Scripture: Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3: 15-17, 21-22

“And a Voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the beloved; my favor rests on you.’”

-- Luke 3:22

The Church’s calendar for the year is by now well launched. We have celebrated the birth of Jesus and now we celebrate his baptism, showing how our calendar is arranged according to the substance of the life of Jesus, not according to nature, and how it intends to be a means for us to include ourselves in that life and not a way to keep in sync with the sun and the moon. That is, our calendar is controlled not by natural circumstances like the phases of the sun and the moon, as were the calendars of, say, the Druids of old Britain who used Stonehenge as a guide to these astronomical phases, in order to coordinate their religious ceremonies with nature, but by the historical events of the life of Jesus. We Christians do not care to relate our truth to nature, only to Jesus, therefore, ours is a calendar that calls us to do certain things not because it is mid-summer’s day or the winter solstice, but because our beloved Jesus is born, baptized, transfigured, tortured, crucified and risen, and alive for ever.

Recently, at the end of the last liturgical year, I meditated in a sermon on the nature of Christian time with the help of poetry. I pointed to T.S. Eliot’s lines on time in his Four Quartets, even quoted some lines that present the mystery of time poetically. Perhaps you remember the theme, “In our end is our beginning…in our beginning is our end.” Today I want to return to the theme of time with the help not of poetry but of physics, and that for a number of reasons. I shan’t waste time (sic) giving you those reasons in detail one is enough. Natural science still has unwarranted authority in the common mind as the arbiter of the nature of fundamental things like time, and is generally accepted as the only reliable witness to the truth. I want to make it clear that this belief of the common mind is unwarranted, and that good science itself suggests that liturgical time like we Christians have kept for millennia, may be nearer the way things are than the clock time, that divides experience into the past, the present and the future, that we take for granted. There are two further fortuitous reasons: I was led by current events in California to see the movie the Terminator, which is the story of a killing machine played convincingly by our governor, that comes from the future to kill a certain Sarah Connor, who will become the mother of the man who in the future from which the Terminator comes has led a successful revolt of the oppressed humans against the half-human half-machine Cyborgs who dominate them. The future returns to the past present in order to change the future. That’s one fortuity; the other is an article I read in the NYT on Jan 1 entitled, “The Time We Thought We Knew” by a professor of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia University named Brian Greene (Jan 1, 2004, p. A 23).

It is not the well-known matters of fact that caught my attention in Greene’s article, - after all if time travel has penetrated the world of the Hollywood screenwriters is must already be a cliché of the common mind. No what caught my attention is Green’s recommendation that we work at making the relativity-quantum notion of time the normal experience of time in our normal experience. Let me remind you of a few well-established facts (I quote Green): “Were you to board a spaceship, head out from the earth at 99.9999 percent of light speed, travel for six months and then head back home at the same speed, your motion would slow your clock, relative to those who remain stationary on earth, so that you’d be one year older upon your return - while everyone on earth would have aged about seven thousand years, Or, were you to venture into space again and spend a year hovering a dozen feet above the edge of a black hole, whose mass was one thousand times that of the sun, the strong gravitational field would slow your clock so much that on your return to earth you would find that more than a million years had elapsed.” 

These facts alone show that time is not what we thought it is. The division of our lives into past, present and future, is a convenience of ignorance. Einstein wrote, “…the experience of the now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics.”  In this spirit Einstein wrote to the widow of his recently deceased friend Michele Besso, “In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me by just a little. That doesn’t mean anything. For us convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however, persistent.” And for us convinced Christians too! We try to live without those distinctions and that illusion every moment of our liturgical lives, when we are with Jesus as he goes down into the water of baptism, when he breaks for us the bread and pours the wine. We are here, and he is here and all our loved ones are here and the apostles and prophets and martyrs are here and Mary the Mother of God is here and now, not there and then, and that is not only poetry and mysticism, but also physics and mathematics!

This state of affairs clearly implies things about the nature of poetry on the one hand and mathematics on the other and more important than both, about theology. We cannot follow those paths of analysis but the conclusion is surely obvious.   Let me quote Greene again, “Most physicists cope with this disparity by compartmentalizing: there’s time as understood scientifically and there’s time as experienced intuitively. For decades I‘ve struggled to bring my experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I delight in what I know is the individual’s power, however imperceptible, to affect time’s passage. In my mind’s eye, I often conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I further fracture Newton’s pristine and uniform perception.” (The point here is that movement, however slow, causes clocks to tick at different rates relative to each other, so with every step one proves Newton wrong and shows the illusionary nature of time. The person sitting on the park bench when I walk by is aging at a different rate than I, simply because I am moving and he is stationary.) “And in moments of loss I’ve taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization.”

This statement powerful as it is, is still not sufficient because it might leave us thinking that time and space are essential categories, that the problem is only to understand them better. That is only partly the case, and for the full story we must listen to Green again, “Today’s scientists seeking to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity) are convinced that we are on the verge of another major upheaval, one that will pinpoint the more elemental concepts from which time and space emerge. Many believe that this will involve a new formulation of natural law in which scientists will be compelled to trade the space-time matrix within which they have worked for centuries for a more basic ‘realm ‘ that is itself devoid of time and space.”

We Christians already inhabit that realm in our liturgy. Liturgical movement along the lifeline of Jesus traverses a “realm” devoid of time and space. It is the realm or kingdom of God, whom theology has always understood to be simultaneous, that is to be present to all things, everywhere, always. That’s why we use of Him the nonsense phrase, “forever and ever and unto the ages of ages.” God is defined by simultaneity; time is an infirmity of the creature, who cannot be all at once but must receive being as a series of coffee spoonfuls, just as you must wait until I have finished this sentence before you know what I mean.  Time is our finitude and frailty, and we have greatly enhanced its power over us by the imperfect understanding of it given us by Isaac Newton. But our faith can free us from the limits of time when we enter wholeheartedly into the liturgy. Our experience has shown us that possibility of freedom, in the mystical, aesthetic, musical, and rhetorical functions of worship. Now our best science shows it to us also – the derivative nature of time that points to a deeper timelessness.

I wanted to remind you of these things, which have been a normal part of my own faith and piety for years, because it occurred to me that some of you might not be aware of them or if aware of them might not see their pertinence to our faith. Some of you might go on believing as an act of defiance against rational thought and scientific evidence, or in fear that such evidence would make faith impossible. The facts are that our best human thought tends to confirm the faith, as far as thought has come, and that alas is not very far!

So where do we connect with all this timeless reality? A few weeks ago my 5-year-old grand daughter Sarah danced into my study singing that there are angels all around us, everywhere in the room. Then she paused and asked, “Grandpa are there really angels?’” I said “Yes there are.” She said, “My Mommy says they are in our imagination.” I said, “Yes, that’s where they are!” I didn’t add that that fact assures us they are real, because the imagination is the realm where time and space, and timeless, non-spatial ness, and angels and demons, and apostles saints and martyrs, and our loved ones are, along with science and mathematics, poetry, prayer and liturgy. Imagination is the realm beyond time and space where the simultaneous God impinges most powerfully on us.

Amen.