First Baptist Church of Granville
January 17, 2010
Jon White
Ripe Fruit
The 13th century poet Rumi wrote:
I called through your door,
The mystics are gathering
In the street, come out!
“Leave me alone. (you replied)
I’m sick.”
I don’t care if you’re dead!
Jesus is here, and he wants
To resurrect somebody!
Rumi’s verse is perhaps a little whimsical, but it actually captures the spirit of our readings brilliantly; it’s all about time. Or more to the point, timing; when is the right time? When is our moment? Ancient Greek had two words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos describes our ordinary experience of time, the time of seconds, minutes and hours, of day passing unto day all neatly organized in a calendar system. It’s tidy, measurable, useful and predictable. Modern life is built upon it and is nothing if not a love poem to chronos (in strict iambic pentameter mind you – no free verse allowed)
Kairos, on the other hand describes an experience of time. It’s the time of being in the moment, the time of striking while the iron is hot. It’s the long interlude of a passionate kiss, the drifting numbness of waiting for a loved one in an emergency room or the tension and release of childbirth. It’s the kind of time we lose ourselves in; it’s messy and hard to measure – more of a “know when I see it” kind of thing. And if Chronos is a Shakespeare sonnet, Kairos is Bukowski.
But kairos is exactly what today’s readings (and Rumi) are talking about. “My hour has not yet come” Jesus says, while King is impatient for those waiting for the alarm clock of justice to ring. In both of these we see the anticipation of the kairotic moment; we sense the question hanging in the air – “when is the right time?” And in these passages, the answer turns out to be that the time is now. The moment has arrived. Jesus does turn the water into wine; the time to proclaim equality of civil rights for all had arrived.
The wedding feast comes very early in John’s gospel; in fact it is the opening of the second chapter. The story so far - Jesus takes on the mantle of flesh, gets baptized, gets some disciples and then goes to a wedding. Now, I want you to think about this. John’s Gospel starts with a hymn to the eternal nature of Christ with God. Christ, he is saying, has been around since before the big bang, and after becoming incarnate he has spent 30 years getting up every day and going to work or whatever, until one day he decides to be baptized and the Spirit descends upon him, others are drawn to him and so he gathers some disciples. Now, the disciples themselves have been looking for the one to lead them, a messiah who will redeem the people of God. They thought maybe that John the Baptist was the promised one, but he tells them to seek another. And they each have their own stories that have brought them, eventually, to this man Jesus. And who knows about the young couple getting married and what their story is. All of this, all of these hours, days, and years rolling by and they all come this one moment.
And what does Jesus say? “My hour has not yet come.” Let’s go back to that story again.
When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine."
And Jesus said to her, "What does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come."
His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."
Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.
Jesus said to the servants, "Fill the jars with water."
When you were a kid, or if you are a kid – did your mom ever ask you to do something you didn’t want to do and then she gave you one of those looks and you roll your eyes and then do it? Imagine, if you will, the look Mary must have given Jesus here.
It turns out that his hour had come. This was the moment that initiates Jesus’ mission of salvation. What seems at first blush like a cheap magic trick is actually something very important and symbolically prefigures Jesus’ mission, whereby we are offered the good wine (salvation and meaning) just at the moment when the hope for wine had seemed to run out. Likewise for Martin Luther King, a host of circumstances and individual stories merged around his person to catapult him into the symbolic leadership of the struggle for justice on behalf of an entire people and for the benefit of an entire nation.
Now I’m treading on perilous theological grounds here, but I think the gospel stories make a lot more sense if you understand them to be the story of Jesus’ growing awareness and initially reluctant acceptance of who he is called to be by God the Father. Jesus’ human nature seems to be only slowly able to understand his divine nature, as though if it were revealed to him all at once it would be too much to bear. For me, the life of Jesus bears witness to the challenge we all face in discerning our purpose, our God-given purpose and the need to find out who we really are so that we can be fully that person we were intended and actually need to be.
One of the key challenges for modern people is coming to understand and appreciate this kairotic perspective of the Christian witness. The Christian story is not on a schedule; rather it is a story of moments, an ongoing story of moments of grace. I believe that the particular relevance of the Christian story for us today is that our lives, as we actually live them are also kairotic. Indeed, for most of us, we must be shoehorned, unnaturally, into the regularities of life lived in thrall to a remorseless clock. The gospel witness is a reassurance that the apparent messiness, contradictions and mysteries of our own lives is real life and that purposefulness for us comes from constantly turning towards the stable center that holds everything together, from constantly and confidently turning to God to find our true selves. As it says in the 36th Psalm:
How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of humankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.
For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.
For the most part I try to keep myself out of the business of this congregation. You hired me for a particular role to which I try to limit myself, but I am neither blind nor deaf to what goes on. And since I have the benefit of the pulpit this morning I beg your indulgence as I share my thoughts with you. In my few short months here I have to come to regard many of you individually and the whole of the community altogether with great affection. You have been kind and welcoming to me and though by the nature of my own spiritual path, my time here will be necessarily limited, for good or ill this is my church home in this moment.
What I hear from you is some amount of fear, but also great creativity in response to your perceived challenges. There seems to be within you great love for this church. And by church, I don’t necessarily mean this particular construction of stone, wood and glass. The church meets here, but these walls and this roof aren’t the church – you are. And if I may, you really have a lot going for you. Often I hear fears about the “small” size of your congregation but I would remind you that on most Sundays you have four or five times as many disciples as Jesus did, and look what they accomplished!
It can be difficult for us to know when to act, to see the ripeness of a moment;
In this community a host of circumstances and individual stories have come together. Perhaps you stand on the threshold of your own kairotic moment. Will you be one of those crying “wait,” trying to find the hour when action is “well-timed” or will you be saying that no, your hour has not yet come? Does Kathy need to give you one of “those looks?” My friends, now is the time to confidently step forward, now is the time to step into a new and deeper commitment, a commitment both to one another and to God.
Now, Jesus certainly had some issues with the religious institutions of his day, and elsewhere in King’s letter he speaks to his bitter disappointment with “the church” and it sluggishness in working for justice. But for both, love and devotion to humanity, messiness and all, and the strength to carry on in the face of great adversity was grounded in a deep and abiding faith in God and a relationship with the divine experienced and nourished in worship and prayer.
Congregations are human creations and prone to all of the frailties and difficulties that brings. But congregations are also the living members of the Body of Christ, and worthy of the best we have to offer.
In another verse, Rumi also writes:
Where Jesus lives, the great hearted gather.
We are a door that’s never locked.
If you are suffering any kind of pain,
Stay near this door. Open it.
This then is my prayer for you, may you be the great hearted who gather here, may your door be open and welcoming to all, and may commitment to this community bring you wholeness and healing through Christ, our Lord and Redeemer. Amen
