Introduction

Let us pray.

Heavenly Father, draw us nearer to yourself

that we may know your will;

loving Lord Jesus, fill us with your joy and peace

that we may respond to your call;

Holy Spirit, inspire us

that we may celebrate our faith,

and give glory to you, God,

ever blessed Trinity,

now and forever. Amen.

In the first reflection I spoke about God’s very simple invitation to receive the loving gift of the shape of the day – there was evening and there was morning, and God said….The day of our discipleship and ministry in the kingdom of God begins with quietness, reflection, listening and the trust that gives us confidence enough to rest.

Now I want to offer reflections on God’s loving, creative, blessed gift of time. Again, you might protest that only a retired priest who has become out of touch with the realities of day to day ministry could speak of time as a gift from God. Surely it is the reality of time that brings us so much stress, so much over-stretch in our ministries. Well, let me begin by getting one thing clear. I do not believe that individual over- stretched clergy by ourselves can just resolve to ‘do time better’ and be successful at that in the long term. We belong to a fellowship of churches engaged in mission; and too often our mission has the spiritual and theological energy torn out of it and becomes seen as little more than church project management of one sort or another.

Alongside the sheer logistics of organising ourselves well enough to meet the demands of our particular ministry context, there is a seemingly relentless flow of demands from community members, diocese and the national church. We are told by holy people that Christian ministry is primarily about being rather than doing and we are tempted to respond with a hollow laugh. So, what we need for us to be able to receive God’s gracious gift of time are some major changes in the spiritualities and practices of our Church, as well as a renewed openness to and a renewed awareness of the presence of God holding out to us this precious and gracious gift of time. God who holds out the gift is God who gives the very simple invitation to receive time for our blessing and for the blessing of the people we serve. Let me be clear. I do not believe that we can organise the kingdom of God into existence by doing church better (even if it is obviously true that often we could do church better than we do.)

Living in Time with God

My own relationship with God can sometimes get a bit techy – at least from my side. When I find myself running so quickly I can hardly think and when people seem to want contradictory things from me at the same time, I find myself saying to God, ‘Well, great for you. You are God and I’m not. You live in eternity and I’m stuck with trying to do your work in time so why don’t you stop just sitting there on your heavenly throne and give me a hand?’

Well, if we’re supposed to have a living relationship with the living God, the relationship can stand a bit of exasperated honesty – even if the theology of it is truly dreadful!

For the truth is that from the very moment when God chose to breath creation into being, he committed to being present, always present, within creation. In creating time God committed to living within time. God committed to living within all the times where his beloved creatures would find ourselves in our joys and our sorrows, in our belonging and yes, in our lostness, alienation and confusion. The kenosis – the self-emptying of God - that reaches its furthest point in Jesus Christ taking the form of a slave and submitting himself to death on the cross, begins with God’s decision to be alive and to move and to walk and to speak with his beloved creation within time.

This journey through Advent and Christmas to Epiphany that we are about to start celebrates exactly this. God’s promise and God’s delivery on this promise to be present with us, within time. St Paul lays this on the line in one of his earliest writings. In the middle of a plea calling Christians to live like people set gloriously free instead of living with the mentality of people tied down in some sort of slavery, he says, ‘When the fullness of time had come God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law in order to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as children.’ (Galatians 4: 4 – 5)

Time and again in the Gospels we are told that at a particular time - before the start of day, in the middle of the day, late at night Jesus met somebody, did something, said something. At the beginning of his ministry we are told exactly what time Jesus met some of his first disciples. ‘They asked him where he was staying and he gave the response, as deep as it was direct, ‘Come and see’. They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was four o’clock in the afternoon.’ (John 1:39)

And when Jesus comes to the cross, the synoptic Gospel writers are very careful to tell us what time it was when it was all happening. Mark tells us Jesus was crucified at nine o’clock in the morning, Mark, Matthew and Luke tell us that darkness came over the earth from noon until three in the afternoon when Jesus actually died.

And of course, we have throughout the Gospels, but especially John, with his repeated use of the expression ‘the hour’ or ‘my hour’ or ‘his hour’ the sense that in Jesus the time is coming to its fulfilment. So, John has the whole series of passion narratives beginning with Jesus connecting his own awareness of who he is, where he is going, what he is for with his knowing what time it is. See John 13:1 – 5, especially verses 1 and 3.

I’m sure all of us are aware of the difference between the two words for time – Chronos – the time of day; Chairos – the right time for something to happen. It would be tedious for you to have me spell out the references to these. The point is that in those tetchy moments when I snarl my prayer about God living in eternity while I have to struggle on in time, I am telling the truth about my self-pity and frustration, but I am not telling the truth about time. For by God’s grace – and I just can’t help praising him for it – both these realities of time are bound up together like the two main chords of a single rope. God did not enter our kind of time from eternity when Jesus was born in Bethlehem. God has been present in time since there ever has been time.

That is why when the Psalmists sing aloud in their frustration, ‘How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? (35:17). How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself for ever?’ (89:46), they are not just yelling hopelessly into thin air. They are crying out, as people have cried out through the ages our protests toward God who is present with us in time. In Jesus God is intensely present with us (if I can put it that way) in time.

I speak of God giving us a very simple invitation to receive the gracious gift of time because I think we sometimes try to defend ourselves from being closely present with God in time by using God’s gift of time against him.

Gordon’s 60/40 rule of ministry.

Gordon’s 60 / 40 rule of ministry goes like this. For about 40% of the time we can realistically have some clear idea about what is going on. We are preparing to preach or lead worship; we are attending vestry or Konsistory meetings; we are making plans, arranging things; we are even saying our prayers as if God is another one of our projects.

But for 60% of the time we really do not know what is going on. People are phoning us, texting us, asking all sorts of questions, making unexpected demands, requiring unscheduled meetings. We are listening carefully and trying to make sense of the stories people are telling us about their sufferings, their needs, who has made them angry, why they can’t forgive, etc., etc., etc. Often it is in this ‘formless and shapeless’ time that the real work of good ministry is done. But ministers find it uncomfortable to have such shapeless and unformed time, so we tend to fill our diaries with organisational and management tasks and projects. This helps to boost our sense of our importance, but there is a serious risk that we are so busy doing ‘ministry’ in our own strength, that we miss the voice of God and the grace of God in the lives of ordinary people in ordinary places at ordinary times, and in our own lives too.

Make no mistake, there are times in our ministries when we genuinely do hardly have time to answer ‘the call of nature’, let alone have a proper meal, let alone spend quality time with God in contemplative prayer. God knows that and God is kind to us. He doesn’t abandon us at such times. God graciously works with us and through us, and waits patiently until the storm of activity is past.

Then our heavenly Father gives us the gifts of space, the gifts of relative peace; and God graciously waits for us to notice again that he is present to us and with us; and God holds out his scarred hands to us as he did to Thomas after the resurrection, and God says, ‘Here I am, now talk with me about what you are enjoying, talk to me about what is hurting you, talk to me about the people who are on your heart. And as we begin to relax God helps us to see that when we were so busy, he was not just standing back and holding our coats. God was in there grafting away with us.

I love this prayer of St Richard of Chichester:

Thanks be to you, my Lord Jesus Christ,

for all the benefits you have given me,

for all the pains and insults you have borne for me.

O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother,

may I know you more clearly,

love you more dearly,

and follow you more nearly, day by day.

Amen.

What is less well-known is another prayer of Richard of Chichester. He was a medieval soldier bishop and he was about to go into battle. He is said to have prayed:

‘Lord, this day I will be very busy;

I may forget you.

Please do not forget me’ Amen.

We may not all be about to go into military conflict, but we will all have days like that and God who loves us knows it.

As we receive God’s very simple invitation to receive this gracious gift of time, I think it is helpful to learn from people like Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection about what he called the Practice of the Presence of God.

I used to think that somebody who could come up with an idea like practicing the presence of God must be somebody who led a very ordered, very quiet, very peaceful life. As perhaps you will know, Lawrence was a lay brother who worked for the better part of fifty years in the kitchen of a Carmelite Friary in Paris during the 1700s. For much of that time he was what today would be called a kitchen hand.

I did some research on Brother Lawrence. He was in constant pain because of a leg wound he’d got in battle. On the one occasion when the abbot decided to give him a break from the kitchen by getting him to assist the wine buyer, Lawrence fell over a barrel and rebroke the same leg. When he got better, he was sent back to the kitchen. The kitchen was in a basement and the cooking was done over coal and wood fires. For much of his time there the kitchen had to produce 120 hot meals twice a day, plus special orders, such as when the abbot wanted an omelette and everybody else was having what was being served up. It was hot, busy, often dark and frequently chaotic. As a kitchen hand, Lawrence was expected to be able to move in lots of different directions at the same time.

By some miracle he got to have a conversation with his spiritual director. How on earth was he supposed to even think about God, let alone pray, when he hardly had time to think and his leg was hurting all the time? His spiritual director told him to find a picture of the face of Jesus, or draw one, and pin it onto the back of the pantry door. Every time he went into the pantry, he was to look at the picture as he passed and he was to know that Jesus was present to him and he was present to Jesus.

So, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The ‘Practice of the Presence of God’ does not come out of some detached spiritual experience of a hermit living in isolation, but from a noisy basement kitchen in the back streets of Paris. Lawrence’s spiritual director did not talk to him about ‘believing’ in the presence of God, or even ‘resting’ in the presence of God, but practicing the presence of God. Something we can all do, whether by simply naming the name of Jesus, praying the Jesus Prayer, gently or firmly feeling our holding cross, or whatever helps to knowing that, ‘The Lord is here, God’s Spirit is with us.’

My former boss, John Goldingay, a professor of Old Testament wrote that the distinctive thing about a biblical prophet was that, ‘a prophet is somebody who knows what time it is.’ I think that is also a key spiritual quality of a person who accepts God’s very simple invitation to receive the gracious and precious gift of time.

Amen

canongordon.oliver@gmail.com

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