Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Second Corinthians 6:1-13 June 28, 2009

As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. For he says, "At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you." See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation! We are putting no obstacle in anyone's way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see - we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. We have spoken frankly to you Corinthians; our heart is wide open to you. There is no restriction in our affections, but only in yours. In return - I speak as to children - open wide your hearts also.

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I suppose it's a sign of my having reached my mid-life years, but I find I'm very conscious of time lately, especially how fast it always seems to go. We all know the old saying, "Time flies when you're having fun." These days, it seems, time flies whether I'm having fun or not. So I can really relate to the poem I came across this week:

When as a child I laughed and wept, time crept.

When as a youth I dreamed and talked, time walked.

When I became a full grown man, time ran.

And later as I older grew, time flew.

Soon I shall find while traveling on, time gone.

I don't know who it was that wrote those words, but I'm sure we can all appreciate the truth of them. The perception that time speeds up as we grow older is very common, if not universal.

I remember watching a nature program on television one time. Some scientist was discussing our sense of time and how it relates to the animal kingdom. He said that our time sense is a function of our metabolism; that the faster our heart beats the slower time seems to go. He said that a bear in hibernation would have a very slow heart rate and thus a very fast sense of time passing. A fly, on the other hand, with its racing pulse, would sense time passing very slowly. Flies are hard to catch, he said, precisely because they perceive us to be moving at a snail's pace, except of course for fast paced people like Barak Obama. For bears in hibernation though, time simply races by. I don't know how many bears he had to talk to before he figured out what their subjective perception of time was, but his point about people was that as advancing age slows our metabolism, our time sense really does speed up. We're not just imagining it.

Now, I don't know if that's true of me or if I've just been having too much coffee lately. What I do know is that for most everyone I know time does seem to fly. It often leaves us with our heads spinning, and it often leaves us wondering whether we're using our time wisely. That can be a very tricky question. If we have high standards for ourselves, as most of us do, it's so easy to start feeling guilty about wasting time. It's easy to become all rushed and harried, trying to cram more into the time we do have. Whenever I head off in that direction, I always seem to end up sacrificing quality to the god of efficiency. I've had to learn, the hard way, that there needs to be some reasonable balance between how much I'd like to accomplish and how many hours there are in a day. Usually, I think I'm doing pretty well so long as I'm making some progress without carrying around a lot of anxiety. But then I come across a passage like the one for this morning and I'm not quite sure what to do with it.

Paul, in a number of places in his letters, seems to feel that we're not nearly anxious enough, or at least, that our anxiety isn't focused in the right direction. In today's passage, for example, he starts off by quoting the prophet Isaiah who said that an acceptable time was coming, a time of salvation. But then, in no uncertain terms, Paul proclaims that that time has arrived. "Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation." The message, in case any of us are left wondering, is that we had darn well better get on board with God's salvation before it's too late. Isaiah was preaching about a messiah he believed was coming soon. For Paul, the wait was over. The world was in its last days before the end of time. The culmination of all history was at hand, and Paul deeply felt the weight of that history bearing down on the world. He believed absolutely that those who accepted Jesus as the messiah would be saved and those who didn't, wouldn't. The task God had given into his hands was to save as many as he could.

Paul had good reason to believe this. After all, Jesus believed it. You may have noticed that we're usually pretty selective about the gospel passages we use on a Sunday morning. In our tradition we don't often focus on the "end of the world" sayings of Jesus. But they're definitely in there. If you simply read through the gospels looking for apocalyptic passages, you won't have any trouble finding them. "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Sound familiar? We have good reason to believe Jesus wasn't being metaphorical when he said things like that. In one passage (Matthew16:28) he says, "Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom." For Paul, that was gospel. Paul, it seems, fully expected to be alive to personally witness the second coming. And believing it was just around the corner is what lent an underlying sense of urgency to most everything he said. Paul was in a hurry. He believed time was running out.

The question for us is, what do we do with the fact that it is now over two thousand years later and, as far as any of us know, the second coming still hasn't happened? Paul's sense of urgency seems very out of keeping with the lives most of us are living, doesn't it? But that hasn't stopped a certain class of minister from continuing to beat the drum of immanent demise. The message of the apocalypse is very much in fashion lately; in books and movies, as well as literally thousands of pulpits across the country. I've been reading a book lately by Nicholas Guyatt called "Have a Nice Doomsday." I love that title. The book is a fascinating, sometimes frightening study of the modern American apocalyptic movement.

One example from the book is of John Hagee, pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. Hagee, according to one website, is "perhaps the most powerful and influential Christian Zionist figure in America." When it comes to the end of the world, there is no question about which side Hagee is on. Visiting Hagee's church one Sunday morning, Guyatt talks about the message he hears from the pulpit:

Hagee asks a pregnant question: "Do the people in the churches of America really know God?" America, it seems, "is being saturated with a counterfeit Christianity." Fake Christians and phony pastors are promoting an empty religion that doesn't make any real requests of its adherents, and doesn't outline any consequences for those who reject it."

"He warns us that we could be taking our last breath - that Christ could come back to earth this minute - and that the imminence of the Rapture should compel us to beg God for forgiveness."

"Let me ask, you, [Hagee thunders] "when was the last time you heard your preacher preach a sermon on sin? Your preacher sounds a lot more like Dr. Phil or Sigmund Freud than St. Paul."

Well, I'm willing to give him that one. I don't have any trouble talking about the insights of psychology in my sermons, but I do find St. Paul's apocalyptic messages hard to preach. According to Hagee that makes me what he calls a "cotton candy" preacher. For me, Hagee's basic message seems so patently absurd that my knee jerk reaction is to simply dismiss him. What's harder to dismiss, what I find it simply mind-boggling, is that he has some 18,000 followers in his church, a global TV ministry, has published and sold dozens of books on prophecy, and, at least during the Bush administration, had ready access to many of the movers and shakers in Washington.

How exactly are we supposed to respond to this? Well, one possibility is to say that Hagee's is right and we're wrong. Since St. Paul preached the apocalypse it is the bounden duty of all faithful Christians to do likewise until such time as Jesus does get around to coming back. That's one possibility. I have to confess though, it doesn't really work for me. Over the years I've come to the conclusion that if this is what it means to be a Christian, I'm going to have to start calling myself something else. However, I'm not willing to concede to someone like John Hagee the right to define for the whole world what is and is not Christian, no matter how hard he pounds on his pulpit. Personally, I think his apocalyptic preaching is not only wrong, it's dangerous. At a minimum, it reinforces in people an intolerance for anyone who dares to think differently. How do we account for all of his many followers? Beats me, but one thing we do know, psychologically speaking, is that people who are afraid can be easily manipulated. No doubt there is a great deal of fear alive in the world today, and some people seem intent on using our fears to further their own agendas.

All that aside, who knows what Paul would say if he were alive today. Who knows how his beliefs and preaching would be changed by the fact that the world is still here 2000 years later? It's quite obvious that his thinking on some subjects changed just over the course of his own lifetime. Are we to believe that he would want us to continue proclaiming for all time the same message he left us with, regardless of how times might have changed? I don't think so.

I do think though, that there is something to be learned by his sense of urgency. While I'm perfectly comfortable letting Jesus come back in his own good time, what is undeniable, as far as I'm concerned, is that we do have a limited amount of time here. Jesus seemed pretty clear that he wanted us to use our time in particular ways; worshiping God, certainly, but also ministering to the sick, the lonely and the lost. Giving of ourselves in love to our neighbors, to strangers, even to those we call enemies. We don't have to live in fear of the end of the world in order to have a healthy appreciation that time is passing and we need to use it well. In that at least, Paul was right. Now is the acceptable time. Now is our day of salvation.

Well, I had intended to share a couple more thoughts with you this morning but, honestly, I ran out of time. (Ha ha) I do want to close though with a piece that I found very interesting and very much to the point. It was written by a man named Arnold Bennett.

Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions...

I have to agree. Time is a most precious possession. I choose to believe that every minute of the time we have is a gift of God's grace. It comes to us with no strings attached, but perhaps with the hope that we will use it well, in the service of a graceful ministry.

Amen.