September 7, 2008
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
The last time I was behind this pulpit was May 25th, fourteen Sundays ago. During this time, I have not had to write a sermon. For 104 days, I did not come into the church office. For all intent and purpose, today coming back from my 3-month sabbatical feels like the beginning of a new year.
By most calendars, January 1 is the beginning of the new year, but if you serve a church and especially if you have been on sabbatical during the summer, you and I both know that the real new year actually begins the Sunday after Labor Day when folks start coming back to church after the last summer barbeque is over. Today we’ll have Promotion Sunday and present new Bibles to the 3rd graders. Later on this morning, you are invited to come up to Cameron House to hear about the new Fall adult classes which I hope you will make a new commitment to attend.
We know that around the Bay Area, local schools have been in session a couple of weeks now and the Cal Bears football season is underway. Although it’s awfully hard, we are settling back to our work places after summer vacations or what some have called, “staycations” when we stayed close to home this summer because of high gasoline prices and an economic slump. We can make a pretty good case that it’s September, not January, that anchors the calendar for many of us.
You may not know this but in the church calendar, the new year actually begins with the First Sunday of Advent, but few people are too excited about this since Christmas is so close at hand. Businesses and governments have different fiscal years such as the state of California’s fiscal year came to an end on June 30th leaving us without a state budget for the past two months. With all these different beginnings and endings on the calendar, we have calendar confusion!
Julian and Gregorian Calendars
Did you know that even the 12-month in the year calendar has been up for grabs? In 45 B.C., Julius Caesar established what became known as the Julian calendar that began the year on March 25. That calendar was the standard until the Middle Ages, when astronomers and mathematicians noticed that the Julian calendar didn’t line up with the actual solar calendar and, perhaps more importantly, caused the Christian church holidays to fall on dates that were outside of the traditional seasons for them.
To fix the problem, Pope Gregory XIII, along with his astronomers and mathematicians, came up with a new “Gregorian” calendar. In order to make adjustments to the new calendar in 1582, 11 days were eliminated from October of that year. October 4, 1582 was immediately followed by October 15, 1582. Eleven days were gone, like they never happened.
Protestants held on to the old Julian calendar for 170 more years. England and the American colonies finally adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. So if you were living in 1752, you went to bed on the evening of September 2 and woke up the morning of September 14. You lost 12 days while sleeping. That’s calendar confusion!
Calendar Confusion
You and I have enough trouble dealing with occasional leap years, annual daylight saving time and figuring out when Easter is every year. But imagine losing 12 days overnight and being left with all those tasks and jobs that still needed to be done! Maybe in your eyes, I have been lost from your sight for 104 days!
When I was away in Israel, I lost all sense of time—I had little idea of what day it was. What compounded the confusion was that Israel was 10 hours ahead of Pacific Time. But it was reassuring that it was the same sun that greeted me in Jerusalem will greet you 10 hours later. We like to think that chronological time is fixed and reliable. The next day will come regardless of what we name it or where we might be around the world.
Chronos time, as the Greeks called it, is just one thing after another, chronologically. It marks our place in history, but it can’t give us meaning. In fact, focusing too much on chronos time according to C.S. Lewis can be hazardous to our spiritual health. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters writes about the devilish Screwtape teaching his apprentice, Wormwood about the horror of the “Same Old Thing.” We humans are enslaved by being successful in doing the same old thing or by focusing too much on a predictable future.
The truth about chronos time is that time marches on, day by day, regardless of the date. And unless we break up this monotony, time holds no meaning for us. Do you remember a time in your life when you have lost days, wasted on trivial and, sometimes, destructive pursuits and not even realizing that those hours, days, and weeks were gone?
For sure, God created chronos time by marking out the seven-day week at creation but we were not created to simply mark time. Instead God gave human time meaning by inserting the divine Presence into time itself. Biblically speaking, this is kairos time—the appointed time for God’s purpose and activity, the moment of God’s visitation and intervention.
A kairos moment may take place at a chronos point in history, but its meaning would extend beyond chronos time and be celebrated again and again as not only a past event but a present reality.
On my sabbatical and on our Holy Land Tour, we visited countless religious and sacred sites. We saw the Church of the Visitation when Mary and Elizabeth shared how they were being used as instruments of God’s divine plan. We went up to Mt. Tabor where Jesus was transfigured and appeared with Moses and Elijah. At St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, we visited the Burning Bush where God appeared to Moses. These were all kairos moments that took place at some chronos time but still have powerful meaning for us today.
Passover and the Lord’s Supper
The Passover is one of those kairos moments breaking in on chronos time. In Exodus 12, God instructs the Israelites through Moses and Aaron to prepare themselves for liberation, but to do so with some very specific and repeatable procedures. The liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt through God’s intervention would be the event that marked a new beginning, a new relationship between God and his people marked on the calendar as the “beginning of months” and “the first month of the year” (12:2).
While the Egyptians marked their calendars by the appearance of the sun and moon, the Israelites were to mark their calendars forever with a story—that will interpret their past, preserve their present, and shape their future as a covenantal people chosen and to be obedient to God.
The Passover was not to be just a one day event, but a “day of remembrance” to be celebrated as a “festival to the Lord” as a “perpetual ordinance” throughout all generations (12:14). It was, and is, the Passover that marked God’s people and gave them meaning and purpose in the world.
And for us Christians, Jesus is the kairos moment that fulfilled the ultimate liberation of all of God’s people from the slavery of sin and death. It’s that kairos time that we enter every time we break the bread and drink the cup of the Lord’s Supper, every time we participate in the baptism of a new believer, every time we do or say something to testify our faith in the name of Jesus Christ.
By far, one of the most meaningful times we had on the Holy Land tour was to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in the Upper Room. Even in the midst of many other church groups, some very loud and noisy, we took bread and drank the cup to remember the kairos time when Jesus died on the cross to liberate us from the death of sin. What took place over 2000 years ago still has meaning for us today because it’s God’s presence interrupting our chronos time.
The early Christians changed the day of worship from Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, to Sunday as a way of celebrating the reality of Easter again and again—a constant weekly reminder that the resurrection wasn’t just a mere historical event but a living and present reality; the beginning of a new age that looks forward to completion when Christ established the kingdom, making life “on earth as it is in heaven.”
Time has meaning because God has entered into it and has called us to use our chronos time to look for, celebrate and proclaim God’s kairos. Regardless of how confusing our calendars might be, it is perfectly clear that in God’s time, we will find meaning and purpose for our lives.
Sabbatical Kairos
We are trained to live and work in chronos time. We have the tendency to view life as the “Same Old Thing.” The ancient Israelites would soon forget the miracle of liberation out of Egypt and through the waters of the Red Sea. Once they got to the other side of the Red Sea, they started complaining about the monotony of the desert and the daily diet of manna and quail. They got so bored and distracted that they gave up on God, manufactured a golden calf and worshiped it for the sake of change (Exodus 32). When we fail to see the daily presence of God in our lives, we, too, have a tendency to use our time to construct gods for ourselves.
It’s without saying that having come back from my sabbatical that you will hear me share many illustrations and experiences that I had being away. I want to thank you again for your gift of granting me this sabbatical. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my ministry had become monotonous and that I started to manufacture a golden calf. But what I can say is that by being in Israel for 6 weeks to study and learn about the Holy Land, spending ample time to rest and be with my family, and taking some time to become better acquainted with the missionary history of our church that I have experienced God’s kairos.
While I was relieved of my weekly agenda and tasks, I began to recognize the fact that I miss writing a sermon every week. I miss being with all of you and to hear about your goings and comings. I started to dream about what God might have in store for me and for us as I pray about the calling of a new Chinese-speaking pastor or supporting the increasing growth of our young families or the possibilities of working more with the Chinatown YMCA to make available more space for ministries. In the 104 days of chronos time, I sensed God’s kairos in my life and for this church and with all of you to interpret the past, preserve the present, and shape the future as God’s people in the world.
Kairos Living
During the summer, you may have had the chance of watching a water bug. They are amazing creatures. They have long legs that splay out, supporting the weight of the insect’s long body. The bug never gets wet—they just skate back and forth, searching for whatever it is they’re looking for.
Water bugs don’t live in the water. They live on it. Their world is the shimmering, glassy surface. Beneath them are the depths, which they most likely have no awareness of.
In the insanity of hurriedness that permeates every facet of life and prevents us from being able to enjoy our friends, families, and ourselves to the fullest, we are like the water bug. We race to and fro, busy with one errand or another—oblivious, all the while, to the deeper dimension below. We spend so much of life gliding along the surface that seldom do we dive into the depths.
As we begin the real new year today, I invite you to kairos living where there’s no calendar confusion. Set aside time to plan a new day ahead. Begin by reviewing yesterday. What did you accomplish? Where did you see God at work? What opportunities did you miss to serve God? Then take your planner or calendar and look ahead to the coming day, seeing it as a blank canvas upon which God can work within and through you. Ask yourself. How can God’s purposes be worked in and through me today? How can I reflect God’s presence in my life in each event? How can I go deeper in my faith with Jesus and not just skate around on being superficial?
When I was in Bethlehem, I thought about you. So I bought these small olive wood crosses for each of you to have one. We know that Jesus prayed at the Garden of Gethsemane that was filled with olive trees. In fact, almost wherever we traveled in Israel, there were olive trees. Jesus prayed to listen for God’s plan for his life in the midst of olive trees. With this little cross, would you pray deeper to seek for God’s kairos moment to happen in your life, on your calendar, PDAs, Blackberries, iPhones, Outlook and a host of other devices and techniques designed to manage chronos time?
Every day is an opportunity for us to know God’s purpose and activity in and through us in the world. Every day is a moment when God visits us and intervenes in our daily lives. Every day is kairos living.
Let us pray.
Lord, Let us not be confused over your presence in the world but let us begin today to see you in our lives transforming us to become your disciples. Enable us to have a kairos moment in our daily living so that we may give you praise and glory. Bless this church and all the many people it strives to reach with the good news of Jesus Christ. Amen.