Chronos or Chiros, August 22, 2010

Jeremiah 1: 1-10
Luke 13:10-17
Often times in reading from the Bible, we skip over the references to who was King, who was Priest, who was keeping the flame, in which provinces of a long ceased Nation. We read the Bible, particularly words of Prophecy as God's Word to us, like some ancient horoscope, the mysterious words of Nostradamus foretold long ago. The reference to Kings and Priests and Provinces are markers of time, reference points, allowing us to know this was a real circumstance in the lives of real people.

In school we were taught the Scientific method, extrapolated from Natural Sciences to Social Sciences, that GIVEN certain THEORIES we can articulate HYPOTHESES, we can then create tests and experiments and PROVE the TRUTH of what we have wondered about. But about 1985 two researchers from the University of Michigan demonstrated that we could never actually prove anything, there are always spurious anecdotes which do not fit. Instead, they determined that all we can ever do is describe what we have seen and what we know to be true, hoping that others in a different time and place will find single points of truth in our circumstance that match and undergird their experience.

The Ancient Greeks had two different understandings of TIME, CHRONOS and CHIROS. Chronos is where we have acquired the understanding of Chronology, in Human Society there are clocks and calendars for measuring Minutes and Hours and Days and Years, time is always moving froward from the Past into the Present determining the evolution of the Future. One of the greatest inventions of human society was the clock which measures the regular passing of seconds and minutes and hours, before which the Church was responsible for tolling the hours, controlling when people went to work and when they returned home. According to Chronos, time can never go backward, because we might change circumstance and undo what has been done. We can never go back, we can only go on. But there is also CHIROS, God's Time, which is not bound by Seconds or Centuries, but remembered in lifetimes and experiences of faith. When in Seminary, students question and try to define ideas as ABSOLUTE TRUTHS: What is Evil, What is Good, is Righteousness time bound and cultural or True?

Some of us are hardwired to arrive early, others are perpetually late but all this is according to Chronos. Chiros is about the Quality of time. To look into the eyes of a newborn and recognize that one day this child of God will be a Grandmother herself, to witness a couple in their nineties holding hands with all the love and affection of newlyweds.

Similar to The Call of Jeremiah, I had a wedding recently, where the Groom asked me just before entering the Sanctuary, that he had been asking everyone if we had any advice about getting married, without missing a heartbeat I said “Don't do it!” He looked at me outraged, sputtering that if his bride heard the minister say this she would be furious. And I responded, if you need to listen to others' about how to live your live, what to do and not do, then you are not ready, Marriage needs to be a conviction that you can do nothing else but be committed to one another. Each of the ancestors of faith describe their Calling, as being something they tried to avoid, Abraham, Moses, Isaiah all protested that they could not take this on, Jesus in the Garden at Gethsemane, described “Lord, Take this cup from me, allow it to pass by. But if it is your will, then allow me to be used to fulfill it.”

Jeremiah's Call describes not only that God has a use for us, a plan, but by describing “before you were formed I knew you”, God affirms that there can be a God ordained purpose for our lives, a purpose we did not recognize or choose until the circumstance is before us. Most of us hear the encouragement, “Do not say I am only a child, for God is with you” and also “See I have put my words in your mouth, I have set you over Kingdoms and Nations.” The added burden most of us fail to heed is that God's Word is to PLUCK UP, BREAK DOWN, DESTROY and TO OVERTHROW in order to BUILD and to PLANT. We want to create without letting go of what has been. Often times, we cannot embrace resurrection without first memorializing the Death.

Ingrained in our psyche is a reaction that to Pluck Up and Break Down, to Destroy is somehow EVIL. Part of our acceptance of all things new and different, is a questioning of if there is Evil in the world? Our deConstruction of History, our Global perspective, listening to so many different pundits make us question whether all heroes actually have a shadow self of weakness and corruption, whether all villains are without humanity?

Prior to coming to Central New York, we lived in the western suburbs of Milwaukee in the late 1980s and early 90s. There was a young man in his 20s named Jeffrey Dahmer, who was preying upon homosexuals. Regardless of your feelings about homosexuality, Jeffrey Dahmer was murdering these men and committing cannibalism. Like Hitler and Musselini, he was the personification of evil. But one morning an older woman came to worship, frail, mourning and grieving for her grandson, the child she used to read to and bake cookies for. She did not excuse or make excuses for what atrocities he had done, but she wept for the loss of the grandchild she had loved.

I remember receiving a phone call when our eldest was toddler, it was on a Day off, and having no babysitter I brought him along to sit in my lap and play on the floor. The couple began to describe that their daughter had suffered pos-partum depression. She had risen in the middle of the night, taken her baby to her husband's favorite golf course and drown the baby in the water hazard. She had been arrested and eventually served ten years for taking the life of her child. I remember feeling embarrassed and yet that it was somehow especially poignant to have our infant crawling into the lap of this grandmother as she wept for her child and grandchild.

Controversy arose when in the midst of this settled Western European Suburb in the Midwest, Buddhist monks wearing Saffron colored robes wanted to build a Temple. The City Government was outraged and attempted to block any development claiming this was a Judeo-Christian Community. Rarely do I wear a Clerical Collar, but I recall attending that Community Hearing as people spat racial epitaphs and fears. I was one of the last to be able to speak that night, and addressing our Mayor and Council described that to deny a religion the right to create a place of worship, meant all the other places of worship, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, should also be denied. That routinely, we had taken our Confirmation Class to Jewish Synagogue and Catholic Mass, so as to have our children able to explore and ask questions both of other faiths and their own, to make an informed and conscious choice of what they believe, and that I would look forward to bringing our Confirmands to the Buddhist Temple.

One Sunday morning a car pulled into the parking lot several hours before worship. A woman came to the Pastor's office dressed in a Nurse's uniform, she described having worked several shifts back to back, and last night was hectic in the Emergency Room. In the midst of several crises, a family came in with a sick child. The Doctor had ordered up Codeine, and going to the Pharmaceutical cabinet she had mistakenly taken a vial of Cocaine instead. The child went into convulsions and she realized what she had done. They were able to fluch the drug from her system and stabilize the child. But surely the parents and hospital would sue her. She envisioned the loss of her job, her license, her career, she had been working multiple shifts because her husband was out of work. I don't know why, but something possessed me to ask: “If the family were members of the Church, rather than strangers, would it make a difference? Could you ask their forgiveness, could you forgive heir anger at you?” She left, and a short time later another car drove in, with a young couple who described a terrible night in the ER, as their child had received the wrong medication. For the next 18 months, because she was not wearing a uniform at church, and they were not parents in crisis, but simply a family in the congregation, the two worshipped beside one another unaware. On the day of the Hearing, they faced one another, and recognized one another, and heard each other's pain and forgiveness.

There is evil in the world, when we ignore one another's humanity, ignore one another's needs, let alone their human rights.

Bill Mauldin was an Editorial cartoonist during and after World War II, especially known for his characters Willie and Joe who were soldiers in a foxhole. He described having published a cartoon, titled MICKEY MOUSE CIRCUS at STATE FAIR. In the cartoon were several very hagard looking mice, which obviously had been white but someone had dyed their fur pink and green and bright blue. The cage was filthy and the rodents severely neglected. Mauldin described that more than any other editorial, he received response to this. People were outraged, wanting to report whomever this depicted to the American Society for the Protection From Cruelty to Animals. He described feeling puzzled, that on days prior to and for months after, he had had editorial cartoons about would be immigrants living in deplorable conditions, malnutrition and war, wanting to be set free to come to America, and America debating closing our borders.

On the Sabbath, Jesus was teaching in one of the Synagogues. And there was a woman who had suffered for 18 years with an infirmity, who was hunched over and could not stand upright. When Jesus saw her, he Called her and said “You are set free from your infirmity.” The ruler of the Synagogue was indignant because it was not the time for healings, it was the Sabbath.

What I had never seen in this passage before was Jesus reference that her “infirmity” had bound her, like a donkey or ox tied to a post, like being bound to evil. And all of us would have compassion to allow an animal to drink, so why not to set free a Child of Abraham from sin. It is easy for us to respond to the need to set free the oppressed, to clothe the naked and feed the hungry. But in this circumstance taken from the life of Jesus, he saw someone oppressed by circumstance, needing to be set free from evil, restricted by the hours of the day that she had not come during healing hours, and he offered her forgiveness and healing and raised her up as a Child of Abraham.