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The Time of Our Lives (by Jonathan Storment)

The Time of Our Lives (by Jonathan Storment)

Last updated on: March 5, 2014 at 6:33 am by Scot McKnight

The Time of Our Lives (by Jonathan Storment) 2014-03-05T06:33:06-06:00 Scot McKnight

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The Time of Our Lives

I come from a Free Church tradition, for those of you who don’t know, that doesn’t mean we have a symbol of an eagle for our services, it just means that we aren’t as tied to the historic liturgy and traditions from older streams of Christianity (like creeds or prayer books)

I am aware of the dangers and the benefits of a free church, but these are my people, and I plan to be with them as long as they will have me. However…

One of the things I’d love to reintroduce to my tribe, or at least my church, is the Christian calendar.

To be honest, it is a learning curve for me. Growing up, my family was suspicious of all things Catholic. My parents barely let me be friends with girls named Mary.

So since Christian tradition doesn’t swing a big stick for us, I’d like to argue for it from the last place my people would expect.

The Bible.

Specifically, Leviticus.

Stuck between all those passages about how to kill a goat and abominations, there is an incredibly powerful idea, that our time matters, and the story we lay on top of our time matters.

God gives His first people a calendar, with an annual cadence, as a way of telling a story about their time that is more than just when to plant and when to harvest.

Did you know that the Bible talks about how we think about time on almost 1,000 different occasions? In fact, the Bible cares just as much about time as the modern Western person, but in a very different way.

I doubt most people in America have a strong awareness of time as sacred.

Or at least we don’t think we do.

Did you know that more men get vasectomies during March Madness than any other time of the year? (Which I think is both brilliant, and telling.) We do set apart certain parts of the year. The danger of not paying attention to the Christian calendar is that we will orient our time around something other than God and His work in our lives. We will orient our days around April 15th or July 4th or Superbowl Sunday.

We get our word “holiday” from the idea of Holy Days. There are certain days and seasons that are different than others. They are days that are set apart to remind us that the Jewish/Christian faith is one that is rooted in history.

Something happened. Actually lots of somethings have happened, and how we view our time is one of the ways we remember, because we think God is up to something; because we live in an enchanted world where God has been working all along.

There is a deep seated human need for all our life to not just blend into one continuous stream of moments. We know intuitively that there is a time for joy and a time for tears.

A couple of months ago I read a fascinating article in the New York Times about how people inside prison view time. As a former jail chaplain I thought it was incredibly accurate. Inmates don’t wear watches, they don’t count time the way people on the outside do. They measure time in months, not minutes.

The man writing the article, had taught inmates for over a decade, and had learned from them to measure time in a different way, they taught him to measure time by love and loss. Time wasn’t just a series of to-do lists but a way of recounting meaning, and determining future direction.

Which is very much like the way the Bible talks about it.

One of the books of the Bible, Ecclesiastes, says that time is God’s way of helping us embrace our limitations. We will live and we will die and the world will go on. And so we should number our days because this is wisdom.

Time is God’s gift to us…which carries the idea that what we do with it is our gift back to God.

This leads me to Lent, a season of honest appraisal of the state of our hearts. And while this season is new to me, Lent is starting to make just as much sense to me as Easter.

Lent, is the Easter season’s misunderstood sibling, it is the other side of the coin for Easter. Because if you really want to understand Easter, you have to really understand death.

Before we can get to the truth of the resurrection, we have to look death squarely in the face. Not just the abstract versions of death, but the ones which we are more familiar with. The way death came to our marriages, or that friendship, or that job, or the thousand other ways that we have been bearers of death in our life.

For religious people, Lent can be a painful, difficult experience. Maybe that is why the Christians of old observed it.

We can start to believe that if we sing the right songs, or participate in some ritual, that this darkness won’t be true of us anymore. But a stained glass version of denial is just as poisonous as any other version.

This is Lent. It can be painful, but it also is very freeing.

It is the way Christians have worked into the calendar a time to prepare for good news, by being very, very honest about the bad bits that led up to it. It is where Christians have forced themselves to come to grips with their face in the yelling, shouting crowd saying, “Crucify Him! May His blood be on our heads!”

In a time of culture wars, political shouting matches, and increased belligerent social discourse, Lent whispers to Christians “Remember your sin and drop your stones.”

Lent reminds us what drew us to Jesus in the first place. Grace, before it is received is an indictment, and forgiveness leads with an honest naming of wrongdoing.

Because only the sick need a doctor, and only those made from dust need Resurrection.

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