January 13, 2010 - Who Owns Our Time?

     We are a people who are connected to time. We cannot get away from time. It is a part of our biological fiber to the very core of our existence. We live in a cyclical world of days governed by the earth’s rotation on its axis, a cyclical world of years governed by the earth’s annual rotation around the sun, and a cyclical world of seasons governed by the tilt of the earth’s axis with regard to the earth's rotation around the sun. It just comes around and goes around and has always been a part of the pattern of life.
     Many dedicated and smart people have taken time to understand all of these natural activities that so order our lives and put us into patterns of living that are healthy, flowing, and sacred. It is our pattern to sleep long and quietly retreat in the dark months of winter, to anticipate and move actively into the spring as life returns, to work hard into the summer to pile up and stock pile for darker cold months, to celebrate and be festive in the fall after the harvest and to enter the dark months to fix harnesses, mend tired bones, and live on stored root vegetables with hearty stews.
     But industrious as we are, it is our continuous quest to conquer and defeat time, so it will have no effect on our daily lives and actually be owned by us, controlled by us, manipulated by us. We spend much energy and activity on trying to cheat the harvest season, both early in spring and late in fall. We dedicate our lives to industry that moves from the natural rhythm of sleeping when it is dark and working when it is light to working before the sun comes up and quitting long past the sun going down. We so fill our daily lives that to be held up 20 seconds at a “stop light” upsets the entire day and we frantically and fleetingly believe we must work extra hard to gather those 20 seconds back regardless of the stressful costs and emotional toll. We even gather up an hour in one season to give us longer light at one end of the day, so we can mold time around our organized cycles of life.
It seems natural to politicize time and to make it a commercial commodity so that people with means are able to transport quickly from one place to another, with easy and timely access, while others must use public transit with long walks and many delays, often foiling lives due to late arrivals and lack of an ability to keep a strict schedule: which this world demands. All modern conveniences, medical breakthroughs, gadgets and gimmicks are based on time control. The reward is always more free time, less time spent sick, more productivity with our time, more quality time in leisure, and therefore a quality of life that has not been known in previous time.
     Even the Church of Jesus Christ was formed, divided, and cyclically organized to tell the story of faith. Easter therefore would always fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This date was not of a sacred nature but was a solely political decision at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. to avoid the use of a Jewish lunar calendar and the insistence that Easter never fall at the beginning of Passover. Therefore the most sacred day of the church was decided by a political criteria, rather than a sacred and holy revelation.
     But one form of time that is seldom revered or saluted, in our modern days of time control, is the holy moments known as “sacred time.” Sacred time is neither cyclical nor linear and would be considered an “anti-time” when compared with the modern ideas of time. Sacred time is time with God. This time is not based on a clock, a designed period, a beginning or an ending but is so designed to hold up God’s perfection, eternity, and timeless nature.
     Other people of faith have drawn this distinction by referring to the measured time of our life as “chronos” time and the sacred time as “kairos” time. We live the vast majority of our life in chronos time (clocks, calendars, 30-minute TV segments, and routine). Kairos time is that time that goes against everything we know and salute in decent society. Kairos time can hardly be accurately scheduled, laughs in the face of routine, and is an inbetween time when something special happens. Chronos is about quantity and kairos is about quality. Kairos is God’s time in our lives.
Too little of our lives are given over to kairos moments and our lives are otherwise afforded to the ownership of schedules, and the servitude to the system. Learn to surrender more of your time to God moments in the company of the timeless living God.
Rev. Dan Martin is pastor of First UMC, Hendersonville. He can be reached at moose1953@hotmail.com