Kairos!

They say that timing is everything. Fishermen in the Pacific Northwest set their clocks by the ocean tides because they know that the best catch happens when high tide is just coming in. Commuters in New York City set their clocks by the traffic. If they leave home at 6:30 they arrive at work on time, but if they leave 10 minutes later, the trip takes an hour longer. Christmas shoppers have learned that 5AM on the day after Thanksgiving is the best time to catch the deals; if you sleep until 6:30, you miss out. Timing is everything, and if you live by a schedule, you know that this is true.

But there is another way to measure timing. If you sold 1000 shares of General Motors five years ago, you would have received a check from your broker for about $50,000. If you sold the same stock today, you’d be lucky to get $3000. No clock on the wall or date on a calendar told you to sell your stock; it just seemed like the right time. Pregnant women listen to their bodies as to when the baby is coming. It matters not what date the doctor said the baby would arrive; babies come when they’re ready, and then the mother announces “It’s time!” Farmers do not plant their seeds the same date each year; there are too many variables to do that. So how do they know when the time is right? The Farmer’s Almanac? Maybe. The neighboring farmers? Maybe. One farmer told me that the old fashioned way to know when it was time to plant was when the farmer went out into the field, dropped trow, and placed his bare butt on the black soil, and if he was able to sit there for five minutes, the soil was warm and the time was right. Timing is everything, or so they say.

For much of his three years of public ministry, Jesus tried to prevent his disciples from saying too much about him. When he came down the mountain after the Transfiguration, he instructed his disciples not to tell anyone what happened up there, because the time was not right. When he healed the man born blind, he ordered him to tell no one because the time was not right. When his mother wanted him to turn water into wine at a wedding reception, Jesus said to her “Why does this concern me? My time has not yet come.”

You see, there are two words for time in the Greek language; the language of the New Testament. One word is chronos, from which we get the word chronology. It means a specific time, a calculated date and hour that something is supposed to happen. We meet for worship every Sunday morning using chronos. A specific time. But the other Greek word for time…which actually means “timing” – that word is kairos. It means “special time,” or “the right time” or “the opportune time.” It is a subjective thing; a time when it just feels right.

And kairos happens all the time in our lives. When you met the love of your life and knew that “this is the one!” that was kairos time. As a parent, when you sense that the time has come to tell your children about the birds and the bees, it’s not because they turned 10, or hit fifth grade. It was simply the right time…the kairos time. When I decided to be a pastor, I didn’t have that date written on my calendar years in advance…it was a feeling in my gut and my heart that this is want I was supposed to do… that was my kairos time.

So in today’s gospel, Jesus has made his way into Jerusalem, along with thousands of others, at the Jewish festival of Passover. But apparently, Passover wasn’t just for Jews, because some Greeks who had also come, perhaps out of curiosity, had heard about Jesus and they wanted to meet him. “We want to see Jesus?” they said to Philip. They did not want to simply “see him.” Anyone could see Jesus. They wanted to meet him, to speak to him, to gain a relationship with him. Philip gets Andrew, and the two of them report to Jesus that the Greeks want to meet him. Now Jesus knows that his ministry had finally reached beyond the Jewish community; it was finally opened to the sinners, the “Gentile dogs” as the Jews love to call them. The tipping point had arrived, the right time, the opportune time, the kairos. “The hour has come” Jesus told his disciples. For three years, Jesus dropped hints about his death, and the disciples didn’t get it. For three years, he offered his friends a glimpse of the future, but they were too starry-eyed about the present to ever consider what was to come. And now Jesus hits them right between those starry eyes: “It is time for me to die.”

I expect that it was at this point when the disciples wondered if they had made a mistake in following this itinerant preacher from Galilee. Had they wasted three years of their own lives, had they left home and family and comfort and security, only to crash land in Jerusalem during Passover? These men loved Jesus; there is no question about that. But was their love poorly invested in someone who would only, in the end, disappoint them?

Author C.S. Lewis writes:

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

When the disciples heard Jesus say that the time had come for him to die, their hearts were broken. But what he next said must have taken their breath away. “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.” Was Jesus now asking them to die too? Would there be thirteen crosses on that hill in Jerusalem?

The simple answer is “no.” Jesus was not asking Peter and Philip and James to die on the cross with him. But he was telling that they would have their own crosses to bear in following him. They would have their own kairos moments along the way, when they would be asked to either stand up and be counted or sit down and shut up. There would be forks in the road when they would have to choose between loving him or loving their lifestyle in this world. There would be hatred, and persecution, and division, and dissention. In short, I wonder if Jesus was telling his disciples that dying for him might be easier than living for him.

Over the two thousand years since that day in Jerusalem, the church has asked less and less of its followers. The service and sacrifice of Christian people is no longer an expectation but rather an inconvenience. The very real definition of being part of the Body of Christ in this 21^st century has become one of moderation: worship a little bit, serve a little bit, give a little bit; any anything more than that gets labeled as “religious fanatic.” One Lutheran pastor wrote an article for a journal entitled “Everything I ever learned about sacrifice and serving I learned as a hockey parent.”

But every year, in these closing days of Lent, Christians see and hear something different. We watch a Savior die on the cross, we are reminded of the price God paid to save us from ourselves, and we somehow believe that it is true. And every once in awhile, there is a kairos moment; a moment when the time is right to change the way we live. A time to take a stand, a time to walk the talk, a time to follow Jesus with our lips and with our lives.

This is a sermon today without a conclusion. Can’t tie it up neatly in a bow and then go and watch basketball. My prayer for all of us is that these remaining days of Lent will bring us face to face with the Savior, and his grace will give us strength to be his servant in this world. Maybe the time is now….