Mark 1:9-15; Matthew 26:17-19; Galatians 6:7-10
Advent is the time of already and not yet. It is the time of God's kairos.
What time is it?
Asked how she’s doing in the
midst of a stressful or chaotic
situation, a friend of mine
often responds, “Well, I’m in the
process of becoming wonderful.” She
knows that transformation is
underway and hope is on the
horizon; but in the meantime, things
are not as they should be.
The season of Advent is the same
sort of meantime place. We
acknowledge that things are not yet
wonderful, but are becoming so.
While radio stations play chirpy
holiday tunes, we dare to sing,
“Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus.”
Why do we ask the
Savior to come? Not
to create some false
dramatic buildup to
December 25 (Will
Mary and Joseph
make it to
Bethlehem? Will the
child be nestled in the
manger when the
shepherds arrive?)
No, we bid the
Savior to come
because we still need to be saved.
Advent prepares us to celebrate the
birth of Jesus, but it also points us
toward Christ’s second coming,
when all will be transformed, made
new — made wonderful.
Advent is the time of already and
not yet. It is the time of God’s kairos.
The fullness of time
A variety of Greek words convey the
idea of time in Scripture; two of the
most familiar are chronos and kairos.
Chronos is clock time, measured in
hours and days — the time we feel
enslaved by as it ticks on
dispassionately. Kairos, by contrast,
is holy time, God’s time. It is the
favorable season, the moment when
grace seeps into ordinary life.
“When the fullness of time had
come, God sent [the] Son,” writes
Paul (Galatians 4:4). What made firstcentury
Palestine the right time and
place? It was the fullness of time. I
hardly think that God was engaged in
hand-wringing over an Almighty todo
list —“Oh, I’m up to my elbows
with this Babylonian exile! When am
I going to find time to get Jesus down
there?” (This is good news for those
of us who are wondering how we will
ever get the Christmas cards out
before Groundhog Day! Perhaps we
can trust the fullness of time for
ourselves as well.)
Jesus’ public ministry begins with
the announcement of God’s kairos.
Still fresh from the waters of
baptism, yet resolute from his
testing in the wilderness, Jesus
proclaims, “The time is fulfilled, and
the kingdom of God has come near”
(Mark 1:15). His ministry ends with a
similar pronouncement. With
Passover on the way and a violent
death lurking in the shadows, Jesus
says, “My time is near” (Matthew
26:18). Our lives bear witness to
these kairos moments, even as we
anticipate another still to come: Paul
writes in Galatians that we should
persist in “doing what is right, for we
will reap at harvest-time” (6:9).
Even while we wait and sing and
serve, God breaks into our
experience with kairos moments. For
many people, holding a lit candle
and singing “Silent Night” on
Christmas Eve is an experience of
kairos. God draws near and the
world seems bathed in a holy light.
But kairos is also a bit of a
trickster, able to alter our perception
of time itself. I once attended a
workshop in which the leader asked
us to remember a time when we
became so engrossed in a task that
we lost track of the clock. The
participants recalled gardening,
knitting a sweater or playing a sport
with friends. The workshop leader
then suggested that those activities
dearest to our hearts can be deeply
tied to our life’s work, our true call
and God’s kairos. The time feels
short, because we are lost in the
moment and the minutes fly by.
Stop all the clocks
Kairos can also feel longer than we
expect, because the moment is
saturated with more than seems
possible. Time seems to stand still.
“Stop all the clocks,” writes W.H.
Auden in “Funeral Blues,” a poem
about grief. Those of us who have
experienced the death of a loved one
know that certain times need to be
set apart for a holy purpose — to
remember and grieve. We cannot do
business as usual. The laundry will
wait. Phone calls can be returned
tomorrow. We need to experience
God’s time outside of time.
In this way kairos time is elastic.
The moments of our lives are not
created equal. As Albert Einstein is
reported to have said, “When you
are courting a nice girl, an hour
seems like a second. When you sit
on a red-hot cinder, a second seems
like an hour. That’s relativity.”
It’s also a little bit like kairos.
MaryAnn McKibben Dana is associate pastor of Burke (Va.) Presbyterian Church. |
