Sermon – Timing for God
Malachi 4:1-6; Mark 9:2-13; 2 Peter 3:8-13
Farmville Presbyterian Church
10/27/24
We as human beings have a love/hate relationship with time. Just the other day, I paid a visit to a friend in the Farmville Hospital who is 100 years old, and she is plenty ready for something else with her life. Living very long enough means outliving your people, outliving the world you knew and with which were comfortable, outliving the norms and culture of society in which you grew up, and outliving your body’s ability to be and do with relative strength. In short, it is right tough to live to a ripe, old age as a number of you can at least begin to attest. Time wears us out.
On the flip side, time gives us holidays and special occasions, makes it easier to mark our lives and significant moments, and helps us to organize our calendars and activities. While some of us try to avoid birthdays now, it was not always thus. Anniversaries for anything would be impossible without marking time. History would be pretty much non-existent because we would have no way to record any memorable moments. Also, the clock industry would be a non-starter, and some of us like our clocks. We would be missing any precision to life because we could not measure anything from movement to cooking to science to age. Business would fall apart without the ability to coordinate its activities. Even though time technically does not exist outside of our minds – we are the ones who came up with ways of marking the passing of experience – time is essential to our way of life. Days come and go, but it is up to us to track that number. Time is the evidence now that there is a road behind us and a road in front of us. That’s where I need to go today.
Time has always been huge, and time turns out to be important to God. Because we recognize yesterday, today, and tomorrow, we understand a progression in life. God has given us this progression. Today, of course, is where things happen. Yesterday is vital for memory; tomorrow is vital for hope. All three are a gift, but time itself is something inexorably tied to hope, and hope is essential to us all, especially in the world of faith. We need hope, so we also need to believe that there is a time coming in which things will be better, when we will see God’s goodness arrive. Imagine living as a slave in Egypt as the Hebrews did for 400 years or wandering through the wilderness for 40 years desperately looking for a new home flowing with milk and honey. Imagine living with the threat of surrounding armies or even being carried off into captivity as the Jews experienced, not knowing whether they would ever see their home, again. Imagine waiting and waiting and waiting for the Messiah to come bringing God’s righteousness into the world. One name for that Messiah is the Son of Man, thanks to the prophet Daniel. The day that he would come to bring God’s justice and righteousness was called the Day of the Lord. This was the great Jewish hope. When you are living under the oppression of a brutal, pagan military power, the Day of the Lord is the hope of hopes. Mary sings of that hoped for change when she discovers that she will help bring the Messiah into the world.
It is no accident that the very last passage of the Hebrew Bible, that is what we call the Old Testament, ends with the promise of a figure to herald the coming of the Day of the Lord. This new Elijah would light the flame of hope for which people were starving. They desperately wanted God’s strong, redeeming arm. In Jesus’ day, this feeling was electric. When Jesus asks his disciples who people thought he was, it is no surprise that others thought HE was Elijah heralding the Day of the Lord. They themselves had just seen Elijah speaking to Jesus. This was a huge sign, but it was Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptizer, who was standing in that role. John is the new Elijah. Jesus wanted to know whether they recognized him as the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of Man. Jesus is the person of God’s greatest coming hope. He is the promise of time. The arc of the biblical story was leading us all to Jesus. Their hope was finally realized in him.
But there was a problem. Time was and is still a problem. Jesus began something world-changing, but he didn’t finish it. He accomplished something beautiful and everlasting in his death and resurrection, but the Day of the Lord… where is it? Jesus promised a return. He even promised a return in their lifetimes. Paul also believed that Jesus would come finish what he had started in their lifetimes. Two thousand years later, we are still waiting. The world is still waiting. History is still waiting. Peter’s second letter directly addresses this problem with time: what we see as years and years and centuries and centuries and millennia and millennia are just a moment for God. Human time is not the same as God’s time. I’m not sure it is the most convincing argument, but I appreciate that it at least recognizes the difficulty of being a people with an eye to eternity but still living day by day. Our time might not be the same as God’s time, but God is still working in our time, if we will see it. That is our necessary hope.
Do you believe that all of this is going somewhere? It is dificult right now to have a deeper appreciation of time with the world weighing down on us. We all might want to skip through the next couple of weeks with the election sapping all human joy. We also see devastation rolling on and on and on in the conflicts across the world. The bad things last too long, and what should be good seems to be fleeting.
When my oldest was just born, I could not wait for her to get to the next milestone. Each few days, it was something different or something new. She was more fun with her growth and ability. I will never forget those days of teaching her how to swing that little plastic bat in the living room. She got good at hitting that ball, especially indoors. I find it remarkable we didn’t break anything, but before I knew it, she was six and I had no idea where the time had gone. Time cheated me, and I tried to be better with my other children. Some of us live under the shadow of illness or injury that never seems to heal. Some of us find ourselves plodding along a treadmill of life that grinds us to exhaustion. Where is God in our time?
It is easy to forget God in our notion of time, to forget that history is, in fact, moving somewhere. We can go through life without any appreciation that God’s day is coming, and it is already here in glimpses. We can probably live a decent life without the assurance that something truly better is coming, but who wants to sacrifice real hope on the altar of this world? We cannot see faith or hope, but they are at the core of our life as people who follow in the steps of Jesus. We will never be the lords of time or history. We cannot control what the future has in store, but we can choose to receive the promise of tomorrow with hope in God. We can choose to see our path as one in God’s hands. We can choose to see time bending to God’s love for us all. It might be hard to believe sometimes, but that’s why faith is not easy. Hope can also be strained.
There is nothing that has ever happened or will ever happen that can undo God’s work in Christ. Jesus has already succeeded; he has already won. The future is ours in God’s grace. There is no way we can speed it up or slow it down, but we can forget just how precious hope can be in God’s coming goodness. Each day, we should be looking forward to what God is about to do, and each day, we should be looking forward to meeting our Savior.
The Book of Revelation lives in this hope, also. It has a dramatic appreciation of God’s timing and places our history in God’s story in a way that is hard to hear for some, and I am sympathetic to that and the ways we have misused the book and its imagery, but one thing is for sure. God wins in the end. God’s good is coming. We can with fervent hope and faith make the same prayer as the author of the book in the second to the last verse (Revelation 22:20), “The one who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus, come.” It might not be our kind of soon, but one way or another, we will all meet our Savior face to face in the love of God.
To God be the glory. Amen.