Time and tide, they say, waits for no one.
I have come to a time in my life where time, all of a sudden, seems to be a real and palpable thing. This last week I was visiting my parents in the house and village I grew up. Just in conversation with people I met there I realised that our family association with that place now stretches over half-a-century; that my memories of living there are now better counted in decades rather than years; and even my young children speak of the years they have been visiting there.
Time is, of course, something we all focus on more that we realise. Who here is still adjusting the time on clocks and forgotten watches after the clocks changed last week? Who of us, as the schools return tomorrow, will be focusing on the time needed to get organised an out of the door in the morning? Which of us is secretly counting down the shopping days till Christmas? We live lives and, in a world, where time, well at least one sense of time, dominates everything. An understanding of life and the world where value is measured in time and motion studies, where time is money and our lives are calibrated to the minute and even second.
But does it have to be this way?
Many of you will know that in the Bible, and particularly in the teaching of Jesus, time comes to us in two distinct senses. The first is chronos-time. This is the type of time I have been speaking about so far. This is clock-time. In the New Testament, when the Magi determined the time when the star in Bethlehem appeared they were speaking of chronos-time. When Jesus spoke with certainty of the time he has left with his disciples, he is speaking of a clock-time we would recognise.
There is a second, richer sense of time known as kairos-time. Unlike chronos-time this is now about the measuring and calibrating of time. Kairos-time is about the quality of the time we have. This is the time of the right season, the fullness of time. When, at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus declares:
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.
Jesus is not saying that that is a promise or time to set our watches by, or mark in our diaries. He is saying that the kairos-time is fulfilled, that this is kingdom time.
On this All-Saints’ Sunday, and as we enter this season or remembering, we are called to be in kairos time. As we remember the saints today, give thanks for the faithful departed at our All Souls’ Service tomorrow, and remember those who have died in time of war next weekend, we are not setting them against the time-lines of our lives, rather we are being drawn into their time beyond time.
As I have heard it explained elsewhere, if our chronos-time is a like a string stretched along a table, then kairos-time “loops around, crosses, and intersects at unexpected junctures.” kairos-time is, as the writer Madeleine L’Engle has written “that time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy”.
When Jesus went up the mountain and began to teach the crowd that sat at his feet this was the kingdom promise he was making in the great Beatitudes we have just heard in our gospel reading. In these timeless words Jesus was giving them a vision of that joy, that blessing, that will come to them, burst into the tick-tock of their lives.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
As we use this richer sense of time to frame what the church has come to know, in these weeks between All Saints’ Day and Advent Sunday, as Kingdom Season, we can also use this wisdom, I think, to re-frame one of the most pressing debates of our time.
In the coming weeks Parliament will debate a bill to legalise assisted dying for the terminally ill. I am no expert in the details of this debate, but I am concerned by the way in which aspects of this debate can and are being framed. As Lord Falconer, one of the strongest advocates for a change in the law has said:
the last few weeks and the last few months [of someone’s life] are a period where there is plainly nothing but an imminent death – the person retreats more and more. And all that they’ve got to look forward to is more indignity, more pain, more struggle.
There is in this view a deep sense of compassion and care for those who are dying. But it is also a view which, for me, is measured through chronos-time. But as we have seen in our reading today, as many of us will know in our own lives, there is a richness to the time we are given beyond the hours and minutes we might live.
One of the great privileges of ordained ministry is being able to spend time with those who know that their lives are coming to a close. In many of those cases there is, naturally, a desire not to waste the chronos-time they have left. So, whilst they are able they will use the time well and to get things in order. But there is also a palpable sense of the richness and uniqueness of that time. That when the right and fitting end of life and palliative care is in place there is a sense of joy and blessing in the gift of that time.
I remember a woman in her fifties in my last parish who died of motor-neurone disease. Through the sacrifice and care of family and friends she was able to receive first rate palliative care, and when I asked if she would want to choose the time of her own end, she said didn’t. All she wanted was to be able to open her eyes and see her family. She wouldn’t have used these words, but what she treasured was the gift of that kairos-time.
For me we can find in this debate, in sharp-relief, a challenge which exists in all our lives. That in the pressures of our modern world, in our lives dominated by the utilitarian cost benefit analysis our time, all our time, can so easily become yet another commodity for us weigh and balance and barter.
But as we sit in this season, surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses; as we still ourselves from the busyness of our lives and pressures that rain in on us from every angle, we need more now than ever to treasure the time we have. To cherish that time where the poor, the hungry, the merciful, the persecuted are given the time to know that they are blessed in the sight of God. To understand in our hearts that time is not primarily thing of utility, but chiefly a gift of grace. To know that our time is not just precious, it is sacred.
Because it is by knowing this deep truth that we can see the rich blessings and true joys of the kingdom-time which all the saints now enjoy.
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