Genesis 15: 5,6, 12; Luke 13: 33

Questionable timing

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian novelist living in Sweden.  He is a bit of a phenomenon because he is writing in the smallest detail about his rather everyday life in a series of four novels entitled “My Struggle.”  I am almost done with part I, but I may stop after that one.  What makes him special is that he does not seem to filter himself. He says the kind of things about his inner life that most other writers would not dare to say.  It is refreshing, especially if you have had some of those thoughts before.  He is only in his forties, so you wonder how much he will write by the time he is ninety.

Friends, what if we had had Martin Luther King into his nineties, or JFK or Mozart or Mama Cass or some of the great thinkers and artists?  James Taylor just released a new album in his late sixties/ early seventies that he says is his best ever. There are some great songs on it that keep getting better the more you listen to it.  Tony Bennett is doing some of his best work and he went to school with Thomas Jefferson, at least that’s what young people may think.   So when in our passage for today we hear Jesus talking about “Herod” as a sly fox and referring to his own end as a very young man, the thought occurred to me:” what if He has been on earth longer?  What if instead of a very limited record of his acts and saying in a very small part of the Bible, we had had a life time’s worth of wisdom?  What we could have learned!  Think of Jesus as Shakespeare on steroids! Wow.  And then Abraham, what if he as a young man had learned that he would have been a father of a great nation, would that not have made a great difference?  What if we could have switch Jesus and Abraham or at least in terms of the length of their life.  But of course this is silly thinking.

Craig Barnes, President of Princeton Theological seminary (sermon, February 1, 2016) talked about gravitas.  He explained that gravitas is something a person who has really lived has acquired.  He talked about how people who have had wounds in their life that have never healed or have not healed well are traumatized, but gravitas happens when a person’s wounds have healed well.  Jesus, well, because He was Jesus had gravitas from a very young age.   He did not need to live a long life to have gravitas.  Abraham did need a long life to acquire that kind of wisdom.  It took the shape of obedience and relinquishing to God’s grace.  Nevertheless when we look at the text in Genesis and the text in Luke closely and in comparison, we could come to the conclusion that the timing is all of.

Friends, what is about God’s timing or to be more exact, God’s time? Well, to be clear, most what looks like bad timing is just people getting in the way with their selfishness and impulsiveness and insecurity.  People’s bad sense of timing is not God’s fault. Then there is the timing of the body, like disease imbedded in our DNA.  They have their own time release.  So in a way there are three kinds of timing that affect our life: the timing of our bodies or nature, the timing of others and the timing of God.  And there may still be others.

Friends, you put all of these together and no wonder that our lives can so often feel disjointed and out of whack.  I have heard it said that for a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder it can feel like there are three clocks in the child’s mind and they are all turning at different speeds.  But at the moments those clocks line up, get in sync, the child makes huge progress.

Remember Marlon Brando’s famous line in “On the Waterfront:” I could have been a contender, I could have been someone.”  The timing wasn’t right.

You and I experience Lent and hear the same stories again about the inevitability of Jesus’ suffering.  We know what’s going to happen.  We know that there is nothing we can do.  We don’t question it. We don’t question the time of the whole thing.  Was the timing off? “Could it have been avoided,” we don’t think about that.

Friends, God’s time, or as they call it “kairos,” has its own drumbeat, its own rhythm.  Like us it has to deal with the timing of nature and the timing of people who often make disastrous decisions. God is not responsible for the decisions of people.  What we do know is that God is working to make all the good things happen: reconciliation, peace, compassion, joy, community, forgiveness, justice.  Think of God’s timing like the sun trying to burn through a thick grey cloud cover.  So what does this mean in your lives today?   It means that when you wonder about what God is doing in your life, remember that God is not some puppet master pulling strings, but that God’s love is trying to burn through the clouds and bring light and warmth.  And when it comes to time or the time of your life, God’s clock is always ticking. Thanks be to God.