Sunday, January 28 - Past, Present, and Future

This sermon was preached on Sunday, January 28 for the fourth Sunday after Epiphany at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. The texts for this sermon were: Deuteronomy 18:15-20, Mark 1:21-28 and Psalm 111.

There’s nothing quite like a four hour international flight with a 1.5 year old and a 2.5 year old to make you question your perception of time. It’s moments like that when I say to my children what I remember my parents saying to me, “The faster you fall asleep, the faster we will get there.” In some ways, that’s actually true: a human being’s perception of time is somewhat within our control - or at least the control of our brains. And there’s nothing like a wintertime tropical vacation in a beautiful place with people I adore to inspire me to practice all my best strategies for being in the moment and slowing time down, too. 

So many of our faith practices include some way of strengthening our relationship with time. How we relate to our past, present, and future is, after all, how we relate to our lives, and how we relate to God. The threefold Christian approach to time: past, present, and future mirrors our threefold understanding of God: Creator God, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is most clear in that quintessentially Anglican doxology that goes: Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. In Revelation, we hear God proclaim: I am the Alpha and the Omega, the one who was, who is, and who is to come. God both transcends time and is experienced by us within time. Together we learn to see God’s hand at work in our past, shaping our story, we practice sensing God’s presence with us in the now, and we trust in God’s promises for our future. 

It isn’t until we look to other faiths and cultures, like Hinduism, Buddhism, and various indigenous worldviews, that we realize the conception of time as past, present, and future isn’t the only way to perceive it. Religion is deeply concerned with how we relate to time, and relating to it well. Done poorly, and religion can have us obsessed with the past - trying to return to some perfect time that’s already gone. Or some religious movements are fixated on the future or the afterlife so much that the present is to be fully eschewed. Even too much focus on the present can be harmful. I think of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s tenderhearted critique of Thich Nhat Hahn’s Buddhism. The singular focus on the present experience can remove any motivation to fight for a more just future and the betterment of humankind. 

Christianity, at its best, would bring us into a balanced relationship to the past, present and future. The past holds deep wisdom about who we are and how we got here - we tell and retell its stories. In the present we find healing and connection - we clear away distraction so that we can appreciate our blessings right here and now. In the Christian faith, there is always hope, even in the darkest times, there is always a brightness, a coming to life again that pulls us forward. Each experience of God - the God that was, the God that is, and the God that will be - is essential. 

In this moment in Deuteronomy, Moses’ new religious movement centered on the Torah and Sinaic covenant is beginning to shape its relationship to the future. It’s a crucial moment: there has never been a prophet quite like Moses before. Who will the community be after him? In his commentary on today’s passage from Deuteronomy, Jason Byassee writes "So much religious faith is so habitually backward-looking, it can sound like the best days are past and only gloom is to come. Deuteronomy resists this conservatism.” God promises to raise up another prophet - a trustworthy prophet that the people are longing for. Muslims interpret this passage to be speaking about one particular prophet, Muhammad. But Byassee argues that the Christian perspective is that God is continually raising up prophets. He points to the Pentecost moment affirming that God makes messengers of everyday people, giving them the words they need. There is always someone to speak the word of God in every time and place.

The Gospel of Mark, which we read from today, has its own bias toward time. Mark is infused with urgency. It begins with John the Baptist proclaiming the long-awaited future is now. The Gospel writer’s favorite word is “immediately.” Jesus is driven out to the wilderness right from his baptism. Then he goes and calls the disciples - they get up and follow him immediately. Our passage today is Jesus’ first sign and miracle in this Gospel. Notice where and when it takes place. Jesus drives out an evil spirit from the synagogue on the Sabbath. Evil has infiltrated a sacred place and a sacred time. Jesus is here to rebuke and expel all that would distort our relationship with God, ourselves, and our neighbor - that would distort our relationship to who we were, who we are, and who we will be.

There are so many forces that manipulate our relationship to time to take advantage of us: those who would have us convinced that the future is bleak and that our only hope is in recreating the past, those who would have us throw out the wisdom of the past wholesale, and those who use a sense of urgency and time running out to get us to act quickly or foolishly. 

Then there are just life events, things that just happen that shift or shatter our relationship to our past, present and future. 

I think of sudden betrayal or an unpleasant revelation, when our story of the past is put into question. Did I ever really know that person? Did I ever really know myself? Can I trust my memory of events? I wonder if the synagogue community in Capernaum had that experience when the evil spirit was driven out of a man in their midst. Were they startled to find evil had been there with them all along? Had they missed the signs of his possession? I wonder if this exorcism was a crisis moment for them. In moments when our previous relationship with the past is irrevocably shattered, faith calls us to remake our past. Faith would have us retell the story so that we might once again glimpse the hand of God at work reshaping us. Faith would have us forgive. 

Then there are those moments that rob us of the future we had depended on, dreamed of. End of a job, death of a loved one, the breakdown of a marriage. Moments when we cannot bring ourselves to imagine this new future. In those moments, faith would have us let go of the project of imagining all together. Faith would have us trust God to imagine for us, until we can again. To trust that someday the future will be meaningful and full of life once more, even if we cannot see it yet. Faith would have us hope. 

Then there are just those mundane moments when our present feels more like something to simply endure, to get through or escape from. God is there once more to remind us of the divine presence. Faith would have us reach for the sacredness of every moment, to see somehow there is belovedness in even this.

Faith is here to contend with all three: with the regret that keeps us locked in the past, with anxiety that traps us in worries of a bleak future, and with boredom that insists that here and now is not enough. Faith also teaches us that rebuilding our relationship with past, present and future is a communal act. Each of us has a role to steady one another. 

Recently, in preparing for our annual meeting, a group of us were discussing the financial picture of the church and its future. Someone commented, “Well, we are not out of the woods yet.” But what if our task as a community is to learn to live in the woods? To remember that there was never a time when we weren’t contending with regret about the past, anxieties about the future, and dissatisfaction with the present, and there probably never will be - that’s not the goal. The goal is to learn to make our home in these woods - to allow faith, faith above all else, to define us and our relationship to who we were, who we are and who we are becoming. 

Each of us has a role to steady one another. When it is hard for you to hope for the future, I will hold that hope for you until you can again. We remember for one other, we shape our collective memory together. And here in worship, we speak God's presence in prayer and song and touch.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.