So, I probably have a weirder sleep pattern than most of you. Maybe not, but I bet I do. It is not uncommon for me to be in bed by seven o'clock at night. Sometimes, if I'm splurging, it's six-thirty. Now I don't go right to sleep. I check out a podcast or two, or maybe I'll watch a Brit-crime show. Or some old Doctor Who. More often than not, a cooking show. But I'm in bed early.
But I also get up early. Sometimes at 4:00. Most often around 5:00. I like that time of the morning, and it makes going to bed early well worth it. It's that quiet time. Being awake before most of the modern world really begins to stir.
But last week, those quiet hours, they’re about the only time I’ve had all week that I could escape the News. And believe me, it’s not for lack of trying! Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, I'd wake up every hour or so and see that numbers haven’t really changed all that much. But there are plenty of people on the internet spending a lot of words telling me that nothing's changed, and to prove it they show me the same ole map, showing me that, indeed, nothing has changed. One day this week, I felt like I’d chewed my fingernails down to the elbow waiting for 9:00 AM Pacific Time to roll around, so I might learn something new only to find out that there was nothing new to learn. To borrow a line, the human body wasn’t designed to think this much about Nevada.
So those hours while the news stations replay the announcements they made an hour ago or the night before, those hours where the last most recent numbers I’ve already memorized keep being repeated, those hours of being awake long before so many others, those hours have become a treasure. Having the TV on or phone in hand doesn’t do any good then. So, in those quiet, the news goes off. The phone sits to recharge, and so do I.
Often I'll take that time to walk through the village. It is so different in the dark, and I've long since learned where the jumps and breaks in the sidewalks are, even though I can't see them. And sometimes I'll just sit in a chair in the living room and clear my head and let my heart take some time to heal.
During this last week, that quiet time has been a gift I wasn't prepared for.
The other day, Fr. Brooks and I had a discussion about time, I’ve been thinking a lot about it. Things have sped by and crept along all year, but this last week especially has brought time to mind.
I expect things to happen predictably when it comes to time. I know how many seconds are in a minute, and how many minutes are in a year, and they are steady.
We call that chronos in Christian theology. Put simply, it’s human time, both the strict, predictable measurement of the thing and the way we experience it. Chronos is steady, and while events may surprise us, the time that passes in that period is totally constant, normal, maybe even boring.
But there’s another way of looking at time: kairos. Kairos is God’s time, an unknown to us, completely unpredictable yet appointed point where God shows up. Kairos is wily, quiet, immensely surprising, and highly anticipated.
And this story of the Ten Bridesmaids is a story with kairos, God’s time, right at the middle of it all. The ten wait for God to come, accompanied by that ever-longed-for Kingdom of Heaven. Some are ready for the wait, and some just aren’t. How ready they are has no bearing on when God shows up, so it’s best to be ready at all times, receptive and prepared and focused in the waiting.
Y'all I don’t know if I was actually ready last week. I don’t know if I was receptive. I certainly wasn’t prepared or focused. If anything, my default has been anxious and frustrated. It’s been hard for me to cherish that treasure of early, quiet hours because my head’s been in the wrong place.
Now, I don’t want to discount the importance of the politics of our country. Lord knows whatever happens next will affect us all, and lord knows, for some, their ability to live satisfying, rich lives were on the line and for others it's on the line now. This is all true. But it’s also very much in the realm of chronos, human time. And it’s so easy to be consumed by concerns about human time.
But as Christians, God holds a greater claim on us than even that. At Morning Prayer Friday, we talked about how at height of his earthly popularity Jesus sets his face on Jerusalem, the place where he will surely die, but also the place out of which we’ll taste God’s salvation. All week long, I’ve had my face set on Washington DC and Nevada and Arizona and a host of other places I never think about. I’ve had my face set on human things and on human time.
But something different happens in that quiet dawn twilight. With the news and the phone and my head silent, human time shuts down. And I can finally sit in the embrace of God's time, where the passage of time doesn’t matter and a second of silence can heal as much as an hour. When I set my face on Christ, whatever’s blue or red doesn’t ache anymore. My worries for the world pass from my heavy heart to God, and all is turned over, and what will be will be, but in it’s own time, in God's time.
Now it's not always easy. See, just because we long for God’s time, for that coming Kingdom of God we’ve talked so much about lately, that doesn’t mean that we get to just sit on our hands and wait. Much as I love the quiet time, that’s not where the work of the Kingdom happens, rather, it’s not the ONLY place. Because, our waiting requires preparation. Like bridesmaids saving up oil, we’ve got some work to do, work that we begin in our time and complete in God’s.
Because you see, we hold elections every day, each one of us. We check a ballot whenever we decide to treat someone different from us with respect. We check a ballot when we put on a mask to protect others more vulnerable in our midst. We check a ballot when we give freely to our churches, to our charities, to help others try their best to get by. We check a ballot when we stand up to people who abuse power or people, who foster injustice or violence. We check a ballot when we love each other, we stand up for each other, and we protect each other, the way I believe Jesus asks us to.
Now, I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t care about what happens in our nation with this election. Like everyone else, I spent days wishing the people in Nevada would count ballots as fast as they count cards. But there are so many things we set our face on, so many things we’re invested in that draw us deeper into this world and further from God. There's got to be a way to be invested in both, but, yeah, it’s hard.
It’s hard because it means putting the Kingdom of God above all else. It means standing athwart history and proclaiming “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again” in all we do, even when we are met with scorn. It means waiting and working with one goal in sight: lives lived glorifying God. We can’t do it on our own, and we can’t do it fully in our own time. But with God’s help, and each other’s, we can, in due time. We can...in God’s time.