CHAPTER ONE

NEW

My subject is how to preach the faith of the church—again? We preachers repeat ourselves. To be a faithful preacher is to be willing to preach the truth again and yet again. We've got fifty-two Sundays a year, without interruption. The Common Lectionary requires texts to roll around again every three years, like clockwork. I've preached the death and resurrection of Jesus repeatedly—at least 135 times (not counting a botched attempt as a seminarian in 1969). I ought to know something of the challenge of preaching even so stirring a story as Good Friday and Easter again. The Second Law of Thermodynamics declares that even the most heated outburst of energy immediately entropies. Everything is moving toward average, even the most brilliant sermons.

In one of my early congregations, Hubert Parris could always be counted upon, if the service stirred him, to stand and recount the story of his conversion again. He had narrated his conversion so many times I watched as young children mouthed the words before Hubert could repeat them—a little girl on the front row mouthing, in unison with Hubert, “I was sunk in sin. I was lost, lost, I tell you … .” The story of Hubert's Damascus Road Experience (which actually occurred on the highway headed toward Gainesville) went limp in the retelling. It was the again that got us.

Hubert is us preachers, even on Easter. The modern world makes neophiles of us all. That which is new is self-validated simply by being novel. Truth becomes truth when it is endorsed by my subjective recognition of it as new, by my excited acclamation, “How fabulously fresh!” Inner, subjective validation, in which my subjectivity becomes the supreme arbiter of all truth, is just one inheritance of modernity, that epoch that thought it had ended inheritance. Schleiermacher created modern theology when he made “God-consciousness” the proper subject matter for theology. Note that “God” is no longer the concern of ​theology now but rather our subjective “God-consciousness.” Human experience of God is made more interesting than God.

A confession: as a child of modernity, I too am servant of novelty. One of the weaknesses in my preaching is the enjoyment of novelty engendered in me by twenty-five years of ministry in an academic community that tends to confuse innovation with intelligence and to hope that originality is a safeguard against mediocrity. That's the worst sort of book review: “This book tells the truth, but alas, it says nothing new.” Every university town is Athens where, to paraphrase Acts 17:21, “they spent their time in talking about something new” (Greek: kainos).

I therefore confess a bit too much delight in cleverness—the gospel delivered with a lime twist. I have thrilled to some academic emerging from Sunday at Duke Chapel muttering, “That's so-o-o interesting! Haven't heard the story of the prodigal son from the point of view of the fatted calf. How deliciously novel!”

As a young pastor I imbibed Fred Craddock's Beecher Lectures, Overhearing the Gospel.¹ Our problem, said Craddock, is that the gospel has been “over heard,” preached and preached again until it went limp. We preachers must therefore find that Kierkegaardian ironic side door into the gospel, that stunningly new means of presentation whereby our hearers hear again as if for the first time.

Kierkegaard had the problem of boredom and faith ever before him. S.K. said that he took as his task “reintroducing Christianity into Christendom” after Christian language had become boringly wilted with thoughtless overuse. He attempted this by avoiding traditional Christian language, attempting to speak of the faith “in other words.” Having no intention of theological innovation, S.K. wanted to say the same thing that Christianity had always said, but “in other words.”² The language of the church is bankrupt. Boredom is the great modern malady. Now all must be said “in other words.”

Craddock's lectures traded heavily on Kierkegaard's statement that “in a Christian land there is no shortage of information about the gospel, what is needed is a new hearing of the gospel.” (I discovered, in my own preaching since the seventies, that this is not a “Christian land” and there is a “shortage of information about the gospel.”) Notice that what's needed is, according to S.K.'s construal of preaching, something about us rather than something about the gospel.

Back in the seventies, pastors were either guardians of the tradition— the faith delivered by the saints—or young bucks (like me and my buddies) ​who assaulted the tradition and mocked the saints.³ Today I spend most Sundays in congregations who are contemptuous of tradition, empty their auditoria of all historic Christian symbols, and try to look as much like a mall as possible, or as some say on their signs out front, “church for people who hate church.”

“Take off that tie!” shouts an usher as I make my way in from the parking lot. “Do you take your latte with a touch of amaretto?” It is so much easier to change that which we fear (the gospel) than to risk change in ourselves by someone as challenging as Jesus.

All but one of my most rapidly growing congregations see themselves as aggressively innovative, making all things new. Churches that once prided themselves on being careful custodians of the past and cautious protectors of the status quo, have now become celebrators of and aggressive advocates for the current age. The eager discovery of “the next thing,” once the province of theological liberals, has now become the specialty of so-called Evangelicals. Theological minimalism and reductionism among Evangelicals, where everything about the faith is reduced to “the message,” conspire to produce a naive, enthusiastic embrace of the media of contemporary culture in worship with little worry that the content of Christian worship may be radically changed in the experiment.

Neophilia has become the status quo demanded by a capitalist economy. Neither Scripture nor the Christian tradition told these churches that “new” is the chief virtue of a church. What passes these days for new tends to be an uncritical capitulation to the culture, subservience to a “tradition” of the past three decades under the guise of innovation. In loving the new more than Jesus, we lay bare our deep accommodation to a capitalist culture. The market demands new in order to keep functioning. More consumers than believers, we shop for the “new and improved model” of faith “that works for me.” Any church that acts like a shopping mall is sure to be treated that way.

Don't you find it curious that High Holy Days get “old” mostly for us preachers? Most of our people come to church on Christmas or Easter hoping to sing the same old hymns, to hear a familiar story.⁴ No layperson ever asked, “Easter? Again?” Most laity come to church on these high days hoping it will all be “again.”

Is our boredom with the gospel simply an occupational hazard of being a preacher, of having to handle holy things repeatedly until they droop? Are our laity on to something in their inchoate sense that here our faith rises or falls, that here we are at the center of the story that can't be ​improved or expanded but only be reiterated? Perhaps our laity, failing to receive the benefits of a first-rate theological education, are less well defended against Jesus than we clergy, therefore to them, the good news of Jesus Christ stays news.

The Temptation of New

In 1913 the French writer Charles Péguy exuberantly pronounced “the world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years.”⁵ The birth of modernity was accompanied by unparalleled hubris.⁶ At last humanity had succeeded in doing something wonderfully new, newer than Jesus.

Modernity's self-congratulatory spirit was contested just a few years later by a bloody, pointless war, the invention of modernity's new world order. The brave new world—seen from the muddy mess of World War I—was cruel on a scale unknown in warfare thanks to a deadly concoction of the technological discoveries with the political science of modernity. And soon afterward the Second World War demonstrated that, morally speaking, we had learned little from the First. The modern world gave us not only better and bigger bombs but also the philosophical means to deploy them against civilians without even a twinge of conscience. Of course, like all modern wars, both World Wars were fought in order to make the world a better place.

Prominent German theologians told us that Christianity had overcome the primitive, archaic faith of Israel. Jews were not only questionable citizens of the New Germany but also relegated to the worst of fates—their religion was vestigial, out-of-date. Nazi ideologues exhibited the more somber side of the grand European Enlightenment.⁷ Voltaire not only gave us a world in which God had been left behind as the world moved onward and upward but also the bloodiest century we had ever known. Voltaire's snide references to the Jews were somehow connected to the smoke of Dachau. As Dostoevsky ironically commented, without God, anything is possible.

The self-importance of the modern, the sense that humanity was making all things new, continues into the present day which some call “postmodern.” Postmodernity may be the latest phase of modernity's faith that novelty is progress, that destruction of the old is necessary to make way for the new and improved model, and that we are—all evidence to ​the contrary—progressing forward. What is called “postmodern” may simply be modernity raised to an even higher level of hubris—“most-modern.”⁸

Art critic Robert Hughes says that the primary emblem of the modern was the Eiffel Tower, finished in 1889, built as the centerpiece for the Paris World's Fair—a grand mechanical exhibition on the centenary of the godless French Revolution. Gustave Eiffel (an engineer, not an architect) designed a great tower with its top in the heavens (Genesis 11:1-9 leaps to mind) that would thrust itself, phallic-like, into the now emptied heavens. Having tamed the earth as our dominion, la France moderne would now claim the air. The past—previously esteemed by the human race—became the enemy, something limited and earthbound, something dreadful to be defeated. The tower would support a radio antenna, the source of new, humanly engendered revelation in a world now bereft of a Revealer. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire, ex-Catholic, in a mocking poem compared the tower to the Second Coming of Christ. Where Christ once left the earth to ascend into the heavens, now the tower “climbs skywards like Jesus,” leading all blessed modern humanity in its wake.⁹

A century after Péguy it is more difficult for us to muster ebullient delight in the avant-garde. The ascent of the tower was followed by a plummet into the grubby trenches of the Great War. About the time that work was begun on the glorious new tower, we invented the recoil-operated machine gun.

Not everyone thought positively about the new and the modern. Back in 1818 Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Some warned that the mechanical paradise would lead to a desolate hell. Today when we see an automobile, we tend not to think of one giant step forward for humanity but rather of toxic pollution, a mechanical servant that has become our menacing master. It's difficult to get anyone to say a good word for the godless, technologically induced future other than intellectual throwbacks like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.¹⁰ For those who think more deeply, modernity appears anything but grand.¹¹ The new has been subjected to almost a century of critique as we learned the hard truth that not every step forward is evolutionary progress and that in each new dawning day, while something is gained, something is lost and the loss may be painful.¹² The modern notion (a mix of Enlightenment and Romantic delusions) that history is actually moving somewhere—onward ​ and upward—has been exchanged for postmodern cynicism that history is going nowhere.

The real killer of the idea of progress is evil. As a young pastor, Karl Barth picked up the morning newspaper and there read a “Declaration of Support” for the Imperial German war effort, a statement signed by some of his most admired seminary professors. That declaration made Barth question what he had been taught by his professors, realizing that all of his received theology was tainted by the lies of modernity. Thus began Barth's great theological rebirth, which was also an escape from the debilitating grip of the new.

As Liberal Protestantism dies, the last words upon its lips are, “Progressive Christianity.”¹³ In modernity, even those who are falling down and backward have the illusion that they are climbing upward and forward.¹⁴ “Progressive Christianity” will never take hold in Germany. Progressive is a peculiarly American appellation for the Christian faith, sign of our failure to come to terms with the somber side of modernity. The Germans learned too much about themselves—the hard way—in the twentieth century, to think of the term progressive as anything but ugly.

The Christian story is not about humanity gradually, but surely, going onward and upward—Progressive Christianity!—but rather about a God who descends in the darkness to rescue humanity from its downward spiraling plight.

The Temptation to Be at Home in Time

The Bible is obsessed with time, containing over eight hundred references to the subject. While Scripture frequently depicts sacred places, holy space, it more often is concerned with sacred time. “What, then, is time?” asked Augustine. He answered that he knew well enough what time is, but if anybody asked him to explain time “I am baffled.”¹⁵ Although I respect the difficulty of attempting to analyze time, much less explain it, even for so great a mind as Augustine, I doubt that many of us really know, even inchoately, what time is, or more importantly, what time is now. One of the pressing questions before the church, anytime we gather, is “What time is it?”

The world's time is not kept by the church. “The church is not the world.” On this “humble fact,” says James McClendon, theology begins.¹⁶​John Howard Yoder said that the church has friction with the world because what Scripture names as “world” is “structured unbelief,” a “demonic blend of order and revolt”¹⁷ from the world's true Lord. The world's time is a component in Yoder's “demonic blend.” As Karl Barth said (in Evangelical Theology), “Israel means ‘contend against God,’ not ‘contend for God.’ ” The church's contention against God takes many forms. One form of Constantinian resistance to the gospel is to sanctify the world's order, to become dependable patriots rather than restless pilgrims, for the church to be at home in the world's time. Yoder called it the “Solomonic Temptation”—the sacralization of the emperor's time in order to make the state the functional equivalent of God. Visit the mall in Washington, D.C., and you will note large, heavy, pagan-inspired granite buildings, all bigger than they need to be, all made to look as if the United States is eternal, as if Thomas Jefferson is forever.

There is a reason our civic architecture is indebted to imperial Rome. Classical literature, philosophy, and art have as their theme the capturing of the eternal. Pagan civilization rests upon the fear, expressed as a question by Aristotle: “Can it be that all things pass away?”¹⁸ By thinking this, or building that, or endowing this chair in the university (or publishing this important book!) we shall not die. We shall go on forever. We have it in our hands—through Platonic philosophy or steel frame construction, to be immortal.

The first three miracles in John's Gospel are Jesus' direct challenge to three great gods of the imperial world—Dionysus who presumed to have a monopoly on turning water to wine, Demeter who thought that she was the source of bread, and Asclepius who reputedly managed the health care delivery system. My point here is that Jesus also challenged Chronos, retrieving time from the grip of a fake god. True, Scripture definitely depicts time as the cycle of recurring seasons, natural time (Gen 1:5, 2:1-3; Eccl 1:4; Ps 78:5-7). Yet the Bible seems more concerned with disrupted, eschatological time, time in which God takes time for God's own purposes, thus disrupting cyclic, natural time (Mark 1:15; 2 Corinthians 6:2).

As William Cavanaugh notes, the purpose of the Constantinian (that is, pagan) eternality project was to make ourselves at home in the world's time.¹⁹ Caesar has a stake in people believing that the cyclic passage of natural time is all there is. Cavanaugh calls Constantinianism “an escha-tological heresy.” This age, as we have developed it, is normal. There is ​nothing more. What we have built will last. It is normal. We shall be like gods, for what does any pagan want of a god other than eternality?

Charles Taylor demonstrates that secular political society (the political order in which we moderns now live) could not work without enforcement of a strictly secular (that is, Godless) view of time.²⁰ Contemporary states presume that civil society occurs in “ordinary historical time” as the achievements of ordinary women and men rather than having any sacral, extrahistorical establishment in “higher time” either by heroic founders (as in the case of Remus and Romulus in Rome) or by God and King David (as in the case of Jerusalem). This “radical horizontality,” as Taylor calls it, made God into an ahistorical abstraction. God is still a sort of vague, primordial “Creator” who inspires a degree of awe, but any sense of particular providential care or miraculous intervention is absent. The official “god” of the secular state is an indescribable, therefore undemanding, timeless “mystery.” Thus, the modern state virtually required God to be outside of the modern state's time and, therefore, irrelevant. The modern state demands that we first believe that this time is all there is in order to convince us that all there is is the state. We have no time but Caesar's, no God but Caesar.

On the other hand, Barth declared that “humanity is temporality.”²¹ Humanity is that species for whom the past vanishes, the present is an enigma, and the future is unknown. We literally don't have time. Time has us. Behind us is time lost, and before us is time unknown. All of our achievements (including our invention of the modern state) are trivialized by time. Kant noted that everything “is” only for a moment. After that, everything is only “it was.” The fleeting present alone is “real”; all else is a play of thought. Schopenhauer said that time made human existence empty because of the daily human experience that “at every moment, all things become as nothing and thereby lose their true value.”²² Barth says that humanity, as time-bound, time-dominated finite creatures, “has no beyond.”²³ Time makes the “Thousand Year Reich” a lie. We have arisen from dust and, even now, we are rapidly returning to dust. The great Julius Caesar, strutting about on the stage of history, is now undistinguished dirt. All we have is the moment and, even as I have written this on my computer, this moment is no more. We have no beyond. Humanity is momentary, inextricably temporal.

Only God has a beyond. Only God can do something about our human problem with time. When the Word was made flesh, eternity took ​time, defeated time's futility. We are surrounded by nothingness that is time lost,

But 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… . So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God. (Gal 4:4-5, 7)

We are not redeemed away from time but as Paul says here in Galatians, God moves into time, adopts our time, redeems us from bondage to time's ravages, and generates “the fullness of time.” That's the main reason the church attempts to help us take time in the name of Jesus by demanding that we follow the church year. The church teaches us to mark time according to Epiphany, Lent, and Easter rather than as Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Mother's Day. We are thereby encouraged not to escape time (as in some Eastern religions) but rather to live in time as those who know what time it really is.

Many have noted the peculiar tendency of the Gospel narratives to locate themselves in a particular geography, constantly mentioning place names and specific geographic locations that no one has ever heard of or is likely to hear of again. The Incarnation is thus demonstrated by Judea, Bethlehem, and Galilee as typical of a God who locates. Note how the Gospels also take pains to state that Jesus occurred not only in place but also in time. “The next day … ,” “It was about the third hour … .” “Immediately … .” “On the Sabbath … .” “It was night … .” In Jesus Christ, God takes time, our time.

From Jews, Christians got the notion that time begins and ends in God's own good time. Christians claim that God became flesh, entered time, and died. Then God raised Jesus from the dead and thereby broke time's sovereignty, disarmed Chronos, unmasked time (Col 2:13-15). That victory is known as resurrection—old time's defeat. In the resurrection our comfortable normality was exposed, eternal-looking temples collapsed, gods were put to rout, and eternality was presented, not as a possible human achievement but rather as pure divine gift. In the resurrection, so we believe, God gave us that which we could never have on our own—a beyond.²⁴

And yet, what was the first act of the two apostles after they witnessed the aftermath of resurrection? They went back home (John 20:10)! They attempted to get back to normal. Whenever the emperor's official time is ​disrupted, we immediately move into action and try to “get back to normal.” Homeostasis—that is, static time, uneventful, eternal time—tends to be the goal of most every human undertaking, including the church. We so want things to be predictable, tied down, fixed. Death is the end result of our time, the main reason why nothing that is, is forever. And given a little time, with the help of stoic resignation, we can get used even to death.

Against our deadly accommodation, in the resurrection, death was disarmed and time was taken by God. The end, the future, is in Easter commandeered by God. Time disrupted, eventful is Jesus' time; time under the illusion of normalcy and eternality is Caesar's time. In discussions of war, I have noted, a major argument against pacifism is that “war is hell, has always been hell, and this war is too. Big deal.” The violence of war is normal, unavoidable, and the way things are, reality. This defense of war shows a failure to think, a disregard of the history of war and the current practices of war. It is nihilism meant to establish Caesar's time as normal and inevitable.

It is of the nature of the Trinity to disrupt time, to rob Caesar's time of its vaunted claims of inevitability.²⁵ Time in the Gospels seems compressed, heated, fast-paced, and not only in the Gospel of Mark (whose favorite chronological word is “immediately,” euthys). It takes Mel Gibson's movie two hours to belabor what Mark does in less than five minutes. One of the reasons we read the Gospels in church is to read ourselves into this peculiar, heated, frenetic gospel time.²⁶ When Jesus Christ voluntarily submitted to death on the cross, rather than confront Caesar with Caesar's weapons, he thereby robbed Caesar of the illusion that Caesar's time is normal.

In exile, with no future, Israel had her end named as her beginning: “Remember ye not the former things… . Behold, I will do a new thing” (Isa 43:18-19 KJV). God is taking back time. In Constantinianism the present social order, the state, is seen as more real, more normal, more eternal, than the reign of God. Peace is then defined as what can reasonably be expected of the state, justice as the accomplishment of the lesser of possible evils, progress is that which a reasonably well-functioning administration might possibly deliver. Under Constantinianism the supreme theological virtue is “realism.” (I think this accounts for the enthusiastic support of the Iraq war by University of Chicago theologian Jean Bethke Elshtain. War is the major means of achieving security— security defined as the secure continuance of the state.²⁷) As John ​Howard Yoder said of the world after Constantine, the concept of the millennium was pulled back from the future (whether distant or imminent) into the present. All that God can possibly have in store for a future victory is more of what has already been won by the empire.²⁸ And we have shown, in Iraq and elsewhere, that we will defend the status quo, for all its limitations, with murderous intensity, calling that “freedom.”

What's now is normal. Joel Osteen's best-selling book is Your Best Life Now! Now is the time for the “best.” Now is as good as it gets. Marcus Borg similarly collapses eschatology in his attack upon “otherworldly” notions of salvation. Borg says that, “Salvation means to be saved from our predicament in this world.”²⁹ Now. Here. People on top, people in power, tend to be threatened by talk about alternative futures, preferring to construe their now as God's.³⁰

Sometimes the attempt to normalize the official present—what is— takes another tack in which the new age of Christ is relegated exclusively to the future, so that since the old age is all-powerful over us, we must adjust ourselves to whatever the current administration is good enough to give us now. The great chronological heresy of Constantinianism is not only its assertion of the normalcy of the now but also its assertion of progress, development.

So-called Progressive Christianity is the latest chapter in our attempts to trim gospel time to the world's time, to denude time, to empty time so there is no agency other than ours.³¹ They have thoughtlessly adopted the adjective progressive and attached it to Christianity without any apparent awareness of the theological ambiguities in the concept of progress from a Christian perspective.³² Progress, our progress, becomes the functional equivalent of God. We assume, in modern fashion, that the past is an inadequate, lesser experience of reality and that we are progressing onward, upward to reality in a greater degree. We are gaining on our goal of being God. (I find it odd that, just over half a century from Hiroshima and Dachau, there are Christians who use progressive in a positive way.)

Or we go for inner piety, reducing God's promised future to personal experience, or a philosophical ideal, or the church invisible. All of this is meant to disembody and permanently postpone Christian hope. I even worry that the current infatuation with “spiritual practices” could be just another attempt to normalize time—since God is absent and silent, follow these practices to keep busy now in order to sanctify the present order as that which God intends for all time. Some of the “spiritual practices” being urged upon us seem effete, too tame for a people who are evoked by ​the wild, untamable Word. The spiritual practices needed by preachers are those that give us the guts to be in conversation with, and to speak up for, a true and living God who loves to meet people through the Word. Where the word of God is rightly preached, said Luther, demons are unleashed. I therefore resonate with Marva Dawn's characterization of prayer by preachers as “battling the demons.”³³ The great P. T. Forsyth emphasized that preachers require a peculiar kind of prayer life. Prayer for the “preacher … is only serious searching prayer, not prayer as sweet and seemly devotion at the day's dawn or close, but prayer as an ingredient of the day's work, pastoral and theological prayer, priest's prayer.”³⁴

Islam, as well as any faith I know, has marvelous spiritual disciplines for taking over time in the name of God. The faithful follower prays to God throughout the day, stops everything and prays. It must be a marvelous way of taking time for God. Similar disciplines are practiced in monastic spirituality as the Psalms are prayed through in the course of a day. Mainstream Christianity has generally taken a different view. We do not, perhaps we cannot, take time for God. God in Christ takes time for us and interrupts, takes time from us. God does not wait, thank God, for us to fine-tune the spiritual disciplines to the point where we are praying all day long. Rather, God grants us the freedom to be about our vocations in the world, doing what we have to do in this life. Then, while we journey (Acts 9, the call of Saul), God suddenly shows up, unexpectedly becomes an event in our time, takes our time, disrupts our lives for God. While we are busy planning a wedding, God interrupts, impregnates, and enlists a young woman in a revolution (Luke 2). Eventually, God promises really to take all time from us, that is, all of us shall die and be subsumed into God-determined time, like it or not.

This is how we can say that Christian worship is not primarily, not at its core, something that we do. Rather, our worship is something that God does for us, in us, often despite us. Today's talk about “spiritual practices” could be just one more in our long line of attempts to take time on our terms. Thank God that we don't have to cultivate a tedious set of practices in order to live in God's time. God takes time.

Time Made Strange

Classical Greek religion (that is, most of what we call philosophy) attempted to connect us with the divine, to think rationally and thereby ​to escape contingency, to rise above flux and instability and to flee the ravages of time into a Platonic eternity of thought that is impervious to mortality and the passage of time.

Kierkegaard was among the first (I presume) to note that the Jewish and Christian views of time are very different from the pagan. In Christianity the believer seeks not to rise above time or to escape time but rather to hear the command of God in time, like Abraham heard God calling him on a starry night. Is that why the synoptic Gospels begin with relinquishment, with Jesus' demand to let go of jobs, to abandon marriage and family, and to follow him into an unknown, never predefined destination? Time flows along normally until Jesus sets foot on the scene.

The Greeks marveled that time was full of pattern, recurrence and the eternal return. The first historian, Thucydides, said that the task of the historian was to sort through the flux of time and place, the confusing, odd particularities of human events and find universally recurring patterns. Armed with knowledge of these patterns, the historian could rise above the seeming senselessness of contemporary events and, because one had uncovered the eternally recurring patterns of human history, one could predict how future events would go. Nietzsche's “myth of eternal return” was something similar—this world is finite, closed, bearing within it only a limited number of possible combinations. True newness is impossible. What appears to us as “new” is only the cyclical recurrence of every finite situation an infinite number of times, said Nietzsche.³⁵ There's nothing new under the sun; it's just the same old thing again and again because all that happens in time is left up to us.

Thucydides and Nietzsche also imply that truth comes through theory, by discovering, through reason and abstraction, that which is universally, eternally true. Detached contemplation is therefore the platonic best way to think. Intellectual discovery is not really discovery of something genuinely new, but rather the uncovering of pattern and order that leads to predictability and understanding. In Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates catches an earnest young man on his way to rat on his father for killing a slave. Euthyphro is sure that he is doing the pious (that is, the good) thing. Socrates is not so sure. He asks the young man if his action is right and good because the gods love it and, therefore, it is good or do the gods love it because what he is doing is good? And you know that Plato favors the latter. Plato believes that an action is good because it is inherently good. It is in the structure of reality. It is not part of time but serenely above ​time. It is eternally good, always and everywhere, for everyone. Even the gods must bow to what is real, that is, to what is eternal.

Kierkegaard realized that Plato was more in love with eternality and abstract ideas of good than in love with the gods. Against Plato, Kierkegaard recalled the story of Abraham's near sacrifice of his son Isaac. Did Abraham think that he ought to offer God his only son because such an act is built into the structure of reality and is therefore always and everywhere good? No. Abraham feels commanded by God, at that time and that place, to commit this act. There is no suggestion that what Abraham does or refrains from doing is applicable to everyone everywhere, noted Kierkegaard. Abraham acts upon a command of God in that specific time and place because nothing is real, nothing has eternality but God.

This is the peculiar sort of truth—God—that is found by practicing truth, embodying truth, engaging in life in a certain time and place. From a biblical point of view, argued Kierkegaard, truth is that which is to be obeyed, not simply that which is contemplated with serene detachment. Truth for the Greeks means that which is most general, most universal and free from time, that which is to be contemplated. Truth for the Hebrews is local and historical, a form of summons, not for everybody, a vocation in time, not above time.³⁶ Truth for Jews and Christians is found not in detached, sublime contemplation of the ideal but rather in obedience to this God amid the tug and pull of this time and this place.

Theologian Robert Jenson shows that Jews and Christians have a very peculiar idea of what it means for God to be “eternal”:

The biblical God's eternity is his temporal infinity… . What [God] transcends is any limit imposed on what can be by what he has been, except the limit of his personal self-identity, and any limit imposed on his action by the availability of time. The true God is not eternal because he lacks time, but because he takes time… . [God] is not eternal in that he secures himself from time, but in that he is faithful to his commitments within time. At the great turning, Israel's God is eternal in that he is faithful to the death, and then yet again faithful. God's eternity is temporal infinity.³⁷

The Greeks presumed that outsiders, barbarians, could be brought to the truth of things—provided they were willing to learn Greek. Socrates demonstrated this by teaching a mere slave boy—Meno—to do geometry. The Hebrews, on the other hand, treated foreigners as idol worshipers ​who couldn't become people of the Covenant because they had not been invited by Yahweh to do so. God had shown a sort of serene particularity, here, now in choosing the Hebrews for a Covenant but not others. The faith of Israel shows few aspirations to be a universal religion. Nor was Hebrew morality commended as universally applicable for everyone. This is the way that the people of the Covenant behave after having their time commandeered by God.

Contemporary Evangelicals, therefore, make a big mistake to say that Christianity is absolute truth in the face of alleged postmodern relativity. Jewish-Christian truth is relative to whatever God says. Nothing is true until God speaks. God is not to be found outside of time, absolute, but God descends to time and speaks, reveals, commands, demands, and summons. What's good is good because God commands this in this time and place. Such truth is always relative to the God we've got. Such truth wants to be obeyed rather than contemplated. Obeyed now.

Time and Preaching

I have this on my mind because there appears to be a new form of preaching, unknown in the entire history of Christendom, that for lack of a better term I call “PowerPoint Preaching.” I'm talking about the computer program that adeptly throws images and words on a screen. PowerPoint has become the new preacher's essential assistant in communicating of the gospel.

You need not buy a projector to do PowerPoint Preaching. What you do is take some biblical text and boil it down to no less than three “biblical principles,” or a set of “Purposes for a Better Life,” or “Guides for a Better Marriage,” or “Six Steps to More Fulfilling Sex.” Sometime ago I edited a collection of sermons from Duke University Chapel. I belatedly noted that none of these seventy-five years of sermons looked anything like the PowerPoint Preaching that I was now hearing everywhere. I have just read through a stack of Rick Warren's sermons. They are all, “How to Get More out of Worship,” “The Way to Joy in Your Life,” and, of course, “Purposeful Living.” Warren majors in minor, abstract, general propositions such as “Five Ways to Get into God's Word.” (A sermon that begins with “Last Sunday we said you need five things. You need people to live with, you need principles to live by, you need a profession to live out, you need power to live on, and you need purpose to live for.” ​Note the conspicuous absence of “God” from the list. God is apparently unnecessary when you have got the right list of principles.) Rick has succeeded in doing what no preacher in the Bible—much less preacher Jesus—has ever done: reduce the vast, bubbling mystery of biblical faith to a platitudinous slogan fit for a bumper sticker.

What we're seeing here is a curious Evangelical embrace of the old, now discredited, liberal attempt to reduce the Christian faith to its “essence,” or its “essentials,” reframing the historical, narrative Christian faith as a matter of abstract propositions and helpful ideas.³⁸ Marcus Borg does this, one more time, in his Heart of Christianity. The motivation for such reductionism is always apologetics. Borg says that he writes because “there are no serious intellectual obstacles to being a Christian. There is a way of seeing Christianity that makes persuasive and compelling sense of life in the broadest sense.”³⁹ There you have it. If you look at Christianity through the lens that is given to you by late, capitalistic, market-driven, autonomous individual liberalism and if you reduce the faith to some generality that makes “sense of life in the broadest sense,” then, wonder of wonders, no intellectual obstacle.

Marcus is perilously close to Rick's introduction to The Purpose Driven Life:

This is more than a book; it is a guide to a 40-day spiritual journey that will enable you to discover the answer to life's most important question: What on earth am I here for? By the end of this journey you will know God's purpose for your life and will understand the big picture—how all the pieces of your life fit together. Having this perspective will reduce your stress, simplify your decisions, increase your satisfaction, and most important, prepare you for eternity.⁴⁰

As preacher I breathlessly announce that at last I have found the key, the hidden gnosis, the true essence that will make Jesus more accessible to your ways of thinking without conversion of your ways of thinking. Rather than what you know being a gift of God (revelation), it's your personal epistemological achievement.

This appears to be the major motivation behind PowerPoint Preaching. Even though much of this is done by alleged evangelicals (like Rick), it is capitulation to the old liberal project. The gospel is advocated on the basis of its utility in effecting desired outcomes and goods that are neither internal to nor promised by the gospel. The wild scriptural narrative of creation and redemption into which we are to be inculcated by preaching ​is reduced to a more acceptable and manageable message. The gospel is truncated to fit the dominant cultural stories of who we are apart from being addressed by God.

The modern, essentially atheistic mentality despises mystery and considers enchantment and befuddlement an affront to its democratic right to know (and then to use) everything for purposes of individual fulfillment. The flattened mind loves lists, labels, solutions, sweeping propositions and practical principles. Vast, cosmic claims of the gospel are reduced to an answer to a question that, though it consumes contemporary North Americans, is hardly ever found in the Scripture: what's in it for me? The sovereign, free story of God with us is condensed to what can easily be managed, controlled, contained, and stabilized by me. Technopoly⁴¹ deludes us into thinking that there is a tool for everything, including preaching, if we can find it and buy into it.

Limiting our preaching to immediate, practical impact and instant, quantifiable results prohibits preaching from being uniquely biblical. PowerPoint Preaching pushes for a selection of timeless general principles—rather than relationship with a complex person who is on the move, moving through time, our time, yet not bound by our time, not bound even to our wise general principles.

As Bonhoeffer noted, preaching is where Jesus Christ takes up room, where he deems to make himself available to the church. In Christ, God's Word became a person before God's words became a book. Preaching doesn't merely describe Christ, or offer some accurate ideas about Christ, or suggest some principles derived from Christ but is Christ's self-appointed medium of presence.

The proclaimed word has its origin in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. It neither originates from truth once perceived nor from personal experience. It is not the reproduction of a specific set of feelings. The proclaimed word is the incarnate Christ himself, the thing itself. The preached Christ is both the Historical One and the Present One. The proclaimed word is not a medium of expression for something else, something that lies behind it, but rather is the Christ himself walking through his congregation as the word.⁴²

Augustine (in De Doctrina Christiana) observed that in the gospels Jesus is curiously depicted as always on a journey, always in movement where there is a not-too-soon determination of where we are headed with him. So many of the elements required to listen to a sermon—patience, time, a willingness to be confused by the other, risk of conversion into the ​other's world, respect for the integrity of the other—are precisely the skills required for friendship. Because of Scripture, the goal of truly biblical preaching is personal and relational rather than a set of manageable abstract propositions on a screen. It is more a matter of friendship than of intellectual understanding. The gospel is meant for embodied performance, not mere cognition. To paraphrase Stanley Hauerwas: if you can find a set of propositions that can give purpose to your life, go worship them rather than risking assault by this speaking, relentlessly demanding Jew from Nazareth.

No wonder PowerPoint Preaching is popular with us North Americans. It flatters my ego to be told, in effect, “Now here are some common sense principles that you, as a thinking, sensitive, empowered, self-sufficient modern person, will recognize as eternally useful.” I then am invited by the preacher to pick and choose the principles that make sense to me. Rather than be coaxed into an alien story, or seduced into a new world, rather than hear a word that is not self-derived and not self-controlled, the preacher puts me in the driver's seat as the one who manages communication. This confirms my impression, engendered in me by a consumer culture, that religion is just another technique for getting what I want rather than a means of getting what God wants.

Preaching is thereby construed primarily as a product to be consumed. Through the adept presentation of information by rhetorical procedure, formulaic technique, and instrumental concern we get what the preacher judges to be “relevant” or “effective.” Packaging is everything, and the best PowerPoint preacher is the one who cuts through all that irrelevant, archaic scriptural packaging and pointless, unprincipled biblical diversions, boiling everything down to the message: a set of abstract propositions and practical advice detached from the church that makes gospel propositions or advice work.⁴³ The goal of preaching becomes motivation of the listener, who exclaims, “I got it!” The result is almost unavoidably a gospel that is privatized, trivialized, and reduced to a memo that everyone can “get” without moral transformation or inculcation into a community that has, as one of its major tasks, our indoctrination into the rigors of faithful Christian listening (that is, prayer).⁴⁴ In orthodox Christian faith, the “message” is a Messenger. Therefore, most of us find that the gospel is more a matter of “it got me” than “I got it.”

PowerPoint Preaching is often pushed as truly evangelistic preaching. As a preacher I am told that this method reassures anxious listeners— particularly the uninitiated listeners—providing them with a sense of ​intellectual certainty. “I got it,” they murmur appreciatively on their way out of church. That is, they got a specific technique to take home and utilize in getting whatever they happen to want rather than Jesus. Thereby the embodied gospel is disembodied, abstracted from the story of the God who has, in Jesus Christ, “got” us. Preaching becomes subservient to the “real world” (that is, the governmentally sanctioned, officially defined world without God) of the omnivorous and always needy, modern consumer.

It's user-friendly Christianity as the triumph of the market. The congregation becomes another vendor of a “meaningful life” to individuals who come in, give a listen, take what techniques they can use, and then go home and have lunch with a minimum of fuss and bother.⁴⁵ A primary way that the reigning order protects itself from the cosmic, imperialistic claims of the gospel is to marginalize religion, making it a purely personal matter of individual choice. We continue under the illusion that we are free to decide and to choose which principles we serve without ever noticing our enslavement to the one principle that holds us captive: in order to have a life in capitalism, we are fated to decide and to choose which life we shall have.

More to the point of my central argument, PowerPoint Preaching also signifies an accommodation of Christian, eschatological time to pagan, Constantinian time. The vital, constantly moving, free Christian faith is stabilized into a set of eternal, universal, commonsensical, useful principles that appear normal to the average, thinking North American. We can attain understanding of a set of Christian ideas without having to have a Christ who enables the understanding of his ideas.

Christians believe there is no communication between is and God until God takes time. Therefore, preaching is not about the skillful application of technique and technology through PowerPoint. Faithful preaching is inherently eschatological in its refusal to capitulate to flat, godless time. Preaching is a form of prayer in which preacher and congregation show their utter dependence upon God to enter time, seize time, and speak— now. Therefore, faithful preaching is defiant and politically contentious in its attempt to make room for God to interrupt and wreak havoc with Caesar's determination to have the last word on this age.

As Isaiah says, “The grass withers, the flower fades,” everything dissipates. We preachers can take heart in the reality that only one thing is eternal: “the word of our God will stand forever” (Isa 40:8). For the preacher, only one thing is eternal—the living word of a living God. To ​preach as a Christian is to claim real presence. Jesus was not a new idea. He was a new presence, a speaking, revealing presence. It was New Creation, not as mere renovation or extension of the old creation. The Galileans thought they heard a new teaching by Jesus (Mark 1:27) and the Athenians thought they heard, in Paul's address, something new (Acts 17:19). In a profound, yet inchoate way, they were right. A new One had come on the scene (Eph 2:15; Col 3:10), genuinely new. That “new [thing]” foretold by Isaiah (Isa 48:6), the “new heaven and new earth” of Revelation 21:1 was here, in God. Those who thought old wine is better than new (Luke 5:39) were wrong. There's a new commandment in town (John 13:34). “Behold I make all things new,” says the one who now, after Resurrection, rules (Rev 21:5 KJV).

Humor is thus a part of Easter because, as is in so many good jokes, humor gives us a temporary escape from the bounds of history. In a joke, things don't end as they usually do in life. We are surprised. We smile. There is room, God-granted space between the determinations of history and time as God is making time God's.⁴⁶ We are not to take the present too seriously, as if now is all there is that is going on in the world. Thus the saints once spoke of Easter as the great joke God played on the devil.

We are ultimately hopeful and humorous about the future because we already have seen the future. The One who is, and is yet to come, is also the one who has come. This new is not merely some future hope but is already present as event, as newly enacted here and now. That's what “kingdom of God is at hand” meant in the preaching of Jesus. In preaching, Jesus took time for us. In Easter, that which was concealed in the earthly life of Jesus was revealed, became present to us, now. That which was from before the foundation of the world (John 1) became real, now, whenever the Risen Christ slipped through locked doors and was present (John 20). We who were “once … far off ” have “now … been brought near” (Eph 2:13). Whenever this story is preached, it is effected. Whenever anybody hears anything in a sermon, the kingdom of God has come near, now, death's grip on the world is broken—it's Easter all over again.

Surely that's why, though John could have written in his Gospel enough words about Jesus to fill more books than the world could contain, John wrote just these words that we might come to believe that Jesus is Messiah, Son of God, that we might have life here, now in his name (John 20:31). Jesus preached, “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:15) and Galatians 4:4 depicts Christ's birth ​as when “the time had fully come.” “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2 KJV).

Ancient words, spoken then, spoken to them, remembered, recollected from the past so that Christ might be present to us—it's a move that happens all the time in preaching.

They say that in Martin Luther's class on Genesis, a smart aleck student asked, “Dr. Luther, since you know so much about the book of Genesis, tell us: what was God doing all that time before God created the world?”

Luther, not one to be one-upped by a smart-mouthed seminarian, replied, “What was God doing before God created the world? God was gathering sticks to make a switch to beat the hell out of people like you who ask such dumb questions!”

But seriously, what was God doing all that time? It's not a dumb question. What was there for God to do before God did for us? What did God think about before God thought about you and me?

And in the exodus, it was wonderful when God finally came down and heard the cry of the Hebrew slaves. But some of the glory of the exodus fades when one realizes that they had been crying in slavery for 430 years! Why did God wait 430 years before liberating the Hebrew children?

The Bible has been called the book of the “mighty acts of God.” But according to my reckoning, the Bible covers well over two thousand years of history—God's history. True, there are really impressive, though occasional, actions by God. But there are also these large gaps when God doesn't say or do anything. John Calvin said that if God would withdraw his beneficent hand from Creation for even an instant, everything would fall apart, collapse into chaos, and be nothing. But there are some rather ​long periods of time, if you read between the lines of Scripture, when God doesn't seem to do anything, or at least anything worth writing down in the book of Numbers.

Almost everything we know about Jesus takes place in less than a three-year span after he was thirty. What was Jesus doing all that time before he was thirty? Most of us regard our childhood, youth, and young adulthood as the most formative and among the most important times of our lives. Why were those years so uneventful for Jesus? All the way between kindergarten and college graduation, one would have thought Jesus might have done something memorable during all those years. But no, nothing noteworthy.

In John's Gospel, Mary and Martha send Jesus the urgent plea, “Lazarus, our brother whom you love, is ill. Come quick!” (John 11:3, author's paraphrase). Friend Lazarus is near death. Two terrified sisters wait anxiously.

John says that Jesus waited three more days before setting out for Bethany. Why? No reason is given. Doesn't say that Jesus was otherwise engaged, busy with more pressing work. Just says he hung around where he was for three days. Of course, by the time Jesus got to Bethany, Lazarus was dead, the funeral was over, he was entombed, and as Martha later told Jesus (in the old Authorized Version) “by this time he stinketh.”

Why did Jesus wait three days before going to Lazarus's aid? Jesus tells Martha, when she chides him for taking his own sweet time to get to Bethany, to pipe down because this was all “for the glory of God.” What's the “glory” in taking three days to respond to someone in such urgent need?

Saint Augustine, in thinking about time, says that God doesn't count time as we count time. I'll say.

Paul tells his churches, “Don't marry! Don't worry about being slaves! Don't bother about persecution by the government! It will all be over soon. The Lord is coming—sometime.”

Some of his churches wrote to Paul saying, “OK. We're hurting. It's been decades. We're still waiting! Any word on when you expect Jesus?”

And 2 Peter answers, “Er, uh, don't you know that with the Lord, one day is like a thousand of our years? What seems like a long time to you is no time at all to an eternal God” (2 Pet 3:8, author's paraphrase).

Nice try, 2 Peter. I've heard of procrastination, but really!

Ecclesiastes eloquently proclaims that there is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to make peace and a time to make war, a time to laugh ​and a time to cry. For everything under heaven there is just the right time. Beautiful thought.

But then Ecclesiastes follows with a not-so-beautiful thought: and only God knows when that right time is! (Eccl 2:10-12).

There is just the right time for this, and the right time for that, but you'll never know the time! God just doesn't do time the way we keep time.

Thus this gospel. Jesus tells a story about a woefully unproductive fig tree that's wasted a lot of time. Let me put the story of the barren fig tree in context. Luke's chapter 13 opens with focus on time (kairos). We live in a lousy time, judging by the newspapers. A couple of horrible contemporary tragedies are put before Jesus.

“Jesus, did you hear about those poor people on whom the tower fell during the earthquake? What did they do to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?

“And did you read about the poor Galileans who were murdered by Pilate when they were just trying faithfully to worship God? What did they do to deserve this? Why didn't God intervene and protect these martyrs? Where was God at the time when they were getting their throats slit?”

Jesus cryptically responds by not answering their questions but by saying, “I tell you, if you don't repent, you will likewise perish.” Not the most pastoral of responses, I'd say. Here are two tragedies, one caused by natural evil and the other by political evil, and Jesus responds by judgmental demands for repentance from those who dare to ask, “Where is God now? Why doesn't God come, now?”

It's right then that Jesus tells the story about the poorly producing fig tree. Three years, no figs. Fig trees should bear every year. And in Judea, fig trees even bear fruit twice every year. But this tree has never borne fruit.

“Cut it down!” says the owner. Time's up.

But a servant pleads, “Master, let it alone [Greek: aphes, which also can mean ‘forgive it’]. I'll dig around it, pile manure [Greek: koprion, which also means ‘dung,’ ‘feces,’ or worse] on it, and then let's see what happens and you can do as you please.”

Three years is a long time to wait for fruit, a long time to be patient with such a worthless tree in a place where land is at a premium. And still the servant begs for more time for the tree.

There are times, when we're waiting on God to do something for us, when (sad to say) God seems to take forever.

And there are times when God is waiting on us to do something for God, when (thank God) God seems to give forever.

“Lord make haste to save us!” cry the psalmists (Pss 22:19; 31:22; 40:13; 70:1). In my experience, rarely does God make hurry. And that's hard, especially when you are suffering, or needing an answer, or waiting for deliverance. God didn't run to hold back that falling tower or hasten to stop the murderous wrath of Pilate. God didn't scurry to raise Lazarus or hasten to free the Hebrew slaves. In such times, God seems so slow.

And sometimes divine tardiness is a blessing. Jesus tells a story about a tree that, in all justice, ought to be cut down.⁴⁷ Yet a servant pleads, “Master, give it some more time.” And that's grace, especially when you have yet to bear the good fruit that God expects from you, or when you have yet to take root, or when you have not yet come to blossom into what you were created to be. In such times, God's delay is God's gift. There's still time.

I know a woman who, after her diagnosis of cancer, prayed twice every day for God to heal her. A year later, as she entered her third round of chemotherapy, she said, “Well, it looks like once again, God isn't on my schedule. I guess God's decided to heal me at some other place, in some other time.” She had been given a level of faith, in that time, I have yet to reach.

A therapist once told me that, in therapy, the greatest challenge is to offer help at the right time. “People's problems must be allowed to ripen,” she explained. “The premature offer of a solution to their problem will not be received. The therapist must be patient, must allow the client to talk, and talk, and wait and wait for just the right time.” Aristotle said that, in telling someone the truth, the trick was to tell that person the truth at the right time. Maybe God knows enough about us not to rush. Maybe.

Maybe Jesus didn't drop everything and rush to the bedside of Lazarus because Jesus isn't jerked around by what jerks us. Maybe we are not at the center of God's time. We think of time in terms of what God needs to do for us. Maybe God looks at our time as that time we are given to do what needs doing for God. And, according to the parable, there's still time.

When old atheist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote his spiritual autobiography about his late-in-life conversion to Christ, he called it, Chronicles of Wasted Time.

One of the greatest challenges of loving God is to permit God to keep God's own good time. We have faith that God will come to us, will heal us, will save us—but not always on our schedule, not always on our time. Will you praise God, even when God doesn't run to you?

I'll tell you, as your preacher. One of the toughest tasks of being a preacher is allowing the Holy Spirit to enter, to enlighten, and to speak to my listeners—when and where the Holy Spirit chooses. Believe it or not, I've worked hard on this sermon. I've carefully crafted what I want to say to you so as to communicate with you here, now, without fail.

But I've been preaching long enough to know that no matter what I preach, it isn't a sermon, it isn't God's word for the congregation unless and until the Holy Spirit descends and enables them to hear. It's not a sermon until God says it's a sermon. I want that time of revelation to be now, right now, while I'm talking. But sometimes I can tell, just by looking at the congregation's faces that once again, God is taking God's own sweet time with my sermon!

Jesus tells this story of the barren fig tree on his way to Jerusalem. He is not at his destination. He is on the way. At the end, there will be judgment. For now, there is still time. Jesus tells this story to me and to you who are not at our destination. We are here today, still on our life's way. By the pleading of the servant, by God's grace, for you and for me, there is still time.

Is this a story about judgment (“Cut it down!”) or about grace (“Give it more time!”)? I suppose that the answer to that lies in what time it is in your life related to God's own good time.

There will be judgment, accounting, a day when fruitfulness will be examined (“Cut it down!”) and there is still time (“Give it more time!”). Justice is here depicted as accounting for fruitfulness; mercy is here depicted as time. There shall be a time when time's up. And there is, by God's grace, still time.

Perhaps it's because of my advanced age (I've clearly got more yesterdays on my account than tomorrows), but I find that I wake up each morning surprised, grateful even, just to be waking up in the morning! I find myself saying to myself, “So. You have one more day. What a surprise. What a gift. So, what will I do with today?” The time before me is both a gift and an assignment, grace and judgment. What will we do, what will God do, with the time?

A man in my congregation had dangerous open heart surgery. He was told by the doctor he had no more than a fifty-fifty chance of survival ​during the surgery. But he did survive. When I visited him afterwards, I said, “You did survive after all! Isn't that wonderful?”

He said, “No, preacher, I didn't survive. I did more than survive; I was born again. I'm not the same person I have been for the past fifty years. I've been given a second chance and I'm going to be different, better than before.” His postoperative time was for him a time of both judgment and grace.

The servant says to the master, “Let me dig around the roots, turn up the soil, disrupt the fig tree, pile some smelly manure on it, and let's see if the dung does the trick.” Fig trees require almost no special cultivation. This is extraordinary horticulture. So maybe in those times when you think your time has turned terrible—and the koprion is getting deep— maybe you are being cultivated for greater fruitfulness. The same servant who pled for more time is the friend who is piling on the koprion, using the time to produce more fruit. Maybe.

Jesus' parable is a play in two acts: (1) “Cut it down!” then (2) “Give it time!” I guess that means that we're now living out the third act. How long did the master wait? Surely his patience is not forever. Did the dung do it? Was there ever fruit? We don't know because, as in so many of Jesus' parables, this one doesn't have an ending. Maybe that's because God is still working on the ending, and so are we. By God's grace we're given time to finish the story.

Are you willing, in your heartache and struggles, for God to take time from you, or to take time for you or, or to give time to you? Are you able, in the time that God gives you, to take time for God?

The gospel, good news for this Sunday in Ordinary Time: there's still time.