Today is the Last Sunday after Pentecost, the last Sunday of the church year. It is also informally known as Christ the King Sunday. Hence the references in the Gospel to Christ as King and to the Kingdom.
Thinking about the church calendar led me to think about time in general. There is a book by Stephen Jay Gould which is titled: “Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle.” Two great images or metaphors for time. Time as arrow. Time as cycle. Gould died just a few years ago. By training, he was a paleontologist, but he wrote extensively for both popular and scientific audiences.
Time as arrow; time as cycle. We recognize and experience both of these qualities of time in our life in the church. Time as cycle. A cycle, of course, is a pattern that repeats itself over and over again.
We experience time’s cycle in the Daily Office as it is offered to us in the Book of Common Prayer. Daily Morning and Evening prayer. As we pray the dawning and setting of each day, day after day, we experience time as cycle. And there is comfort and a sort of anchor in the routine of the cycle. And reassurance that each new dawn will come. Another book I like the title of is a book about Benedictine spirituality entitled “Always We Begin Again.” Renewal, reconciliation… are offered to us again and again and again.
Our weekly celebration of the Holy Eucharist on the Lord’s Day is a manifestation of time’s cycle. You may know that in the church, the number eight signifies fulfillment. The full cycle of Sunday through to the next Sunday. We celebrate the octave of Easter. Easter through the next Sunday, a sign of the fulfillment offered in the resurrection hope.
And, of course, there is the yearly cycle of the church calendar. One cycle ends today but another begins next Sunday. The cycle of seasons in the church calendar… Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost… remind us of the great cycles of life and remind us that we are connected to God throughout all of the seasons of our lives.
By definition, cycles are infinitely repetitive. An arrow, on the other hand, has direction. It has a beginning and an end. It starts in one place and ends in another. We all experience time as arrow, of course, as we age, living our lives as a former priest of mine used to say from the death we did not request to the death we cannot escape. But for us as Christians, time as arrow is particularly important because we affirm the arrow’s trajectory is in God’s hand. The purpose and destination of time’s arrow are in God’s hands. We move from creation to kingdom, in our individual lives and in all that is. We are headed for something. God’s kingdom.
Our diocesan convention was Friday and yesterday. Bishop Lee talked about time’s arrow a lot. In a way, it was the theme of the convention. He didn’t use the language of time’s arrow, but it was what he was talking about in his sermon at the Eucharist and in his address to convention. His sermon was all about the positive nature of change. Change is an inevitable aspect of time as arrow.
The theme of creation was “Behold, I make all things new.” Thinking about time’s arrow, listen to this excerpt from Bishop Lee’s address to convention:
The theme for this 176th convention is that we are doing a new thing. Actually, I think that's not quite the title I want to use. I think I'd rather say, and I'll proclaim it here right now: God is doing a new thing. God is always doing new things. Our scriptures, the vast sweep of the contemplative tradition, the mystery of Christ's death and resurrection itself and the sending of the Holy Spirit -- they all testify to the truth of it. God is always doing a new thing, in creation and its ongoing renewal, in the evolution of human culture, in the community of faith, in our own individual lives. God is the prime mover, the creator and sustainer of all that is or every will be, and God's mission is the repair, the restoration, the re-newing of that creation into a right relationship with himself. The new thing is God's project and we who have been redeemed by God's unexpected action in Jesus, we have the staggering invitation to join in God's mission of making all things new. That's what we're for, that's what all of this is all about. There's a phrase ascribed to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to the management guru Peter Drucker, "The best way to predict the future is to create it." The Christian faith proclaims that God invites us to be nothing less than co-creators....
A friend of this diocese, the author Diana Butler Bass said to me once that out of all sins nostalgia may be one of the most pernicious. Nostalgia says that the best has already happened. But the God we worship, the God made known to us in Christ, the God who has not and never will leave us, that God is the one who makes all things eternally new. The best is always yet to be. I give thanks to serve with you as a people who are daring to believe that the future belongs to God and so do we.
