What Time Is It?

Mark 1:14-20

What time is it?

And what are we to do?

These are two questions that organize our lives.

I set an alarm at my bedside in order to wake myself at a certain time.

And I know by the alarm and by the time what I am called to do.

When 12 noon hits, I invariably feel that I should start thinking about lunch.

The Hobbits in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings were very sensitive to meal times.

They had a meal between breakfast and lunch called “elevensies.”

I have a new class schedule which has given me times and told me what to do and where at those times.

And I keep a calendar that tells me what to do at various times.

What time is it?

And what are we to do?

We organize our lives around chronological time.

Time we measure with clocks or sun-dials.

But that’s not the time that Mark is referring to in our reading today.

After John is arrested, Jesus takes up his prophetic mantel and proclaims good news to the Galilean peasants.

And he says, “The time is fulfilled.”

This does not make any sense with chronological time.

1:30pm is fulfilled?

Nonsense.

But that’s not the time Jesus is referring to.

It’s more like the time implied by Winston Churchill when he spoke the words,

"This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure."

Churchill was recognizing a difference not in the quantity of minutes or hours.

He was recognizing a difference in the quality of the time.

Some way of being, he was announcing was being suspended, in order for people to take up a different way of being.

And this is I think the way we should hear Jesus’s words. 

Only unlike Churchill who is mobilizing nations for war,

Jesus is mobilizing peasants for nonviolent resistance and community building.

Jesus declares that the time is fulfilled and as a result the kingdom of God has come near.

What time is it?

The time of God’s healing of peoples and the earth and challenging the destructive elements of the world.

God’s reign is coming to challenge the usurpers, people and institutions, that believe themselves to have ultimate authority over the earth and her residents.

And because this is time not in the sense of minutes and days and months, not in terms of quantity,

But in terms of quality, in terms of different ways of being in the world,

It is a time that has not gone past.

Every new day invites us into this decision between the times.

How do we judge the time in which we live?

Is it business-as-usual? Or is it the reign of God?

It would be easier, perhaps, if we could read Jesus’s announcement as saying to us, “the time was fulfilled and the kingdom of God had come near.”

But Mark is using the present tense, the continuing tense.

The time is fulfilled --

What time is it?

The time of the healing of the earth.

Then what are we to do?

Jesus calls his fellow Galileans to “repent and believe the good news.”

Both these words: repent and believe have become words worn from overuse.

Let’s imagine this invitation differently:

Repent, coming from the greek word metanoia, literally means to change your mind – which in the ancient world would not mean just a changing of opinions, but a changing of your outlook, the way that you see the world, your priorities, your loyalties, your image of yourself and your perceptions of other people and the place in which you live.  Eugene Peterson, in the Message paraphrase, has Jesus say, “Change your life.”

Believe, comes from the greek word pisteuo which is one word that means what we’ve separated into at least three words:

We use the words faith, belief, trust – they are all in Greek the same word.

So Jesus I think is calling not only for people reimagine the world and believe that there is a change in the quality of the time – but also for people to trust, to have faith in the God who will overcome

Evil with good.

What time is it?

The time of the reign of God.

What are we to do?

Allow your life to be changed as you trust in God

Jesus proclaims the message and immediately, from the momentum of the story, we might imagine

Jesus marching on Washington, storming the palace gates.

But the next scene shows the different way in which Jesus understood the reign of God.

Rather than a march on Jerusalem,

We see a walk by the Galilean sea.

This new community formed in this new time,

Will consist of friends joining together and students taking the time to learn a new way to be in the world.

When Jesus calls the fishermen from their boats, we see them recognizing a different time.

It’s not business as usual for these fishermen, for Jesus is calling them to help him

Begin something new.

Not all of us will be asked to leave our job or to leave home like these disciples are.

But the kingdom requires that we reprioritize our lives – that job and family become priorities under the priority of the love of God and the good news of that love which transforms lives and changes the world.

When Jesus says they will become fishers of people, he is actually drawing on a theme in the Hebrew prophets where in three different places the prophet compares God’s overcoming of unjust kings or exploitative individuals as a kind of fishing of the powerful out of their comfortable place of privilege.

Jesus calls these Galilean fisherman to move from fishing for the powers, to fishing of the powers.

What time is it? And what are we to do?

It’s so different now than it was when Jesus and the disciples lived.

And it takes all of us working together to imagine what this ongoing message of the nearness of the reign of God means for us.  For today.

One thing to notice and maybe realize again for the first time.

Is that what we are doing right now has reorganized our lives for the sake of God’s healing for ourselves and for others.

Singing together and praying together, eating and drinking together.

These are ways that we encourage one another into this time that Jesus calls us.

These are ways where we foster that trust and become emboldened to imagine ways we might bring healing to our friends and neighbors.

And perhaps you have found yourself involved in helping neighbors in ways that you can.  Thank you for doing that, and do not grow weary in doing good.

It will look differently for each one of us, but I want to encourage you to take to heart Jesus’s call to see the world differently.

I want to encourage you as you live in light of God’s love, imagine how this new way of being changes your priorities and what kind of callings it might be leading you into.

Following in the way of Jesus, as I understand it, takes one day at a time.

And in each new day, we awake to the care of God, and have the opportunity to engage in business-as-usual – or in our freedom take up the call to trust God and take a stand for love.

As we continue to ask these important questions of ourselves:

What time is it?

And what are we to do?