here goes: “For God so loved the world . . . . . . but have eternal life.”
I ask you: what is eternal life?
Let’s first be clear what “eternal life” is NOT:
1) Eternal life is not the same thing as “immortal life” or “immortality.” The Greek pantheon of gods were all immortal—and it was the weight of these endless, everlasting days that made the gods grow restless. The immortal ones typically relieved their endless tedium by messing about in the lives of mortals.
2) Eternal life is not lived in a time-line. Eternal life is not a time line that stretches out forever.
Eternal life is the absence of a time line. Eternal life is a life lived without time.
But how can we imagine such a timeless state?
Actually we live it everyday.
Think of “time.” What do you think of? You either think of the past or the future. For humans, all is past or future. There is no present. In spite of all this talk about “living in the present,” live in the “here and now,” the present is the one time zone we know nothing about.
Catch me a “present.” Can you? Time is either past or future. You live in either the past or the future. We live in the flow of future-past.
The “now moment” is gone with the snap of our fingers. Humans know no present, no “now.” The present or “now” is God’s time zone, the time zone of eternity.
“Now” IS the eternal moment, a moment without time, a moment beyond time, a moment that contains all past and future moments in one Eternal NOW moment. When theologian Paul Tillich spoke of “The Eternal Now,” and named a book that title, he located God in that “time zone” or “timelessness zone.” In other words, the wholeness of God is found in the eternal life of “now.”
Have you ever tried to explain “time zones” to little children? How can it be three o’clock in one place and six o’clock in another, and midnight somewhere else? And when you cross the international “date line” it is even harder to figure out. You are either suddenly living in your yesterday or your tomorrow, depending on whether you are heading east or west.
Living in the time zone of “now” is different. It is the opposite of parsing and piecing time into days or hours or minutes. When your “life flashes before your eyes” and you experience a lifetime of memories, feelings, impressions, emotions--all in a focused flash of clarity--it is a “gestalt” moment, a moment that embraces and embodies the wholeness of life, not tiny counted out fragments of existence.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
When Jesus promised us the gift of “eternal life,” he meant not just something that we can look forward to in the future. Eternal life is a gift of the NOW now . . . . Eternal life is a time zone we can begin living now. Eternal life is the ability to transcend the cage of past and future and to live the divine time of NOW now.
Eternal life is the gift of wholeness, the gift of a reborn, re-created human life made possible because “God so loved the world.” Did you hear that? “God so loved THE WORLD.” The moment of God’s love is “now.” The moment of God’s love is eternal life. That eternal “now” is possible now because of a specific gift: God “gave his only Son.”
God first gave the Son to the world, to an earthly life.
Then God gave the Son to the cross, to an atoning death.
This atonement makes possible a living At-One-Ment with God, with self, with others, with all creation. At-One-Ment enables us to live in the moment. At-One-Ment exists at the point of At-One-Moment.
This is the promise of the gospel. This is the promise of John 3:16. Trusting in the atoning death of Christ on the cross brings us the experience of eternal life, of life lived with God in the “now.”
That’s why I say “now” moments are God moments.
What “God” moments, what “now” moments, have you already experienced in your life?
The moment you knew you were in love
The moment of a child’s birth
The moment of loved one’s death
The moment you sunk the winning basket
The moment you crashed the family car
The moment you got your first job
The moment you retired from your job
The moment you confessed you were an addict
The moment you felt forgiveness
All these “now” moments are where God lives, where Christ’s atoning work brings wholeness and healing. It is the “now” moments that make life worth living, that invite us to participate in God’s gift of “eternal life.”
In this season of Lent we are counting down forty days and nights. It is both ironic and fitting that we carefully count the days to Jesus’ passion. We count the days to that final day when the cross made eternal life, a now life, possible. A day when there are no more count-downs.
Our days are numbered. Your days are numbered. What number is today? This could be number 100. Or number 10. Or number 1, your last day.
Eternity is unnumbered.
Glenn Thompson, a missionary in the Philippines, has the best definition of eternity I have ever encountered.
“To realize the value of one year, ask a student who has failed his exam.
To realize the value of one month, ask a mother who has given birth to a premature baby.
To realize the value of one week, ask an editor of a weekly newspaper.
To realize the value of one days, ask a daily wage laborer who has six kids to feed.
To realize the value of eternity, seek Christ and all His riches.” (As quoted in theCOMMISSION, March 1998, 28C)
You can live in God’s NOW, now. All you need to do is believe in him, trust in him, and follow him. “For God so loved the world, that he gave His only begotten Son, that who ever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
Now!
Animations, Illuminations, Illustrations, Ruminations, Applications
“Two men are talking about the problems at a particular university. One has a good grip on the English language, and the other does not. The one with an understanding of the language talks abut the malaise in the administration, the malaise in the faculty, and the malaise in the student body. The other agrees and says, “Yeah, and pretty soon there will be mayonnaise all over the place.’ We seem to have reached the point where there is ‘mayonnaise’ all over the place.”
Walter M. Brown Jr., “Are We Merely Gazing?,” The African American Pulpit, Fall 1999, 15. (Bao)
One way you could develop this sermon is to talk of the Eternal Currency. What are the currencies of eternity? What do we traffic in today if we are living the Eternal Now?
Have you ever noticed how images of heaven are boring? Eternity can appear too much of a good thing . . .
“What is today? Today is eternity.”
Meister Eckhart (as quoted on p. 22 of Timothy Radcliffe, What is the Point of Being a Christian?).
Woody Allen: “Eternity is a very long time, particularly at the end.”
“Everything that is not eternal is eternally out of date.” C. S. Lewis
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”
Words spoken by the Alchemist in Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist, trans. Alan R. Clarke (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998), 135.
What Amy Carmichael said (according to Joni Erickson Tada): " We will have all of eternity to celebrate the victories, but only a few short hours before sunset in which to win them".
“Eucharistic people take their lives and break them and give them in daily fulfillment of what our Lord did and does. He took his life in his own hands. This is freedom. He broke it—-this is obedience. He gave it----this is love. And he still does these simple acts at every table and in every heart that will have its soul and time and eternity meet.”
Anglican Bishop Stephen Bayne
The night before his crucifixion, this is the prayer Jesus raised to his Father: “this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (Jn.17:3).
One of the “ministers” (that means lay persons) of a local church was delivering meals as part of his work with a “Meals on Wheels” mission. He took the meal to a home of a woman whose only child was visiting that day. He congratulated the woman for having such a nice son, and said “I have eight children of my own.”
“Eight kids,” exclaimed the woman. “I love my son so much that I can’t imagine dividing love by eight.”
“Ma’m,” the man said gently, “you don’t divide love--you multiply it.”
Jesus Love is not zero-based: The more you give, the less you have.
Jesus Love is eternity-based: The more you give, the more there is to go around.
Jesus Love is other-based: we are to reach out in love to “all people” and “especially to those of the family of faith” (Galatians 6:10).
Love for “all people” comes first and presupposes everything else. It is followed by “the Christian community,” which “defines only the minimum of love’s responsibility, not its farthest extent.” (So argues Victor Paul Furnish in Theology and Ethics in Paul [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1968], 204).