A sermon for the third Sunday after Epiphany given at the United Church of Acworth, Acworth, NH on January 22, 2012.
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Psalm 62:5-12
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20
We live in the midst of two kinds of time.
The time of day-to-day schedules, routines, and hours to clock in.
And, if we are lucky, occasionally a different kind of time will break in to our schedules and routines.
If we are lucky, we’ll find ourselves interrupted by a visit from a friend or loved one, a special gift from someone, or invitation to something.
We go on day after day in some ways hoping for that in-breaking of a different kind of time into our monotonous, flattened, tedium.
While the day-to-day time of calendars and alarm clocks, of deadlines and punch-clocks the Greeks called chronos, they had a different term for the higher time, the opportune time which breaks in to our normal day-to-day experience. This they called kairos.
Eugene Peterson comments on this kind of time.
“Time. But not just time in general, abstracted to a geometric grid on a calendar or numbers on a clock face, but what the Greeks named kairos, pregnancy time, being present to the Presence.” (Peterson 2011, 7)
We read in our pew Bibles: “The right time has come” (GNT)
A more literal version speaks of the time as being fulfilled, or filled up, or full. In other senses this same word refers to being pregnant. New possibilities are being born.
Jesus’ announcement that “the right time has come” is a call to wake up from our chronos schedules and routines and day-to-days and to become alive to the new pregnant, opportune time of God’s new way in Jesus.
So we have in verse 15 Jesus announcing the facts and the acts. The facts of God’s actions and the expected acts of our reponse.
The fact is that God is doing a new thing with human beings. A new time has entered in to our time. And the reign of God of bringing new life, reconciliation, of liberating humanity from the bondage of individual and social wrongs and of creating a new way of relating to God and to other people – the reign of God has come near.
Jesus announces the kairos time breaking in to our chronos time and calls us into that new sense of what’s significant, what’s real, what’s enduring, what’s worth our very lives.
The facts are announced, followed by the acts.
Jesus’ call to “turn away from your sins and believe the Good News!” is a call to enter into God’s time, God’s reality and live as if the normal chronos time doesn’t matter or is secondary at best.
Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians recognizes the priority of God’s time over our own. “the appointed time has grown short…let those who deal with the world [be] as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.”
Jesus and Paul are both calling us to realize that our time (chronos – the present form of this world) is a secondary reality to the time (kairos) of God.
The kairos time of the good news of Jesus Christ calls for our participation, heart and soul.
In our pew Bible the Greek word metanoite is translated as “turn away from your sins” – while this is part of what metanoite would entail, it does not capture its full implication. Many translations of the Bible translate this word as “repent.” And N. T. Wright comments that for the first century Jewish hearer, repentance would indeed mean turning away from sin, but it would also mean two different things:
“First, it meant turning away from the social and political agendas which were driving Israel into a crazy, ruinous war. We can imagine someone saying that today in a country where ideologies are driving half the population into violent behavior. Second, it meant calling Israel to turn back to a true loyalty to YHWH, their God….The call to repent is part of the announcement that this is the time for the great moment of freedom, of God’s rescue.”
We are to turn away not only from our sins, our absorption in our own ways of being, our selfish preoccupations, our anxiety over money or security or stability. But also from our partisan politics and economics which drive us to hate and slander our opponents and those who are associated with them. We are called to turn our loyalty to God and God’s way – our true foundation, the more real reality, and the only hope that will not disappoint.
And so we hear the Psalmist saying,
“[God] alone is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall not be shaken.
On God rests my deliverance and my honour;
my mighty rock, my refuge is in God.
Trust in him at all times, O people;
pour out your heart before him;
God is a refuge for us.
We are to turn from our preoccupation with our chronos time and embrace and believe the good news of God’s kairos time breaking-in in Jesus.
Today’s gospel reading helps us to see what this might mean when Simon and Andrew hear Jesus’ call and drop their nets and follow and John and James similarly leave their father and hired men in the fishing boat and jump up to follow Jesus.
The example of the four first followers of Jesus is the example of four people who realized God’s time was knocking at the door of their time and the call was not worth resisting.
Their lives show that they see the kairos time breaking in to their chronos time in the person of Jesus, in the call of Jesus to a new way of being, a new way of living.
And what is this new way of being?
“Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.”
Or as Eugene Peterson puts it, "Come with me. I'll make a new kind of fisherman out of you. I'll show you how to catch men and women instead of perch and bass."
Many find it weird that such a violent image as catching fish is the one that Jesus uses to talk about attracting people to the vision of the kingdom of God.
But we have to understand that this image was a common one in both Greek and Jewish culture. In Greek culture, “to be caught in the net of the gods or God was a metaphor for salvation. It was to be safe from the nets or net of the evil one or evil ones. (Dowd 2000, 17)
In Jewish culture, they understood God’s fishing of people as a way of bringing them back from the state of being lost sheep to become again partners in YHWH’s way and full enjoyment of God’s love.
There’s an uncomfortable aspect of being caught in a net, though I can’t remember the last time I experienced that I can only imagine. But if the catching is being done out of a way that was toward meaninglessness and death and into a way of true fulfillment and life – the pain is worth the new life that it brings.
And to turn away, to leave all and break out of the chronos of our schedules and comfortable routines, our connections to employment, family, partisan politics, our cozy well-established identities. To break out is painful. But it is a pain worth experiencing to join in to God’s new reality that is being born in the new time of the good news we hear Jesus announcing.
We are not called to leave the cows to milk themselves or the maple trees to tap themselves or the students to teach themselves. We see the first followers doing this, forsaking family and career, status and wealth to follow in Jesus’ way and we mustn’t feel that this is necessarily God’s call upon us.
But we must see the connection between their radical choice and the good news breaking in to their world in Jesus’ announcing of the nearness of God’s reign.
They recognized the priority of God’s kairos time over our chronos time.
We can rather hear Paul’s words as relevant to our circumstances. Live according to the true reality, what’s really important. “Deal with the world as if you had no dealings with it.” Deal with the world as if you are an ambassador, a representative of a greater reality – the reality of God’s life-giving, peace breeding, liberating work.
And recognize that just as God’s call went out to the disciples to be fishers of people, we are to recognize our own vocation as being those who seek to rescue others, to be their helper, their guide to the safety of our God who is a rock and refuge.
In this time of party politics both at the national level with these Republican primaries and at the town level with the nearing Town Meeting I am calling everyone here to vote and participate in the town’s affairs.
But please remember that God calls us to see that our identity is not with either political party with any faction or clique in town– our identity is as followers of the one who loved all especially the least of these and even his enemies.
Our goals politically and economically are not the goals of one or the other political or economic agenda, but to see that God’s reign of truth, of love, and of justice is able to be carried forward.
As we deal with the town affairs, let us be as those who have seen and live to see a higher reality of love and mercy and justice break in to this present reality.
Our lives are comparatively short. To live for ourselves, for our own security, for our own prosperity at the expense of others or for an agenda that is for the interests of one group at the expense of another group -- to forsake the greater realities of God’s mercy and desire for all to experience his love – to live as if God’s kairos time has not broken in to our world – is to perpetuate the reign of pride, of selfishness, of death.
We must search our own souls and invite God to give us a new vision for how we might live our lives and how we might relate to others around us and to the town and to the nation – how we might live in God’s kairos time and forsake our allegiances which keep us from the ability to love people and pursue what’s best for others on a personal, town, and national level.
These are tough questions, there is no easy way forward. Jesus calls us to God’s reality breaking in to ours. His rule is love and peace and justice – how that makes us vote, how that makes us act and relate in town will be made known to us. We must listen to God’s call and allow God’s spirit to awaken us to the reality bigger than our calendars, our deadlines, and our own personal or partisan agendas. Whatever happens in the politics of town and nation, we know our call to live out God’s new way and to be those who fish for people – so that many might know God’s love for them and God’s loving care through the community of God’s followers.
In a speech given the day before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. helps us see what it might mean to live for God’s kairos time over our own chronos time.
“Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.
And I don't mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!” (King 1968)
Ina Ogdon, the author of the hymn, Brighten the Corners Where You Are, lived in Toledo, Ohio and saw the building of the Toledo Harbor Lighthouse in 1904. The refrain of her song,
“Someone far from harbor you may guide across the bar;
Brighten the corner where you are!”
speaks of the Christian as being a lighthouse to help others come into the safety of the harbor.
Let us be that kind of light, that kind of help to those who need it. And let us remember that we are called to live according to a different time. And this is good news.
Amen.
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