As we say in Godly Play with the children during Sunday School, “some people think that time is in a line.” Don’t most of us? Inevitably, our lives are oriented around time in a line. On a recent trip south for Thanksgiving, Google Maps wanted to prevent my car from going on the backroads. My husband and I were deliberately trying to avoid I-95 and major thoroughfares, and it took quite a lot of work to outsmart Google Maps to stay on the backroads. Google Maps seems to think it’s smarter than all of us, and it’s certainly even more impatient than we impatient moderns tend to be.
My spouse and I wanted to go on the quieter country roads, because driving there is far more pleasant. As the crow flies, it was not an expedient journey, but it was worth the extra time. We saw lovely foliage and old farmhouses, even though Google Maps was constantly rerouting our journey, trying to take us back to the highways.
Time in a line also encompasses more than just geographical time. We plan our careers and our futures as if time is really in a line. What’s the quickest way to make the most amount of money? Can you avoid the low-level menial paying jobs and go straight to the top? Sometimes I wonder whether I have wasted years. Was the nine years spent studying music in college and graduate school a waste of time if I’m no longer serving as a professional musician? Was it worth all that student loan debt?
But if I recall that time is not always in a line, I usually settle on the conclusion that it was worth every minute of the excursion. It was worth all the experiences of living in New York City and studying with a fantastic teacher. It was worth meeting my spouse. And going to seminary after all that study to prepare for ordination was worth it, too. There’s no second of life on the backroads of life that can be extracted from who I am now. If time is only in a line, then it’s just the churning of cogs in a mechanistic world, and it’s pretty meaningless.
But this isn’t easy for us to understand in our modern world. Aside from communities on the backroads of life, where the pace is slower and people live closer to the ground, it’s very difficult to comprehend time that’s not in a line. It’s hard not to honk at the car in front of you that doesn’t advance a millisecond after the light turns green. It’s hard to wait to spend all the money you received in your annual raise. It’s hard not knowing some piece of information, so you must look it up immediately on Wikipedia. It’s hard to wait for Christmas, so we put the tree up before Thanksgiving.
It's hard, too, to let the person with whom you disagree finish their sentence, without stepping on their words with your rebuttal. It’s hard to await the biopsy results on that tumor that was removed. It’s hard not to share a piece of news instantly, even if a delay would be more prudent depending on the circumstance. It’s hard to invest more money in ministry while the stock market goes down, especially when it might go back up later.
It’s not easy to listen to the reader who goes unhurriedly through the precious words of Scripture because we want to devour it as fast as we do every other book we read. It’s painful to watch more suffering and starvation and violence on the evening news without wanting to fix it all. It’s frustrating to watch the newcomer to the faith struggle their way out of bad theology without wanting to correct it all immediately. For most of us, time is definitely in a line.
Way back on that timeline, the author of Second Peter wrote a letter that probably took an ungodly amount of time to reach its addressees, who were early Christians living nearly a hundred years after Jesus’s death. The letter was timely, coming as it did decades of time in a line from the remarkable events in Jerusalem centered around an empty tomb and a promise. At that point on the time-in-a-line line, there were many naysayers and scoffers, not unlike modern day ones. I’m sure you’ve encountered them.
They’re the ones who scoff at our foolishness for waiting on a promised kingdom that hasn’t yet fully arrived. Meanwhile, wars rage, children starve, and there’s yet one more school shooting. The scoffers, for whom time is in a line, have given up on God. Any attempt to explain that with God, one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day will elicit more scoffing. It’s just an excuse, they say, to cover for a God who doesn’t act in history and might well not even exist.
There are other scoffers who haven’t necessarily given up on God, but who believe that God’s timing needs a little help. They’re the ones who have no time for worship and prayer because action is all that matters. They’re the ones who must respond immediately to every perceived injustice without prayerfully discerning the appropriate time to act. They’re the ones who simplify complex issues with hasty solutions. They’re the ones who talk over those who disagree with them.
And there are yet other scoffers who aren’t outwardly rash or contemptuously atheistic but who still behave as if time is in a line. They’ve simply grown weary with waiting for God to shine some light into the persistently oppressive darkness. They’ve lost hope in the promise made so long ago that a new kingdom would be ushered in to last forever. For these scoffers, impatience is the root of despair. It's to all these scoffers and those persecuted by scoffers that the author of 2 Peter speaks, offering a marvelous invitation into time that isn’t in a line because time in a line misses far too many backroads and far too much hidden goodness.
On the backroads of life, our sense of time changes. We realize that impatience with God, ourselves, and others, usually emerges out of our own self-centered individualism. Sometimes our motives for acting out of impatience are simply ways of trying to alleviate our own discomfort. It’s not at all easy to conceive of time that’s not in a line. We have no concept of the fullness of time, God’s time where one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day.
For a world where time is in a line, every prayer that seems unanswered and every day away from the advent of God’s perfect kingdom is another reason why God can’t be actively involved in our world. But what we can’t see is that God’s timing is perfect in its fullness. We can hardly conceive that what appears to be tardiness might be an incredible gesture of mercy and compassion from a God who is waiting for us to find him, ourselves, and others, and above all, to find love.
As we begin to envision time outside of a line, we see that the quick and easy toll roads of life are usually not the best way. They’re not the best way because on those speedy thoroughfares, we miss each other, and we miss God. We miss the fact that our own salvation is not all that matters. The salvation of others matters, too, and our own salvation is caught up with theirs. On the fast toll roads, we miss the moments of grace to become patient with one another, which is how we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. On the interstates of life, we miss the fact that God has been so infinitely patient with us that God has sent his beloved Son as his perfect revelation in the fullness of time. And it could only happen when the time was right.
Oddly enough, the delay of our Lord’s Second Coming isn’t proof that God is slow to act or gone from the picture. It means that God cares for us far more than we can imagine. And God cares for every other soul on this planet, too, so much that God would be as patient as is required so that not one soul will perish.
Know this: the scoffers among us will try to outsmart our backroad routes and bring us to the quicker highways. They will try to take away our hope and our patience. They will claim to know the best way for us to travel. But no one knows the way better than our God, who’s so infinitely patient with us that he’s willing to take as much time as is necessary to bring us all into the kingdom. And when one soul is lost on the way, such a God will take all the time needed to bring that one soul back. And that’s a God I can take all the time in the world to follow.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday of Advent
December 10, 2023