24th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST   November 14, 2004

(Malachi 3:13-4:2a, 5-6; Psalm 98:5-10; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19)

How do you picture the progress of the calendar? How would you draw the year? I make a circle with Christmas at the top, 12 o’clock, the 4^th of July at the bottom, 6 o’clock, Easter at 3 o’clock on the right, and the start of the school year in September at 9 o’clock on the left. But some people I’ve met draw a line. The year starts, moves on, then another year begins.

In the history of religious thought we can find these same very different conceptions concerning the operation of time. There’s the linear understanding of time that sees time beginning in creation and moving toward its culmination "at the last day". And there’s a cyclic view of time, that sees the times and seasons go round and round in endless cycles of life and death, creation and destruction.

The linear view tended to be dominant among nomadic peoples. It’s religious context was patriarchal and masculine, and it saw the sky as the main abode of God. God was transcendent and called for obedience, just as the patriarchal leadership of the nomadic tribe required obedience to safely negotiate the ways across the wilderness.

The cyclic view was dominant among agricultural peoples mirroring the rhythms of agricultural life, the planting and the harvest, with the new seed coming from the old harvest to be planted again in the spring. The abode of the divine was in "mother earth". God in this view was felt to be immanent, manifesting in the processes of nature. And, rather than patriarchal and masculine, cyclic time was rooted in the matriarchal and feminine. (Feminine life, until, recently at least, being dominated by cycles.) Instead of obedience this view often called for sacrifice, a priming of the pump of ongoing life by the giving of life. (Again, until recently, a sadly common feminine experience.)

These two perspectives, these two world views, met and clashed and interacted in many places throughout history with very different outcomes.

In Greece, for example, they met and created a kind of two-tier religion. There was the official religion of the Olympian sky-gods, and then along side the mystery cults of Orpheus, Demeter, and Dionysus, and eventually, when Egyptian religion was added to the Greek, Isis and Osiris.

In India on the other hand, you get a kind of everybody welcome approach where you go to one God or Goddess for one thing and another God or Goddess for something else. Where each group may have had a favorite deity, but acknowledged all the others.

In Israel, at the source of our faith, where nomadic Hebrews met the agricultural Canaanites, you got over a thousand years of unending opposition. "Wipe them all out," the Book of Joshua says. Don’t look to the high places up in the hills for help says the psalmist, but only to the transcendent, invisible God. Josiah throws out the cult prostitutes when he cleanses the temple, cult prostitution being a big part of fertility religion. (Did you know about the cult prostitutes: They had been there, the Bible says, since Solomon’s time.) The prophet spirit of the Old Testament is linear to its core.

One of the things that happens with Jesus, and the faith that flows from Him, is a blending of these two kinds of spirituality. The spirituality of linear time and the spirituality of cyclic time. Jesus is proclaimed as Messiah, the one expected at the end of time, the new David in linear succession from David. But He also dies and rises again, his birth celebrated with the winter solstice and his resurrection with the first full moon of spring. The sacrifice of Good Friday leads to the new life of Easter. The tomb of death becomes the womb of eternal life. And, unlike Greece and India, and numerous other places that continue to play a both/and, either/or game with the two views of time, in Jesus Christ they truly come together and bring on something new.

And what is true in the larger course of spiritual history is true in each individual life as well. We run our lives, in most ways maybe, by the linear view of time. We are born, we are educated, we work, we retire, we die; we mark success and failures, birthdays, anniversaries. Time marches on. But we also live out patterns in life, patterns and cycles that tend to repeat: clarity and confusion, opposition and acceptance, elation and depression, joy and sorrow. And even the more individualized themes that typify each of our unique stories.

Often we live in a kind of Greek two-tiered way, moving through the linear with an outward show of progress, while our inner life goes round and round. Sometimes we may be spiritually more like India – wildly polytheistic in a way – using one model for work and another for our families, having one view in Church and another in private prayer.

But when we come to Jesus it can all come together. This word made flesh in our word and our flesh encompasses both our linear and cyclic life to bring on something new, new life, true life, new life in Christ, true life in Christ.

Looking at our lessons today in that specially focussed cultural and personal context we can see that one of the main spiritual teachings here, by both Jesus and Paul, coming out of these lessons, is to not look so much to the future, but live in the here and now, because that is where the line and the circle come together.

It is interesting when you compare the first letter of Paul to the Thessalonians with the second letter. In the first letter Paul shows a strong enthusiasm for the coming of the end-times. He talks about the many who will still be alive at the coming of the Lord. How he will "descend from heaven with the archangels call and with the sound of the trumpet of God." "Let us not sleep as other do", the letter says, "but keep awake, putting on the breastplate of faith and love and for a helmet the hope of salvation." "He who calls you is faithful," Paul says, "and he will do it." The message is to "Be ready!"

Then today we hear in the sequel to that letter, written either by Paul or by those whom he taught, that the Thessalonians were taking the call to be ready a little too literally. They were ready, but that is all they were doing. They’d quit their jobs and were just sitting around reading all those Left Behind books, waiting for the end of the world.

So this second letter is cautionary with a message of patience rather than readiness, or rather patience and readiness held together in one stance.

And the Gospel reading gives basically the same message. People are running around like crisis junkies looking for signs of the Kingdom to make what otherwise may have been a life of suffering or boredom more tolerable. Luke has Jesus here counsel endurance, "By endurance you will gain your life." "To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven." Jesus echoes the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, Sophia, the feminine balance to the masculine linearity, balancing the over-eagerness of prophetic expectation. It is all in God’s hands. It is fully in God’s hands.

Of course Jesus counters the excessively cyclic as well. (His way, in good Anglican form, is a middle way.) Cyclic spirituality can tend toward a kind of moral withdrawal. If everything just goes round and round then what is the point of bothering with it all? What is the point of compassion? Why fight the good fight to finish the race if the race isn’t every really finished?

We don’t have much of this problem in the West. We’re so driven by progress and linearity. But it is a problem in India and other parts of Asia, and can be a problem for Americans and Europeans who have been influenced by Asian spirituality (myself included). A kind of passivity can set in about our life in the day to day world when we focus too much on cyclic spirituality. There can be a sense that the life we are living is in some ways essentially unreal. If Jesus is only the Lord of the Dance, then I can sit this one out without consequence. And yet, the life of Jesus shows us that each moment is given to God’s purpose, each moment is dying, each moment is risen, each moment is eternal. Each life is crucial, the center of a circle, a point without which the line would be broken. That’s what comes from the joining of the two, the cyclic and the linear, the prophetic and the wisdom, the earth and the sky, mother and father. We don’t focus on the past. We don’t focus on the future. We stay in the here and now, treating each day as a special gift from God, but then letting go as the circle moves round and the line moves on.

We are fully involved, involved in life, involved in love, involved in joy, and yet not bound to it. Involved but not attached.

Each of our lives is a world created. And each such world is like the temple in Jerusalem, adorned with beautiful stones, at the center of which, in the depth of our soul, is the holy of holies. But as Jesus said, not a stone of that temple will be left standing.

So this I think is a central Christian spiritual teaching as we move toward the close of one Church year and the beginning of another.

Be fully in the here and now. Be awake and attentive to the specifics of your life, observing without judgment. And be willing to let go as one day, one world, dies to give way to another.

In this way the spirituality of the linear and the spirituality of the cyclic are joined, creating the spiral of a whole and holy life that will bring us, in Christ, most surely to God.

Thanks be to God.