Time, we never have enough,
it goes too fast, it drags, it can be our enemy and sometimes our friend. I
begin today with a quotation from my favorite author, Madeleine L’engle. She
writes, “We need to remember that the house of God is not limited to a building
that we usually visit for only a few hours on Sunday. The house of God is not a
safe place. It is a cross where time and eternity meet, and where we are—or
should be – challenged to live more vulnerably, more interdependently. Where,
even with the light streaming in rainbow colors through the windows, we can
listen to the stars.” Many of Madeleine’s stories deal with time, a wrinkle in
time, an acceptable time, the irrational season, and yet she never sets out to
tell stories about time. We are, or at least I am, fascinated by stories about
time. I used to like to watch The Time Tunnel, and I was fascinated by the
story, The Time Traveler’s Wife. John’s Revelation is also all about time,
although he never sets out to tell us a story about time.
So let’s hear again from
Revelation. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the
beginning and the end. It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this
testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright
morning star. The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who hears
say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who is thirsty come. The one who testifies to
these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
What John is doing here is
proclaiming the one who is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and last, the
beginning and end. In other words, he proclaims faith in a God who spans all
time, who lovingly embraces all time. This faith in God has been the foundation
of his message to people of God who are suffering. To people who wonder why God
has allowed time to be invested with pain and suffering. John's answer to them
is to show them the one who sits on the throne of heaven, the one who is the
beginning and end of all things, and so is the one who can promise an ending to
the pain, a time when God will wipe away our tears and all suffering will come
to an end. John proclaims to us a God who stands outside of time and who comes
into time, into the midst of humanity and all it’s suffering along with all its
joy, and embraces all time with divine love.
There is much mystery here.
Time in Revelation is not the straight line of our lives, or the straight line
of history, with a beginning and an end. Time in Revelation is much more like the
wrinkle that Madeleine L’engle imagines in A Wrinkle in Time, like when you
take a piece of fabric and fold it. (show this) Or as it is imagined as a cross
where time and eternity meet. Getting out of the way of thinking about time in
a linear fashion opens John’s Revelation to be what it really is, not an end
times predictor, but an invitation to live fully and completely in this present
that God creates and redeems.
The Good News here is that
the Creator God, the God of the universe, the God that we worship, not only
creates time, but also comes into time and walks with us in the midst of our
joy and our suffering. This is Good News indeed. John shows us this mysterious
reality.
As if the eternal nature of
God isn't hard enough to understand, this God is one who also enters time. As
eternal, God is outside of time but through Jesus steps into time to redeem
it...and us. How so? This is what can be difficult for us to understand. For,
if you or I were making the decisions, we would redeem the world by ridding it
of evil, by simply wiping out all those people and all those things that give
us pain, who give us a hard time, who we don’t like and disagree with. Wouldn't
we? But God doesn't choose to do that. Thankfully, God is God, and we are not.
I'm not sure if it's because God is perfect love and we aren't, but God chooses
differently. God chooses instead to suffer with those who suffer in time, with
a promise that some day, some time, it will be different.
So there is an invitation
before us, the spirit and the bride say come, let everyone who hears say come,
let everyone who is thirsty, come. This is an invitation to live the full and
abundant life that God intends for us right now, at this intersection of time
and space, at this intersection of earth and heaven, at this intersection of
cross and empty tomb, right now. The invitation to us is to welcome the One who
comes into our limitedness, our humanness, who comes into time as we know it;
the invitation is to be fully present to that abundant love and grace. The
invitation is to not be ruled by the past and the future, but to live in God’s
presence.
If we accept the invitation
to live in God’s presence, God’s time, at this intersection of cross and empty
tomb, what does it matter? We have also learned from Revelation that this
present time is God’s realm. So if we accept the invitation to come, if we
accept the invitation to live fully in God’s presence, we stand, or sit, or
kneel, in resistance to the world’s insistence that we must always be in a
hurry, or that we must always have our way, or that we must always meet
violence with vengeance. We stand, or sit, or kneel, in resistance to the
world’s insistence that you must live only for yourself, or that you must amass
riches and wealth. We stand, or sit, or kneel in God’s presence in witness to
the love that includes, the love that makes whole again what is broken, the
love that unites and does not divide.
When we accept the invitation
to live on God’s time, we live more vulnerably, more interdependently. When we
accept the invitation to live on God’s time, we stop living to acquire and we
give away and give over. When we accept the invitation to live on God’s time,
we stop living in scarcity and are assured of enough. When we accept the
invitation to live on God’s time, we stop living in fear, and we live in hope and
in Love.
The one who testifies to
these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
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