God's Time, Not Ours

I speak to you in the name of the one true and living God: Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End. Amen.


What is All Saints day really about? … Who are the saints?

I actually want an answer to that. Who are the saints?

In our tradition there are three kinds of saints. Two are directly referenced in the Bible and the third is only hinted at. Oddly enough, it is the third meaning that we most often use. The ones who get a capital ‘S’ – those declared Saints by the church for what they did in their lives. What they lived for and what they died for. These Saints are important because they remind us of the cost and the purpose of Christ’s message. This does not mean that we are all called to get our ‘s’ capitalized.

One of the other meanings of saint that is used in the Bible refers to those who have already died who were Christians. This is the communion of saints. When we think of the Anglican communion or the Roman Catholic Church, we think that’s a lot of people in communion with each other. These are nothing compared to the communion of saints. Every person who has died in the past 2000 or so years and who had faith in Jesus Christ is a member of this communion. They are the Tradition of our church. They are our past. They foretell our future. (And I firmly believe our church has a future).

We are the final group of saints. When Paul opens his second letter to the Corinthians with “To the church of God that is in Corinth, including all the saints throughout Achaia” he is referring to us. This is where the Mormon church got their name: The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Those who have faith in Christ and live their lives according to his teaching are the living saints.

That’s a lot of saints. We have a way too much celebrating to do.


So what does this all have to do with today’s gospel reading?

It’s about time!

It’s about God’s time. The Greeks had two distinct concepts of time. The first, chronos is the time that we use every day. The time is says on our watches and clocks. The time that says supper will be ready in 15 minutes. The time that says today I am one day older than yesterday. Time marches on. This time is measurable and moves ever onward at a consistent pace. Chronos does not stand still. This is not God’s time.

Kairos on the other hand does stand still. Or it sometimes seems to. Kairos is God’s time. Eternity can be measured only in kairos. It has no meaning in chronos. Eternity is not endless time. It is all time. In the eleventh chapter of John, we get many examples of God’s time: some are obvious, some are less so. Right at the beginning we are told that “Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair.” This hasn’t happened yet, but it will. This is talking about Mary anointing Jesus for burial (which is done after someone is dead). Jesus isn’t dead yet. In God’s time sequence doesn’t matter. The order in which things happen is not important, only that they happen.

Later Martha says “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” She tells us something very important about God’s time. Christ being alive in the world is not an event fixed in the past. This is chronos thinking. In God’s time Christ is eternally (remember eternally is for all time) coming into the world. We are not living between the first and second coming of Christ. We are living in a world where the coming of Christ is an ongoing reality.


So what does all this about kairos and chronos, God’s time and the time on our clocks, have to do with the saints?

How many groups of saints did I say there were?

I was thinking in chronos time. In God’s time there is only one group. There is another term that is used for the saints in God’s time. They are called the “cloud of witnesses.” All those who have witnessed, who are witnessing, and who will witness to Christ’s eternal message. Now this is a BIG COMMUNION!

It is very important to remember this when we feel like what we do doesn’t matter, when we see things in the world that are not just and think that we cannot change them. It is true that one person has very little, if any, influence on what happens in the world (unless that person happens to be Bill Gates). Even the president of the United States can’t get much done unless he is backed by a large number of congressmen and senators.

But if we choose those issues that are part of Christ’s message, we are not alone. Not everyone in the cloud of witnesses will pick the same issue, but we are a huge force which spans a lot of time (all of it). What is there that we cannot do?

But what does all of this talk of kairos and chronos have to do with what we actually read today?

There is a very important message in our gospel reading that means much more in this light. “Jesus wept.” This is the shortest verse in the Bible and one of the most significant. Jesus did not grieve for the death of Lazarus. In God’s time, death has very little meaning. Lazarus was alive and would be alive again. No, Jesus wept because he felt Mary’s pain. God feels our pain when we grieve. God understands that we live by our clocks and only have glimpses of God’s time.

So remember these two things.


With the cloud of witnesses behind us, we can do anything.


Jesus wept.