Time

Ephesians 5:15-20; Proverbs 9:1-6; John 6:51-58

A leap second was added to the clock the end of June. I hope you didn’t waste it. I suspect that every one of us, excepting night owls, got an extra wink of sleep out of our leap second. Oh well.

We human beings are obsessed with time. We can’t live with it and we can’t live without it. Who of us doesn’t have at least one watch and if we aren’t wearing it, feel lost. Although with the near omnipresence of cell phones a lot of people check their phones when they want to know what time it is. When I was growing up a stop watch was a wondrous thing. My first digital watch had it built in and every smartphone has one. On our phones, our tablets, our computers we have a number of apps to keep track of time, signal deadlines, keep appointments, and remember birthdays and anniversaries. 

We have clocks everywhere: In our cars, on our coffee makers and televisions, on the thermostats, on the microwaves and ranges. We have so many that it is a chore to reset them. When our power glitches or the time changes, I try very hard to set the range clock and the microwave clock so that the digital readout is the same and changes at the same time.

In some places, telling time is literally a big deal. If you’re in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, for example, you can’t help but see the Abraj Al Bait Towers clock just about anywhere you go. Its clock face is 43 meters in diameter. That’s roughly three times the distance from where I’m standing to the sanctuary doors. Plus, the clock is on a tower that’s 601 meters tall. (That’s almost 200 feet taller than the new One World Trade Center building.) By comparison, Big Ben, the most famous clock in the world, is about 20 feet in diameter on a 300-foot-high tower on the bank of the Thames.

We are so dependent on external means of measuring time that we have lost our internal clocks. A character in a novel I’m reading noted that if he worried about how much time had elapsed, thinking about it every five minutes or so, he invariably was wrong. But if he refused to worry, he nearly always got the time right. 

We may grow up as children learning how to tell time but we spend the rest of our lives with time telling us.

All our clocks don’t make us better at managing our time. That’s one of the biggest stressors in our culture. We work too many hours, we have too many distractions, we fritter away too much time, and we trying to squeeze more things in less time. 

The relentless passage of time is what the ancient Greeks referred to as chronos time, from which we get “chronological” time. To paraphrase an ancient Timex commercial, we take a licking, but the clock keeps ticking. 

The apostle Paul didn’t wear a watch or carry a cell phone, but he was nonetheless always aware of time. It was a different sort of time, however, than you get by glancing at your watch. Paul actually kept a running clock in his head. Instead of tracking the chronos, Paul was far more interested in redeeming the kairos. 

Kairos is the time most often mentioned in the New Testament. You won’t find it on a dial or digital readout. Kairos is decisive time – the right time, the appropriate time. The New Testament writers associate kairos time with the activity of God intervening in human history. It can also be the ultimate time, the coming of the final age. That’s why Paul admonishes the Ephesians to “Take advantage of every opportunity,” [make] the most of the time [kairos], redeem the time, “because the days are evil.” 

The kairos expectation is the fuel for the management of our chronos. A little earlier in the letter Paul issued a wake-up call. The darkness of evil was about to be exposed by the bright dawn of God’s coming kingdom, thus Paul tells the Ephesian church not to “participate in the unfruitful actions of darkness. Instead, ... reveal the truth about them” because “everything exposed to the light is revealed by the light” (5:11, 13).

That’s why Paul urges the Ephesians – and us – “be careful to live your life wisely, not foolishly.” Use your time wisely, order your lives according to the new reality that is breaking in. That’s how you can make the most of the God’s kairos time. That’s how to prepare for the coming day of the Lord. It is a choice that we have to make. Either we align ourselves with what God is doing or we follow the mob mentality of the present evil that governs the daily calendar of much of the world. To “understand the Lord’s will,” and to do it, is the best time management strategy in light of the coming of the Lord.

Paul gives us one simple direction: “be filled with the Spirit.” That will be far more effective than all the time-wasting activities that fill the lives of so many people. He calls that depravity or debauchery. Alcohol may cause drunkenness in the body, but there are many things that cause drunkenness in the mind. People can get drunk on exaggerated self-importance, on pride, on unthought-out religious, philosophical, or political ideas, on flattery, on fear, on the idea that they can run their own lives and be masters of all that they do, the center of the universe. 

Be filled with the Spirit instead, says Paul, and you will be able to face the present world not with songs of drunken parties, ideologies, or emotions, but the “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” of worship. That’s what happened on the day of Pentecost. The Spirit rushed upon the gathered church. As the tongues of fire and mighty wind of the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples, some of the bystanders looked at their ecstatic behavior and their speaking in new languages and said, “They are full of new wine” (Acts 2:13). Peter told the crowd to check their watches, since it was only 9:00 a.m. Then he said that their behavior was a sign that the last days, the kairos of God, was at hand. Quoting the prophet Joel, Peter preached, “In the last days, God said, I will pour out my Spirit on all people” (Acts 2:17).

Life in the Spirit is life in kairos time, and the people of God set their watches and calendars by that standard. The atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado, may accurately measure out the chronos time of our lives, including that leap second most of us slept through, but kairos time is measured by the Spirit, which calibrates us toward being right with God’s time and accurate in our faith and practice.

So how does the sweep hand or blinking digital readout measure out God’s kairos time in our lives? How do we take advantage of every opportunity to use God’s kairos time wisely? One way would be to consult scripture as frequently as we look at our wrist or phone. Another way would be to count our time by the prayers we offer to God and the silent times for receiving God’s communication to us.

Rather than just letting time tick away, put it to the Spirit’s use. If you regularly carry a timepiece of some sort, be it analog or digital, consider the practice of saying a short prayer every time you check the time. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, pray for whatever is happening or whomever you’re with at that moment. Coupled with a disciplined and regular spiritual life, it’s a practice that makes the most of the time in a way that allows the Spirit to work in us and through us.

Time is a gift from God. We may revere or rue the past, we may dream of the future. But the here and now is God’s present, in terms of a gift and in terms of where and when God is actively at work in the life of the world and in your life. Take advantage of every opportunity and always give thanks to God for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.

General Resource: “Big Time,” Homiletics, August 16, 2015 (http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/btl_display.asp?installment_id=93040909). 

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright © 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.