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January 30 - January 31, 2024
A lot of contemporary Christianity suffers from spiritual dyschronometria—an inability to keep time, a lack of awareness of what time it is.
We don’t recognize how much we are the products of a past, leading to naivete about our present. But we also don’t know how to keep time with a promised future, leading to fixations on the “end times” rather than cultivating a posture of hope.
But the question isn’t simply what’s true; the question is what needs to be said and done now, in this place and in this moment given this particular history. To assert that “All Lives Matter” as a response to “Black Lives Matter” is not wrong in principle but temporally. It fails to recognize that “Black Lives Matter” is something that has to be said here and now because of a specific (contingent) history that got us here. The assertion of the ideal, timeless truth that “All Lives Matter” is performatively false in such a situation. It lacks prudence and does not constitute faithful witness
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A faithful Christian life is a matter of keeping time with the Spirit. But what the Spirit asks of us always reflects history—our own, but also the history of the church and the societies in which we find ourselves. “What do we do now?” is one of the fundamental questions of discipleship.
We don’t need coaches who will help us manage our time; we need prophets who make us face our histories (and futures).
The miracle that puzzled Nicodemus, that should astound us, is that the God of grace can redeem even me—this historical creation—can begin again with this history that lives in me, that is me. It’s the body with scars that is resurrected; it’s the me with a history that is redeemed, forgiven, graced, liberated.
Being a Christian, then, is not so much a matter of believing something about God as much as living in light of this event’s cascading effects on history. Christian faith is ongoing participation in the Christ-event which continues to rumble through human history. Christianity is less a what and more a how, a question of how to live given what has happened in Christ.
First, spiritual timekeeping is the working out of our creaturely finitude as creatures embedded in time (what Augustine described as our being “conditioned by time”).14 For every creature, to be is to become; to exist is to change; to have and to hold is to lose and to mourn; to awake is to hope. The baby’s chubby wrinkles presage the elder’s craggy folds. Autumn’s fire is latent in spring’s green.
Second, spiritual timekeeping reflects a sense of time shaped by covenant—a promise made in history reverberates through subsequent time.
Third, spiritual timekeeping is nourished by Jesus’s promise that the Spirit will guide us into all truth across time (John 16:13).
Finally, spiritual timekeeping is animated by the future. Such a futural orientation we call “hope.”
Everything past is thrust back from the future and everything future follows upon the past, and everything past and future is created and set in motion by the One who is always present. —Augustine, Confessions 11.11.13
Whenever the past is invoked as a template for the present, the first question we should always ask is, Whose past? Whose version of the past? And what does this invoked past ignore, override, and actively forget? Which half is recalled? Whose half is forgotten?
Discernment is the hard work of peering around us when everything is cloaked in the coming shadow of night.
The movement of the Spirit is something to be joined, which requires something of us. “To recognize one’s connection with Geist is ipso facto to change oneself and the way one acts.”
There’s a difference between believing we are the ones we’ve been waiting for and realizing we are called to join the Spirit of God coursing through history.
It’s never too late for us to become who we’re called to be.
We are bundles of potentiality, but the possibilities are not infinite. We are thrown into a time and place, thrown into a story that is our history, and these form the horizons of possibility for us—our temporal halo we described earlier. That is not a limitation as much as a focusing, a gifted specificity. This corner of earth I’ve been given to till. These neighbors I am called to love. These talents I’m exhorted to fan into flame. This neighborhood in which to birth a future. “Go with your love to the fields,”12 for the horizons that circumscribe you are not fencing you out of something
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Shame lives off the lie of spiritual self-improvement, which is why my past is viewed as a failure. Grace lives off the truth of God’s wonder-working mercy—my past, my story, is taken up into God and God’s story. God is writing a new chapter of my life, not starting a new book after throwing out the first draft of my prior existence.
Grace doesn’t justify evil; grace overcomes it.
In the hands of such an artist, all my weaknesses are openings for strength, the proverbial cracks that let the light in.14 Even my sins and struggles hold the possibility for compassion and sympathy. Only such a God could make even my vices the soil in which he could grow virtue.
God’s self-revelation in history means everything, but that only becomes an encounter with the paradox of God-come-near if God grants the condition to see the Son in the servant. So “let no innkeeper or philosophy professor fancy that he is such a clever fellow that he can detect something if the god himself does not give the condition.”11 The encounter with the eternal could only happen in history, but God’s revelation could never be extrapolated from history, deduced from the facts by some religious Sherlock Holmes.
The resurrection is now, and in the now you hear a God who says, “Awake. Breathe. Live. I want you to be.”
In the liturgical calendar, we are indexed to the solar time of the Son who is the light of the city of God (Rev. 21:23).
“Space offers us something to love, but time steals away what we love and leaves in the soul crowds of phantasms which incite desire for this or that. Thus the mind becomes restless and unhappy, vainly trying to hold that by which it is held captive. It is summoned to stillness so that it may not love the things which cannot be loved without toil.”
The trick, Augustine says, is to learn to love what you’ll lose. That doesn’t mean despising what can’t endure or hating what is transitory. It means holding it with an open hand, loving it in the ways appropriate to mortal things. When love is rightly ordered, we can embrace even the ephemeral.
All that’s coming, young man, is vapor. That doesn’t mean life is empty or meaningless; it’s just that our lives are fleeting, ephemeral, fugitive, given to rhythms of consolidation and dissolution. Like a mist that evaporates, not only does our mortal life come to an end, but the seasons and microepochs that make up our lifetime coalesce and form like clouds that appear solid and formidable, only to disappear in the afternoon.
When you understand that life is a vapor and appreciate that the seasons of life are both expected and transitory, you’re primed to inhabit them with the proper expectations: to know when you are and dwell in that now, but in such a way that you recognize this too shall pass.
If we can cultivate a sense of expectation, we won’t be unmoored by a season of weeping; we won’t expect perpetual dancing; we could even be primed to ask ourselves, “Is this my time to die?” and thus receive even that season with a graced equanimity.
If seasonality is a recognition of inevitability and duration, there is also a sense of assignation in this passage: “a time for every matter,” “a time to act.” If there are seasons in which we should expect certain kinds of experiences to befall us, there are also times when certain actions are expected of us. While some of these seasons arrive without our bidding (birth, death, weeping, laughing), much of what the Teacher counsels here assumes our agency.
You have to listen for the whispers, Augustine counsels, because “divine providence controls even the lowest things on the earth, producing as evidence all the thousands of beauties found not only in the bodies of living creatures but even in blades of grass.”22 This is not a puppet-master picture of providence but rather a sense of God’s Spirit as the breath of all creation, infusing, inspiring, sustaining, moving.
Black culture isn’t “magic” because of some deistic proximity of black people to the universe. Slavers had their cargo dance on deck to keep them limber for the auction block. The magic was born out of a unique historical and material experience in world history, one that no other group of people underwent and survived for so long and in such intimate proximity to the main engines of modernity.
Contra the utopianisms of both left and right, Christians are an eschatological people. That’s what it means to not “live ahead of time,” as Augustine puts it. If we remember that we live in the saeculum, in this contested time of waiting for the full realization of Christ’s reign, we should not fall into the trap of thinking the kingdom has come. We shouldn’t absolutize some penultimate regime or form of life.
This eschatological posture is characterized by a kind of holy impatience. On the one hand, we pray and labor for a world that looks more like the just, flourishing kingdom we long for. The “waiting” of Christian eschatology is not the same as what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his “I Have a Dream” speech, called “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” which used waiting as a code for enshrining the status quo.29 On the other hand, even our properly prophetic desire and hunger must avoid becoming the hubris of human amelioration projects, as if we could socially engineer our way out of the
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Christians above all should not fall prey to the temptation to treat our meantime political identities as ultimate identities.
Hence a secularized society is apt to treat politics as everything, and hence treat political differences as if they were ultimate differences (my political opponent doesn’t just disagree; he is evil). This betrays a stunted imagination that should not characterize Christians: while we are not indifferent, we know that justice will ultimately only arrive with the King.
If Christ is King, then all earthly rulers have, in a sense, already been deposed—they are merely stewards in the meantime. They can make no ultimate claims on us.
Advent patience refuses right-wing theonomies that would forget this waiting and try to install the kingdom by political machinations. But it equally pushes back on any progressive utopianism that imagines that the full arrival of justice could be achieved by our efforts at social amelioration. Both of these are practical postmillennialisms that assume that the arrival of the kingdom is up to us—and hence something we should fight to impose. Both of these are failures to live into the realities of Christ the King and the waiting of Advent—not to mention the cross-shaped life of a people who
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Christian political participation should be bold but circumspect, tempered but hopeful, cross-shaped but kingdom bent. An eschatological life is one animated by the cadences of two hopeful exhortations: “Lift up your hearts” and “Be not afraid.”
Hope is a disposition toward the future that is at once expectant and dependent. It is entwined with faith because it trusts that the God of grace is a father who gives bread rather than stone (Matt. 7:9–11). And hope is bound to love because it is a form of desire.
The trick, the feat, the graced posture we are called to cultivate on the way is faithful labor in the present, rooted in discernment, always with our eyes on that coming city.
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
To be unhurried is a tangible discipline of hope.
Leisure is an eschatological discipline of stilling hubris and resting in the God who has raised Jesus as the firstfruits of what is to come. “Having enough time” is an act of hope. Building margins into a life so you can respond to opportunities to muse, play, talk, pray is its own defiant act of trust and expectation.
O God of our ancestors, God of our people, before whose face the human generations pass away: We thank you that in you we are kept safe forever, and that the broken fragments of our history are gathered up in the redeeming act of your dear Son, remembered in this holy sacrament of bread and wine. Help us to walk daily in the Communion of Saints, declaring our faith in the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body. Now send us out in the power of your Holy Spirit to live and work for your praise and glory. Amen.
