ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
November 12, 2026
During this time of the year, there is always this unspoken battle between Thanksgiving and Christmas. We don’t want Christmas to encroach upon Thanksgiving’s territory. This has clearly become more and more difficult. Some even blame Sears, as their Christmas catalogue was usually delivered to people’s homes in October, and if your childhood home was like mine, once the catalogue arrived, the Christmas list started. I try to give room for Thanksgiving, yet this week, I have been working on my Advent sermons, and even jotted down a couple of ideas for my Christmas Eve sermons. No one wants me to wait until after Thanksgiving to begin thinking about my first Advent sermon, as that would only give me a couple of days.
I write this because time is sacred, and we quantify this sacredness, in part, by how we structure and prioritize our time. I was first introduced to the writings of Rabbi Abraham Heschel in graduate school. His words inspired and challenged me. Heschel wrote, “The highest goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments. Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.” I believe Heschel is correct in naming how the eternal is present in time. In the Greek of the New Testament, there are two words we translate as time. One is Chronos (χρόνος), as in chronological time. Or as is often said, clock time—tick-tock. The other is Kairos (καιρός), which is often described as the fullness of time or Divine-time. You might have spoken of an experience where time seemed to stand still. Your watch didn’t stop, but for a moment, you no longer felt confined by the rules of time.
In Mark 1:14-15, we read:
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
The word translated as ‘time’ is not Chronos, but Kairos. The time was fulfilled, not because it was September 17 at 4:26 p.m. Instead, time was fulfilled because the fullness of God was breaking into time, or as Heschel described it, “…the grandeur of what is eternal in time.” With all this said, I still like to structure my time, and not get too far into Christmas before I have celebrated Thanksgiving. However, I hope I never become so consumed with dates that I miss those Kairos experiences that will never be measured by a calendar or clock. And as I get ready to preach this Sunday on gratitude, I think about those experiences where I have been awe-struck by some gift, whether it was given to me by a person or by the Spirit. In those moments of awe, it no longer feels like a moment of time. In an experience unquantifiable by chronological language, I think we step into the presence of God, which is the eternal choosing to be present in time.
In whatever way I plan to structure my day or week or other period of time, I pray that I am not so rigid and constrained by my watch as to miss you, Eternal God. For though the eternal being present in the finite makes little sense to me, it seems to be what you do. And for that, I am thankful. Amen.
