Sermon Illustrations on the passing of time

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Background

Coffee Beans & A Contrast to the Realm of Eternity

The framework of seven days is rich with divine intention. Certainly, in biblical numerology, the number seven symbolizes divine perfection. But perhaps it goes deeper than that. Echoing church father Basil of Caesarea, theologian Colin Gunton argues that the ordering of seven days establishes a distinct relation between the present time and eternity.

That is, the seven-day week was created by God to serve as a contrast to the realm of eternity in which God dwells. Time serves as a contrast to eternity. Have you ever walked into a perfume store at the mall and encountered an array of overwhelming scents simultaneously?

Somewhere, you will also see a small cup of coffee beans sitting nearby. What are the coffee beans for? Coffee beans clear the palate so one can distinguish and fully appreciate the nuanced characteristics of each perfume separately, rather than being bombarded by the many scents at once. In a way, time serves as a cup of coffee beans. Time establishes a contrast to eternity, where God dwells.

A.J. Swoboda, Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World, Baker Publishing Group, 2018, Kindle Location 378.

The Creation of Artificial Time

We all know our world has sped up to a frenetic pace. We feel it in our bones, not to mention on the freeway. But it hasn’t always been this way.

Let me nerd out on you for a few minutes just to show you how we got here. We’ll talk about the Roman sundial, Saint Benedict, Thomas Edison, your toaster, 1960s sci-fi, 7-Eleven, and, naturally, Steve Jobs.

First, the sundial, aka the original Casio.

As far back as approximately 200 BC,[i] people were complaining about what this “new” technology was doing to society. The Roman playwright Plautus turned anger into poetry:

The gods confound the man who first found out

How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,

Who in this place set up a sun-dial

To cut and hack my days so wretchedly

Into small portions![ii]

Next time you’re running late, just quote a little Plautus.

The gods confound the man!

Fast-forward to the monks, our well-meaning spiritual ancestors who played a key role in the acceleration of Western society. In the sixth century Saint Benedict organized the monastery around seven times of prayer each day, a superlative idea. By the twelfth century the monks had invented the mechanical clock to rally the monastery to prayer.

But most historians point to 1370 as the turning point in the West’s relationship to time. That year the first public clock tower was erected in Cologne, Germany.[iii] Before that, time was natural. It was linked to the rotation of the earth on its axis and the four seasons. You went to bed with the moon and got up with the sun. Days were long and busy in summer, short and slow in winter. There was a rhythm to the day and even the year. Life was “dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity,”[iv] in the words of the French medievalist Jacques Le Goff. (And yes, I just quoted a French medievalist.)

But the clock changed all that: it created artificial time—the slog of the nine-to-five all year long. We stopped listening to our bodies and started rising when our alarms droned their oppressive siren—not when our bodies were done resting. We became more efficient, yes, but also more machine, less human being.

Listen to one historian’s summary of this key moment:

Here was man’s declaration of independence from the sun, new proof of his mastery over himself and his surroundings. Only later would it be revealed that he had accomplished this mastery by putting himself under the dominion of a machine with imperious demands all its own.[v]

When the sun set our rhythms of work and rest, it did so under the control of God; but the clock is under the control of the employer, a far more demanding master.

Then in 1879 you had Edison and the light bulb, which made it possible to stay up past sunset. Okay, brace yourself for this next stat: before Edison the average person slept eleven hours a night.[vi]

Yes: eleven.

I used to read biographies of great men and women from history who got up to pray at four o’clock in the morning—Saint Teresa of Ávila, John Wesley, Charles Spurgeon. I would think, Wow, they are way more serious about Jesus than I am. True, but then I realized that they went to bed at seven o’clock! After nine hours of sleep, what else was there to do?

Now, at least in America, we’re down to about seven as the median number of hours of sleep per night. That’s two and a half hours less sleep than just a century ago.

Is it any wonder we’re exhausted all the time?

Adapted from The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World. Copyright © 2019 by John Mark Comer. Used by permission of WaterBrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

[i] Encyclopaedia Britannica estimates that the first sundial used by the Romans was set up in 290 BC, with one designed for the city being built in approximately 164 BC; www.britannica.com/technology/sundial.

[ii] Aulus Gellius, The Complete Works of Aulus Gellius: Attic Nights (East Sussex, UK: Delphi Classics, 2016), attributes these lines to the Roman comic play-wright Plautus.

[iii] Carl Honore, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 22.

[iv] Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 44.

[v] Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 39.

[vi] Arwen Curry, “How Electric Light Changed the Night,” KQED, January 20, 2015, www.kqed.org/science/26331/how-electric-light-changed-the-night.

Parkinson’s Law

It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.

C. Northcote Parkinson, “Parkinson’s Law” (The Economist, 1955)

What Time Is It?

This may seem like a simple question, but there are many ways to answer it: my phone tells me it’s 6:18 a.m.; the calendar tells me it’s May 25; my prayer book tells me it’s the thirty-fifth day of Easter; the sun tells me it’s just past sunrise, and my brain tells me it’s time for another cup of coffee. The differences between these answers may seem trivial, but the standard by which we tell time determines to a profound extent what events we see as significant or newsworthy. Indeed, one of the reasons our culture has an unhealthy obsession with the news is because its sense of time is off kilter. If we want to learn how to read the news Christianly, we’ll have to learn to tell time Christianly.

We can distinguish between two broad understandings of time by way of the Greek words kairos and chronos. Kairos refers to the propitious time, time that is right for a certain act—the time to plant or harvest a crop, for instance. Kairos time is rhythmic, cyclical, seasonal. Chronos, as its English derivative chronological indicates, is closer to our modern understanding of time. This is time as quantifiable duration, as something that is linear and sequential. Insofar as the news is, by definition, concerned with what is happening “now,” it is rooted in chronos.

Stories

BE SHORT

The Puritan preacher Cotton Mather, hard at work over the business of ministry, prayer, and writing, wrote over his study door in large letters, “BE SHORT.” Today, he might well have written “MAKE IT QUICK.”

Adapted from Charles Spurgeon, Feathers for Arrows (1870)

The Creation of Artificial Time

We all know our world has sped up to a frenetic pace. We feel it in our bones, not to mention on the freeway. But it hasn’t always been this way.

Let me nerd out on you for a few minutes just to show you how we got here. We’ll talk about the Roman sundial, Saint Benedict, Thomas Edison, your toaster, 1960s sci-fi, 7-Eleven, and, naturally, Steve Jobs.

First, the sundial, aka the original Casio.

As far back as approximately 200 BC,[i] people were complaining about what this “new” technology was doing to society. The Roman playwright Plautus turned anger into poetry:

The gods confound the man who first found out

How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,

Who in this place set up a sun-dial

To cut and hack my days so wretchedly

Into small portions![ii]

Next time you’re running late, just quote a little Plautus.

The gods confound the man!

Fast-forward to the monks, our well-meaning spiritual ancestors who played a key role in the acceleration of Western society. In the sixth century Saint Benedict organized the monastery around seven times of prayer each day, a superlative idea. By the twelfth century the monks had invented the mechanical clock to rally the monastery to prayer.

But most historians point to 1370 as the turning point in the West’s relationship to time. That year the first public clock tower was erected in Cologne, Germany.[iii] Before that, time was natural. It was linked to the rotation of the earth on its axis and the four seasons. You went to bed with the moon and got up with the sun. Days were long and busy in summer, short and slow in winter. There was a rhythm to the day and even the year. Life was “dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity,”[iv] in the words of the French medievalist Jacques Le Goff. (And yes, I just quoted a French medievalist.)

But the clock changed all that: it created artificial time—the slog of the nine-to-five all year long. We stopped listening to our bodies and started rising when our alarms droned their oppressive siren—not when our bodies were done resting. We became more efficient, yes, but also more machine, less human being.

Listen to one historian’s summary of this key moment:

Here was man’s declaration of independence from the sun, new proof of his mastery over himself and his surroundings. Only later would it be revealed that he had accomplished this mastery by putting himself under the dominion of a machine with imperious demands all its own.[v]

When the sun set our rhythms of work and rest, it did so under the control of God; but the clock is under the control of the employer, a far more demanding master.

Then in 1879 you had Edison and the light bulb, which made it possible to stay up past sunset. Okay, brace yourself for this next stat: before Edison the average person slept eleven hours a night.[vi]

Yes: eleven.

I used to read biographies of great men and women from history who got up to pray at four o’clock in the morning—Saint Teresa of Ávila, John Wesley, Charles Spurgeon. I would think, Wow, they are way more serious about Jesus than I am. True, but then I realized that they went to bed at seven o’clock! After nine hours of sleep, what else was there to do?

Now, at least in America, we’re down to about seven as the median number of hours of sleep per night. That’s two and a half hours less sleep than just a century ago.

Is it any wonder we’re exhausted all the time?

Adapted from The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World. Copyright © 2019 by John Mark Comer. Used by permission of WaterBrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

[i] Encyclopaedia Britannica estimates that the first sundial used by the Romans was set up in 290 BC, with one designed for the city being built in approximately 164 BC; www.britannica.com/technology/sundial.

[ii] Aulus Gellius, The Complete Works of Aulus Gellius: Attic Nights (East Sussex, UK: Delphi Classics, 2016), attributes these lines to the Roman comic play-wright Plautus.

[iii] Carl Honore, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 22.

[iv] Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 44.

[v] Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 39.

[vi] Arwen Curry, “How Electric Light Changed the Night,” KQED, January 20, 2015, www.kqed.org/science/26331/how-electric-light-changed-the-night.

Stones for Time

I once gifted my husband a container of small stones on his birthday. I’m thoughtful like that. Each stone represented a month we had remaining until our children left home. While some may consider this a countdown to freedom, we have different intentions. We use the stones as reminders that even though the days seem long, the years are short. We have to live each exhausting moment of parenthood with intentionality and purpose, joyfully celebrating the gift of time and the brevity of life.

Alisha Illian, Chasing Perfect: Peace and Purpose in the Exhausting Pursuit of Something Better, Harvest House, 2020.

Analogies

Keeping Time with the Spirit

Keeping time with the Spirit is less a regimental march—left, right, left, right! ad infinitum—and more like a subtle dance, a responsive feel for what comes next. Lionel Salter offers a parallel in his description of a conductor’s role in an orchestra. “The conductor has to judge the proper tempo of the work, and indicate it clearly to the orchestra by movements of his baton.” But this is not just a mechanical process. What the music requires of the orchestra changes over the course of a symphony.

If tempo were just a mechanical factor of timekeeping, “it would be sufficient to play the orchestra a couple of ticks from a metronome, or, as sometimes in dance bands, say ‘One—two,’ to set the right tempo for the whole piece.” But of course that’s not what happens with an orchestra, because playing the symphony well requires different timing across the course of the work. “One of the beauties of music,” Salter remarks, “lies in its subtle variations of pace—the urging on, the yielding, the big broadening.” The conductor is helping the entire orchestra to become attuned to these subtleties.

James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now (Brazos Press, 2022).