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Advent Sunday
SERMON – 10.15am, Emmanuel Church, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Sunday 30th November 2008
Revd. Matthew Vernon
I'm very conscious of time passing at the moment.
Its now just weeks until we leave Hong Kong.
35 days until my last Sunday…
Time is one of the themes of Advent.
Advent language includes "the time is coming" and "you do not know the time or the hour" – talking about the return of Jesus.
Its not far from "the end if nigh" – Advent certainly reminds us that the end of time is part of the Christian story when the Son of Man will come.
Traditionally, Advent is when we focus on the end of time and the final things: death and judgment, heaven and hell
So this morning I'm going to talk about time.
In two senses:
• how our lives are finite
• and how we are connected to God's time which is eternal.
Time is something that affects us all.
Its a very Hong Kong concern.
It's ironic that modern culture is dedicated to the pursuit of leisure
• and yet for many people it's provided just the opposite.
How often do you feel rushed for time?
Our days are too full and move to fast, we never quite seem to catch up with ourselves.
We need a bit of space to do that.
The complexity and activity of modern life can be disorientating.
We squeeze more and more into the day.
For a time I wondered whether we do too much or whether we are making the most of life.
I've come to feel we do too much.
We often feel that time is an enemy.
Our lives reveal an unease with time: frantic busyness; chronic impatience as we expect everything to happen immediately; denial of our mortality.
These lead to us treating others less than lovingly and not caring for ourselves.
Those things take time.
It's strange.
No one says after a concert: "If only they had played a bit faster, we could have had another piece of music in the programme."
Taking time is part of the nature of things.
Trees take time to grow into their mighty maturity.
Children take time to develop and grow.
We don't usually see that as a failing!
Pregnancy is a good image for Advent with its waiting and unexpected arrival,
• pregnancy takes time.
Some of you have to work across time zones.
The demands of business make time zones irrelevant:
• getting to work early to catch the markets opening in Australia;
• or getting up in the middle of the night for a conference call.
Demands of work mean we can overlook our natural, biological patterns for eating and sleeping and exercise.
And of course our lives are constantly interrupted by the telephone or email.
You know you don't have to answer the phone.
So often we treat the phone like it's the most important thing in our lives –
• we drop everything to respond to its sudden demands.
But we can let it ring and leave it.
My father-in-law mastered this art long ago.
When Kate was a teenager she would come home after an evening out and ask Colin if the phone had rung.
"23 times" he would respond, having counted the number of rings, without answering.
Colin is a Horatian scholar – a published translator of Horace's Odes.
One of the most well known sayings relating to time comes from Horace: carpe diem or "seize the day", as its popularly translated.
Colin's translation is:
"Practice wisdom; filter wine; and prune back to life's brevity long ambition;
as we argue spiteful minutes steal away;
don't rely upon tomorrow's harvest; gather in today."
Being at the end of my time here gives a different view of things.
In these final months, I'm being more precise about how I spend my time and more careful to do the things I like doing:
• like the tea house in Hong Kong park
• or playing squash regularly with a friend
• or saying no to requests for help at work – not all requests, but some meetings and services.
It's helped improve my delegating – to some of you's cost!
In one way its like having a terminal illness:
• you know you have limited time.
It focuses the mind on what's important and makes you think carefully about time.
It might be a good way of viewing life all the time.
We all know our time in this world is finite.
Imagine that you're going to leave in three months and see how that affects your priorities.
We have a beginning and an end.
We are bound by birth and death.
The world existed before us and will continue after us.
But that does not make our lives futile, only finite.
Our time here gives us glorious opportunities.
Turning then to God's time.
Do you know that the first clocks were to help monks to hold their day and night prayers at the right time?
Now of course clocks and their fractions of time dictate our lives and are far from that original monastic purpose.
Except on Sunday mornings, perhaps.
Coming to church indicates you have a handle on the good use of time.
I don't mean church is the always the best use of time
• or that you should be in church every day – though you could…
Observing the Sabbath is about remembering God's time,
• remembering the context of our lives.
This Advent, we might ask ourselves "what determines our use of time and our view of time?"
Is it the things of God?
Is it work?
Those things are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Do we see time as a gift from God?
To allow ourselves to be dominated by our clocks is a form of idolatry.
Time shapes our lives, but is not God.
To recognise that time is a gift prevents us from taking ourselves too seriously.
Day and night, our biological rhythms and so on are beyond our control.
There was a lovely piece on the BBC World Service last week about Barack Obama being addicted to his Blackberry and how as President he'll probably have to give the Blackberry up.
During campaigning he was often seen checking it and on one occasion Michelle scolded him.
The BBC reporter was himself addicted to his Blackberry, or Crackberry, but has weaned himself of it.
He spoke of how it dominates life and disrupts regular human interaction.
He said that many Blackberry owners check their messages during the night – waking up specially.
Observing the Sabbath is central to the Christian view of time.
Advent language includes Christ being the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
The Christian claim is that Christ is the beginning and the end of all things,
• that Christ gives time its meaning and shape.
In the Western, Christian calendar that is literally true –
• we divide history into BC and AD.
But the Christian claim is that God gives time its meaning for all people.
In Advent we prepare to celebrate the incarnation:
• God entering our world in the birth of Jesus.
The incarnation happened in real time.
Jesus was bound by time, just as we are.
But in the life if Jesus we see a life not driven by a damaging obsession with time control,
• or any attempt to escape time,
• but a life of steady trust and responsiveness to God.
Jesus avoided the two idolatries that we struggle with:
• time and self.
We thrive when there is a shape, a pattern to our lives.
Sunday to Sunday provides that.
The Sabbath reminds us of the context of time: of God, the creator of time and space.
The church calendar also gives a shape to our lives.
The calendar begins, of course, with Advent.
These remind us that our time is part of God's time – eternity.
Giving some time each week to God,
• indeed each day,
• breaks the tyranny of our idolizing time and our trying to control time.
Worship is not a hobby,
• not just one of many ways we use our time.
Worship is participating in God's own time.
Modern time keeping is founded on GMT:
• Greenwich Mean Time.
Worship is founded on GMT:
• God's Mean Time.
God's time which interprets all our time.
God who is past, present and future.
Our Christian Sabbath represents both God resting on the seventh day
• and Jesus' resurrection.
So it represents both God's victory over chaos in creation
• and God's victory over the causes of sin in the resurrection.
To keep the Sabbath is to show control over the powers and forces in our lives.
Even in Hong Kong!
Time to stop … with a short parable on modern life.
There was a meeting of the animals.
They began to complain that humans were always taking things away from them.
"They take my milk," said the cow.
"They take my eggs," said the hen.
"They take my flesh for bacon," said the pig.
"They catch me for food," said the fish.
Finally, the snake spoke. "I have something they would certainly take away from me if they could. Something they want more than anything else. I have time."
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
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