2 January 2011

2 Christmas A
Ephesians 1:3-14 / John 1:1-18
2 January 2011


The beginning of a new calendar year always brings with it an onslaught of “self improvement” aids, designed to help the buyer accomplish everything from losing weight to having a cleaner kitchen to learning Japanese. It’s just the way we do things … those new calendars go up on the wall and with their fresh start we want to make fresh starts too, the optimistic American in us wants 2011 to be a better year than was 2010, and so on.
Some of these get pretty creative … using charts and graphs, maybe even cell phone apps to mark progress … kind of a high-tech version of “every day in every way we’re getting better and better.”
But in the end, it’s all a lot like the “think system” isn’t it … remember the old movie musical “The Music Man” and how the super-salesman / con artist “Doctor” Harold Hill makes the youth of River City believe that they can play any musical instrument just by thinking it’s so. It really doesn’t work … in the straight-line way of things that is our human desire for “progress” … it turns out that there is no substitute for practice and hard work.
That is the nature of time … in the straight-line sense of it … chronological time … from the Greek word chronos … time which can be marked off with calendars, watches, telephone apps … noted in notebooks and meeting “minutes” … it’s how we humans keep track of time. It is the sense of time which we record … through which, we show progress or decline … the time which tracks us as we are born, we live, we die.
But there is another sense of time … another Word for time … the sense of time in which, through which, The Word of which we read and hear in our Gospel text … the prologue to John’s gospel … that Word … it has its life and meaning in kairos time … “God-time” … not a straight line sense, which can be catalogued and categorized, recorded, written down, tracked, managed, controlled … no, kairos time breaks in to our straight line sense of time, our human idea of “progress” and “decline” … and states, STOP. LOOK. LISTEN. PAY ATTENTION. GOD IS AT WORK HERE.
“In the beginning was the Word,” John writes … “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John’s word for us today starts out sounding “straight line” enough … “In the beginning” reminds us of the first words of the Bible, from Genesis 1, “In the beginning, when God was creating the heavens and the earth” … yes, fair enough … but hear and see what this Word of beginning is all about …
“… the Word was with God, and the Word was God … he was in the beginning with God, all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being … what has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”
The Word of which John speaks and writes is Jesus, “the Word (who) became flesh and lived among us.” And so right here, right now, our “straight line” time sense … when it comes to faith, we see that it’s all wrong … misguided … and useless.
What John is saying, is that faith is not a “once-then” deal … the way we people like to put it. Some “faiths” live in this sense more than others … “I was saved” … “I was baptized” …. “I became a Christian” … like one can put a date-stamp on their own personal history.
John isn’t a fan of straight lines … calendars … agendas and meeting minutes … no, John’s sense of time isn’t chronos … chronological … straight-line … but rather, kairos… circular.
Straight-line time doesn’t work with a Word who was present “in the beginning” and is present now as the life and light of all people. Which beginning are you talking about, for starters? That one? This one? Mine? Yours? Ours?
John’s answer to all those straight-line questions is Yes.
The beginning is the Word. The ending is the Word. For Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Ruth and Naomi, David and Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and all the prophets … for John, and his fellow Gospelers Matthew, Mark and Luke … for Paul … for Luther … and for us.
Time … when it comes to faith … is not straight line at all. It is a circle … a line without beginning nor end.
Indeed, our faith-walk with-in in the Word is circles upon circles upon circles.
Straight-line “progress” says we can get better on our own … whether that’s with a “kick start” from God, or an occasional “infusion” of religion … we’re moving along, climbing the ladder of faith, ever better, ever higher.
But the straight line lines out Jesus, God’s Word. It relegates him to a “helper,” a “friend,” a touchpoint along the way. A talisman, a good luck charm. An adornment. A cross around our necks and nothing more. A prayer we say at the beginning and end of meetings and nothing more.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There is a need for calendars and watches, clocks and meeting minutes, plans and preparations, numbers and programs. They are tools to help us manage the gift of chronos time … God’s gift to us of time … but that is all they are … tools.
Do not look to these for faith. That is the mistake of the world, the mistake of “religion,” the error of “church.”
In the end, it leaves us with … dissatisfaction. Incompleteness. And a lack of hope. “Religion” … “churchianity” … faith in their human institutions, structures, committees, organizations … it will do that to you, for you.
Return to the circle of life.
Pay attention to the kairos moments. This is when the Word breaks in to our lives.
Each break-in is a Beginning … a call to change. Every beginning is a call to change because to change is to live. To stay in the same place, the same ways, the same time, is to die.
Yes, we are intimidated by change. It’s no mistake that the Chinese character-symbol for change can mean both danger and opportunity. Some of us stay too latched on to the “danger” side of change … any change is seen as bad news … “oh no!” … and must be avoided at all costs. So we cling to the false hope of straight line time … that we can make it happen, that we will make it better … and in doing so we lose the opportunity to grow, to grow in faith, and hope, and in the gifts of the Word for us.
“In the beginning was the Word.” Hear the Word that calls us back to a series of Beginnings … beginning with our repentance. The Word is the Word … God’s Word. Our words intend well, but our words fail us, fail others, fail God.
And so our beginning is a call from God to fall into a posture of repentance. We begin at the beginning which is confessing, same-saying, to God, what we are … God’s beloved children, brothers and sisters of and in the Word, but children who fall far short of that word. We need to repent. We must repent. Individually, corporately. In families, associations, congregations, schools, communities, nations, God’s world. The kairos moments begin with repentance … the God-moment which breaks into our straight-line lives and makes us see ourselves, the world, and God, as they truly are.
And then the Word takes over … creating and sustaining, changing us. Changing everything about us.
Hear this Word in the word from Ephesians for us.
“In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished upon us.”
“In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance … so that we … might live for the praise of his glory.”
To live for the praise of God’s glory … means living in that circle-posture of repentance and change. Renewal and change. Nothing stays the same because everything remains the same … For Us … in the Word of God who has, who is, and who will be with us always.
Continually breaking into our graceless chronos, our straight-line time, with the kairos moments of God’s lavish grace.
I am baptized. You are being saved. We are sinner-saints, together on the road of faith, the holy highway, whose end and beginning is, are the Word.
So many people start their new year wishes with “to be better.” But Better without the Word ends up being more of The Same. That is the nature of straight-line change. Change as the world gives. Change, met about, minuted, concretized, put on the shelf in notebooks, dust gathering markers for those who come after us. That change just calls forth more doing, all the time, from our side. More meetings. More minutes. More scheduling. That change just makes us tired.
May you, may I, may we, have instead … a 2011 full of faithful beginnings which bring God’s change to lives gone tired and faith gone cold from old straight-line ways.
May we bring the kairos word that transforms old straight line words and ways … like “church” and “denomination,” “membership,” “program” and “attendance” … transforms them into language of our hearts … “gathering of Jesus’ disciples” … “Christ-followers” … “humble and repentance driven” … “servant leaders.”
And may we have change. Change and change and change. Beginning leading to beginning, change on top of change.
Not as the world gives, not “new and improved” one day only to be tomorrow’s cast aside … no, may our changes and beginnings fill us to overflowing, slathered and dripping with the New which is the Word which is For Us in Jesus Christ.
Change which is enfleshed … Beginning which is en-Worded, if you will. Spoken, breathed, lived out … to and for others. To and for the world. To and for the sake of us.
We have seen his glory. We will live his glory. We shall be his glory.
Around and around and around it goes, and where it stops … Christ is there.
But “It” doesn’t stop … or start … at all. He is the Eternal Word. Always For Us.
STOP. LOOK. LISTEN. PAY ATTENTION. GOD IS AT WORK HERE. AND HERE. AND THERE.
Always has been. Is now. And always will be. The Word is all and all is the Word.
Live in that Word, this year, and for all time … for all time is The Word.
Amen.