Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

Jeremiah 31:7-14

Time is an obsession. There is either too little of it or we have time on our hands; we run to keep up; we struggle to wait; we enjoy moments of leisure; and, sometimes, resent the demands it makes. We mourn and mark time’s passing. Time is so much a part of our lives that we can’t buy appliances without clocks in them so that we can sort of make sure we’re keeping an eye on it. Sometimes, we’re trying to hurry time up—hence, the microwave oven. Sometimes, we’re trying to slow it down—hence, the crock pot. We see our relationship with time in our relationship to food.

Many of us don’t consider our attire quite complete until we have donned the watch. Each year, Americans spend in excess of $2B. That’s billion with a B on watches—from the little cheapo things you can buy at CVS to the multi-thousand-dollar timepieces in the finest jewelry stores. Most of us have more than one watch.

I have two. This one belonged to my grandmother’s sister, my great-aunt Goggie. Her real name was Gladys but, when I was a little kid, I couldn’t say Gladys. So, she became Goggie and I called her Goggie until the day she died. This watch is about 85 years old now and it’s a windie. Nobody has windies anymore. It loses twelve minutes between the eighth hour and the twelfth hour that it’s wound everyday. It’s one of those quirky little things, but it reminds me of a person who was incredibly important in my younger years. My other watch is a little more whimsical. It’s a Harry Potter watch and Harry Potter comes and goes as a hologram on the face of the watch. The second hand is the golden snitch that goes around from the quidditch game. Now, my watch always has to be analog. Digital watches bother me because it only blares out the time of the moment and I like to see how time is connected, how the moments go together. So my watch has always had to have a face. So, there’s all my little quirks about time, whether you wanted to know them or not.

One of the reasons I like watches that are like this is because they remind me that time is connected and that time is, oftentimes, more than the sum of its parts. That truth is actually reflected in Scripture because there are two words for time: chronos is the kind of time that is measured by clock and kairos is the kind of time that is measured by its quality—it’s time that is more than the sum of its parts; time that we mark, not by duration, but by content.

We all know time like that, those unrepeatable events and moments in our lives. As human beings we know occasions when we stand outside the passing of events and glimpse something of their meaning: a birth; a death; a wonderful blessing; a terrible tragedy; some events of unusual beauty or pain or joy through which we catch a glimpse of what our lives are all about, maybe even of what life itself is all about because it involves something that’s more than what we see in the moment. That’s kairos time. All chronos time is punctuated and defined by kairos moments, the stuff of our lives that unfold simple and, yet oftentimes, profound ways.

“So hallowed and so gracious is the time,” it is said in the opening scene of Hamlet. On the dark battlements of Elsinore, Marcellus speaks to his companions about the time of Jesus’ birth. He says it’s the time that we cannot bring about but it comes as a free and unbidden gift. So Marcellus says that Christmas and the birth of the Christ Child is such a time. It’s one of the best ways to understand the Incarnation. It’s time eternal punctuated by God. Eternity becomes particular in a moment.

You notice when it’s John’s turn to tell the story. There are no shepherds. There’s no manger. There’s no star. There are no angels. There are no cows, or sheep, or goats, or camels, or pigs. There is no census. There is no Bethlehem. There is simply the Word—the Word that has been, from the very beginning, that becomes the Word in a particular moment. From that moment on, all things are changed. So time becomes different as a result of that event. It means that all of the cronos moments of our lives, all those moments that kind of march on whether we’re paying attention or not, have the capacity to become kairos moments, moments that are more than the sum of their parts because God has come to us with a face and made God real.

Each year, for me, there’s a moment that makes Christmas real because, otherwise, you just go through the motions. It’s all the same, the routine is familiar. But each year, I wait for a moment when Christmas becomes real and alive in a very personal way. It’s a different kind of moment every year. Sometimes, it sneaks up. Sometimes, it is as obvious as the sunrise. Well, this year, it came in the mailbox, buried underneath the daily offers for credit cards, things looking for money for the latest disaster, or professional journals that all but promise to write my sermon for me and things that I can’t live without.

There was this little envelope with very compact handwriting in red ink addressed to The Reverend (with “reverend” spelled out) Patricia Liberty. It was forwarded to me from Miriam Hospital which is where I worked before I came here. I didn’t recognize the return address. There was no name. Inside, there was a very simple card that said, “Joy to the world. The Lord has come.” The inside verse read, “Thinking of you and wishing you the joys of the season.” It was signed by a woman with whom I had spent a great deal of time as her husband came into the hospital for the final days of his journey with a very rare form of leukemia. They had been married for over fifty years. During the days that unfolded, she told me the story of their life together—stories in time that defined her life and defined his life and defined their journey. She sends me a card, “Joy to the world. The Lord has come.” Suddenly, much of the sentimental rubbish that passes for Christmas yielded to this gift in time that reminded me that the Incarnation comes into the midst of our days as they happen to unfold. For her, it had unfolded as a song sung with a broken heart, but was sung, nevertheless. The Incarnation, she reminded me, is a hymn sung in the voice of the moment. For her, it pulled the joy out of sorrow. For the rest of us, it offers to do the same, as well as pulling joy out of resistance, desire out of fear, mercy out of judgment, and life out of death.

John Howard Yoder suggests that a more apt translation for good news is “revolution”. The message of Christ’s coming is that we are being met and reconstructed by a revolutionary God who intends to make all things new, including us, whether we have a broken heart or a joyful heart; whether we are the richest of the rich or the poorest of the poor. Time is punctuated by the eternal coming into the moment in the face of a child.

The heart of the Incarnation is that God comes into our human lives as they are so that we can be all that God intends us to be. The Incarnation is always a hymn that is sung in the voice of the moment. God comes. The Word becomes Flesh. It lives in you and in me. The world is never the same. Thanks be to God. Amen.