Keeping Time
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
October 1, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

II Chronicles 5:11-14
II Peter 3:8-13

“It was the duty of trumpeters and singers to make themselves heard in unison in praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, and when the song was raised…the house, the house of the Lord was filled with a cloud, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.”

This Sunday Christians throughout the world are gathering at Christ’s table: the table that is a foretaste of new heavens and a new earth where righteousness is at home, the table that grants us a glimpse of the time when there shall be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, and I daresay, neither Muslim nor Christian, because God will be all in all.

Yet this morning, like most every morning these days, we wake to the news and find ourselves wondering anew how we as believers in God and followers of Jesus Christ are to inhabit the time until our time is up and God’s reign is begun. Or put in the light of today’s text, replete with trumpeters and singers, what might it sound like for this community to wait for new heavens and a new earth where righteousness is at home, ourselves duty-bound until then to be heard in unison, in praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, as a shout against the darkness? Or in echoes of II Peter’s words, what sort of persons ought we to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God while others hasten that day, in God’s name, with explosives on their backs?

I cannot shake the notion on this World Communion Sunday that though you and I inhabit the same planet as the rest of the human race, we occupy an increasingly different time. Social scientists have called the divide a “clash of civilizations”. Philosophers talk of post-modernity and subjectivity versus modernity and the Enlightenment versus the medieval and feudal mindset of religious fundamentalism. Politicians opine that the rest of the human race should get up to speed with Western civilization, missing the point that our so-called civilization is, in relation to the time fundamentalists inhabit, the embodiment of evil.

But in Scripture, in the narrative that tells this community who it is, the distinctions in time are only two: there is created time [the time God has taken for creation, the room God has made for us all in God’s life] and there is God’s time [when our every whence and whither will be gathered into the eternal life that is God]. Of the latter we read in II Peter that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like one day; a thousand years in thy sight is but as yesterday when it is past, sang the psalmist before Peter, and as a watch in the night; both suggesting the distinction we make between the created time we inhabit and the created time the unimaginable other inhabits may not be as apparent or at least as important to God as it is to us!

In fact present human distinctions likely will not be the point when together we dine at table in God’s eternal life or when we enter into new heavens and a new earth where righteousness is at home! Peter’s words therefore have admonished Christians in every age to spend the fleeting time given paying attention to the sort of persons we ought to be as we wait for and hasten the coming of the day of God.

The distinction at issue from the start, therefore, is between the persons we ought to be and the persons we have become in created time! In a word, we are persons who have forgotten how to take time and so a culture that no longer is able together to keep time. In a book entitled Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, James Gleick “describes the condition of a society in a rush….We have the modern concept of ‘real time’,” he says, “which means right now or sooner. And now, in Internet time, thought and consideration give way to immediacy of communication, the imperative instantaneousness.” Writing on ‘The Paradox of Efficiency,’ and ‘365 Ways to Save Time,’ and ‘Eat and Run’, Gleick critiques “a society and culture racing to the horizon.” That is to say, time has become a commodity—something to use, spend, allocate, fill. The telos, the end, the goal of human existence turns out to be the intersection of money, space and time, says theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie, “a substantial nexus of social power we cannot afford to ignore.”

Literally, we cannot afford to ignore it even as we cannot afford to pay attention to those that time has passed by: the unemployed, the disadvantaged, the poor, the sick, the elderly, the ones who are, in Jesus’ words, the least of these, the ones in whose face we see his. “We have no time for them,” we say not realizing that the judgment uttered indicts not them but us! To put the critique theologically, the pace and ultimate pathos with which we inhabit time, despite our reified religiosity these days, has made us more and more indifferent to the questions and contours of life’s meaning and purpose.

The consequences of such indifference are imperceptible to us, immersed as we are in the immediate. To wit, observes music critic Robert Commanday, “We now read differently, thanks to the hours spent in front of the screen, skimming, skipping, only infrequently scrolling back to reexamine a particularly interesting or elusive passage.” Moreover there is multi-tasking, text-messaging under the table, call-waiting lest we miss a matter of more consequence, emails by the hundreds holding time hostage each morning.

Or put conversely as Sven Birkerts does in The Gutenberg Elegies: “To the extent that we immerse ourselves in a book…sink into the visual realm of a painting…listen to music [music being the art form most clearly about time]…to that degree we surrender our awareness of the present as a coordinate on a grid….All circuit-driven communications, by contrast, are predicated upon instantaneousness.”

I think it no coincidence, then, that the arts and specifically music [again the art form most clearly about time] recall us to the persons we ought to be: persons who may sustain attention, persons who may wait patiently, person who may lose ourselves gladly in things with no utility (in bread and wine, water, words, dance, melody), persons who watch with eager longing for new heavens and a new earth where righteousness is at home!

This is so because, in the first place, says Jeremy Begbie, “music takes or demands our time, it cannot be rushed. It schools us,” he says,
    in the art of patience. Certainly we can play a piece faster, but this is possible only to a very limited degree before it becomes incoherent. We can, given today’s technology, ‘cut and paste’ music in ways unimaginable to our forebears: we can hop from track to track on the CD [or the I Pod}, flip from one rock number to another, buy highlights of a three-hour opera. But few would claim we hear a work in its integrity by doing this [because] music requires my time, my flesh and blood, my thought and action for its performance and reception. Music asks for my patience, my trust that there is something worth waiting for….Music can teach us a kind of patience which stretches and enlarges, deepens us in the very waiting.

What sort of persons ought we to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the day of God? What might it sound like for this community to wait in time for new heavens and a new earth where righteousness is at home? Perhaps it might sound like the trumpeters and singers whose duty is was to make themselves heard in unison in praise and thanksgiving to the Lord!

In the second place contends Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, “music can function as a ’moral event’ [in the sense that] it can remind us that we are not in control of the world, that we do not have the overview, that we are in the narrative of the world’s history and never above it.” We become the persons we ought to be, in other words, as we surrender our hold on time. More often than not, we surrender not by choice but by seeming chance, when by tragedy or trauma we know ourselves as creatures subject to the decay against which we have raced. A cloud descends, we say, leaving us stopped in our tracks, disoriented, shaken to our very foundations. If we dare to inhabit the cloud, if we dwell in the time that eludes our control, we may find ourselves, when the song is raised by the great congregation, in the presence of God’s glory, in the cloud that filled the house, the house of the Lord so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the house.

Time and time again in Scripture there is a coincidence between God’s glory descending like a cloud, invading created time, and the time when human action comes to an end, when characters are stopped and bowed down…their attention arrested often at the precipice and turned just in time to behold in the ordinary the extraordinary Presence of the One for whom they were made. This is time, a poet once exclaimed, redeemed from insignificance!

I think of John Hull who, after he had gone blind, reported that time became “the inexorable context within which I do what must be done….You are no longer fighting against the clock, but against the task. You no longer think of the time it takes. You only think of what you have to do. It cannot be done any faster. Time, against which you previously fought, becomes simply the stream of consciousness within which you are.” Age and aching joints afford us the same lesson, as do illness, grief, failure, disappointment.

But so also does music! In its very temporality, tone gives way to tone and depends heavily for its meaning on finitiude. “Music is always dying, giving way. The next tone in the plainsong melody can only come if th last one [surrenders its time] and is not sung.” It almost is as though we must become one for whom the world has no time before we may really inhabit the time God has created for us! Then with only time on our hands and a listening ear, we are left to face the terrible and tender mercy of the God who has time for us.

That God, says Robert Jenson at the end of his Systematic Theology, is pure music, is a melody…and the melody is fugued! A theme is voiced, and reiterated in a second voice, and then reiterated in a third: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three singers that take each their part underneath the chorale that, it seems, is ours to sing. We crowd in as one chorus with no distinctions. Nothing is more capacious than a fugue, says Jenson, and therefore “the last word to be said about God’s Triune being [wherein God has made room for our voice] is that God is ‘a great fugue.’…Infinitely approachable and infinitely to be approached, the enlivening telos, [the end, the goal} of the Kingdom’s own life, is perfect harmony between the [music] of the redeemed and the [music] that God is.” Meaning and melody at the last and eternally are one! Until then, may wait with patience accompanied by a Bach cantata or two. Thanks be to God!

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