As the days get shorter, 15 days until the winter solstice, my mind always returns to contemplation of time. Maybe it is the hymn planning. “Of the Father’s Love begotten, e’re the worlds began to be…”. The advent ones are all about waiting and coming. The Christmas ones are about “the golden hour” or “see, the gentle lamb appears, promised from eternal years.” It is a season that compresses time and space. I was looking at photo of myself holding probably 1.5 year old Anna in winter finery and a red hat on the way to church asking “where did those two people go?”
We tell narratives. We like to connect those moments. That guy on the porch with his young daughter with snow around is somehow connected to this guy with an adult daughter sitting in the desert. And it is not that our narratives are wrong, but that there is always some trouble with them. One of the biggest binaries is probably people who tell decline narratives vs. people who tell progress narratives. Did you get kicked out of Eden at some point in the past and have been tumbling down ever since? Or are you the type to tell the story of advancing from victory unto victory each step getting better? The long arc of the universe bending toward justice.
The gospel this church year is Luke’s. And Luke’s gospel is really volume 1 with Acts being volume 2. Luke-Acts has a long history of being read as the progressive march of salvation history. From Jesus to the 12 to the 120 gathered at the ascension to the 3000 at Pentecost to the entire world at Paul takes the gospel to Rome. But there are always troubles with narratives, especially progress narratives. Without revelation how do we know that the “progress” is really the work of God? We know that Luke’s is, because it is revealed, but ours? What about the lean years and troubles, do those times not count? What about people who get in the way, are they enemies to be thrown down? Are you sure enough to do that?
I’m not tossing away salvation history with its narrative and numbers. The bible does tell a narrative of the people of God. But the way we move through time, the way we think about time, does not always match up with the way God talks about time. We live in tick-tock time and occasionally feel the golden hour. We live in time that is often one thing after another, but occasionally we are struck like the food critique in the Pixar film Ratatouille, old cantankerous and alone Anton taken back in a moment to his mother’s table and the best food he ever had. Or like Scrooge seeing his younger self as Old Fezziwig’s and the mistake of letting his love go. That appointed time, that golden hour, that time of apocalypse, of seeing.
The gospel works on appointed times. The Kingdom of Heaven draws near. It invades our mundane time and redeems it. It creates beachheads in space. Times of refining. Times of celebration. Times when you know like Jacob waking up from the ladder that “the LORD is here.” “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar…(Luke 3:1)”. When this old world was tick-tock-ing along like is always does, “the word of GOD came to John the son of Zachariah in the wilderness…prepare the way of the LORD.” And that Kingdom breaks into our mundane time and space and claims it. Because once you’ve seen it, you know. The veil has been lifted. “And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” Not in some narrative of salvation history. But long after my skin has been destroyed – after I can no longer connect 30 year old me with whatever age me and the narratives I tell myself no longer make sense even to me – long after that, “yet in my flesh I shall see God (Job 19:26).” The crooked shall become straight, and the rough places plain.