Scripture Lesson: 2 Corinthians 8:7

Sermon Transcript for October 12, 2008

By Pastor Bob Coleman

As Pastor Andy said, we begin a series this Sunday on stewardship. It’s that time of year. As we do so, I want to invite in a moment Ellis Hall to come forward. Ellis will be coming forward for two reasons—as lay leader of the church and also as a member of the church—to express a statement of stewardship about time. That’s what we are focusing on today based upon the most excellent promise, the most excellent promise that God gives us in time and how we respond with our time. So I invite Ellis Hall to come forward now.

Ellis: Good Morning. As many of you know, I’m an educator in higher education; and I love my job. I’m passionate about the difference that college can make in students’ lives. Consequently, I spend a lot of time at work. While I admit that sometimes I’m there because I have to be, to meet the needs of a situation, but usually it’s because I really love what I get to do. My work is a blessing on so many levels and the time that I invest there is very fulfilling. Now at ever college I’ve served, we focus a lot of energy on new students as they begin their college experience. This is because they face many challenges—meeting new people, developing new study skills, managing their money, dealing with independence. But you know, do you know what the most difficult or most challenging thing they face? - Managing their time! Success in college can largely be attributed to how well students’ manage their time. But they are not alone in this challenge. Many of us have difficulty managing this very precious recourse – time. There is an old expression, “Time is money”. But unlike money, I can’t go out and earn more time. Unlike food, I can’t go out and grow more time. Unlike material goods, I can’t go out and make more time. And unlike knowledge or skill, I can’t go learn more time. Time is a precious gift from God. Managing time is key to achieving success in life as well regardless of how you define success. How a person spends time says a lot about that person’s values. More so than money, how a person allocates time, a non-renewable resource, indicates a person’s priorities in life. Each Sunday, a part of worship service is devoted to the collection of an offering. We acknowledge at that time that all we have is God’s and that we are giving back a portion to Him. It’s not always easy to meet that responsibility and we certainly struggle with the demands on our money. But at times it can be so easy to put some money in a collection plate and check that off the “To Do” list and move on to other demands and priorities. But time is a resource God has given us. How much time to do give back to God? It can’t be put in a collection plate and I know I don’t have a register recording the time that I do, although I suppose I could track it on my PDA. As Christians, our stewardship of time is a part of our commitment to God and our passion for His work. I know all of us are busy and I know many of you give many hours crossing the bridges that we’ve heard about the past four weeks to the church, to this community, and to the world. And for that I say, “Thank You” and “Amen”. And as we move forward in faith and in stewardship, let us be faithful in our effort to give back to God a portion of this wonderful gift to us – the gift of time. Thank you.

As the Dean of Students at Franklin College, Ellis lives by what we call a “calendar” of time. You have to. There’s a beginning and there’s an ending and the deadlines are there. No question. That’s called chronos in the old Greek term. It’s the marking of the beginning and the ending by way of days, months, years, decades, centuries, and millenniums. We go backwards in history and we go forwards and we always think of it in the calendar concept.

The scripture that we are using for these three sermons the next three Sundays is a simple one and straight-forward. It’s found in II Corinthians, Chapter 8. Paul starts off the beginning of that asking for an offering. The Macedonian Church has been very generous. They are in need also. They have extreme poverty. But they give generously in an overflowing joy welling up in rich generosity as he uses the phrase. And in verse 6 he says, “So we urge Titus that since he had earlier made a beginning to bring also to completion this act of grace on your part.” And then our verse, “But just as you excel at everything – in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in complete earnestness, in your love for us – see that you excel in this grace of giving.”

I know we automatically jump to treasure, and we will talk about that eventually. But today this grace of giving is the grace of giving of time. The chronos we live in, we know that. It’s what we live and breath and have our being. This is where we are starting off in our life for that chronos of time is our birth date. But then there is something else that parallels with and yet supersedes and goes over and interacts with. It’s another understanding of time. It’s called “kairos”. There is something about this whole study that intrigues me. I think partly because we live in the chronos but there is something mysterious out there. And I’ll translate it from chronos, called calendar time, and then also kairos becomes God’s time.

Kairos is the eternal moment. It means all things together in one moment of time. Not bound by earthly limits, God lives beyond the calendar we would say in the expansiveness of the universe. That’s why it’s so confusing and frustrating to me that people want to peg when the creation began to some calendar time. It’s an ongoing experience that’s far beyond. I mean, we’ve talked about the beginning and the end, the first and the last. We talk about that in chronos time. But it is beyond with God.

It’s like an intersection. You know what intersections are. Either you drive or you have someone drive you. And if you are out there, be careful when you come to an intersection. Right? I’ll say that as it happened the other night. I was coming in the dark along 44. We all know where it goes. It jogs sharply to the left and then jogs sharply to the right before it eventually becomes four lanes just right out here. Well, I was abiding the laws and came up to that intersection. At the intersection, I was going to go straight. Another car came up to my left and had its right turn signal on. That means it’s going to turn completely out of my line of traffic. No problem. No car over there; no car over here. And I pull out and all of a sudden the lights and the siren of a police car are at my right door. Yeah, you know what your heart does. I thought, not that I was guilty of anything, but he almost hit me. I don’t know how close it was. At night you lose that perception. But it was scary. It was the intersection of two cars being in the same place at the same time. But it’s the chronos of our life that we live in the calendar intersecting with God’s kairos, the eternal moment, when we can be surprised.

Well, we’re not really surprised because one of those moments is our very birth. It’s when we enter in to the world in the chronos but it is God in the midst of that in the kairos of creating us in God’s own image. Another moment when it happens is our death. We transition from the chronos of this life to the kairos of God’s time. And there are many moments in between. Just like an intersection, it’s like a weaving of a cloth. I borrowed from Andy’s office the very cloth that you see there. That’s a weaving, as well as the stole that I have on today. You know what weaving is. It’s taking a string that hangs loosely here and another string that hangs loosely there and putting them together with others and keep crossing them and crossing them and intersecting them and intersecting them until you weave something different and new and dramatic compared to what you had before.

God is continually, by God’s Holy Spirit, intersecting with our lives creating a tapestry that we may see the glimpses of but we really are not sure what is there. God has a goal for you and for me and for all of creation and for this church. But it is not a goal necessarily of the calendar. It’s the goal of God’s time. Five years ago or thereabouts there was a group of leaders called together here at this church. Well before I got here. And the purpose of that group was to essentially ask the following question. I don’t think it was exactly worded in this way. If it was, praise God for that. But I discovered this question which I think is a valid one. “What does God want our church to look like five years from now? You see, we have to live in the premise of time so we measure things by the calendar and the years. But in a sense what it is saying is, “How does God want us to be transformed as God intersects with us changing things as they go along, making us become something different and even better than what we had hoped for?” So now God has woven together a new piece of that fabric, of that tapestry.

The hope, five years ago, was to expand physical capacity and to have a new children’s’ wing. We have that now. And in vacating the old children’s wing, the goal and the hope was to refurbish that in to an adult wing. And we have that now. Another goal and a dream was the second floor of the Shrader Youth Center. And God willing and contractor’s do their job well, by December that will be done. Our own Preschool was another dream out of that five years ago. We now have that in the second year. Another hope was to expand ministry so that we could eventually move towards a full-time youth ministry an also in children’s ministry. And thanks be to God, those recent threads have been woven in to the tapestry and they are here now in Joe and Pastor Jenothy. There’s another one yet to be fulfilled and that is another worship service different than the three that we have—location and time and construct still to be considered.

Now through the last five years people have come and gone. There have been births and there have been deaths. There has been a change of leadership both pastoral and lay. Things like that go on and do change. People have come and gone moving in and out of the community. And yet God has continued to intersect in that five-year calendar time to move us toward God’s ultimate kairos time, God’s goal for this church. God’s goal for our lives is to become more like Jesus. That’s what the word Christian means, Christ-like, to follow in the way of Jesus, the Christ. Physical buildings are only means to that end.

In a week or so we will be gathering for the first moment all of the new staff and the ongoing staff to get together for building of a team and thinking about that question, “What does God want our church to look like five years from now?” We do that well and correctly many of the rest of you will be involved in that vision dreaming when we seek to find God’s direction for us so that we might all be more like Jesus. Only God can make this happen. It is only God who truly makes us whole and holy as individuals and as a church. This is why God’s Spirit works within us to shape us from within. That’s the kairos of God’s work. On the outside we measure chronos by how we look whether we are ten or five years of age or fifty or a hundred. We can tell where a person is on that calendar. But it is much more difficult to tell where a person is in God’s kairos time, where they are spiritually. Spiritually being formed moment by moment, event by event, formed by God not just by us. We embrace God’s embrace of us. From the very beginning God has wanted us to be His own. God has given us that open door. Some of us walk through it partly, some of us stand at the door and are fearful, others rush through and are surprised to find what they find because God will always surprise us in God’s kairos of time.

But we are to open ourselves more deeply to be encountered with God noticing that the divine presence, when we notice the full tapestry, is really everywhere and in every thing and is expanding all the time. For God is not captured by our concept. God is beyond. But God intersects with us almost like that police car and that dark night frightening us by the moment when God steps in and says, “I’m here, will you now see what I have for you to see. See with your own eyes what I have seen for you. Or listen with your ears,” God will say, “to hear what God has heard for us. Reflect with your own mind,” God tells us when God intersects in our lives daring to say and to think what God might think. You know the phrase that we use, “What would Jesus Do?” Well, we could also ask the question, “What would Jesus think about this, that, or the other?”

These are what I call the “Ah hah” moments. We don’t get them all the days of our lives, every hour or every minute. When they come we call them “mountain tops”, we call them the “unexpected”. But they are the “ah hah”. When they all of the sudden makes sense to us or the surprise drives us home. Have you not found yourself driving along or walking along just in the journey of your own life and you know you’ve got a plan in mind according to your calendar and to your plan of life and it means that when you come up to this intersection, you’re going to go right. But you come up and instead, for no explicable reason whatsoever, you go left. And you go down that road or that pathway of life and you meet someone that you didn’t plan on meeting. And you experience something that you had not thought about experiencing by having touched that life. You stop at a place you hadn’t planned, you met someone you didn’t expect and God was there in that meeting. Have you ever had that happen? I don’t know how many times in the calendar God has said, nudged, pushed. I have had people say to me audible words, “Do this now” or “Be prepared for that”, while others it is just a sense of “I need to go do that”. And if you don’t, it almost bugs you until you finally harden over your heart and ignore or you go do it! When you’ve done that, you’ve entered in to God’s time. Most often you can reflect and look back and see another weaving in the tapestry where that intersection took place.

The New Testament uses that word often, kairos. It’s the right moment, it’s the critical moment, it’s the opportune time, it is the moment of truth, it is the time of decision. When God speaks, it is our opportunity to listen. And it creates another cross in our life. There is a time when God calls us forth and says “Go this way not that way”. And our response to that intersection is a commitment. It is a moment when God acts; we see the result of that action. Others in the world will not see it, but if your eyes are open to it, it is there. And our response becomes another intersection when we see God’s action and we step forward to follow it.

Planning for five years is hard work and it’s a process and it’s a human, mental step that we take. But never forget that as we are faithful to that process, God is faithful to being with us to weave together God’s purpose and plan. I discovered a group in, of all places, Yukon in northern Canada. I was searching through the web looking for articles and information about kairos and chronos. And if you’ll display the graphic that I found, it’s called a Kairos group which deals with prison ministry. This prison ministry has chosen an image with the word kairos at the bottom and something mysterious, something like the northern lights probably coming down from the heavens intersecting into the earthly world that we know. They have translated it into living out Micah 6:8 that they are to do justice, to love kindness and walk humbly with their God. To do so in understanding that in every crisis there is an opportunity, in every moment when change is possible is when we are able to change with God’s direction.

This financial crisis is a crisis of an opportunity. We will need as a church to determine the intersection of this time. It is a moment when we turn to God and ask the ultimate question. Just what is it God you wish for us individually, us as a congregation, us as a church as a part of the body of Christ? What do you want us to do that lifts us out of the chronos and the calendar time into your time, God? It’s a tough question because God will answer in some form and in some way and not always to our liking necessarily. It will be a challenging moment, but it will be a fulfilling moment. It will be one when I hope that we can look back, those who are here five years from now, look back to this moment and say, “That’s when God moved us further and we went this way.”

Simply, I would look in a very general term that we have the facilities now, we need to focus and concentrate on the ministries of people. Meeting people where they are, helping them to understand God’s intersection into their life and what it makes for the difference for now and for all time.

I came across a poem, the author of which is not listed. That being noted that it is one that is anonymous or lost somewhere. And I changed it just a bit to fit for today, but it seemed to fit for me to understand that concept. And remember as we use the words, go through, think of the parallel or each moment the word time or its equivalent is used. Think of the parallel of the calendar and God’s eternal moment. Think of those coming together each time, each moment, each opportunity the word is used.

A baby is conceived and comes to earth in God’s time.
A seeking soul finds spiritual birth in God’s time.
Flowers bloom so beautifully in spring in God’s time.
The birds build their nest as they sing in God’s time.

We feel the evening breeze softly blow in God’s time.
An assurance is given that God loves us so in kairos time.
Yet when troublesome times come and skies are grey
Too often we complain, a man named Job did this one day

And his life was never the same
Until he awakened and began to see
It was working for his own good.
He bowed his knee and finally, at least, he understood.

Shall we accept good and not the bad?
The happy times and not the sad?
God is with us through the good and the bad
The Lord is working to fulfill the plan in the divine time

So when the storms of life linger with dark clouds all about
Let us look to our Savior knowing the sun will come out in God’s time.

May we trust the Lord whatever comes our way,
God’s grace is sufficient for us each day
Then we’ll understand fully as time goes by
When one day we enter the heavenly kingdom on high in God’s time.

And the wisdom of God through the writer of Ecclesiastics, “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven.” May you live as fully as possible in the calendar that we have using, balancing, planning, managing as Ellis said. For that’s a gift and a most excellent promise that God has given to us. But each one has his moment is a moment, day is a day, hour is an hour. But while we are doing that and taking that gift and investing it as fully as possible, never forget that there is the kairos of God’s time. Whatever we do for the moment here pales in comparison to what God is doing for all time everywhere. Or we use the phrase, as Jesus said, that He is the beginning and the end, the first and the last, the alpha and the omega. But let us never forget that God is beyond that before there ever was and will be after all is gone or after all is made new in God’s time.

Let us pray. “Each one here this morning has a calling upon their heart. Some have heard it clearly and well and others have run and hidden. We have found ourselves too busy with the calendar of this life thinking that is all that there is. But thank you Lord that there are moments when you quietly, gently come upon us by your Spirit intersecting with our lives, touching us by your Spirit, filling us for a brief moment with your time so that we can see beyond this life and understand the greater good that is to be lived. And that what we do now with our time in service and ministry for others for the protection of the innocent, for the caring of the lonely, for the healing, that is our call to be in your time and you will be there. Thank you God for the blessing and the most excellent promise that you are here now for all time. Amen.”

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