Turn, Turn, Turn

We have recently entered into a relationship with a "intentional interim" pastor at our church. (The term "intentional interim" implies an interim relationship between pastor and congregation with an intent to discover the church's mission and purpose. In other words, the church will not call a permanently installed pastor until the congregation has come to a conclusion about this.) Our pastor's sermons have been departing in recent weeks from the Revised Common Lectionary in favor of special "themes" each Sunday. This week, the key word is "time." The Old Testament lesson is Ecclesiastes 3:1-11 -- the source for the wonderful song recorded by the Byrds, "Turn, Turn, Turn."

I remember a time before time shifting. (No pun intended.) Back in the days when Johnny Carson's Tonight Show was still ninety minutes long, it was followed by Tomorrow with Tom Snyder. Tom chain smoked and interviewed interesting people for an hour, lasting until 1 a.m. in my time zone. One evening in 1975, Snyder interviewed John Lennon, and I desperately wanted to see that interview. I knew that I would fall asleep before midnight, no matter how hard I tried, and so I set an alarm clock to wake me up at 11:55. Back then, that was my only option.

Gradually, with the invention of the VCR, we all learned that we could control when we watched something on television. Now ATT is plugging a DVR on which you can record up to four separate programs at once and then, as you are watching, pause a program in one room and begin it at the same spot in another. Meanwhile, we can stream things on our computers and smart phones and download them as podcasts on our iPods. In short, we are accustomed to being in complete control of our time -- at least as it concerns when we watch things on television.

We also are less content to do one thing at a time. Students in my college classes often have their laptops open, typing instead of writing notes as I lecture, while they surf the Internet, write an email, and --perhaps -- order shoes. In our general faculty meetings, we are told that our students are experts in multitasking, and we are not to take it personally. States and municipalities are wrestling with the control of cell phone use while driving. Many people even attempt to answer email and send text messages behind the wheel. This has all happened so quickly that it is hard to realize that it wasn't that long ago when all of this was impossible.

Human beings have always been impatient. That is one of the points of Ecclesiastes 3: things happen when they should happen, not when we want them to happen. The technological explosion has only heightened our impatience, not created it. As Christians, the struggle we face when we pray is that we are temporal beings addressing an extratemporal God. I think this is one aspect of Jesus' time on earth that is often neglected. Philippians 2 (my favorite passage of scripture) speaks of Christ's self-emptying (the Greek term is "kenosis") -- shedding the rights of privileges of being God. One of these was extratemporality. In our studies on John, my class has been struck by the number of times Jesus spoke of time (again, no pun intended): "My time has not yet come," he said in John 7, for instance. This is the manner in which he answered his mother at the wedding in Cana. And then, in Gethsemene, "the hour has come."

In our prayer, as in our life, Paul's words to the church in Philippi -- "let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus" -- should affect our sense of time as much as it affects our other attitudes. God, the ultimate time shifter, became Jesus, who lived Ecclesiastes 3: "To everything -- turn, turn, turn -- there is a season -- turn, turn, turn..."