Sermon for the 11th Sunday after Trinity, August 15, 2010
Born out of Time

“And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time. For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain.”
ONE of our greatest masters and an idol for our day we bear witness to on our left wrists, pulsing on our cell phones, glaring at us from the wall or steadily showing its presence at the corner of our computer screens. At the tone the time will be - - - a.m. Synchronize your watches, ready, set, go. Even in little Chico, the clock calls to us our schedules, appointments, deadlines, class times, the hour of each meal and the airing of our favorite shows. Time is more than a convenient frame of reference, but an externally imposed and inexorable slave master, a moving sidewalk we can’t get off, the conveyor belt speeding us toward some end now dark to us, racing forward, facing backward, blind as bats in a wind tunnel. Go to San Francisco’s financial district to see time’s true addicts, grimly awaiting the walk signs at Market and O’Farrell. One great god of our time is time.
      I call us all to remember that time never was until Almighty God, who dwelt in eternity without any beginning, in a loving divine community we call Trinity, commenced to create a world, a universe in the single sentence, “Let there be light!” And there was light. Note the past tense. Time began, and whether that first day was 24 hours or longer is a question that makes no sense, for the light created that day formed no planet or sun until, expanding through the vast wildernesses of dark empty space, the energy and light-speed decayed enough to thicken and mass and form spheres and firmaments and waters below and above. At the moment God marked this first event, He had created time, the first ‘day’. God above time, outside of time, never was subject to it and need never to be bound to wonder at an outcome or sequence of things, for He made all things, even the passage of events that remain such mysteries to us.
      We are subjects of this time, for now, but will one day emerge from the laboratory of this universe and enter eternity where God is always I AM. Eternity is impossible to imagine while we remain here, still agog each year at the turning of the seasons, the first bronzed leaves of fall, the shortening days, our granddaughter’s sudden womanhood and our son’s new height marked on the wall in pencil. At the age of 61, every year now blazes by me. I can’t believe it’s August 15th already. I once never believed I’d live to the year 2010.
      The people of our Lord’s day marked time with care, and used the moon to mark their months, each quarter moon a week, each seventh day a Sabbath. Sun-up was the 1st hour, sun-down the 12th hour and the end of a day. And on a day we are unsure of, and a year we only estimate, God entered time, for the first time it’s creature, subject to its grinding gears. A baby’s first cry from the stable at Bethlehem makes it known that God’s Son is now Mary’s son Jesus, and God marks human history as a man. Thirty years passes without much to record, then the man dips under Jordan’s stream and God’s Spirit descends to begin an amazing three years’ declaration of His purpose, His kingdom and His judgment coming. Til then, any thought of existence after the day we die was based in visionary language, a thing of song and epic poems, a wish to beat death and a fearful expectation without established promise. Then Jesus spoke and the curtain parted, life after dying was true and an eternal brightness or an everlasting punishment lay before all people, based in their faith in Him or rejection of what He was bringing. The fate of all people lay in His hands, and then His hands were pierced with huge nails and they bled.
      It’s called the Good News. News is a concept that only makes sense inside of time. Mankind was doomed, is offered salvation, will live forever if faith in this historic figure marks a change in the members of this race. A man who once sought to extinguish this news, rout out its followers and purify Judaism from it once for all, encountered the living Jesus out of a clear blue sky and was blinded by light until he saw the truth. He had not known Jesus while He lived here with us. He had not met Christ’s disciples except to arrest and stone them to death, beginning with Stephen. Now fully convinced, convicted and converted, Paul desperately wanted to share the good news with every nation, fulfilling Jesus’ last command himself, though he hadn’t been there to hear it. And in every city where his proclamation planted a new church, Paul wrote back and strengthened their faithful following by written words we keep to this day.
      “The Gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.” Paul wants all to retain their first powerful experience of knowing what God had done for them. He returns to the tragic and triumphant day when Christ died for our sins, was buried, then rose the third day, and this is all foretold in Jewish Scriptures. His resurrection is certified, and the fact of it seals all else spoken by Him and of Him, that He is Lord over this creation and that death cannot hold Him. Paul cites the witnesses of Christ’s resurrection: Peter, the Apostles, even 500 disciples at once, and the Lord’s brother James.
      “And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time. For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” Paul knows he came late to the party, was born out of due time. He missed the Incarnation, Baptism, miracles, preaching, and the raising of the dead. However, Jesus taught Paul daily for years in preparation on the desert, his facts confirmed later by the Apostle Peter, and this firebrand was commissioned in Antioch to go to Gentile lands and spread the good news. “Therefore whether it were I or they, so we preach, and so ye believed.”
      We are born into time. Now, it’s a bad concept and false teaching to think we existed before we were conceived, as God’s Son had existed. We are not gods to have had a spiritual existence in eternity prior to our human sojourn. We do begin, and as such feel ourselves creatures of time. Everybody knows his or her birth date, and with cakes and candles celebrate the passage of the years, our successful return from flying around the sun once again. And we are born into an era, some portion of human history that sets a context and provides a background upon which our lives may be led with meaning and to some end. It seems like people wore robes and sandals a long time, looking to us so much the same a thousand years before and after Christ, but time sped up and fashions changed with the technologies, only to hit a rapid pace of change in our day. A hundred years ago the Wright Brothers’ flying machine was current news, automobiles rarely seen, atomic power unheard of. In my life the television caught hold, computers invented, jet propulsion introduced, and space travel begun. Every week it seems a new invention changes the way we live. We are distracted by these things and run along keeping pace with the changes, setting our watches, fearing to miss a single thing.
      It’s time to stop. Where are we? And more to the point, When are we? Some Christians are sure that Jesus must return soon, even during their lives, for the wicked world can’t get worse. Others hope for a utopia, the end of nations, a brave new world beyond the Age of Aquarius. The old tales are scoffed at, and science conquers antique beliefs, proving their fallacy, it would seem. Patience turns to complicity while we play a waiting game with destiny, hoping and fearing what will come. We have to improve our memory, and remind ourselves of what we know, like Paul admonishes his church at Corinth. This good news is ever news, but we may grow tired or bored with it, and lose the essential thing we had at first, when it suddenly made sense to us.
      God sent His Son to be a baby, then a boy, and a man who walked our earth, ate and drank our food and water and wine. His words spoke from a wisdom no one ever experienced and still speak today transformational truth, a promise and potential for future glory and joy. Do we still believe it? Have we grown stale in hearing it? What it cost Him to give us this eternal message can’t be forgotten. That’s why we Anglicans hang crosses where Jesus is depicted crucified, not that He still hangs there, but that we remember the moment in history when we were saved. Our birthday pales in comparison with the day of Atonement on a hill overlooking Jerusalem, as the Son of God looked down and prayed upward, “Father, forgiven them, for they know not what they do.”
      Do we have time to recall the power of that moment, time to mark it on our hearts, time to praise Him for what He has done and is doing and will do for you and for me? Can we take time out of our busyness to stop and regard the God who from outside of time entered time and re-set the clock of this universe to Jesus savings time. Daylight savings time will end November 7th this year 2010, but Jesus savings time doesn’t run that way. It doesn’t end. He had no beginning, except being born to us in a human form and soul, and will have no end except in dying once, rising to life again, Savior forever. Jesus savings time is a clock that ticks for you, a clock that keeps an entirely different kind of time and if that clock beats inside your heart and mind, you can just make out in it the beat of eternity, the pace of a world in total stillness filled with light and life, glory and joy and peace and plenty. It’s not a vain promise, for He died to get it for you. Paul lived to proclaim it, but died to prove he believed it, as did so many of the first Apostles and Christian witnesses, the 500 who saw Him at once.
      Time is a creature, like you are. One day He intends for you to rule over it, as it has seemed to ruled over you all your life, marking your aging processes, moving you along toward some destined end. You shall laugh at time as you should at death, for Christ conquered them both in your name, so that in His Name you would have this and every victory eternally.
      Jesus savings time has begun. Born out of time and into eternity, let’s begin once again.

PFH+