So what are you going to do with your extra hour?
You know—the extra hour we get the first weekend of November
when Daylight Savings Time ends and we “fall back” to Standard Time.
A full hour of free time on a Saturday evening or Sunday morning—
what a gift!
Of course, we’ll “lose” the hour next spring when we start
Daylight Savings again. But right now, what are you going to do with
the gift of those extra sixty minutes?
Because that extra hour is a gift. In fact, all time is a gift, going
all the way back to the beginning of creation. In Genesis, after God calls
forth light, God then set the great lights in the heavens—the sun to rule
the day, the moon to bless the night. God creates the days and the
seasons, and at the end of it all, God creates the Sabbath day—the
“Cathedral of Time,” as the great Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel
called it.
So what are you going to do with your extra hour the first
weekend of November?
We pay attention to time in the church. There’s the practical
aspect of making sure worship starts on time, keeping meetings within
time limits, getting the newsletter out on time. But as people of faith, our
relationship with time goes far beyond the practical. We set aside time to
mark special times in human life, from birth to death. We acknowledge
the passing of time, as when a child starts first grade or leaves childhood
to start adolescence.
Moreover, the church keeps time differently than the world
around us. We begin the “church year” with Advent, a month before
New Year’s Day. The liturgical seasons of Epiphany or Lent seldom
coincide with actual months like December or March. Some seasons
have specific lengths—twelve days of Christmas, forty days of Lent,
fifty dates of Eastertide. But Epiphany and Pentecost stretch from weeks
to months.
Time in the church gets confusing at times. As people of faith,
we always live in two different time zones—world time and faith time.
World time is “kronos” time—chronological time defined by the ticking
of the clock or the numbers on a digital watch. Faith time is “kairos”
time (from a word meaning “fullness of time’). Kairos time is measured
not by the passing of time, but by the fullness of time. Not by minutes,
but by meaning.
We are in kairos time when, no matter what we are doing, we
are aware of God’s presence in that moment. Kairos time is time filled
with God’s hope and love, or perhaps simply with the fullness of God’s
breath.
May this month’s extra hour be a kairos hour for each of us.
No matter how we spend it, may we realize that hour is a gift—just like
every hour is. Indeed, may all November be a kairos month. No matter
what happens, may we trust that God is still present in our time and in
this world. And in this kairos time, may we be fully present to God, one
another, and this world.