The Texturing of Time
Revelation 21. 1-6a
Isaiah 25.6-10a
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 5th November 2006

November 1st: All Saints Day. The first day of the ancient northern winter. The first day of the Celtic year. The ancient Celtic pagan festival of Samwhain (So-wane). It’s a day associated with the ‘Communion of Saints’ that doctrine in the creed that asserts that all Christians in every age and in every place, are mystically joined with Christ in God and therefore with each other in the act of worship, and especially in the Lord’s Supper.

What are we to make of such a doctrine, especially when we see its pagan antecedents. A day when the ghosts of the dead walk among us: that’s the ancient Celtic idea of November 1st. Really! What are rational, contemporary Christian thinkers going to make of such a strange and suspect doctrine? Isn’t it all of a piece with some kind of wishy-washy new-age spiritualism?

This doctrine is both intelligent and significant and has important implications for how we live richly and meaningfully as Christian people in the contemporary world. Today I want to reflect with you on our experience of time and what this doctrine might offer us. In a fortnight we’ll reflect on what this idea says about our experience of self and community.

Is this doctrine of communion of saints just an ancient pagan idea that was incorporated into a church of a more accepting or even superstitious age? Well, “No!” is the short answer although we can’t go into all the background today. But let us acknowledge the little fragments of truth that are present in the pagan idea!

The dead are with us in many ways – ways that make perfect sense to the modern mind. We all carry the genes of our ancestors: genetic material is combined and recombined to shape our bodies and our development, but their particular structures accurately replicating the DNA of our parental chain. We carry their genes in our bodies.

The history of ideas tells us that it is very rare to have anything new under the sun. Ideas tend to flow through human history and shape our thoughts and our ideology. A retired minister of my acquaintance was moving from the Manse. The young offsider of the removalist was not impressed by the many boxes of heavy books he was required to carry out to the truck. As he passed the owner of the books on the verandah he complained with disgust in his voice: “Dead men’s brains!” And he was right of course. GK Chesterton  wrote that "Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead." Just as we carry their genes in our bodies, we also carry their ideas in our minds.

But beyond this, the dead live on in the love and esteem in which we hold them. We carry them in our memories and in our hearts. To the extent that the dead live on in our bodies our minds and our hearts, the pagan idea of them walking among us makes some sense, although not in the macabre and immediate way many people think.

The experience of worship, however, brings in a totally new dimension to the issue. In worship we encounter God and sense the love and grace and forgiveness that embraces us as sinful human beings. Rather than experiencing ourselves as the self-actualising, empowered, rational masters and mistresses of our own destiny, we discover that we are children, that we are sinners, that we are creatures sustained by the loving presence and power of God. When we really worship we discover again our frailty, our sinfulness, our vulnerability and dependence – and we discover again that its alright to be vulnerable, that it’s not catastrophic to make mistakes because we are loved and forgiven and held and nurtured by a marvelous and welcoming Presence. With Isaiah upon the mountain or John of Patmos in the vision we know that God has prepared a feast, a celebration, a welcome home party and that we and all people who have heard and understood his gracious invitation are both God’s guest and God’s great project, his work of art in a renewed creation.

Isaiah of Jerusalem ministered in a time of great crisis. In his day Jerusalem was besieged and the threat of collapse was imminent. In the midst of fear and hunger and the threat of death, Isaiah presented the vision of a great feast in the very place of their present deprivation, on the mountain fortress of Jerusalem. Similarly, John of Patmos in the Revelation, saw beyond his island prison to a day when God would really dwell with his people and wipe away the tears from their eyes. Their visions are connected in language and content. In two very different places and two very different ages the same vision becomes real and empowering for a besieged and an imprisoned community, a community that defines itself not in terms of present circumstance but through its relationship with God and his promise.

Like them, as we discover ourselves as dependant upon, and sustained by, and blessed in, God, in ways beyond our capacity or our deserving, we become aware of others so held and nurtured and blessed. Because God is eternal and all loving, we discover one another mystically held together by and in God. The vision and hope of Isaiah became the vision and hope of John, becomes the vision and hope of us and all God’s people.

The communion of saints is, at its heart, about how we know ourselves and one another, through the grace of God and not through present circumstance or the usual human dynamics of responsibility and guilt, accountability and blame. As Paul says, we know one another only in Christ and not by human understandings.

[John Ellerton – Hymn 319 ?] But can that experience really transcend the limitations of time?

Time is difficult for us to reflect upon because we live in it as a fish lives in water. And yet, we are living in an age in which time has been transformed as a concept and as a structure that constrains our lived experience. It was only a little over a 100 years ago that global time zones were established. Time was a local phenomenon, specific to place. Town clocks before that often only had an hour hand – because that was all anyone needed.

Human temporality has been transformed since then. Nearly every wrist or purse in this building wears a watch with measurement of minutes and seconds, and not a few of you are timing me! We work and play within the virtual world of email and SMS in which communication is telescoped in time so that message and response can be almost instantaneous. After Mr Einstein we know that time can be warped, and experienced very differently. Our days are heavily scheduled and our hours are logged and analysed. We live, it seems, at a faster and faster pace in the daily rhythm of our lives and in the flow of time in our culture. We live with Moores Law that suggests that IT technology will double in speed and capacity every 18 months. We have coined ‘Future Shock’ to describe experiencing change coming at us like an express train. The pace of life seems speeded up, time seems telescoped. Our temporal and spatial worlds have been compressed.

I could go on with reference to the social analysis of “timeless time” – time as something we increasingly control, stretch, manage, shift. We set our VCR’s to record and play back when we wish. We shop at 3 am if that suits us. Now we can even be scheduled for birth at times that suits the doctor’s timetable, or in some countries, scheduled for death at a time that suits ourselves.

One consequence of this is that we are more and more empowered, we all become a little like Dr Who, the Time Lord, if not of the universe at least of our own existence. The present becomes the important dimension of life, along with the planned and controlled project of our proposed future. The past drifts into insignificance, and the future as an unconstrained and serendipitous unknown becomes vaguely threatening. (The future, all unknown!) There are disconnections in our experiences of time: disconnections of past and certain parts of the future, and a dominance of the present. This has serious impacts in human society – in how we evaluate options and make decision. Let me mention four examples of this.

This past week the climate change debate has taken off. Various of our political leaders have emphasized that we will not give up our competitive advantage in the Australian economy, nor is there any obligation upon us to take action when others who are our economic competitors will not also take action. This makes sense, of a sort. But it is an entirely synchronic analysis – an analysis bounded by the present, and our current systems. We will compare ourselves adversarily with those in the world at the moment. There is no thought for the future, no connection with our children or grandchildren. It is a rhetoric for today with no reference to tomorrow. Within this logic we might all happily keep competing until the world chokes on our shared exhaust fumes. I’m not wanting to discuss one set of policies over another or have a shot at the government or the opposition – the way the discussion is framed is almost entirely bounded by the present! Here we have the present dominating the future without regard to what the consequences will be for those of us who follow after.

A second example operates the other way. Some years ago societies like the AMP Society were demutualised. Bodies like the AMP were mutual fund in which monies were subscribed and managed in a shared way to cover risk carried by members. The Mutual society owned the accumulated assets which were handed on to the next generation to help meet their risks. Over four or five generations considerable assets were accumulated. Then in the 1990’s the managers of many such funds ‘demutualised’ them, took the shared assets and converted them into shares, into tradable commodity on the stock market. The present generation took the wealth inherited from previous generations and decided to own it for ourselves. There may be good reasons to open such structures to the interplay of market forces, but it did mean a net transfer of wealth from the past to the present, and just how it will be handed on to the future was radically changed. Here the past was financially ransacked for the benefit of the present.

A third example relates to Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead”. Some years ago a prominent Victorian University rationalized its operations to save money. The way they chose to do this was to simply close their Classics department. Fifty academics were made redundant and the teaching of Greek and Latin languages and Greek and Roman cultures was ended. I was reminded of that scene in The Life of Brian in which the revolutionaries sit around grumbling “What have the Romans ever done for us?” and one by one catalogue all the wonders of Western civilization. Apart from mathematics, theatre, philosophy, astronomy, medicine and law what have the Greeks and Romans every done for us? Nothing, according to the bean counters of this modern Australian university. Certain actors in the present decided that certain gifts from the past should not be passed on to the future.

A fourth example is closer to home. Two weeks ago the worship committee of this church met. There was some spirited discussion of church music. Now surprisingly, (many of you won’t believe this) there were differences of view. Some people like the old hymns, and some people like modern Christian music. Some value the past. Others value the present or even look to the future. I must confess I lean towards the older material. In planning the music for this week with a member of the worship committee I suggested two lovely hymns one drawn from the second century liturgy of the Didache and one much more modern one from the 5th century liturgy of St James. Both suggestions were met with a studious, but eloquent silence! What shall triumph in our music – the tunes of the past or the tones of tomorrow?

In each of these four examples our experience of, and values around, time are crucial! And in all of them the power is with those of us in the present to impose decision upon the past and the future, and often it is the interests of the present that prevail.

The communion of saints invites us to situate ourselves always within the great flow of God’s time, within the history of his dealings with his people. It means that we take seriously the Psalmist’s affirmation that ‘one generation shall declare God’s works to another’. The communion of saints means that we live with the memory of the prophetic vision of God’s abundant feast to which all peoples are invited, and the hope of Revelation that one day we will find God again living among us and fulfiling the world in a new heaven and a new earth. The metaphor of the feast invoked by Isaiah is a key theme in the Jewish and Christian tradition.  In this feast, this Communion, we recognise the feast that Jesus shared, the feast of justice and joy shared in life, the feast of love and transformation shared in his death.  In discerning these meanings of the feast we cannot but discern our oneness with those who have sensed this and known this in every place and in every age. We find ourselves not just held in the love of God now, but in his eternity as it has touched and transformed time in the flow of human history.

Our own experience of time in our world is rushed and compressed and disconnected from that flow of history and God’s saving work in human experience. Around this table, time is given texture and shape and substance as we pray and open ourselves to the mystery of a love that is strong enough to hold us and all people in the gracious loving patience of God.

And in that textured time, we find space for decisions that are mindful of generational justice, of remembering and honouring the past, and feeling it present with us, as we also are aware of and open to the future, with all its challenges, as a sphere of God’s goodness and promise to us. We find ourselves between his Cross and his Coming in the continuing dynamic of resurrection and new life, the power of which touches not only us in the present but those of past and those in the future and holds us mysteriously and powerfully together in the worshipping community of Jesus.