Date:
December 6, 2009, Second Sunday in Advent
Author: The Rev. Dr. James D. Kegel
GRACE TO YOU AND PEACE FROM GOD OUR FATHER AND THE LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST, AMEN.
Imagine you are on the New York subway. If you stand at the back of the train while it is hurtling through the dark tunnel, you will see only shadows swallowing up the track you have just passed. In the front of the train you may see a green or red light glowing in the distance, but again everything else is hid from you. You move constantly—the past recedes into oblivion and the future has not yet arrived. In a certain sense, it is only the present that is real. You exist only in that subway car. Suddenly you come to a station. The train stops. The station is lighted. You can now see ahead and behind. The world in the subway car has expanded. The past and the future become more real.
St Augustine in one of his more psychological moments said that the past was really only memory and the future only hope…You cannot reach out and touch the past; it is always retreating. You must wait for the future to arrive and it never does. Then come those moments of special time, ripe time, the fullness of time. The lights come on in the station and you can see ahead and back. It is what the Greek calls KAIROS, pregnant time, instead of CHRONOS, the time on the clock.
One of my favorite hymns did not make it into our newer hymnals. James Russell Lowell, the American poet, wrote these words: “Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide, in the strife of truth with falsehood for the good or evil side. Some great cause, God’s new messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, and the choice goes by forever twixt the darkness and the light.” I am not sure that people or countries are given but once to hear God’s call, but I am convinced there are special times, KAIROS times, when past and future become clear and we see that all is in the hands of God. There are times we are given a clear choice. Most of our days we muddle through, we stay in dark of life’s tunnel seeing only that which is about us. Then all of sudden the lights come on, the special moment comes.
We may recognize the fullness of time. It may be the baptism of a child—this morning we welcome little Annika Jacobson into the family of God--a confirmation, a wedding. I don’t know about you but the one thing I remember about our wedding of thirty-four years ago is it seemed that time stood still; it was sort of time-out-of-time. This summer our daughter Anne will be married. People cry at weddings not only out of happiness or disappointment but more likely because it reminds us of the passage of time, that somehow the past and future are joined. I know if the band plays “Sunrise, sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof, I’m sure my tears will flow. I have to preach the wedding sermon and will have to work hard not to talk about grandparents and friends who are no longer with us but we wish they were. It is a happy wedding time not a funeral! Our special times may be those moments we share with people who are ill, those who are dying. We remember those last words, the good-byes, sometimes we wished we could express our love. Pastor Earl Anderson was definitely not a touch-feely guy but we had grown close as he was dying from prostate cancer. The last time I saw him, I said, “Earl, I love you.” He said back to me, “Jim, I love you too.” Those are KAIROS moments. Sometimes God uses ordinary time and mundane events to break in to our lives. C.S. Lewis told how he came to believe in God while he was riding in a sidecar of a motorcycle to the London Zoo. When he got in, he didn’t believe but somewhere along the streets of North London he was, as he put I, “surprised by joy,” and knew there was a God.
` Lutherans don’t talk much about spiritual experiences but we have them. Once in our adult Bible class we went around the room and talked about our experiences of angels or how we had sensed Christ’s presence. I have heard your stories. I have my own. I was just talking to a family who shared with me that their father had felt the presence of angels around him as he was dying. Some of you have seen the bright light of God’s presence or felt that somehow you have been singled out. One young man told me that his mother had had such an experience before he was born. An old woman had told her that her child would be set apart for the Lord’s service. He is now in seminary because, while he long resisted the expectation, he always felt deep inside that God was calling him. Some of you may have had such experiences. Perhaps you are being called to follow the Lord right now. You may be wondering about what God’s will is for you. You may be seeking the right moment to speak to a child or grandchild about the Lord. You may be waiting for that teachable moment to bring up something that is bothering you and wondering what you will say. Here is God’s promise to you; God will give you the right words. Jesus said, “Do not worry about how you are to defend yourselves or what you are to say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say.” Be open to those moments in your life when God is calling you, when you must decide, that special time, KAIROS time, God’s fullness of time for you.
Today our Gospel talks about John the Baptist. His is the voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” All the Gospel talk about John the Baptist but Luke puts his ministry in historical context. Luke has already told of the conception of John the Baptist and his birth. Now he announces the beginning of John’s ministry: “In the fifteenth year of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judaea and Herod was ruler of Galilee and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. Then John went into all the region around the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” At a definite time in history, in place we can still find, God’s word broke into our human story. In the middle of everything ordinary and muddled, God’s salvation dawned. In a world of darkness, great light appeared. The light of Christ came and still comes to us. In the ordinary darkness of chronological time, the rule of kings remembered and forgotten, God broke into time with the good news of the coming of the Christ and John who prepared his way.
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide…well there are moments of decision, times when the lights come on and we sense God’s purpose for us. I came upon an interesting letter written by a Catholic seminarian now studying in Ohio. This Latvian student named Ringold Klimons wrote that he left Riga for England to improve his English. It was a 46 hour bus ride. On his way back to Latvia, he missed the last bus from Warsaw. He recalled words that one of his teachers had shared in England. The answer from the learned professor was very simple. To the question, “How is the Holy Spirit active in your life?” He had answered, “When the Holy Spirit tells me to stop, I have to stop; when He says go, I go.” Klimons knew that he had to find a place to sleep for the night in Warsaw and had no money so he went to a church. He remembered Christ’s words “Do not worry.” But as a human being of course he was worried. But then he met a young man at the church who had just graduated from the university and was unemployed. He offered Klimons a cot in his one room apartment. The man said he wanted to find a job and a wife and have a family but wondered whether his troubles meant that he should become a priest. Klimons writes, “After that conversation he was so happy that he wanted to give me something as a sign of his gratitude. My words, it seems had cleared his doubts. He had nothing to give me but a bar of soap, which I of course accepted. The next morning I was on my way back home. I do not know why the Good Lord wanted me to stay that night in Warsaw. Because I was very tired, hungry and needed rest? Because of the man who had his doubts cleared through his conversation with me? I do not know why, but the priest’s words proved true: when the Holy Spirit tells me stop, I have to stop and when the Spirit says go, I go.” We too ask for God’s direction in our lives; we pray in confidence that God will give us what we need. We pray that we might be brought to people who need us, to the right place at the right time, to be given the Spirit’s words to say the right thing. We pray for those moments when we sense God’s presence with us and come to know that we are not alone in the universe; when we understand that Jesus is not only our Lord and Savior, but our brother and our dearest friend. We pray for the lights to come on in the station, those moments in the darkness of our everyday life, those KAIROS, moments, the fullness of time, when we see more clearly. God give us strength and courage to decide for Christ. Amen.
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