Over the Christmas holiday, we had family in town, so we took them to visit the Musical Instrument Museum. There are big rooms for each continent on earth, and they give you a set of headphones, so as you walk up to the display for each country, you see someone playing music on a video screen, and your headphones pick up the sound as you walk up to it. So, we learned about music from all over the world, and I noticed different concepts of time in music.
Some musical cultures, like our Western tradition, have fairly defined notions of time in music – time signatures that give predictable rhythm and tempo. Others, noticeably Asian cultures, don’t have a time signature that’s recognizable to Western ears – the music seems to meander and at its own pace. It’s very interesting to listen to music that obeys a completely different set of rules than you’re used to hearing.
Even for us westerners, good musicians learn how to transcend time. Jeanne Person, professor of spirituality at General Seminary, tells this story about a metronome, a very irritating object that music students use to help them keep time: “I remembered my own metronome, a small, mechanical one in a rectangular red case that helped me, when I was a young musician, to learn tempos as I played Czerny piano exercises and Bach organ fugues. Usually, the metronome would reveal my weakness, as I failed to keep tempo, to live up to its demands, to be perfect. One day, a new piano teacher … stopped me as I pounded through a Bach piece, striving for faultlessness. He took my hands in his, tenderly. “You must love the piano,” he said. “Love the music.”
Which is as good a way as any to think about the two kinds of time the ancient Greeks recognized: they had two different words for time. One was chromos: the kind of predictable, measurable time a metronome keeps track of, or a clock, or a calendar. Chronos is the kind of time that says, this is New Year’s Day, and every New Year’s Eve makes me wonder why we should celebrate the fact that the clock changed from 11:59 to midnight – as it does every single night. Chronos time is not something to celebrate, in my view – it’s simply a mechanical measure.
But it’s the other kind of time that we remember in our lives – the kind of time that you are living when you “love the music” – and it’s what the Greeks called kairos time. Kairos time takes place within chronos time, but it feels different: you say, it’s time for me to make a change in career, it’s time for me to apologize to my mother, it’s time for us to build a new church. Watches and calendars can’t tell you about that kind of time – that kind of time, kairos time, lives in your heart.
Kairos time, in a sense, is God’s time. If New Year’s celebrates mere chronos time, then the Christmas season (which we are still in) celebrates kairos time. When God takes action to enter our world, God’s Kairos time has entered into our dull chronos time, and the world is eternally altered as a result.
In fact, my favorite Christmas poem recognizes that fact: BC:AD, by the British poet U.A. Fanthorpe:
This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future's
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.
This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.
This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.
And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.
In Jesus, God's Kairos time entered our chronology so decisively that our whole way of measuring time had to change. We point to Jesus' birth as the fulcrum of all human time - everything before was BC, everything after was AD, and all of time in the western world revolves around that moment. At that moment, the moment of Jesus' birth, the clock ticked on and the world looked no different - but at this moment, God took decisive action to enter our world - and eternity came crashing into chronology.
Reading today’s gospel story, you might think that Kairos time is moving fast indeed. Just a week ago we had Jesus as a newborn, and today he’s a 12-year-old boy. In between, we know next to nothing about his life: Luke tells us that at 8 days, Jesus was dedicated in the Temple – the custom for newborn boys. And Matthew tells us that to get away from King Herod, who wanted to kill the newborn King of the Jews, the family fled to Egypt, then returned after Herod had died (which was about 4 BC).
But gospel writers don’t tell us so little about Jesus’ early life because they’re keeping some kind of secret – it’s because they’re telling us kairos, not chronos – they’re not interested in filling in a timeline – they’re interested in God’s moments. God’s time says there is something significant in this event in Jerusalem, when Jesus amazes the priests and scribes with his learning and wisdom. Luke probably wants us to understand that Jesus was gifted with wisdom beyond his years, wisdom that can’t be explained by his country origins. But he also wants us to understand the choices Jesus’ parents made with kairos time.
I think we can discern some very interesting facts about Jesus’ life here. In the 19th and early 20th century, it became fashionable for scholars to see Jesus as an illiterate peasant – but this is not true, as you can plainly see by reading today’s story. Jesus was not a peasant – he was the son of a tradesman living in a small town. Joseph was a carpenter – not a furniture maker, but a builder, day laborer. Joseph would probably have walked each day to the nearby Roman city of Sepphoris to work on building the great Roman city there – Herod Antipas’ capital, full of Roman baths, theaters, all the delights of Roman civilization.
As Jesus reached the age of 8 or 10, old enough to hold tools responsibly, he would have been expected to be about father’s business, help support his family. Yet this gospel story tells us that he claims a different Father’s business. He claimed God as his Father, and the Temple discussions of God’s laws as his business.
This was possible because Jesus’ parents made sure he had time for something else than working for a living – he had an education. Jesus learned how to read, how to study scripture, how to discuss God’s words at a very high level. Granted, he was Son of God – naturally gifted for this work – but his parents must have paid a rabbi in Nazareth to give him reading and scripture lessons, sacrificing not only the cost of education, but also foregoing some income that he could have brought into the family.
So the Jesus we picture as a country bumpkin would really have been literate and very well educated for a Jewish boy – all gospels are clear about his intellectual gifts and his ability to hold his own against the most distinguished scholars. And this is true for him because the adults around him made his religious education a priority – and because they did this, he changed the world.
The Son of God is not a 12-year-old child today: but our world is full of young people whose lives are brimming with God’s possibilities. These are children and youth whose whole lives are before them, who are in the prime years of learning their place in the world, developing their God-given talents.
Yet fewer and fewer of these young people have any exposure to faith. The fastest-growing religious demographic in the US is the “nones” - those who claim no religious affiliation at all – 12% of the US population. And 25% of young people are “nones.” Even Evangelical Christians are failing to keep their young people in church – a majority of them drift away when they grow up, which researchers David Campbell and Robert Putnam attribute to the politicization of religion.
These “nones” are not atheists – 93% of the nones believe in God or a higher power. They are simply people who don’t know what to believe – they dabble in different things – Buddhism, Catholicism, Sufism, New Age. But with no faith tradition, they are left with no solid foundation, no religious community, no spiritual discipline or tradition to fall back on when life gets hard. And studies in Britain show that 94% of children raised without faith will never have it – it’s much harder to help adults develop a relationship with God.
Growing in faith is a lifelong process that for most humans, as for the Son of God, needs to begin in childhood, needs to develop in young people the habits of faith and the conviction of God’s love, and the willingness to reach out and love others as we love ourselves – if they will ever have these gifts.
If you want to know why we’re building a church – this is why. It’s partly for us who are here in this room – we love our church community, we want it to grow. But it’s mostly for the generations who are now children, and for the generations to come after them. Their lives will be changed because of the priority we are giving them.
And if you want to know why we put time and budget money and effort into our children’s and youth programs, this is why. Growing in faith begins when we are young, when our minds are open, when our hearts are ready for God.Because God’s time is now; kairos time is here; and we are the ones whom God calls to bring the news of God’s love to a new generation. God’s love comes bursting in on us, in God’s time, in the form of a child who was loved and made a priority by his parents, and would grow up to become our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
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