Keeping an Eye on the Clock
Luke 13: 1-9
Rev. John P. Wesley
March 7, 2010
Any good cook knows the importance of time when it comes to preparing a good meal. Whether considering the freshness of food, or ciphering how much cooking time is needed, or planning the best time to set certain foods on the table, it is important to keep one’s eye on the clock. The best steak one can buy can be ruined by overcooking. The perfect recipe can taste flat if ingredients aren’t fresh. And if a meal comes too late to the table guests may have to rush through the meal taking little time to enjoy the food. When it comes to cooking, you have to keep an eye on the clock.
As Jesus talked with his disciples he indicated it was important for those who would feast at the table of life to pay attention to the clock. “You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” Jesus asked those who followed him. Now it may sound like Jesus is encouraging us to pay attention to what time it is in our lives. We humans have a tendency to forget about time as we go about our days. We want to believe tomorrow will be the same as today. We don’t like to think about the changes that time may bring to us as we age. Young parents can forget how swiftly the time will pass from those happy moments in the nursery of their newborn to that graduation ceremony at the university. The new employee at a company can’t conceive of that day forty years away when they will sit at a banquet table held in honor of their retirement. And the young person who watches their parent go through the loss of their parent cannot imagine how quickly time will pass and it will be their time to say goodbye to their parent.
It is healthy to remember what time it is, to keep in mind our own humanity. At the beginning of Lent many of us received the sign of a cross on our forehead. The ash that marked us came from the palms used last year to celebrate the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem. The minister said, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Those are hard words, serious words. But they are words we need to hear. Life doesn’t stay the same. It changes. We will not always be where we are today, so we had best take advantage of the time we are given. And we had best remember that those who are in our lives today may well not be there tomorrow. Remembering where we are in this journey of life, remembering there is a beginning and an ending point is important.
We have this thing about time, this idea that we should all be given a good and full life. And when something happens that robs someone of a long life, when tragedy strikes like in Haiti or Chile, we sense an injustice has been done. And we want to know the cause of such an injustice. After Jesus encouraged his disciples to know what time it was some of those present mentioned some people who were killed by Pilate’s soldiers, killed while they were offering a sacrifice at the temple. The blood of these young men mixed with the blood of the sacrifices they were offering. Jesus went on to mention another tragedy that everyone seemed to know about. Apparently eighteen construction workers were killed when a tower they were working on collapsed in the town of Siloam. The question close to everyone’s heart was “Why do these kinds of things happen? Who’s to blame?”
It’s strange how this ancient conversation would fit so well around our tables today. Every day tragedies occur around the world. Every day we hear of someone we know or someone a friend knows who has been struck down in the prime of life. We wonder aloud, “Who’s to blame?” Has someone sinned? Is God punishing them?”
Jesus says something that goes against the grain of popular belief both then and now. He simply says there’s no cause and effect going on between tragedy and someone’s sin. While poor choices may lead to disaster, and while someone else’s bad decisions can have an effect on other people, Jesus seems to go out of his way to remind us tragedy is a part of life in this world. We are fragile. Accidents happen. People can get sick at an early age and die. It’s almost as though Jesus says, “Stuff happens!”
This is not what his disciples wanted to hear. And it isn’t what most of us want to hear. We desperately want to know we will be blessed with a long life if we do the right things. If we go to church, if we treat everyone fairly, if we try to be loving and forgiving, we want to believe we won’t be on that airplane that crashes. We won’t be in that building that collapses when the earthquake strikes. We won’t be the person who is diagnosed with cancer. We want our time, every minute of it, to be given to us. We want to live a long and full life. We want to know why some people don’t so we can make the adjustments and get the blessing of a long and happy life.
Jesus seems to say, “There are no guarantees.” But then he says something that at first sounds very cold and harsh. He says what we need is not the promise of security and shelter, not the promise of protection from an early death, but what we need is repentance. At first appearance it seems Jesus joins those preachers who at a funeral begins to call people to the altar. At a most vulnerable time, when people are confronted with the shortness of life, why not squeeze a confession or commitment out of the folks who are mourning?
Maybe that’s what Jesus is doing, but I don’t think so. I think Jesus is trying to get the conversation turned back to the clock, not the kind of clock that marks the passing of our days in the world, but the kind of clock that marks God’s time. You see when Jesus encouraged his followers to learn how to interpret time, he didn’t use the word for time that marks chronological time, the passing of time day to day. He used the word karios to denote God’s kind of time. There is no English word capable of giving the full meaning of this kind of time. It is a time in between, a moment outside of time. It is seen by Jesus as the breaking in of that which is eternal, the coming of what has such height and breadth and depth that it is overpowering. Such moments have transformative power. They can change a twenty four hour clock into a time machine that brings eternity into a present moment and changes not only how we see the events of life, but how we choose to use the time and energy we are given.
It seems we’ve always associated the word repent with past sins. The call to turn around, to go in new directions appears to be a call away from bad habits and bad choices. But in this circumstance the call of Jesus is to turn away from calculating time in terms of how we are perishing and to begin calculating time as a moment in which the living God is fully present and fully alive in us. This turning in our heart and minds can change how we define and live our lives each day. Frederick Beuckner wrote, ”To repent is to come to your senses. It is not so much something you do as something that happens. True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, "I'm sorry," than to the future and saying, "Wow!"
There is no promise from Jesus that our lives will be easy. As one person wrote, when Jesus died on the cross he erased any thought that by being good you could avoid trouble. But what Jesus seems to invite is for us to spend some time in those painful places, to allow those disappointments and frustrations, those fears and worries to become holy moments where God’s time can break into our lives, where we can hear and see that which goes beyond the moment, that which is full of eternity. Human moments like the suffering inflicted on a cross can become resurrection moments where rules that govern time in this world have no power.
It is hard for us to see God’s time. We are so caught up in the passing of our days, in the need to get results immediately. We are like the person who plants a fig tree in his vineyard. It’s not a tree essential for our livelihood. It is a vineyard where grapes are grown and turned to wine. But the fig tree is an extra, an opportunity to have some delicious, sweet fruit on our plate. We want the tree to produce for us. But after three years we grow discouraged. It doesn’t matter that it takes a fig tree six years to bear fruit. We think we’ve given it long enough. So we are ready to cut it down and move on to something else. But the gardener knows the truth. He is aware of what is possible and not ready to give up so easily. Wait, do a little more work, put a little more cow manure around its roots. Just because you can’t see what you want to see today doesn’t mean there’s not something going on that will bear fruit.
We get frustrated looking at the slow progress we see in our lives from day to day. One success seems to be followed by so many failures. We take one step forward only to take two steps backwards. We attend a wedding one day and the funeral of friends the next. Maybe Macbeth was right:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idoit, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
But there is another way. With God’s clock the passing of our days is but an opportunity for that which is eternal to find presence and meaning in our world. No life, no matter how short is meaningless. No wound, no matter how deep, is beyond healing. We have to live in the world, and we have to live by the world’s rules. There’s no doubt about that. But that is not the whole truth. We are invited to confess God’s time, to put ourselves not just in the hands of God but in the presence of God’s people and to imagine how God is nurturing each moment, to imagine how each event is pregnant with the ability to produce something good, and to participate in that effort to bring love and compassion and justice out of the tragic events of life.
Thomas Long, a teacher and preacher from Georgia told of a story often told in the little Georgia church in which he was raised. “The tale involved a certain Sunday night in October 1938. Evening prayer services were in full swing when a man named Sam, a member of the congregation who lived down the road from the church, charged into the prayer meeting trembling with fear and excitement. Finally gaining the breath to speak, he shouted, "Martians are attacking the earth in spaceships! Some of ‘em have already landed in New Jersey!" The preacher halted in mid-sentence; the congregation stared at Sam blankly. "I s-s-swear," he stammered, now a little unsure of his footing. "I h-h-heard it on the radio."
What Sam had heard, of course, was Orson Welles’s now infamous Mercury Theater radio production of War of the Worlds, but no one in the congregation was aware of that at the moment. For all they knew, the world outside was coming to a flaming end. The little flock looked apprehensively at the preacher, but he was mute and indecisive, never having had a sermon disrupted by interplanetary invasion. Finally one of the oldest members of the congregation, a red-clay farmer of modest education, stood up, gripped the pew in front of him with his large, callused hands, and said, "I ‘speck what Sam says ain’t completely true, but if it is true, we’re in the right place here in church. Let’s go on with the meetin’." And so they did.”
Here in church, here gathered around the table, we can’t ignore the world’s clock. We have to see what’s going on. We have to feel the pain and frustration, the fear and confusion of a world caught up in the judgment of its poor decisions and evil ways. But we are the body of Christ. We have another clock that guides us. There is potential even in the barren places, in the unproductive places. When God’s compassion and grace, when God’s love is mixed with the world’s time, daily moments can be transformed. Hope can be given. Life can be renewed.
At this table of mercy we must keep our eyes on God’s clock.
