In the Wholeness of Time

“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman…” (Galatians 4:4a).

As we enter a season full of concerts and performances, I am struck by how only a handful of words can so powerfully set the stage. Whether voiced from makeshift bathrobe or traditional vestment, with only three simple introductory phrases, the pageant and its players are revealed – a donkey or two, some camels, an ox (if it fits), a few wisemen, a smattering of shepherds, a star, a troupe of the heavenly hosts, and lots of sheep, all surrounding a mom, dad, and newborn baby. Most of these arrive in our imaginations without invitation. Of the three invited guests verbally introduced, only the mother and child take the stage. Time remains backstage, unadorned.

Aside from its reputation of being a dullard on the stage, time tends to be perceived, more often than not, as an antagonist or adversary. No one really wants to play time. No one eagerly anticipates any length of time. But I’d like for a moment to give time the benefit of the doubt. I wonder if we too often misrepresent time.

Here is the problem. Time is a creature. God calls it into being and it is good. When humans join time alongside all other created things, it is declared very good. So I am left wondering how a creature as redundant, mundane, ordinary, and dull as time testifies to an extraordinary creator who continues to create and recreate all things very good.

Two revelations converged for me as I entered Advent this year, and each challenged me to rethink my view of time. One came from a technological historian, the other from a letter to a waiting church.

Giving up things for Advent may not be a common practice, but I wonder how our waiting—and our view of time—might change if we decided to give up our electro-mechanical representations of time for a season (or even a day). I often tell students in the History of Technology class that I teach that time is an invention of the Middle Ages – the product of a cadre of mechanically-minded monks who invented the clock. Until the mechanical clock was invented, time did not exist…and then as doubtful eyebrows raise, I add…at least not what we understand to be time. I lean into the ideas of technological historian Lewis Mumford, as re-framed by Neal Postman:

"Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.​

…beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers.​ In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes…Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God's supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment."

We might take Mumford’s observation one step further in an age of smart watches. Electro-mechanical representations of time have now made us into time-consumers, with time-wasting, time-killing, and time-burning as legitimate ways of relating to time. Such violent metaphors rarely strike us as out of the ordinary in our casual day-to-day conversations. But the same metaphors applied to any number of other creatures should give Christ-followers sobering pause.

My recent re-read of a letter to a waiting church convinced me that my smart-watch way of thinking of time was becoming an exegetical stumbling block: “…with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness…” (II Peter 3:8b-9a).

I need to say it: God is slow. For all of us longing for wrongs to be made right, for the hurt to end, for nothing more than to be “done with it” for good—God is slow. To say otherwise would be dishonest. But Peter’s letter to the waiting and suffering church does not argue that God is not slow, at least not in the way we think of slowness. Instead, the epistle boldly challenges our heretical views of time. It does so in a beautifully subtle way, substituting our reference frame of time (slowness) with God’s reference frame of fullness and wholeness (patience). Rehab is slow. Healing, restoration, and forgiveness lead to wholeness. Yes, rehab is painful.

For those of us slow learners, we are given another angle on time a few verses later: “…what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming” (II Peter 3:11b-12).

The phrasing here strikes me as a bit strange. Since when did holiness become a high-octane fuel additive capable of burning eschatological rubber? Holiness speeds. This seems an oxymoron. Biblical commentators don’t help me too much on this detail; there is still debate on how exactly to render the writers phrasing here, but it probably doesn’t hurt to catch the aroma of burnt things when reading this letter to the long-suffering church. The bigger picture is this: holiness will happen—ready or not. Like a thief or a wind-driven fire consuming the dross, and just like that, all is again seen for what it truly is. We are left in wonder. For when all is finally consumed, what remains is more, not less! Creation—time included—is not gone; it is filled, adorned, restored, and refined.

We’re all familiar with the adage “time flies when you’re havin’ fun.” Our experience testifies to its truth. Likewise, it seems that from a Biblical reference frame, it’s also true that time flies when you’re bein’ holy. Our electro-mechanical time handicap makes this so difficult to get our minds around. We spend time. God fills time.

God is slow in the very best sense of the term. He repeatedly reveals Himself to us as “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” For God, slowness is always paired with abundant love that always burns but is never consumed—a revelation that should prompt us to take off our watches. We are always on Holy ground.

If the modern electro-mechanical clock encourages us by its nature to disembody and dissect time into moments, then it is Advent waiting that patiently re-adorns and re-fills time with eternity. Advent waiting is holy waiting. In contrast to our electro-mechanical concepts of violent waiting (killing, spending, consuming), Advent waiting is about filling time. It is the everyday, ordinary task of adorning time with expectant holiness. It is an act of dressing everything up in what we hope for, playing and replaying the part, with our best guess at what “new creation” might look like. In the meantime, we’ve lost track of time, caught up in ordinary, everyday Advent pageantry.

Let all mortal flesh silence their electronic devices; the waiting is about to begin.

Come quickly, Lord!

References

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Penguin, 1985. (pp. 11-12 in 25th anniversary edition, 2005).​