It’s About Time

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 27, 2022 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Advent Sunday

In 1980, just as Rowan Atkinson was becoming famous, I had the chance to see him at the Bristol Hippodrome. In one scene he’s trying to teach his long-time scriptwriter Richard Curtis how to tell a joke. Rowan says, ‘It’s one of those ones where I ask a question, and you say, “I don’t know, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.”’ Rowan begins by saying, ‘I say, I say, I say, what’s the secret of great comedy?’ Richard replies, ‘I don’t know, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.’ Richard laughs. Rowan’s stony-faced. Rowan, disgusted by working with amateurs, repeats the question. Richard replies, ‘I don’t know. What is the secret to great…?’ But before Richard can finish his reply, Rowan interrupts, ‘Timing.’ Rowan deliberately gets his timing wrong when saying that timing is the secret to great comedy; but Richard doesn’t get the joke. Rowan’s exasperated by Richard’s stupidity. He enquires, ‘But didn’t you see?’ ‘Sorry,’ Richard replies, ‘Was it a visual joke?’ Rowan tries the joke a third time. But Richard still doesn’t get the joke. Rowan demands, ‘Don’t you think that’s a clever joke?’ to which Richard replies, ‘Clever… no. Joke… no.’ Rowan says he blames his timing. Richard replies, ‘It could be other factors. Like the complete absence of anything funny in the joke.’ Rowan laments, ‘It’s so difficult telling jokes.’

I knew a man who used to say, ‘The saddest words in the English language: “Too late.”’ Understanding comedy is perhaps the quickest way into perceiving the significance of time. Advent is fundamentally about time. Advent suggests there are three key moments in history. The first is the calling of Abraham, when it’s clear God is profoundly invested in created time, by becoming bound by covenant to a people through whom all the world will find a blessing. Yet somehow that covenant and that blessing are never fully realised, so God’s people find themselves waiting. That waiting is rewarded in the second key moment, the coming of Jesus, born from Abraham’s people, offering the utter revelation of God’s identity and purpose. Yet even after Jesus’ ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit, things aren’t the way God and we long for them to be. There’s another period of waiting – we don’t know how long. One day the third key moment arrives. The second coming of Christ. Which, we trust, will be well worth waiting for.

Advent Sunday’s the day we traditionally focus on the second coming of Jesus, most vividly portrayed in Charles Wesley’s hymn ‘Lo, he come with clouds descending.’ But Advent covers a significant ambiguity in the way we think about time. Let me put it this way. Does Jesus’ second coming mark the end of time, and our transfer to a different realm that transforms our whole experience of time? Or does Jesus’ second coming mark the beginning of a new kind of time, which we could perhaps call the fullness of time, in which everything that’s incomplete in this realm finally takes the form for which God originally made it? In short, what is Advent Sunday actually all about?

To answer that I’m going briefly to touch on two ways in which you could say the whole notion of time, and the waiting that almost inevitably accompanies it, is out of fashion. One’s what you could call the militant atheist way, while the other’s the militant Christian way.

The militant atheist isn’t very interested in time, if by time we mean the series of past happenings over decades, millennia or billions of years that can in principle be ordered into some kind of a story, and that will go on long into the future in ways that fulfil or subvert that story. The scientific determinism that’s interested only in mathematical coherence maintains that there are natural laws that do not change, and from the very beginning, they have set in motion everything that can subsequently happen. It’s a way of removing all trace of uncertainty from existence. Notice how it takes away any need for patience. You don’t need to wait, because everything’s been the same since the beginning.

It works a lot better for the inanimate matter that pervaded space-time for the first ten billion years than for the lives and eventually the minds that have come into being since. But note the unshakeable irony that lies at the heart of scientific determinism: such adherents assume everything is determined except their enlightened mind. Their enlightened mind is able somehow to step outside the necessities of existence and perceive that everything’s determined. Funny that.

Before Christians feel too smug, having identified the flaw in the militant atheist argument, we should pause to recognise there’s a militant Christian logic that also seeks to obscure time. If your gospel is that this is a terrible world, and you’ve lived a shameful life, and that you need to be saved by being rescued from the world and yourself, a salvation that lies in another realm entirely, and that you connect with that salvation by escaping this world in solemn withdrawal, and that you’re wasting your time trying to redeem this world because the only one worth focusing on is that other realm, then time has got nothing to offer you. You’ve created a philosophy that’s got no use for time. You’ve made eternity the only thing that counts. Again, you’ve removed the need for patience, because all the things that really matter will be available to you when you die.

These two positions show how widespread is our tendency, secular or religious, to try to bypass the contingencies of time, and have everything wrapped up and certain. Time isn’t like that. Which is why philosophies and theologies that sideline time, and make timing irrelevant, are always going to have a significant appeal.

You may be familiar with a phrase I like to use – a future bigger than the past. I like to use it about the Church of England, in fact the church in general, because I sense a mistaken nostalgia for a time some people talk as if they want to return to, a mythical 1950s, a time apparently distinguished by its higher rates of churchgoing, but a time we could more honestly recognise as one of profound sexism, homophobia, racism class prejudice, and a host of closeted and unpunished crimes even worse than those. There was no golden era when the church got it right. We have a chance to discover together a church that’s never fully been, a church that models an alternative society where gifts are cherished and strangers are seen as angels and people no longer use words like disability because they only see people’s abilities and we’re all identified by what we are, rather by what we’re not.

But there’s another sense in which for Christians the future is always bigger than the past. And that’s expressed by St Paul in his priceless words from today’s epistle: Now is our salvation nearer than when we first believed. These are some of my favourite words in the Bible. Just think about it. However foolish, fragile and feckless our journey as a disciple has been – however much we’ve doubted, distrusted and despaired – however much there’ve been times we frankly thought, ‘The church is a bunch of wasters who aren’t good enough for me,’ or humbly feared, ‘I’m a complete waster who isn’t good enough for the church’; for all those misgivings, in simple historical time, ‘Now is our salvation nearer than when we first believed.’ What I like so much about Paul’s words is that they don’t assume moral improvement. They don’t say, ‘Every day and in every way we and/or the world are getting better and better.’ They just do the maths, and say, whenever this story ends and the big and ultimate story of God begins, it’s sooner now than it used to be. In a generation like ours that valorises youth and energy and denies and obscures increasing age, that’s amazing yet utterly simple news.

And when you put it in a context of a planet that’s 14.8 billion years old, and an imagination that struggles to envisage either more space or more time or even more complexity than what’s already been, to say a future bigger than the past is a truly awesome thing to say. It makes us realise that God was serious about creating time. The incarnation of Jesus isn’t a promise that we can escape from time, but a confirmation that God intended time and is prepared to inhabit time and that being with God is a fundamentally time-filled experience. Jesus is the intersection where time meets forever; and forever is not mystical and ethereal, but made up of genuine time and space. Time and space, yet without the restrictions of this time and this space. A future bigger than the past, including the past we were only living a few moments ago.

That phrase, a future bigger than the past, first came to me 30 years ago when I presided at the blessing of the wedding of a couple that eloped to Gretna Green. It wasn’t quite like eloping from London, because they lived in Newcastle. It wasn’t your Victorian melodrama kind of eloping, because from memory he was around 72 and she was a year or two younger, so this wasn’t straight out of Wilkie Collins or Charles Dickens. But it was a moment to remember, because he’d clearly made previously what we discreetly call ‘a few mistakes’, and she’d evidently experienced in her time what we gently call ‘a lot of unhappiness.’ On first sight you could call the match the triumph of hope over experience. But it struck me that there was something subtler than that going on. Here were two people, one about to give up on himself, the other about to give up on other people. They’d reflected on the past. It had yielded some good things, but a lot of grief and regret. What they were doing together was pledging their trust in a future bigger than the past. It was an experiment in hope.

In doing so they changed the way I think about Jesus. Before their wedding I’d imagined Jesus as a figure in the past, calling us back to something – to holiness, justice or faithfulness. But since that wedding I’ve seen Jesus in a different way. I’ve seen Jesus beckoning us into the future, inviting our trust, our hope, and our transformation. The future is bigger than the past because the future draws us closer to Jesus, however unresolved and unready and unworthy we feel. Now is our salvation nearer than we first believed, because every moment we draw nearer to the embrace of the one who is our companion forever. If Jesus meets us at the end of the story, we need never worry about the dreaded words, ‘Too late.’

The secret of great comedy is timing. The secret of great faith is time. Time in which we can be patient. Time in which we can wait, because the future’s bigger than the past, because now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. For the future goes by many names, but in the end only one of those names abides: and that name is Jesus.