Kairos

Scripture:  Jonah 3:1-5, 10, I Corinthians 7:29-31;  Mark 1:14-20

Kairos

As I was meditating on our Scripture passages for today, I was struck by the fact that all three readings contain the element of time.  In our Old Testament reading, Jonah proclaims to Nineveh, “Forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown.   In our Gospel reading, Jesus begins his ministry with the words, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the Gospel.”  And in our reading from I Corinthians, Paul writes, “I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short.”   Paul thought that the world would soon be coming to an end, and so he advised his readers to live as if they were running out of time, and thus not to cling too closely to the things of this life:  “let those who mourn live as if they are  not mourning, and those rejoicing as if they were not rejoicing, and those who have possessions as those with no possessions, for the present form of the world is passing away.”  As I pondered further on the nearly two thousand years that have passed since Paul wrote these words, I was reminded of Salvador Dali’s famous painting “The Persistence of Memory” – it’s the one with the melting clocks, and I included a copy in a bulletin insert – so if you leave worship today with nothing else, you’ll have a not-very-good inkjet-printed copy of a famous, if famously bizarre, work of art.  Just to reassure you, the picture of the melting clocks has nothing to do with the length of today’s sermon.  I’m not an artist or an art critic, nor do I play one on TV – watching Rod Serling’s Night Gallery on TV growing up is about as close as I’ve ever gotten – but in my artistically illiterate way, I’d observe that in this painting by Dali, with its melting clocks, time and memory have a fluid, elastic quality.  At the same time, the closed pocketwatch in the lower left corner, being devoured by ants, reminds us that, if not used purposefully, our time, indeed our lives, can be devoured by trivialities. 

Jesus said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.”  In the Greek language in which the Gospels were originally written, there are two words used for time.  One is chronos time – the time that is captured by our watches and calendars.  From the Greek word chronos we get words such as chronic and chronology and chronological.  The other – and the Greek word for time used in today’s reading – is “kairos”.  It has a meaning of “the appointed time” and, particularly with regards to God, it means the time that God has chosen to act in a special way.   Perhaps we can think of these two kinds of time in our own lives.   Chronos time is the time we live with every day, when we know we have to get up early to get spouse and kids off to work or school, when we’re watching the clock to see how long until our workday is over or the calendar to see how long till the weekend, when we look back over the past week or month or year or decade and wonder where the time has gone.  But then there are those moments where things come together in a special way – that moment when we meet that special someone who ends up being a spouse or best friend, or an experience that changes the course of our life – when we discover a new talent or skill we didn’t know we had.  These pivotal moments in our lives, when time is on a hinge and we stand in the doorway between what are lives were and what they will be, and there’s no going back – those are kairos moments, moments when God acts in our lives in a special way.  Often we may not recognize those moments when we’re in them.  We may only recognize them in retrospect, when we look back and think that, “if I hadn’t been in this place at this time and this other person hadn’t been at the same place at the same time, how different my life would be today.”

In our Gospel reading, Jesus is at one of those pivotal moments.  He had just been baptized by John the Baptist – and heard the voice of God calling Jesus God’s son, the beloved – and then spent forty days in the wilderness pondering what God was calling him to do, and, we’re told, being tempted with false choices by Satan.  News of John’s arrest apparently prompted Jesus to realize that this was the appointed time for Jesus to begin his ministry.  And so he called Simon and his brother Andrew – poor fishermen, who were casting from the shore into the sea because they had no boat – and later James and John, whose family was more prosperous, with a boat and even hired men.  God had prepared their hearts, and when Jesus said, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people” – they all followed….Simon and Andrew didn’t have much in the way of material possessions to leave behind, but we’re told that James and John left their father and the hired men in the boat, left the family business behind to follow Jesus.

How can we recognize these kairos moments, these life-changing moments?  How can we be prepared for them?  The brief reading from I Corinthians gives us a clue:  Paul tells his readers that since the appointed time is short they – and we - are to live in a way so that we’re not caught up in the world around us.  In the words of an old hymn, “Jesus calls us from the worship of the vain world’s golden store, from each idol that would keep us, saying Christian, love me more.”  If we’re caught up in chasing what the world has to offer, we will miss the moment in which God is calling us. Now, at our midweek service this past Wednesday, we were reading the story in Acts chapter 9 of Paul’s call, when God knocked Paul off his horse and granted him a vision of Jesus.  For Paul, that was a kairos moment, in which he went from being a persecutor of the early church to perhaps the greatest missionary of the early church.  And earlier in the book of Jonah, in a section we didn’t read today, the prophet Jonah tried to run away from his kairos moment, when God commanded Jonah to preach to Nineveh and he got on a boat to Tarshish, traveling in the opposite direction…..that’s where the famous story comes in of Jonah getting thrown off the boat and swallowed by a whale, and brought back to square one, back to where he started – and it was after the whale coughed Jonah up on shore that he heard God’s call a second time, and went to preach to Nineveh.  But when God is trying to get our attention, it’s unlikely God will knock us off our horse or send a whale to swallow us up….though I sometimes wish God would be that obvious – in order to hear God’s voice, to recognize the kairos moment, the appointed time, we have to pay attention.  Over and over through the Gospels, Jesus tells his disciples to “keep awake, to watch therefore, for you know not the hour.” That word is for us as well.

Some kairos moments – some life-changing moments – are easier to recognize than others, and we have one such life-changing moment before us today, as Benjamin Stephen Jones is being baptized.  Baptism is the rite by which we enter the church – a rite of initiation and inclusion, a rite of passage – but it comes with many layers of meaning.  By baptism we are included in Christ’s death and resurrection – Romans tells us that when we are baptized, we are baptized into Christ’s death, so that with Christ we will be raised from the dead.  In the waters of baptism our sinful human nature is drowned – as those not on the ark were drowned at the time of Noah – and we rise up out of the water with the new life of Christ within us, pardoned and cleansed, freed from the power of sin, freed to love and serve God and neighbor as children of God, disciples of Christ, and members of Christ’s church.  In baptism we receive the anointing and the promise of the Holy Spirit.  By baptism we are made members, not only of Emanuel Church, but of the worldwide body of Christ, and in baptism we are called to ministry as part of that body.  Ministry is not just something the pastor does on Sunday, but it is something to which all baptized Christians are called every day of the week.  And so this baptism of Benjamin Stephen Jones, while it looks like just the sprinkling of some water and the intonation of some words, is a life-changing event.  Like a downpour of water getting into our hair and our eyes and ears and nose, in baptism, God’s grace gets into every part of our lives, and we are never the same again.

God claims us in our baptism.  The German reformer Martin Luther went through many periods of self-doubt.  As he was translating the Greek text of the Bible into German so that the common people could read it, he struggled with doubt every step of the way, felt himself assailed by demons, to the point where he would sometimes throw an inkpot at whatever he felt was tormenting him.  But during these moments of doubt he would say to himself, “But I am baptized.  But I am baptized.”  For Luther, his baptism was the sign of an unbreakable relationship with God, a relationship stronger than his doubts and fears.

Many of our longtime members grew up with the Heidelberg Catechism.  The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism reads, “What is your only comfort, in life and in death.”  And the answer begins, “That I belong, body and soul, in life and in death, not to myself, but to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ…..” – and it goes on from there.    We can take comfort in knowing that we belong, not to ourselves, but to Christ, who through the waters of baptism claims us for Christ’s own.  Amen.