Sermon, 11/21/21. Time: The Biggest Riddle of them all

Christ the King, Last Sunday after Pentecost

Psalm 132:1–19; 2 Sam. 23.1–7; Rev.1:4b–8; John 18.33–37

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.
Ecclesiastes 3:1

Many things fascinate us human beings.  We are intrigued by paradoxes.  You know, those things that seem contradictory to common sense and experience but may still be true.  We like to solve riddles: why we cannot force the toothpaste back into the tube, once we squeeze it out.  I believe, however, that the greatest riddle of all times is TIME itself! 

Scientists—and yes, I put great confidence in the scientific method—can calculate the passing of an hour, of a minute, of a second, with great accuracy.  With the discovery of the Atomic Clock, the most accurate instrument in calculating time, scientists aided international travel and commerce, informed the air industry why it is more desirable to fly a northern route to Asia that follows the curvature of the earth, than to take a direct path from Los Angeles or San Francisco or Vancouver. 

But we want to know more.  The riddle of time remains unsolved.  We want to know who or what set the stars on their course and causes the earth to tilt toward or away from the sun with such precision.  And so this morning, I want you to accompany me on my journey on the importance of time.  And I have limited myself to three possible paths that I take: human time vs. God’s time; the significance of the Feast of Christ the King; and an appraisal of time spent.

I. Human time vs. God’s time
We humans mark the passing of time in as many ways as there are cultures and individuals within those cultures, and our nation is not unique.  For sake of making sure that train connections were efficient, our nation adopted in an earlier century four standard time zones. So have other nations.  Yes, we tamper with the notion of Daylight Savings Time.  But do we actually save the daylight?  Science has taught us that, no matter what, each day has still only 24 hours.  It is clear that the sun, our major time-marker, rises and sets without our aid, and at different times even within each time zone.  The sun does not rise because the rooster crows.

I recall as a child being impressed with the way the people of the Bible marked time, and to this day I smile and recite silently to myself one of my favorite time-markers, one of the few biblical passages that I have ever committed to memory.  Prophet Isaiah has a vision of God’s kingdom and Isaiah introduces his vision, my favorite time-marker, with beautiful prose: “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple.  Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.  And one called to another and said: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.”  (Isa. 6.1-3.) 

This way of marking time is not unique to Isaiah.  Indeed, “Young’s Analytical Concordance of the Bible” offers 9 columns over two and one-half pages of that word alone in our Book of Records.  You and I mark time in our families and in our individual lives differently.  This week, should you gather as a family, or even among friends, to observe our national day of celebrating the harvest, you will use time, because family and folklore rely on getting the time right.  Members of the family, both older and younger, demand it: “no, that was not the year when Aunt Jessica needed surgery.  Remember, that was the year that Cousin Jack’s wife had just had a baby? And she is now 17, a senior in high school!”

We design our lives around calendar years, fiscal years, academic years, and, yes, liturgical years.  Even life under the Coronavirus, with all its necessary changes, seems to have taken on a regularity, so that ultimately life seems not to have changed much.  An essential of life, namely time remains unchanged.  The sun rises, and the sun sets.  Contrary to popularly held belief, we do not determine time.  Rather, at best, we determine how we move within time. 

II. A Brief History of the Feast of Christ the King
Our life in the Episcopal/Anglican Communion operates under liturgical time.  We have made it, you and I, to the end of another liturgical year, and we mark that end by celebrating a special day: The Feast of Christ the King.  Next Sunday, the First Sunday in Advent, we begin another liturgical year.  But that is getting ahead of ourselves. 

Today is Christ the King Sunday, an appropriate end to the journey that we have made in our lectionary since the Feast of the Resurrection.  Yet, even here we are confronted with a riddle:  How can we reconcile the kingship of an individual who washed the feet of his closest friends?  No king does that.  What king hobnobs with the untouchables of society and instructs us to do likewise?  No king does that!  What king is removed from the throne by way of a cross, rather than by abdication or beheading?  No king is subjected to such a degrading end.

As with many of the things we do in our religious observances, this feast day has historical roots, roots that go back to the late 1800’s, when the world’s then great empires—British, American, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese—were at war, or about to go to war somewhere.  The then Pope wrote an encyclical in which he dedicated the world to Christ the King.  In his letter, he reminded the empires that God is present with the whole human race, even with those who do not know God.  The Bishop of Rome had hoped, with his declaration of the Feast of Christ the King, to bring those nominally Christian nations back to the realization that war was not Christ’s answer to human disagreement.

Constrained by language, we use terms such as “reign” or “king,” as we delude ourselves into imaging our nation, these United States of America, as a classless society, in which heredity does not determine leadership.  We can vote a president into or out of office, and we claim not to render the same adulation to a president as to a monarch.  Yet, we have elected those who think that they are kings.  And, sadly, we have allowed our public servants to behave as kings and, more sadly, we have bestowed upon them the adulation traditionally reserved for royalty.  To declare the carpenter from Nazareth King as he makes his way to his crucifixion—a crucifixion, which, if viewed objectively and socio-politically, was politically motivated—is a stark reminder of the riddle of events unfolding even in our own time.

III. An appraisal of time spent on task (and what is the task of followers of Christ the King?
The riddle of time remains, at least for me, a riddle.  Devices and calendars assist me in counting and navigating hours, days, months, and years.  They do not, however, solve the riddle of time.  If we cannot solve the riddle of time, there is another riddle which does lie in our hands, and that is how we spend our time.  Does not the celebration of Jesus of Nazareth as king require a nod to pomp and circumstance?  And if that be so, then the reading from the Book of Samuel catches us off guard and causes us a bit of discomfort, for who want to be called out, to be judge, when celebrating?  Samuel describes God as a rock, something that has lasting qualities, but also capable of causing harm, as ruling in the fear of God, a God who will sit in judgment. (2 Samuel 23.3ff.)

We cannot deny, as recorded in our Book of Records, the image of an angry, revenge-filled God, calling for retribution into the generation of the children’s children.   The writers of the Psalms, the prophets, Jesus of Nazareth himself—all call us to task how we make use of our time, with and among our fellow human travelers, as well as with the riches at our disposal in the world of nature.   Likewise, most of us squirm when we think about Jesus’ coming judgment.  So what are we to make of this day in the church year and its strange mixtures of themes and images?

I offer you an example from our ordinary life.  You did it, I did it, many other parents and guardians, and aunts and uncles and cousins have done it.  We taught our little ones to ride a bicycle.  They pedaled, wobbling down the sidewalk, as we held onto the rear of the seat, or the handle bars, and said encouragingly, “good job!” “Way to go!”  “You’re doing great!”  “Just a littler further, and you will be at the corner.”  And the child succeeds in learning.  A sense of independence is stirred in the child.

However, one day, pedaling solo down the sidewalk, training wheels removed from the bicycle and stowed in the garage or cellar, the child reaches the end of the block.  In a fit of exuberance, carelessness, or defiance, the child speeds into the street and across the intersection.  In an instant, your words of encouragement turn into shrieks of terror: “Watch out!”  When the child is safely back on the sidewalk, you declare: “Don’t you ever, ever do that again!  Do that again, we’re putting your bicycle away, and you won’t be able to ride it for two weeks.”  A passerby, not having witnessed the scene that provoked such a harsh tone, may well think: ‘What an abusive, controlling parent!’

Let’s put this into the third person.  Patient, loving parents, the mother and the father, the aunts, uncles, cousins who helped the child learn to ride the bike in the first place, were not suddenly replaced by their evil twins.  They were the same parents, guardians, aunts, uncles, cousins, who offered encouragement, only now scolding out of terror, but in love.  The difference was in the parents’ words, not in the parents themselves, but in what the child needed to hear.

Both the Old and the New Testaments proclaim a God who is a loving, generous ruler of all creation, a God who sets the time.  God is our impatient, demanding judge, calling us to care for neighbor and enemy alike.  But God’s purpose is always the same: to love us and free us from that missing the mark in our relationships that we term “sin.”  I see no reason to be on guard if we take seriously the message of Christ.  

I admit that the image of Christ’s second coming, his descending with the clouds to take his place on a throne as judge and ruler of all creation, is not one to induce great celebration, for none of us likes even to think about being warned or scolded.  But God judges because God loves us.  We have one God, one God who loves us—who sometimes warns, sometimes encourages, but always loves us.  I see the judgment as something that happens daily and even more than once daily, namely in every interaction with those with whom we come into contact.  Each day is a time for appraisal.

Thus, today we conclude another liturgical year, a year in which we have followed Jesus on his path to Jerusalem, a journey that takes place over that elusive, intangible entity called time, a journey during which he healed the infirmed, denounced those who would take advantage of the weaker ones in society, whipped his own disciples into shape, figuratively speaking, and provided comfort for those whose lot included deprivation or distress, rejoiced with those who celebrated, and above all established a means by which, even in his absence, he would be recalled. 

That ritual—Mass, Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, Holy Eucharist—we observe week in and week out.  That celebration reminds us, and all people of faith, that God rules all creation with divine compassion and tells us just what we need to hear, in order to establish that rule on earth as in heaven.  And next week, we begin again the ancient ritual, the recital of God’s grace in our lives.  Today, our story ends, but never ends, because I believe God is always calling us back to reunion and renewal and, yes, even appraisal.  Amen