What Time Is It?

Scriptures:       Isaiah 43:16-21, Psalm 126

Philippians 3:4b-14,  John 11:55-57, 12:1-11

What time is it?  Our service started at 10 o’clock as usual, but because of setting the clocks ahead an hour, 10 o’clock got here an hour earlier than normal, and it felt like 9 o’clock.  (To me too.)   For the next week or so, we’re probably going to be checking our watches more than usual until our bodies catch up with Daylight Savings Time.

Today’s Scripture readings seem to have little in common – a prophecy of coming good news for Israel – echoed in our Psalm - the story of Mary anointing the feet of Jesus, and Paul’s testimony that he gave up everything to follow Christ – and found Christ to be worth more than all he had left behind.  One theme that binds the readings together, though, is the question, “What time is it?”  Not clock time, of course.  But in Scripture, there are two types of time.  There’s chronos time, the time of the clock – and that’s not what these readings are about.  Rather, the readings speak of kairos time, God’s time, the time in which God is at work in the world.  And so,  when we’re talking about kairos time, to ask “What time is it?” is really to ask, “What is God doing in the world, what is God doing in this situation?  And to ask the question is to recognize that God’s action in the world is not always easy to recognize.

Our reading from Isaiah was written during the Jewish exile in Babylon. God’s people were in a strange land among hostile people.  Some bought into the ways of the Babylonians, but others tried hard to hang onto their traditions – but found it difficult and painful.  “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land,” they asked.   Some were on the verge of giving into despair.  They looked back on God’s saving acts in delivering the ancient Hebrews from slavery in Egypt – but they needed God’s help now.  What had God done for them lately?  Had God forgotten them? 

In response, Isaiah recalled the ancient account of the deliverance of the Hebrews from Egypt – but then says, shockingly, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.”  Forget about all that, God says, at least put it aside for the moment.  Isaiah, speaking for God, goes on:  “I am about to do a new thing, now it springs forth; can’t you see it?”  The “new thing” God is about to do, of course, is to bring the Jews back out of Babylon and into their own land. In writing that God was about to do a new thing, Isaiah was telling his listeners that God’s people were in a kairos moment, a moment in which God was going to do something special for God’s people – and that it was time to shake off their discouragement and pay attention.

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul speaks of the “new thing” that God had done in his life.  Paul basically gives us his resume:  “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”  But, following his visionary encounter with Christ on the Damascus road, Paul recognized that he was in a kairos moment, a time in which God was doing a new thing.  And in response, he left his resume behind:  “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.”

And in our Gospel reading, we have Jesus in a tender moment with the family of Lazarus, whom he had just raised from the dead.  Menace is lurking in the background of this tender moment; the chief priests and Pharisees have plans to arrest Jesus.  What’s more, since Jesus’ raising of Lazarus was bringing people to Jesus, the chief priests wanted to have Lazarus killed as well. 

In the midst of these threats, Jesus and his disciples are having dinner with the family of Lazarus; Lazarus is at table with Jesus, and Martha, characteristically hard at work in the kitchen.  And Mary, characteristically, is not helping Martha in the kitchen.  Elsewhere in the Gospels, Martha complained about Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet listening while Martha was hard at work.  Mary’s sitting at Jesus’ feet sounds subservient, but this actually could be seen as a liberating place to be, because normally only the men would have been privileged to listen to the master’s teaching – and Mary would have been listening along with them.

And now Mary does something so striking that a version of the story is recorded in all four Gospels.  Mary takes a pound of perfume made of pure nard – very fragrant, very costly – uses it to anoint Jesus’ feet, and wipes his feet with her hair.  We’re told that the fragrance of the perfume filled the house – and when I do healing prayers and use oil for anointing, the oil I used has nard for fragrance, and fragrant it is indeed.  The fragrance would have been nearly overpowering.  It’s really a lovely, tender moment between Mary and Jesus – a lovely, tender moment which Judas steps on with his words, “Why was this perfume not sold and the proceeds given to the poor.”  It sounds like a compelling argument – but John, the writer of the gospel, whispers from the sidelines, “Don’t listen to Judas.  He doesn’t give a hoot about the poor; he just wants to skim some money for himself.”  Jesus cuts Judas off, “Leave her alone! She bought it for the day of my burial.  The poor will always be here, but I won’t be.”

I’d like to unpack Jesus’ words a bit. Jesus’ words have been misused to say that we don’t have to care about the poor – but that’s not what Jesus is saying.  Instead, he’s in effect calling BS on Judas’ hypocritical condemnation of Mary by reminding them what time it was, that with the chief priests and Pharisees wanting Jesus dead, they were sooner or later going to get their way – and the disciples had best value whatever time they had left with Jesus.  In normal times, during any other time in fact, they could give alms to the poor.  But this moment was not every other moment.  And Jesus’ mentioning of his own burial is pretty heavy foreshadowing of what’s going to happen when Jesus and his disciples arrive in Jerusalem:  he was going to be killed there, and he knew it.  And Mary was trying to provide whatever comfort she could in the only way she knew how – because Mary, unlike Judas, knew what time it was. 

What time is it?  We live in strange times.  Recent weeks have given us political debates more suited for a junior high school boys locker room and political rallies fit for the Jerry Springer show.  It’s a year in which candidates – even candidates with long political resumes – want to be seen as outsiders, because the label “establishment candidate” is seen as equivalent to a label of “corrupt, bought and paid for candidate”.  It feels like a transitional time, with established assumptions passing away, and something new struggling to be born.  We seem to be in a time of birth pangs – but what is it that is being born?  Old black and white news footage from the civil rights era shows nonviolent protesters, black and white, being met with water cannons and police dogs and violence from private citizens and law enforcement alike – and this violence was all part of the birth pangs that led to greater freedom for African Americans.  By contrast, in Germany, Hitler’s rise to power was also accompanied by violence by his supporters, and this violence was part of the birth pangs that led to death for millions and great suffering for millions more. 

What will our era be called?  It’s difficult for us to know while we’re in it.  Indeed, during the civil rights era, nobody made a public service announcement: “We are now entering the civil rights era”.  It was only in retrospect that we understood the time of change through which the country had passed.  So it’s difficult to know what time it is.

But in order to be faithful, the church needs to be aware of the signs of the times.  During the civil rights era, Dr. King lamented the silence of his fellow clergy colleagues and friends, who knew what was right but failed to speak up, who chose fleeting popularity over faithful proclamation. In Germany, during Hitler’s reign, most of the German churches, Catholic and Protestant, accommodated Hitler’s policies and remained silent about the horrors that were going on around them.  Sunday after Sunday, sermons were preached and sacraments were celebrated, while the church remained silent about the deadly elephant in the room.  Confronted with monstrous evil, most German churches did exactly nothing.  By contrast, a small number of churches adopted what they called the Barmen Declaration, which explained that because of their loyalty to their Lord Jesus, they could not support Lord Adolf. I encourage you to look up the Barmen Declaration on your own (http://www.ucc.org/beliefs_barmen-declaration ), but here’s a snippet:

“As Jesus Christ is God's comforting pronouncement of the forgiveness of all our sins, so, with equal seriousness, he is also God's vigorous announcement of his claim upon our whole life. Through him there comes to us joyful liberation from the godless ties of this world for free, grateful service to his creatures.
We reject the false doctrine that there could be areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ but to other lords, areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.”   

What time is it?  It is time to remember, in the words of the Barmen Declaration just quoted, “God’s vigorous announcement of his claim upon our whole life”, time to celebrate our joyful liberation from the godless ties of this world and the opportunity for free, grateful service to God’s creatures.  In a time of change, may we remember who we are and whose we are.    May we be alert to signs of God’s actions in the world.  May Jesus Christ, the living Word, be a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.   Where Jesus leads, may we follow.  Amen.