Kairos Moment

Sermon for Friends Congregational Church“Kairos Moments”Delivered by Rev. Dan De LeonSunday, January 22, 2012Psalm 62:5-12; Mark 1:14-20At about 1:30 on Tuesday afternoon, I got one of the best text messages a pastor can ever get. It was a picture from Amanda and Kay of their son, Cooper Clinton Conley, just a half-hour old at that point. As I looked at the picture of this beautiful child, weighing just a few pounds and not able to open his little eyes just yet, I thought about my kids who are now 4 and 6 years old, and I found myself saying something I didn’t think I’d be saying for a few more years: “Wow!

They grow up fast, don’t they?”It was just last week that Mac and Ruthie were Cooper’s size. I can remember those days, but it’s already getting harder and harder for me to grasp them; like they’re slipping through my fingers. But seeing little Cooper in that text message, I was able to remember something from the days when Stacy and I were first-time parents of an infant.When Mac was just a matter of weeks old, he had no sleeping schedule. No sooner would we go to sleep than the baby would start crying. At one hour Stacy would get up to nurse him. The next hour I would get up to change him.

The next hour Stacy would get up to nurse him and change him again. But sometimes being fed and changed wasn’t enough for the new human being living under our previously quiet roof. Some nights, usually between the hours of 3 and 5am, the baby would cry and I would pick him up out of his crib (or out of his little Moses basket that we kept beside our bed for those first few weeks of his life). His diaper was dry.

He wasn’t hungry. So, I’d hold him in my arms (Sometimes I’d just hold him in one arm like a football—He liked that; Ruthie not so much), and I’d walk him around the living room, and I’d say, “Shhhh. Shhhh.” But he’d still be crying, so I’d walk over to the window and the moonlight would pour over his tiny face.

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And sometimes the cats would be looking in from the patio, George and Gracie, going, “What’s that thing you have there? How come he’s getting all our attention?” But he’d still be crying, so then I’d start moving my weight side to side, just kind of swaying. (This got to be a habit.

I’d be in the middle of a conversation with another adult, and I’d just start swaying for no reason. Took a long time to break that habit.) But he’d still be crying. So, I’d keep swaying and then I’d say really softly, over and over again, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” And eventually, he’d calm down and stop crying and go back to sleep.I see this imagery when I read Psalm 62: “Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him.” It’s like the person who wrote that Psalm is describing a struggle that has to happen before they find peace. I love that message because I can relate to it. It doesn’t say, “My soul finds rest in God alone,” it says, “Find rest, O my soul.” Calm down. Those moonlit hours of swaying back and forth with an infant in my arms were that kind of sweet struggle where rest didn’t come easily, but it was an assurance that came only after saying over and over again, “It’s okay.

It’s okay.” And you know what? We struggled, but it was always okay.Those already long gone late night struggles are what I now see as “kairos moments.” Kairos is the Greek word for time, and it’s what Jesus says in Mark 1:15 when he says, “The time is at hand,” or, “The time has come.” When we think of the time being at hand, we might think of an apocalyptic message that some guy has scribbled on a sandwich board. It has a tinge of finality to it: “The time is at hand!” But what we hear isn’t really what it means.The time that Jesus is talking about—kairos—means the time foreseen by the prophets. Kairos refers to the time fixed in God’s foreknowledge.

How God sees the world and how God knows that the world can be when Creation is at its best is at hand. So when Jesus says, “The time is at hand,” he’s proclaiming the realization of God’s vision. It’s not a question about whether everything’s going to be okay, it’s all just a matter of when. So swaying my children to sleep were kind of kairos moments where it didn’t matter how long it took, eventually the babies would find rest and it would be okay.It sounds nice, but we think of time in terms of urgency and finality. Time for us is that hourglass flipped over with those grains of sand trickling down faster than we’d like. But for God, time is a nonissue.

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Part of the Good News of the incarnation is that God has defeated even time itself through the destruction of death itself and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. God deals in terms of eternity, not temporality. Jesus says, “The time is at hand.” The kairos is at hand. God’s vision is now being realized. And it’s those kairos moments in our lives when that realization, that vision of God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, comes just a little bit closer.

Kairos moments are when God is whispering to us over and over again it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay, and for a change we actually listen.Another way to think of kairos moments is to think of those times in our past when we have set aside our self-absorption and started listening. We’ve started listening for more than just our own willpower that says, “I got this. I’ve got a handle on things. I’ve got perspective.” Kairos moments are the times when we get over ourselves, those moments when we remember that from dust we were created and to dust we shall return, and we start hearing that as good news, not something urgent.

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We start hearing it as empowerment so that we can reach out and start relying on people and power and perspectives and possibilities that are greater than the little god I have made myself out to be in my everyday life. Kairos moments are when our life’s posture stops making fists and starts opening our arms. It’s when we do what some of my Catholic friends call letting go and letting God.Now, this is the second week in a row that the Scriptures have focused on Jesus calling his first disciples. It’s a fascinating story.

But what fascinates us are those disciples; those guys just drop what they’re doing and they follow Jesus. We’re so enamored with Simon and Andrew and the rest of them just dropping their nets and following Jesus. We say, “I don’t know if I could do that!