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Time Yonce Shelton
Second Sunday in Advent Today’s passage from Peter says, “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day” (3:8). With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. What are we to make of this when we are charged with preparing for Jesus’ arrival; when we think in terms of a yearly calendar and a season of Advent with four distinct weeks? Mark says, “I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way” (1:2-3). How are we called to be messengers – and how do we prepare? How much time do we need? Time. That’s all we really are. I have been moved in beautiful ways over the past month in spending time with Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Some of you may react as JoJo did when I had her read a few passages that really spoke to me. She commented that it reminded her why she hated philosophy so much! Hopefully my integration of Buber will not leave you feeling the same way. What Buber has to say about history and relationship helps keep focus on what Hayley said last week about waiting. How we wait says a lot about us, our relationship to God, and our notion of God. Preparation goes hand in hand with waiting. As we journey into Advent, we should think not just about this Holy season and the symbolic arrival we eagerly wait for. We should also pay attention to what we have waited and prepared for in our lives, and what we are still waiting and preparing for. It is in the connection of divine and human striving that produces, as Buber says, “a new form of God in the world.” This new form is created “in the course of history, in the transformations of the human element. … It is not man’s own power that is at work here, neither is it merely God passing through; it s a mixture of the divine and the human” (166). Months before I began my degree in counseling, where Buber has become relevant to my approach, Alden brought I and Thou to my attention during our Lenten book study of The Last Temptation of Christ. It was in the context of the fully human/fully divine mystery of Christ’s essence, and how that should shape our understanding of relationship with God, where Buber came up. As I think more about God and time, I have a similar way of understanding how we are empowered to experience God through God’s gift of time. We are time. God does not experience linear time as we do. Years ago someone drew a line across sheet of paper, like this, and said that the line is us and our linear progression through history, and the paper was God. God has no start and no end. Without the paper the line could not exist. For a year or so now I have thought more about the moment; living in the moment; experiencing God in the moment; staying with the here and now; not focusing on the past or future. And I have this understanding that just as Christ was both human and divine, the mystery of God includes God experiencing time – us – in linear fashion as we do, but at the same time as a single, moment-like event without beginning and end. God knows beginning, end, and in between, but also wants to know us in each moment; wants us to experience Godself in each moment. I think of it this way: that the whole of human history, all our progress and becoming, all our learning and loving, happens in but a snap of the fingers in God’s eyes. In terms of knowing and experience, each human moment has the potential to be equivalent. That challenges me to think about how I live each moment. With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. Still with me? Am I still with me?! Fear not – we can now address the question: So what? The answer has much to do with preparation, waiting, and being co-creators in history; in time. Remember today’s gospel: “Prepare the way of the Lord” (1:3); “he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit” (1:8). Richard Rohr, of the Center for Action and Contemplation, says: The prophets before Jesus are not preoccupied with creating a fault-free environment that will ensure their own happiness, but rather they tell us that joy is finally in entering into another, the Other, an objective Presence, Love itself, the Lord. What freedom we have when we no longer have to wait upon ourselves to be in love! Undoubtedly this is the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the fire that John the Baptizer announces in the gospel. It is baptism not created, like mere water baptism, but a baptism that can only be waited for, longed for, believed in and therefore received. (Radical Grace, 9) For the past year this community has been preparing, waiting, and co-creating. We have been trying to be free and trusting as we long to receive the Spirit’s help. We have been searching for ways to love ourselves and others. Three aspects of our life together have helped me learn more about waiting, the Spirit, availability, and creativity with time. First, about a year ago we spent time at our annual retreat asking if we should even keep this building. We decided stewardship and vision required that of us. So we spent nearly a year preparing for new tenants. We trusted that the right ones would find us. We acted, but we also waited. We longed for partners to share our ministry. And finally, they have arrived. Second, at that same retreat we recognized that we needed more spiritual support within this community — and that we needed help understanding how to provide that to each other. We prepared with the Henri Nouwen book study. We are still preparing in designing the next retreat around spiritual support. And we wait. We wait for the Spirit to work among us more and help us discern next steps. Third, we have wanted to help our immigrant neighbors in need more. We were present in many ways when the fire across the street made hundreds homeless. We are now present in the lives of two families in need. We were prepared for this. Even though they may not have come to be in the time frames I, you, or we wanted. These processes have taught me much about patience, but maybe more about God’s timing. I had certain expectations. I create certain pressures because of how I view linear time and planning. But God’s time is different. I am just now beginning to find more joy in the process — in each moment of preparing and waiting. I try to pay attention to those snap-seconds in fresh ways. I ask: How has God prepared me for and within each of those seconds? What did I experience of God’s love in that blink of an eye? I also think about personal aspects of my life over the past year. Two-thousand and eight will go down as a defining year for me from a spiritual perspective. Critical to that is the sense that much of it was preparing me in both simple and complex ways. Some I can name; some remain mysterious. My preparation came because I was preparing and waiting. JoJo and I still prepare and wait for baby number one. Doesn’t she make a nice Advent prop?! I am preparing the way for what I have come to realize will teach me more about spirituality than anything else I’ve encountered in this year of contemplation and growth. I will learn more about time, experience, and human limits as gifts that try to help us know God more completely – and what Advent means. I wait for a deeper understanding of love that will also bring more exposure to sacrifice and pain. So it is with free will and the gift of life. But I learned this summer that pain has its place. Preparing and supporting each other in tough times is important to experience. I cared for my friend and mentor each day for two weeks before he died in July. I helped prepare him to die, and he helped prepare me to live. Love, loss, grace. Two weeks. Two weeks in the course of all these years. Those weeks were powerful because of all the years before, in which my parents prepared for my birth — and then prepared me. Time is not what we think. This whole thing about time — do you get it? Is it at least clear enough so that you can toss it around in coming weeks in productive ways?! My point is that time was created with us. But we are not left on our own within it. God knows what has been, is, and will be. But God does not remove Godself from history with us. The added dynamic is that God allows us to get a glimpse here and there of what it means for all existence to take place in the time of a snap. All of God’s love, creation, plans for us, and support can be understood in the moment. If we can look for that in another, we can find it. Jesus was both human and divine. God is present at the same time in both history and moment; in both revelation and relationship. The moment, and our string of moments: that’s all we are. Time is ours to prepare within, to wait within, to hope within. It is the way in which we partner with God to proclaim, as today’s gospel does, that “one who is more powerful than I is coming” (1:7). This is the “new form of God in the world” created “in the course of history, in the transformations of the human element” (Buber). God allows us to act — to prepare, to love, to take one step at a time — because God is patient and wants us to become who God already knows we are. We prepare and become by showing up, resisting fault-free notions of who we are, and seizing the freedom that comes with longing for the Lord. In doing so, we long for each other and we give ourselves to each other. And we give ourselves to all those out there. We wait: not upon ourselves to be perfected; but for each moment to help us understand perfect love in God and other. We wait, as Buber says, in “[t]he anchoring of time in a relation-oriented life of salvation and the anchoring of space in a community unified by a common center” (163). Wrapped up in this message is me trying to make what I intellectually know more real in my being. My birthday is today, so in addition to thinking about Advent in terms of Baby Shelton, I am aware of my own birth. And the time until now. And the time to come. As Hayley said last week: “Every birth is a beginning and yet also marks an end — and end of life as we knew it prior to the arrival of the babe.” I feel like I am finally starting to get it regarding life, spirituality, and faith. I feel like a newborn. At the same time, years of experience — time that is uniquely me in relationship with God and others — teaches me that I need to shed more of the guilt and judgment I place on myself for not making things happen the ways in which I envision them, or within time frames I deem acceptable. Too much control; not enough Spirit. I need to realize how fortunate I am that many of those who care for me — including you — are much more gentle and patient. I hope you, too, can be patient with yourselves. Cherish time in all the ways God does. Live in the moment. Love the waiting. Expect and experience the greatness Advent brings. Then, in the next moment, let us do it all again. Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord a salvation. (2 Peter 3:14-15). Amen. * * * Song of the Day: “Before My Time” by Johnny Cash I know that hearts were loving
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