At the Right Time
Reflection given in Holy Trinity Church, St Andrews on the 10th December, 2006 by Rev Dr Jamie Walker
Readings: Isaiah 9:2, 6-7, Luke 1:26-35, Luke 2:8-20 and John 1: 1-14
Sermon:
Many years ago I visited in the outskirts of Cairo. Living there are several thousand Christians and they collect the rubbish and the garbage of the Cairo. At all times of the day and the night, they can be seen going through the city, collecting the rubbish, loading it on to carts, taking it back to their homes, dumping it next to their houses and sifting through it. If there is no space next to their house, they dump it inside and sift through it there. They recycle as much as they can, and the rest is left for the scavenging goats. It is an utterly sad and depressing place. I had never imagined such poverty or seen such scenes before. In the company of the Orthodox priest we wandered around for about an hour. I too felt the despair. I wanted out of the place.
Right in the centre of this garbage city was an Orthodox Church. It happened this was their saint's day Simaan had his hermit cell in a cave nearby - so we joined a whole stream of people heading into the Church. What a contrast to the outside! Inside was all light and brightness, colour and movement and flair. On every wall space there were icons, pictures with scenes from the Bible, or from lives of Christian saints. The service, when I eventually looked at my watch, had been going two and a half hours and it seemed nothing like that. So much was going on! Time did not seem to matter in there, and indeed the service went on for some three and a half hours. It was the kind of place I did not want to leave. There was a sense of belonging, or peace, of thrill about it. Rarely have I seen such joy on people's faces. They looked so alive, incredibly alive!
Outside time passed, the clock continued ticking; inside time continued passing too. But inside, it felt as if time itself was different - transformed.
There is a Bible text that says, At the right time God sent forth his Son, born of a woman (Galatians 4.4)
At the right time. The New Testament has two words for time - the word CHRONOS and the word KAIROS.
Chronos is time as we normally understand it. The time at the moment is around 9.00pm. We started the service about 8pm; we will leave, if I do not take three and a half hours, soon after 9.15pm. Chronos is the kind of time that can be measured by a watch. There is a past, a present, a future. We can't do without this kind of time - lectures begin at a set time, essays have to in by a fixed point, trains run at a set time. In terms of Jesus' birth, it happened some 2006 years ago.
The other word for time in the New Testament is kairos, which is the word in the phrase at the right time. The idea here is that God takes a moment of ordinary time and fills it with special significance. It becomes pregnant with meaning. Kairos is time wedded with eternity. It is time opened up to the presence of God, time freed from the restrictions of a clock. It is time renewed, time which does not get lost in history, but which keeps pace with the present. Somehow all other time is bound up in this time.
Kairos is God's time, uniquely his. It is God's entering into our ordinary time, into our chronos, into our human life, filling it with his presence. Time inside that Orthodox Church was time sparkling with the presence of God. It was if chronos time had been stretched, elasticated, burst open.
I think it is wonderful the way we gather each Christmas to sing our carols. We are singing too of that moment, when time opened up, when God was born in Bethlehem. We are singing of God creating our own moments of faith, of God being part into our everyday experiences, of God transforming our lives with his presence.
It is no wonder that when Jesus was born, singing burst out among angels, among shepherds too - Glory to God in the highest, peace to his people on earth.
And so Jesus is born, and throughout his life, there is this kairos. God and the human interacting, the human lit, sparkling, with the presence of God. When I do gardening, sometimes I don gloves to keep my hands clean. God does not put gloves on when he comes. He joins the place where we are, where we and our garbage is to be found, and slowly, gradually, opens humanity up towards God he stretches human life, making it capable of what it could not do as well before. Jesus opens our human life towards God, and does this all through his life, right into the cross and resurrection. He does it for us, in our place, and he then offers the fruits of his life to us, amazingly.
I invite you over this Christmas period, to stand back from the continuous tick-tock of history and to focus, like those Christians in that garbage city, on God's presence in Jesus, on God's coming to you, to me. And then, I believe, for you and for me, our lives begin to be stretched, opened and renewed in God's love and kindness, in God's embrace and forgiveness. May all of us at the time of Christmas be aware of this kairos, of God's coming to us, of our being opened up to him! And may we experience something of the amazing joy and vibrancy felt by those Christians in that garbage city!
At the right time, kairos, God sent forth his son, both of woman!