HEARD AT CHURCH

                         In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

            Welcome back.  Let’s talk about space and time.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, which my pastor tells us is a season all to itself.  He began his sermon with a story about a 1974 encounter with a woman at Vanderbilt University who told him she had met a man who changed her life. 

So, I’m thinking she met her husband, or she met a doctor whose surgery saved her life, or she met a celebrity.

She had met Sun Myung Moon.  He would turn out to be the founder of the Unification Church.

          My pastor said he and a friend went to hear Mr. Moon that day.  The meeting place was not a mountaintop, not a stadium, not beside a river, and not in heaven, but in the Nashville Ramada Inn.  My pastor said it was the most remarkable two hours of his life.  I wish he had elaborated on the latter. 

          As the sermon unfolded, as indeed all sermons must at least do, the impression of the story was to illustrate how uneventful the first Advent would have seemed outsiders.  Furthermore, the event it proclaimed, Jesus’s birth, also would have all the excitement of a Ramada Inn religious gathering circa 1974. 

          Indeed, the Christian Bible suggests that Jesus’s birth was not so earth shaking.  Much about his birth is obscure.  We have the earliest Christian writer, Paul, never mentioning a nativity. Mark, the first gospel, contains no birth narrative.  The nativity is absent in the last gospel written which is John.  Only Luke and Matthew, who include a lot of their words and timelines of Jesus’s life from Mark, have birth narratives.  They are not the same.  Do they agree?

          Yes, they do agree.  Here’s where and when:  something wonderful happened for humanity in space and time. 

Space:  something wonderful happened where Jesus was born.  It happened locally to the shepherds and townspeople; it happened globally to itinerant Magi who visited from other nations; it happened politically within Judea, a conquered nation of the Roman Empire.

Time: something wonderful happened for humanity when Jesus was born.  We have one word for time.  The Ancient Greeks had two words: chronos and kairos.  We get our word chronology from chronos. Anyone who has ever recorded their plans on a calendar knows about chronos.  That word indicates clock time. 

We do not have a word for kairos, but we experience it.  Kairos means the right time, which we know in our experience in phrases like “Seize the day” or “Opportunity knocks.”  Kairos is the right time, the right moment that had to happen the way it did because it was supposed to happen the way it did given what preceded it.  Because it happened the way it did and when it did, then other events must happen the way they will and when they will. 

In Luke and Matthew’s birth narratives Advent proclaimed the birth of God’s Messiah in chronos time, which is the hour in history when Jesus was born; and in kairos time, which is that divine moment when Hebrew, Greek, and Roman history came together at that one birth--where and when events that would usher in God’s kingdom on earth were just beginning.

It would take decades before that "Nashville-Ramada-Inn" event would become meaningful to millions.  It would take centuries before it would become meaningful to me.

Blessings…