The Point of Intersection of the Timeless with Time

Text: Matthew 28:16-20; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13

May 30, 1999 (Trinity Sunday)

James R. Gorman

Did you ever have an experience in which time, in the sense of clock time or chronological time, seems to have stopped. Or it passes without your noticing it? It usually is because you are doing something or are involved in something so engrossing and enveloping that you fail to notice the passing of the second, minute or hour hands. And after a period of such involvement, you finally look at a clock and are amazed to see what time it really is.

For me it happens in conversation with good friends and folks with whom one has a long and good relationship. You start talking, or playing cards, or dominoes. You might be reminiscing with friends from whom you've been separated for a long time and there is much catching up to do. Or it may be time spent embraced by a really good book.

Or time spent on the banks of a slow moving river with a mocking bird singing in the distance, water gurgling around the rocks, cicadas chirping.

Or time spent at play with your family or friends, or time spent remembering those most playful moments with your family and your friends. These are times of timelessness and the modern lament is that they are increasingly rare and are, therefore, to be the more greatly treasured.

For me, such an absence of time does not happen when watching TV. The television has a way of reminding you every five minutes what time it is and what's coming up next. "Law and Order will be over in 30 minutes and here are 4 good reasons to watch the news at 10." Absence of time does not occur when we worry about the things we have not done or those things we ought not have done and for which our regrets seem to cause the atomic clock in the Naval Observatory to slow down to a crawl. I sometimes think that if a certain percentage of the population of the United States, say 75%, all regretted at the same time--regretted, say, a thank you letter not sent or a cross word said in haste--maybe we could stop the Atomic Clock altogether.

One of the greatest preachers of our time is an Episcopal priest by the name of Barbara Taylor. She once talked about her visit to the post office. She didn't have the time to stand in line and so she desperately tried to fill the time with something productive. She wished she had brought a book or something. While she was in line she began perusing the pictures of the Most Wanted hung on the walls there. And she thought to herself, at least I'm not as sinful as those guys. I've not murdered anyone, I've not robbed a bank. All I can be accused of is anxiety in the first degree. I just worry about time.

In Gulliver's Travels, the Lilliputians decide that Gulliver's God much be his watch because he consults it so often. Time is our master and we are its slave in the real world. We show up at work at an appointed hour; we get the kids off to school at 7:00 a.m. sharp. If schools do nothing else, they train our kids how to watch the clock. Bells ring, lunches are hurried. My favorite newspaper is called the "New York Times." Newspapers measure the days of our lives in endlessly repetitive stories of time-bound events. I even heard that the Mexican government is thinking of outlawing the afternoon siesta. Now that's a backward step for civilization, if you ask me.

So, in our real time-bound world, these experiences of timelessness are to be treasured. Moments of Sabbath-rest. Times of extended meditation. Times in which time itself is wasted beyond recognition. Time passes without our really being aware of the clock. I have the sense that when we lose track of time, when time loses its power over us, when time becomes timeless, there most intimately is our God.

No poet has more preoccupied his art with the subject of time as did Thomas Stearns Eliot. T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, but became a naturalized British citizen before winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. In his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Pufrock" (isn't that a great name!) he writes,

There will be time, there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Well, that's J. Alfred Pufrock. Not a pretty picture of time. Time is a dreary repetition of events. But then there is Eliot's poem called "Dry Salvages" in his collection of poems, "Four Quartets", which speaks of the hopefulness of time as God created and God inhabited:

Men's curiosity searches past and future

And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint--

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time.

So, back to where the timeless intersects with time, where past, present and future collide in immeasurable ways. Those timeless and hopeful moments in which God invades our tedium with a generous offering of grace and joy and love that suspends time while allowing the Atomic Clock to keep on ticking.

This is Trinity Sunday, in which we go where angels fear to tread. To talk about an utterly incomprehensible mystery, as the Trinity is only for the foolhardy and the poets.

A recent scholar of theology suggested that we stop thinking of God as a being. That only gets us into trouble. It causes our minds to go into too literal directions. He suggests instead that the very earliest Church fathers thought of God as an event that intercepts time and fills it with such meaning and power that it passes without our knowing it or being able to measure it.

In this way, God is not three beings, but rather three events in time: "God is God, and then God is God again and again, each time in a different way."⁽¹⁾ Once as Father, once as Son and once as Holy Spirit. In this way the word we might use for the three parts of the Trinity is not so much three persons but three "identities," three ways of being present to us, three ways of occupying time.

I know that this is tough. It is especially hard to rearrange our conceptions of God. We like the static idea of God as depicted on the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. We like the muscular physique and the long flowing hair and beard. But God is almost never experienced in that way. God is experienced at the point of the intersection of the timeless in time. When our sense of time is suspended by joy, there is God in the most profound sense.

This argument about the makeup of God is very old. It is not some new age discovery. The argument first took place between Gregory of Nyssa and a fellow named Athanasius in the middle of the 4^th century (the 300s). How is it possible, Gregory argued, to talk about God as one and three if we are stuck talking about God as mostly a substance or a being. The Hebrew word for God is YHWH and it means I am whom I am. But the Hebrew language is not so clear about tenses and the word also means, "I will be whom I will be, I have been whom I have been." God is rather mostly experienced in time, in our past, in our present and in our future. God is in our crises, in our celebrations, in our failures, in our hopes. God is in our most profound darknesses and in our equally profound seasons of light. God is most experienced at the point of intersection of the timeless and time.

And this is finally how God can be understood as three-in-one. God is as Father and Mother to us, caring gently and not so gently; God is as companion, friend, one who saves, who travels with us and points out the potholes in the road; and God is the Spirit that blows within and through and around us, making of us a community of grace and hope who, when we gather as the body of Christ, lose all track of time.

God is, therefore, most clearly perceived in relationship.

God as Father,

God as Son,

God as Wind and Fire.God is one who fills time with a presence that is beyond measure. God is our past, present and future. God is, was, and is to come.

God is he who overcomes our enslavement to the clock and liberates us with a love in which time is immeasurable.

Amen.

1. Jensen, Robert W. The Triune Identity p. 110.