Texts: Zephaniah 3:14-20; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18
One of the ways in which some theologians have talked and written about the Incarnation – beginning, of course, with the Christmas event – is to say that eternity invaded time. God invaded time, perhaps. God chose, in Jesus Christ, to subject himself to the passage of time – to become a participant in human history.
Whatever else all that means, it says something about the importance of time in our human existence, and in our faith. As far as we know, the human being is the only creature with any real concept of time. That’s not to deny that other animals follow timetables in their lives. Migrating animals know when it’s time to leave; those who hibernate need to get their timing right. And anyone who has kept a dog or cat for any length of time can testify to the accuracy of their pets’ sense of timing around mealtimes. Come to think of it, dairy herds start heading for the milking shed without any prompting from the farmhands.
But a vital part of being human is our understanding of past, present and future. Take away our past and we lose our identity; take away our future and we lose our hope; take away our present and we might as well be dead. Our lives only have meaning if we can understand them as continuous, as an ongoing story. The scientists tell us that physically we are not the same person we were seven years ago, or whatever it is. Cells are dying and being replaced constantly. And, of course, we grow up, have new experiences, change our views and attitudes from time to time with the passing years. But through it all, surely, we remain the same person that we have always been.
The trick is to keep the past, present and future in healthy balance. We all know people who are stuck in the past, a temptation we all face as we get older. Nostalgia is powerful illusion; someone has defined it as refusing to let go of something that never actually happened! More usually, it is remembering very fondly something we didn’t enjoy at the time. Steam trains come to mind! Usually this sort of nostalgia is harmless enough – part of our charming eccentricity.
More painful are those who insist that everything was better in the past – that the world is going from bad to worse – that “in my day” everyone was happy and healthy and cared for one another, not like today! So who would like to take their chances at a dentist or with a surgeon using the methods of fifty years ago? Who would prefer the planes of that time to those of the present? The past is important to use – the real past, that is.
We also meet people who seem to spend all their lives dreaming of the future and waiting for it, and never quite get round to living in the present. Again, we understand the temptation. When the children are off our hands, when we have finished renovating the house, when our career is established, then we will have more time for this or that. And we go on telling ourselves this same future story for years, without apparently noticing that time is passing, and unless we actually stop dreaming and start doing, it ain’t going to happen.
We need a real understanding of the past, a realistic hope for the future, and a real commitment to the present. Which gets me to page 19 of the ODT ‘s edition for last Thursday. It was one of their opinion pages – and it had two very interesting pieces side by side. The first to catch my eye was from a regular syndicated columnist, Gwynne Dyer. He usually has a political angle, but this column was about space exploration. He took as his starting-point a recent lecture by the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking, the guy who’s battled over the years with the ghastly motor neurone disease.
He was awarded yet another medal of some kind, and in his acceptance speech he said this: “The long-term survival of the human race is at risk so long as it is confined to a single planet…Sooner or later, disasters such as an asteroid collision or nuclear war could wipe us all out. But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe. There isn’t anywhere like the Earth in the solar system, so we would have to go to another star.”
Big stuff – impossible stuff for the foreseeable future. Has Hawking abandoned real science fore science fiction – or is he a prophet who can see several centuries into the future?
The second article was by Rawiri Taonui, the head of the School of Maori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Canterbury . It was about the Government’s proposed deadline for the lodging of historical claims with the Waitangi Tribunal. The writer was opposed to any deadline being set; and what interested me in the article was the emphasis he placed, not on the eventual outcome of a particular case, but in the importance of the process of being heard.
He put it this way: “The OTS process [essentially, direct negotiation with the Crown] denies tribes the fundamental right of all victims to a full and fair hearing of the crimes against their families, ancestors, tikanga and culture. The Crown wishes to end the richness and healing that comes when stories are told in the forum of the tribunal. Their truth is the emancipation of generations, the liberation of suffering and the reconciliation of peoples.”
Put those two articles together ane we are talking about a stretch of time beginning about 200 years ago, and looking forward several hundred years into the future. We alone of the creatures on this planet have the ability to contemplate such a period of time. And we have that ability through the two gifts that in many ways are the greatest we human beings have received from our Creator: the gift of memory and the gift of imagination. Together they must shape the way in which we behave in the present. Together they must guide us in living out our lives as Christians, as the people of God in this place.
And Advent is the time to re-commit ourselves to that calling. Our first reading today is from one of Stephen Hawking’s predecessors – a man known to us as Zephaniah. He was gifted with the sort of foresight that Hawking shows in his speech – the ability to look centuries ahead and see something of the future that God has in mind for his people when the time is right. He was a contemporary of Jeremiah’s; he was talking to the people of Judah , and like all the prophets what he had to say was both bad news and good news. The bad news was that they had forgotten their history; they had forgotten their dealings with God. They had gone astray because they were unfaithful to their covenant with God. The good news was that God was not unfaithful; he had not forgotten the covenant; redemption was coming – one day – several centuries into the future. In the meantime, the people were to guide their lives by a realistic understanding of their past, and a confident hope in the future.
Next we hear the strange voice of that strange man we call John the Baptist raving away on the edges of the desert. What was in Zephaniah’s time a far distant dream is now about to happen; it is time for action. John, we might say, is the ancestor of those who are now at NASA, planning a space station on the moon and a manned landing on Mars as first steps to that incredible journey Hawking has already foreseen
And, perhaps, closer to home, the ancestor of those who are alerting us to the environmental state of the earth. We must act now, they tell us, if the earth is not to suffer catastrophic damage in 50 or 100 years time. Repent, say all our prophets, before it is too late; look to the future and live your lives accordingly.
That’s St Paul ’s message, too. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. The message then as now is to start today living into the future, learning from the past. If we want a peaceful, just and loving future, we need to work for that in the present. If we want a world that is fit to live in, we need to live now in a way that does no harm to our environment.
And if we want to prepare the way for the return of the Lord, we need to remember his coming among us in the past, his presence with us today, and his certain promise of our future with him when time ends – or, as those clever theologians might say, when we step out of time into God’s eternity.
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