Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, January 28, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Before the word “before” even made sense
“Turn that off,” my friend said. I was listening to the radio broadcast of Illinois basketball vs. Indiana while it was playing on his TV. The radio broadcast was 45 seconds ahead of the picture.
A prophet like me will the Lord raise up for you from among your own kin, and to him you shall listen.
We could hear descriptions of what we were about to see. We knew what would happen next. I’d been listening this way for awhile and thought my friend would love it like I did.
I will raise up a prophet for you and will put my words in his mouth. He shall tell all that I command him to say.
Boy, was I wrong! They did NOT want to know what was going to happen until it happened. In REAL time.
If a prophet presumes to speak in my name a message that I have not commanded him to speak, he shall die.
Well, of course.
But this watching the game thing, I don’t understand. What we heard was always going to be accurate, just a moment ahead. God, who created time, does not change something that has already happened. Listening to Brian Barnhart’s and Deon Thomas’ broadcast, we could prepare ourselves for a bad thing, and cheer twice as long for a good thing.
Illinois won the game in the last minute … ssshh. I knew, but kept my phone quiet. Maybe next time my friend Chris will decide he’d like to hear the game a minute before he sees it. You think?
Experiencing these echoes of time, I shiver. There is mystery here rather than something to just take for granted. Experiencing two simultaneous spots in time like this rushes through me like a drug. Hearing, and then watching what I just heard, frees me up. I relax. I feel like a feather caught between a mallet and the skin of a big bass drum, just before the climactic crash. Already. And not yet.
God created light (on the first day) before he created the sun and the moon (on the fourth day). But the sun makes our light, and the moon reflects it. Their movements allow us to measure time. At least our kind of earthy time.
Does time exist if it cannot be measured? God’s time before the fourth day? After that, in my dominion taking days, I could use time, measure time … this measurement gives me a sense of control that is not complete. I can split time into nanoseconds and get amazing things done. But in that other kind of time, in the thin space which it creates, all I can do is to be still.
Come let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the Lord our God our Maker. For he is our God and we are the people he shepherds.
Kneeling in a pasture or in a sanctuary, before the rising sun or before a risen Christ on the cross, I may encounter God outside my kind of time, and within His. Time and space ripple through, through the air and through me. A mystical moment like this, even if I experience it just once in a lifetime, is the stuff on which everything else rests.
Brothers and sisters, I should like you to be free of anxieties.
This moment gives me confidence/faith/resilience. It puts both success and failure into perspective.
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.
(Jonah 3, Psalm 25, 1 Corinthians 7, Mark 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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