Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3: 1-11; Revelation 1: 4-8
Sermon: The Redemption of Time
Topics: time, eternity, tyranny, alpha, omega
Preached: January 1, 2006
Rev. Mike Abma
Note: Revelation 1: 17-18 and Revelation 22: 13 both contain language in which Jesus uses the language of “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” to describe his identity.
Ecclesiastes 3: 1-11
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
2 a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
3 a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
7 a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
9 What gain have the workers from their toil? 10I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. 11He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
Revelation 1: 4-8
John to the seven churches that are in Asia:
Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, 5and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.
To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, 6and madeus to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.
7 Look! He is coming with the clouds;
every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him;
and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail.
So it is to be. Amen.
8 ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.
This is the Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God
INTRODUCTION
After spending a day and a half in Ontario, Canada, at the beginning of last week, I found myself crossing the border at around 12:30 on Tuesday. Crossing the border ended up being extremely slow that day. It took one hour simply to pay the toll to get onto the Bluewater bridge. Then it took another 30-40 minutes to get to that point on the American side of the bridge where the traffic fans out into about 8 or 9 different lanes. After already waiting so long, you want to pick the fastest lane. I saw a lane with two large RV’s in it. I thought, if those RV’s get through as quickly as a car, then that lane will move very quickly. So I committed myself to that lane. In my rearview mirror, a young couple in an SUV was faced with a similar decision – which lane? He was driving and was perhaps thinking what I was thinking. He followed right behind me. His wife, or girlfriend – I’m not sure which – was pointing to the lane next to us. Clearly she thought that was the better choice.
Well, she was right and we were wrong. You see, those RV’s we were behind took four or five times longer than any car, making our lane the slowest moving. What I saw in my rearview mirror was the young woman in the SUV clearly wanting him — the driver — to acknowledge that she was right. She was making her point pretty emphatically, because, all the while, I could see his knuckles turning white as he silently gripped the steering wheel harder and harder. After five or ten minutes of this, I saw him turn to her and say something. I don’t know what it was, but it must have been pretty explosive because there was suddenly a full-scale argument going on.
Finally it was my turn to have a nice chat with the border official. I looked at my watch. I looked at the lanes beside us. By my estimation, picking our slow lane rather than the one beside us made about a two minute difference. Two minutes. I thought to myself, after spending two hours waiting, why in the world is this couple letting two minutes ruin their trip, and sour their relationship?
TYRANNY OF TIME
But that is the tyranny of time.
The tyranny of time is that we never have enough.
We are either irritated that we are idle and have to wait.
Or we are aggravated that we are so busy we can’t enjoy life.
Either way, we never seem to have enough time.
Perhaps time is so tyrannical because we all know time is a limited resource.
We all know that once an hour, a minute, a second passes, it can never be recovered.
And so, we have a love-hate relationship with the “tick-tock” of time
For “tick” there is a time to build;
“tock” –there is a time to tear down
“Tick” – a time to laugh; “tock” – a time to weep
“Tick” – a time to love; “tock” — a time to hate
“Tick” – a time to be born; “tock” – a time to die.
You know, even the sound of “Tick Tock” can drive us crazy.
We own an old pendulum mantel-piece clock that has a fairly loud tick tock.
In the last church I served, we had church school classes in my living room – high schoolers, 11th and 12th graders. They hated that clock. Each time we had a class, they literally begged me to stop the clock, to stop the pendulum, to quiet the “tick – tock.” It drove them crazy, they said.
For their sakes, I did stop the clock.
But there is no way of stopping time.
Time marches on – that is the law of time.
The author of Ecclesiastes knows this.
In Ecclesiastes 3, we have a poem that pictures how time encompasses all things — we live in time the way a fish lives in water.
It is our natural environment.
But ever since the fall, ever since Adam and Eve sinned, time has been tinged with the curse. Time has become an enemy.
And so, at the end of Ecclesiastes in chapter 12, there is another poem that pictures how, with each “tick, tock,”
we are closer to that time
when our bodies are bent,
our work is still,
our eyes are dim,
our ears are dull,
our minds are confused,
and finally, all things stop,
and we return to the place from which we came – to the dust of the earth.
We know what Ecclesiastes is talking about.
We have our own way of expressing it.
We see life as one big hill.
When we’re 16, we think we are on top of the hill,
and everything is downhill after age 21.
Of course, at 21 we think we’re on top of the hill
and everything is downhill after age 30.
Of course at age 30, we think we’re on top of the hill
and everything is downhill after age 40.
The point is, no one wants to be “over the hill.”
That is why there can be a tinge of sadness with the end of an Old Year and the coming of the New. We know our days are numbered.
We know we are perishable.
We know we are mortal.
We know each “tick, tock” is a reminder of our beginning and our end.
JESUS — ALPHA AND OMEGA
The author of Ecclesiastes asks what God is doing from beginning to end?[1]
What is God doing?
The author of Ecclesiastes did not know the answer.
But we have been given the answer, at least in part.
God sent his Son to be our beginning and our end.
Jesus, the only Son of God, entered our world and entered our time.
The Nicene Creed very purposely describes Jesus as
“begotten of the Father before all ages.”
In other words, Jesus is like his Father and not subject to Time the way we are.
In fact, Jesus, as the creator of all things, is also the creator of time.
Time, like the rest of his creation, was once not an enemy but a friend.
But then his whole creation became corrupted by sin,
and everything, including time, became tainted with the curse.
The mystery of the incarnation is the mystery of his rescue plan.
Jesus came from outside our space into our space.
Jesus came from outside our time into our time.
He entered our “tick-tock” reality.
He entered our beginning and he endured our end.
He clothed himself with the perishable, and put on our mortality.
He was born, he suffered,
and when he hung on the cross, all the gospels spell out the hours
– the 6th hour, the 9th hour, the tick, the tock, of time.
And then he died.
Had that been the end, his death would be like every other death.
But his end, and his love, caused a “wrinkle in time.”[2]
In that wrinkle in time, he rose from the dead as someone entirely new.
The Bible uses language like,
the first born of the dead, the first-fruits of the new creation.
Jesus, the perishable, became clothed with the imperishable.
The mortal became clothed with immortality.
His tick tock weight of affliction became the eternal weight of glory.
What is God doing from beginning to end?
The answer is, he is making all things new through Jesus Christ:
our beginning, our end
our first Word, and our last Word.
Jesus Christ,
the one who created all things,
is now the one who is also renewing all things.
In Christ, even time is being redeemed.
Time will not be swallowed and disappear in some big black hole.
It will be cleansed of its curse and in some way – I can’t say how –
but in some way it will be part of the new heaven and new earth.[3]
And our own time will not be swallowed and disappear
in the darkness of death.
When the trumpet sounds and our bodies are raised, we will be clothed with imperishability. I can’t say how, but in some mysterious miraculous way, we will carry the eternal weight of glory.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR RIGHT NOW
What this means for right now is a new perspective on time.
No longer do we need to be frantic about making the most of our time.
No longer do we need to feel as if we need to indulge our every whim,
that we need to “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die.”
No longer do we need to feel as if being stuck in the slow lane will ruin our
day.
No longer do we need to live like Peter Pan’s Captain Hook,
afraid of the sound of “tick tock.”
No, we can rejoice and be glad,
with each hour, each new day, each new year.
We can also be silent and still, waiting and knowing in the tick, tock of time
that Jesus is Lord of our past, our present, and our future.
We can, for we have been freed from the tyranny of time.
Jesus says to us all this morning,
“Eat, drink, and be …. full of hope.
Do not be afraid.
I am the first and the last.
I was dead, and see, I am alive forever more.”
Amen
Prayer: Heavenly Father, fill our hours and days with thanks and praise here on earth
So that they are a prelude to the everlasting day when we will join the heavenly hosts in singing holy, holy, holy to you, the Almighty, the one who was and is and is to come. Amen.
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The attempt of the author of Ecclesiastes to discover what God is doing from beginning to end is much like Albert Einstein’s attempt to discover the so-called Theory of Everything (that theory that holds all things together). ↑
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A phrase borrowed from Madeleine L’Engle. ↑
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I say that a redeemed sense of time will be part of the new heaven and the new earth because it is difficult to conceive of an existence with a resurrected body outside of time. ↑
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