William H. Willimon - "What Time Is It?" (November 14, 1999)
MP3
Loading the media player...
Transcript
- Download transcript as:
-
Text
-
PDF
-
WebVTT (includes timecodes)
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| - | Now, concerning times and seasons, | 0:11 |
| sisters and brothers, let us not fall asleep as others do. | 0:15 | |
| But let us keep awake and be sober, | 0:20 | |
| that whether we are awake or asleep, | 0:23 | |
| we may live in him. | 0:27 | |
| Therefore, encourage one another with these words. | 0:31 | |
| I don't know about you, but I've had just about enough | 0:38 | |
| of the pre-millennium. | 0:41 | |
| I can't wait for the year 2000. | 0:45 | |
| My intention is just to mention the millennium | 0:48 | |
| just this once, and then promise never to bring it up again. | 0:52 | |
| This whole thing is a vast, Silicon Valley conspiracy | 0:56 | |
| to sell computers; you heard it here first. | 1:00 | |
| (laughing) | 1:04 | |
| I'd like to take Bill Gates | 1:05 | |
| and shove that Y2K bug up his modem. | 1:06 | |
| (laughing) | 1:10 | |
| 25,000 teenage Baptists converging on Atlanta | 1:15 | |
| to wait for the end of the year. | 1:20 | |
| Fundamentalists assembling in Jerusalem, | 1:23 | |
| Druids at Stonehenge. | 1:26 | |
| The mathematically fastidious among us believe | 1:31 | |
| that the real third millennium is still a year away. | 1:34 | |
| I hope not. | 1:38 | |
| I couldn't take another. | 1:39 | |
| (laughing) | 1:42 | |
| You've got suburbanites hunkered down with generators, | 1:43 | |
| hoarding corn! | 1:47 | |
| What is somebody who can't even follow the directions | 1:52 | |
| of a cake mix gonna do with 50 pounds of corn, I ask you? | 1:55 | |
| There was actually serious discussion over whether or not | 2:03 | |
| we should close the Duke campus on New Year's Eve, | 2:07 | |
| just like we did during the Final Four, | 2:11 | |
| in case at the strike of midnight, | 2:13 | |
| the citizens of Durham went crazy | 2:16 | |
| and began running towards Duke and began burning benches. | 2:18 | |
| (laughing) | 2:23 | |
| David Duncan's book, Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle | 2:29 | |
| to Determine a True and Accurate Year, reminds us | 2:34 | |
| that the calendar itself is an arbitrary concoction. | 2:37 | |
| The 365 day year was a comparatively recent invention. | 2:43 | |
| And not a very exact one, at that. | 2:48 | |
| For instance, when ought we to date Jesus's birth? | 2:51 | |
| Early Christians appear to have had | 2:56 | |
| little interest in the matter. | 2:58 | |
| To this day, we do not know whether Jesus was born | 3:00 | |
| in four BC, or maybe in six AD. | 3:04 | |
| But we do know that he couldn't have been born | 3:08 | |
| when our calendars say, in one AD, | 3:10 | |
| which means that most of us missed the new millennium, | 3:13 | |
| when we were watching the Super Bowl in 1995. | 3:17 | |
| (laughing) | 3:21 | |
| As Saint Augustine said: who cares? | 3:24 | |
| Christ wanted to make Christians, not mathematicians. | 3:27 | |
| So at the strike of 12 on December 31st, | 3:31 | |
| you may raise your glass and you may say: | 3:34 | |
| happy new millennium! | 3:37 | |
| For that portion of the world that is using | 3:39 | |
| the Gregorian calendar, who do not bother | 3:42 | |
| with the inaccuracies of the 365-day year. | 3:44 | |
| Well, what is the deal with the millennium? | 3:50 | |
| I read about Atlanta's plans to whoop it up for the new year | 3:54 | |
| and they had originally planned for a five-week celebration, | 3:58 | |
| but then they found out nobody cared, | 4:02 | |
| and they've scaled it back to one week, | 4:04 | |
| with one night of fireworks. | 4:06 | |
| According to the Bi-Millennium Organizing Committee, | 4:08 | |
| a very disappointed, Chicago-based company, | 4:12 | |
| hoping to cash in on New Years, four out of five | 4:15 | |
| of us are going to celebrate the night at home. | 4:19 | |
| Dick Clark is bad for your health. | 4:23 | |
| Well, good, let's get this straight. | 4:27 | |
| Christians have got absolutely nothing at stake | 4:31 | |
| in the beginning of a new millennium, whenever it begins. | 4:35 | |
| The change of the capriciously concocted calendar | 4:39 | |
| from this year to the next has zero religious significance. | 4:43 | |
| At least that's what I think Paul would say, | 4:50 | |
| if he were preaching today. | 4:53 | |
| A text from First Thessalonians has Paul speaking | 4:55 | |
| to people who get all lathered up over the times | 4:59 | |
| and the seasons. | 5:03 | |
| And he says to them: | 5:05 | |
| it is important to know what time it is. | 5:08 | |
| But that's the issue. | 5:13 | |
| What time is it, and what is the proper, | 5:16 | |
| faithful response to the year? | 5:19 | |
| Maybe our pre-millennial madness, | 5:23 | |
| or my anti-millennial abhorrence, maybe these are revealing. | 5:26 | |
| I wonder if the excitement of those who are going | 5:31 | |
| to such great lengths to greet the new year, | 5:33 | |
| as if this were something significant, | 5:37 | |
| is maybe testimony to the human desire to make something | 5:42 | |
| of time, even if we've got little reason for doing so. | 5:47 | |
| We want something to happen. | 5:55 | |
| We want for time to be full, as the Bible sometimes speaks. | 5:58 | |
| Weather reporters on TV, this fall, | 6:07 | |
| were unable to conceal their delight that this year | 6:11 | |
| was bad with hurricanes. | 6:16 | |
| At the first sniff of bad weather in the Atlantic, | 6:19 | |
| they get hyper, they bring out the maps, | 6:22 | |
| they say we're going to be on down here, | 6:25 | |
| 24 hours a day, to keep you posted. | 6:26 | |
| And if, by chance, the hurricane fizzles, | 6:30 | |
| they say they're pleased. | 6:34 | |
| But you can tell by looking at the dismay on their faces. | 6:36 | |
| (laughing) | 6:40 | |
| Well, of course you're thinking to yourself: well, | 6:45 | |
| what job is more pointless than reporting on the weather? | 6:48 | |
| True, hurricanes are one of the few interesting things | 6:52 | |
| that happen to a weather-caster. | 6:56 | |
| But isn't it interesting, isn't it interesting how many | 7:00 | |
| of us, not just pointless weather-casters, | 7:04 | |
| but how many of us really long for something, | 7:09 | |
| anything to happen. | 7:13 | |
| Even if it's something bad. | 7:15 | |
| Because most of our lives plod along | 7:18 | |
| in these comfortable ruts. | 7:22 | |
| Then there's the phone call, | 7:25 | |
| then there's the crisis. | 7:27 | |
| And you say that your life has been disrupted by the crisis, | 7:30 | |
| but isn't it interesting how much more alive you can feel | 7:36 | |
| in the middle of a crisis than when your life | 7:39 | |
| is the more predictable, tick-tock, tick-tock | 7:43 | |
| of time's dreary progression? | 7:47 | |
| For most of us, time is that of Macbeth. | 7:52 | |
| The tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty | 7:56 | |
| pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time, | 8:00 | |
| and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way | 8:06 | |
| to dusty death. | 8:12 | |
| I'm talking about time like that. | 8:17 | |
| We speak of killing time. | 8:21 | |
| When all the while, time is killing us. | 8:24 | |
| Minute by minute. | 8:27 | |
| If there's something worse than bad news, it's no news. | 8:31 | |
| No news, nothing new. | 8:36 | |
| For everything, there is a season. | 8:41 | |
| There's a time to be born, a time to die, | 8:44 | |
| a time to build up, a time to take down, | 8:46 | |
| a time to plant, a time to read. | 8:48 | |
| And there's really nothing new under the sun, | 8:53 | |
| says depressing Ecclesiastes. | 8:57 | |
| We wish for the new. | 9:01 | |
| We long that the year, like 2000, | 9:04 | |
| might really be interesting, right? | 9:08 | |
| Might bring some truly new age. | 9:11 | |
| Last week, I heard a former Czech dissident | 9:19 | |
| being interviewed and they were talking to him | 9:22 | |
| about his time in jail, the time when the communists | 9:25 | |
| were in charge, the time when they were being persecuted, | 9:28 | |
| and he said: you know, the worst thing the communists | 9:31 | |
| took away from us was time. | 9:34 | |
| And the reporter said: I thought you might have mentioned | 9:40 | |
| the worst thing they took away from you was your freedom. | 9:43 | |
| And he said: no, no, no, they gotta get your time | 9:45 | |
| before they can get your freedom. | 9:49 | |
| And they took away our time. | 9:52 | |
| Because under communism, whether you were in jail | 9:55 | |
| or whether you were out of jail, | 9:57 | |
| there was never any newness, | 10:00 | |
| there was never any surprise. | 10:02 | |
| And that meant that what you did, | 10:07 | |
| or however you lived your life didn't count. | 10:09 | |
| They took away from us the time. | 10:13 | |
| Matthew's gospel speaks of the days of Noah, | 10:20 | |
| when people were eating and drinking, | 10:26 | |
| and they were eating and drinking, | 10:29 | |
| and they were marrying and being given in marriage, | 10:31 | |
| and then they were eating and drinking, | 10:33 | |
| and then the flood. | 10:35 | |
| Or today's parable, which says: it will be as, ah, | 10:37 | |
| an owner that gives away everything he's got | 10:44 | |
| to his servants, and then he leaves. | 10:46 | |
| And life goes along okay, but when, | 10:49 | |
| in the middle of the night, there is a crisis, he's back. | 10:53 | |
| And suddenly, life gets interesting. | 10:57 | |
| Life gets interesting when something gets over, | 11:04 | |
| and something new begins. | 11:08 | |
| And Paul says that's just how it was, | 11:12 | |
| that's just how it is, for Christians. | 11:15 | |
| An old age has ended, a new is being born. | 11:19 | |
| Jesus describes that as kind of dark, cataclysm. | 11:24 | |
| It's like a thief in the night. | 11:29 | |
| That sounds kind of frightening. | 11:33 | |
| But I wonder if there's also something in us | 11:36 | |
| that finds it really interesting. | 11:38 | |
| In time, our time, a kind of listlessness settles in. | 11:44 | |
| The French call it: ennui. | 11:49 | |
| I really expect that we will wake up on the morning | 11:52 | |
| of January the first, and we will feel nothing. | 11:55 | |
| Oh, that's right, we will have to wait until | 12:02 | |
| January the first, 2001, for the "real" millennium, but, | 12:05 | |
| lathered in millennial froth, a thousand years ago, | 12:10 | |
| the faithful flocked to Zion to await the end, | 12:14 | |
| but there was no end. | 12:17 | |
| We've been working at the gospel for 2,000 years now, | 12:20 | |
| and how many times has the story read this morning | 12:24 | |
| been read before: keep awake! | 12:27 | |
| Watch! | 12:29 | |
| That's hard to do for 2,000 years. | 12:32 | |
| We've had the alpha, and we've been told: | 12:35 | |
| you just wait, here comes the omega. | 12:38 | |
| We did, it didn't. | 12:43 | |
| Our cosmic eschatological hope for that new heaven, | 12:47 | |
| new Earth, it mostly in our age turned inward, | 12:51 | |
| and it turned psychological, and therefore trivial. | 12:55 | |
| The Christian faith all condensed to what you can get | 13:00 | |
| on a WWJD bracelet. | 13:03 | |
| There was a time when thoughts of the end of time | 13:08 | |
| were mostly concerned with the shape of that new beginning. | 13:13 | |
| When white hot expectation among Christians needed | 13:17 | |
| to be channeled into something more positive, | 13:21 | |
| and something more manageable. | 13:24 | |
| Maybe that was Paul's problem with the Thessalonians. | 13:26 | |
| I don't think that's our problem. | 13:32 | |
| Our problem is neither overwrought imagining | 13:34 | |
| about some brave new world, nor is it the modern shock | 13:38 | |
| of the new; our problem is a kind of post-modern languor. | 13:43 | |
| There is nothing new under the sun. | 13:50 | |
| Paul compares his time to that of a woman in labor. | 13:55 | |
| Time before birth, it's a frequent Old Testament | 14:00 | |
| eschatological metaphor; God's redemption is drawing near! | 14:03 | |
| What's wrong with this world is just about to be set right. | 14:09 | |
| Christ is coming to rule! | 14:14 | |
| And that metaphor doesn't seem quite to fit | 14:19 | |
| at a time when the end of the age talk | 14:21 | |
| becomes little more than how to sell more computers | 14:24 | |
| and less about God's reign. | 14:28 | |
| History is but this kind of endless loop of wars, | 14:31 | |
| and rumors of wars, time is nothing but eating | 14:36 | |
| and drinking and marrying and giving marriage, | 14:39 | |
| and there's nothing new under the sun. | 14:42 | |
| It's just like sleep. | 14:43 | |
| Paul expected the soon return of Christ. | 14:46 | |
| But Christ didn't return. | 14:50 | |
| Furthermore, as Paul says, some of the early church had | 14:54 | |
| already, in his words, fallen asleep. | 14:57 | |
| They had died. | 15:03 | |
| Some during cruel persecutions. | 15:05 | |
| This is the kingdom of God? | 15:09 | |
| It was a tough time. | 15:12 | |
| Wherein was there hope? | 15:15 | |
| Paul begins by telling the Thessalonians: | 15:18 | |
| I ought not to have to waste my time | 15:22 | |
| writing to you about trivial matters like the times | 15:26 | |
| and the seasons, and Y2K. | 15:30 | |
| For one thing, nobody but God knows the real time. | 15:35 | |
| God, who comes among us like a thief in the night. | 15:41 | |
| We know something, though, we do know something, | 15:46 | |
| about time that the world knows naught. | 15:50 | |
| Namely, as Paul says, whether we're awake | 15:53 | |
| or whether we're asleep, we live in him. | 15:57 | |
| Encourage one another with those words. | 16:04 | |
| We Christians, you see, we don't know what the future holds. | 16:09 | |
| After your dear husband's death, | 16:15 | |
| I don't know that life will now go well for you. | 16:18 | |
| After the end of the war, I don't know if there'll be peace | 16:24 | |
| in Bosnia in our time. | 16:26 | |
| I don't know that God has picked the one right person | 16:30 | |
| for you to marry before you're 25. | 16:35 | |
| That's not what we Christians mean when we talk about hope. | 16:39 | |
| For the future. | 16:43 | |
| We have no way to lay our cards on the table | 16:46 | |
| and tell you how your hand is going to play out. | 16:49 | |
| What we do have is the constant encouragement | 16:56 | |
| that whatever the future holds, | 17:01 | |
| God holds the future. | 17:06 | |
| Wherever we go in the future, God will be there. | 17:10 | |
| In ways often hidden, | 17:16 | |
| bringing all time to fulfillment in Christ. | 17:19 | |
| Christians don't believe in progress. | 17:24 | |
| We believe in a promise. | 17:28 | |
| Neither life nor death nor anything in all time | 17:30 | |
| will be able to separate us from the love of God, | 17:36 | |
| in Christ Jesus. | 17:38 | |
| We don't have prediction for what will happen | 17:42 | |
| in the year 2000. | 17:45 | |
| I, for one, do predict the sky will not fall | 17:48 | |
| amid Y2K computer-generated chaos. | 17:52 | |
| I predict the chapel will feel stupid | 17:56 | |
| that we just spent $22,000 on new computers. | 17:58 | |
| Still, I could be wrong. | 18:02 | |
| We don't, all we've got is a promise. | 18:06 | |
| But the same God who went to such great lengths | 18:11 | |
| to raise Jesus Christ from the dead | 18:14 | |
| should also raise us, shall bring us home, | 18:18 | |
| whether we are asleep or we're awake. | 18:23 | |
| We shall be in him. | 18:28 | |
| Encourage one another with those words. | 18:31 | |
| We got a hope, a hope that's based | 18:36 | |
| that the God who raised Jesus from the dead | 18:39 | |
| thus obliterating time, the same God that on Easter, | 18:41 | |
| sort of said: let's just start this whole thing over | 18:47 | |
| from the beginning; let's recreate the world, | 18:51 | |
| that shall recreate us as well. | 18:54 | |
| That isn't optimism. | 18:58 | |
| It's called: faith. | 19:02 | |
| When what we call time ends, | 19:05 | |
| and all the clocks are dashed, | 19:09 | |
| and all the calendars fail, | 19:11 | |
| God will be there. | 19:16 | |
| I know a doctor who got out of Duke | 19:23 | |
| and went as a missionary to Africa. | 19:26 | |
| And there, he works among the victims of the AIDS epidemic. | 19:30 | |
| Over half of the entire population has AIDS. | 19:35 | |
| In the area in which he's working, in Africa. | 19:40 | |
| His little hospital is so overwhelmed, | 19:44 | |
| they've got to put patients out under trees, | 19:47 | |
| after surgery, because they lack the beds. | 19:50 | |
| Well, why? | 19:56 | |
| How do you keep going, we ask. | 19:59 | |
| Well, he said, you know you just have to take the long view. | 20:04 | |
| You just have to kind of stubbornly | 20:10 | |
| cling to the possibility of hope. | 20:12 | |
| I like that phrase. | 20:18 | |
| You just kind of stubbornly cling to the possibility | 20:20 | |
| of hope; you take the long view. | 20:23 | |
| None of this silly optimistic: I believe | 20:27 | |
| that for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows. | 20:31 | |
| Or none of this better living through chemistry, | 20:34 | |
| or Bill's going to see us through, or, none of that. | 20:37 | |
| You just cling to the possibility of hope, | 20:42 | |
| the hopeful possibility that our times are not in our hands. | 20:46 | |
| You take what you already know of that relentless, | 20:54 | |
| eternal love of God and Jesus Christ, | 20:57 | |
| and having experienced that kind of relentlessness | 21:00 | |
| and resilience in the past, | 21:04 | |
| you are given hope for the continuance | 21:06 | |
| of that love in the future. | 21:10 | |
| That whether this culture endures or not, | 21:13 | |
| whether we're asleep or awake, drunk or sober, | 21:16 | |
| we live in him. | 21:19 | |
| It really is curious that early Christians appear | 21:24 | |
| to have had absolutely no interest in the calendar. | 21:27 | |
| No interest in dating precisely when Jesus actually was born | 21:32 | |
| or even in when he died. | 21:36 | |
| Paul, again and again, tells people: | 21:40 | |
| would you please stop bothering yourselves | 21:42 | |
| about these silly times and seasons! | 21:44 | |
| Now, why was that? | 21:49 | |
| Well, don't you see? | 21:53 | |
| It's because Paul really believed that in Jesus Christ, | 21:55 | |
| time had ended. | 21:58 | |
| It was no more of this, this ceaseless circle | 22:01 | |
| of turn and return that the Greeks knew. | 22:05 | |
| The day after day after day, there was no more of that. | 22:08 | |
| There was no more of keeping track. | 22:12 | |
| A new age had been born, and an old age was over. | 22:16 | |
| There will be a new heaven and a new Earth, | 22:22 | |
| but not of our own devising. | 22:25 | |
| For we have not within ourselves the means | 22:28 | |
| to make such a time. | 22:32 | |
| We can't make history work out. | 22:35 | |
| But through the not always apparent | 22:40 | |
| but nevertheless sure work of God, | 22:41 | |
| time was being worked out, as God's time. | 22:44 | |
| Whether we are awake or asleep, | 22:50 | |
| dead or alive, we shall be with Christ. | 22:54 | |
| Our time shall be his. | 22:58 | |
| Encourage one another with these words. | 23:05 |
