17 September 2011
I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. (Philippians 1:3-6)
September’s here again. The whole ‘new school year’ thing inevitably kindles a sensation of time flying by. Summer’s over, the light’s changing, and we’re all boarding the speeding bus to Christmas Land.
Already we’re telling you about First Christmas, so you can get everything ready for your festive services in plenty of time. We’re trying to be kind – please don’t think we’re hurrying you or wishing your year away!
But time itself has a way of sweeping us up into a view of life that can be deceptive. We need to be clear when we’re being lulled by its hypnotic rhythm. In short – it’s worth spending some time thinking about time.
We can’t help but fall into patterns as people. We expect predictability; we look for the comfortable, familiar path. It’s how we function – basing our action on past experience, assuming it will fit with events yet to come.
And so we can switch off from looking for anything radical, assuming that our lives are just a cycle, going round and round, another Christmas after another autumn after another summer... the freshness of the present lost in the perceived inevitability of the future, a future already moulded by a past – how much are we actually paying attention to the real possibilities available to us right now?
CS Lewis talks about our attitude to time and why it matters in The Screwtape Letters, an exchange between a junior devil and his uncle Screwtape on the topic of how they can cause humans to damn themselves. Screwtape writes:
‘The humans live in time but our Enemy [God] destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the present is the point at which time touches eternity... In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.’
In other words – the present is the only reality available to us. Right now is the only time we can achieve anything. Right now is the only place we can live. And this is where the verse from Philippians comes in, sweeping any idea of patterns, cycles and rhythms aside.
We’re given a promise here, and it’s something Paul is ‘confident’ of: ‘that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus’. All our present moments are working towards a completion of the good work begun by Christ himself. We are being refined. We are in a process. We are moving forward.
So as the familiar season arrives with its familiar flavours, know that this is not familiar. This is new. Expect change. Expect it now.