Learning To Tell Time

On Sunday, churches celebrated Pentecost, commemorating the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church universal. At our small parish gathering, Father McMullen wore a red cope over his traditional white robe to memorialize the coming of the Holy Spirit through tongues of fire. In America, the Monday after Pentecost is Memorial Day, a holiday where patriots wear red, white, and blue to memorialize men and women killed in military service. This holiday weekend places in juxtaposition “American Time” and “Church Time”, two competing ways of offering rhythm, order, and meaning to life. My fear is that most evangelical churches spent for more time this Sunday talking about Memorial Day than Pentecost.

As followers of Christ, who also happen to be Americans, it is requisite of us to distinguish between the American ‘we’ and the Christian ‘we’, realizing that calibrating our lives around the biblical narrative and her way of telling time, instead of the empire, centers our life in Christ. 

For instance, Pentecost celebrates unity in the midst of diversity. The Holy Spirit weds believers worldwide to share in the one, living Body of Christ. Memorial Day on the other hand is a holy day within America’s civic religion consecrating men and women sacrificed on the alter of empire. It is fitting that we, Christian Americans, choose which holiday to observe. The first emphasizes our communal humanity as God “poured out His spirit on all people”, the second indoctrinates us to live in a story where war and violence are venerated, dividing the world into ‘us vs. them.’ Pentecost brings together a world replete with diversity, Memorial Day reminds us of the importance of defending our racial, linguistic, religious, and national distinctions.

The way we tell time, the rituals we keep, and the holidays we commemorate reinforce reality. The American calendar tells Caesar's story, and is filled with holy days remembering presidents, wars, military conquest, and nationalism. They act as sign posts, guiding us to what the empire believes really matters. The Christian calendar tells time radically different, and points to an alternative reality. First, the new year begins with Advent, not January 1. It then moves into the twelve days of Christmas, followed by Lent, Easter and ultimately culminates at Pentecost. These high holy days form the Christian community living in the midst of empire around a different set of values: community, dependence, sacrifice, repentance, and enemy love.

The marriage of church and state that discharged Christendom made this way of telling time difficult, especially in America where the Gospel has gotten all tangled up in the story of Western, white entitlement. Reorienting ourselves around God’s story, and His way of telling time frees us from the temptation to lump America’s story into God’s larger kingdom story.

As Christians, we are subjects in a Kingdom often at odds with the kingdoms of this world. By shaping life, and the way we tell time, around a different narrative, we experience a new world. A world not ruled by our manifest destiny, but by the patient hand of God that continues to slowly bring His kingdom to bear on earth as it now is in heaven. And as He quietly brings his reign to bear on the streets, in the courthouses, in the slums and nations of this world, we remember that we are citizens in a pluralistic, yet united kingdom transcending time, race, color, creed, and language.

What's Your Story?

Story is the currency of human contact, reminding us once again that life is a grand narrative. If you want to understand what someone values, listen to the stories they tell.  Without story, nothing has any meaning; life isn’t lived in the abstract. We long to know who we are, why we exist and what the purpose of life is, but we cannot locate those answers unless we first know our story and our place in that story.  The question ‘Who am I?’ can only be answered within the context of a larger inquiry which first and foremost asks ‘What is my story?’ [1] To indwell the story of God is to live with the answers to these questions.

Scripture places a tremendous stress on remembrance.  Israel is constantly challenged to remember the larger story of God:

“And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness.”[2]

We join Israel remembering the whole road we’ve come, from the Garden, down to Egypt, back up to Canaan, exiled in Babylon and scattered to the ends of the earth.  At the heart of this narrative is a God who takes the world by its corners and shakes us forward and shakes us free[3]; a God who is slowly and surely working in history to redeem all of creation.  And strangely, He has written us into the plot, giving us a place, a name, a job and a purpose. When we face the drama and dangers of life, we do so with an understanding that we are a people of the incarnation. We are a people who know what it is like to cross the Red sea on dry ground, to be fed with manna in the wilderness, to sing upon our return from exile, to meet Jesus on the road and to join Him in toiling for humanity.[4]  This is our story, a story of universal history that somehow has room enough in its final chapters for us.  

“Who am I?” can only be answered by asking “What is my story?” and that can only be answered by asking “What is the greater story of which my story is a part?”  My story, your story is one of cosmic history from the creation of the world to its consummation.  It is the spectacle of the human family, divided into kingdoms but united by one chosen nation whose own story is fulfilled in the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, giving meaning and purpose not only to universal history, but to our smaller stories as well.[5]  Therefore, whatever our small story, we offer it to Him for whatever place it may have in His larger story of kingdom fulfillment.

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[1] MacIntyre, Alasdair.

[2] Deuteronomy 8:2.

[3] Mullins, Rich. Lyrics from “Calling Out Your Name.”

[4] Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel In A Pluralistic Society.

[5] Ibid.