It's About Time

Matthew 26:18 - He replied, “Go into the city to a certain man and tell him, ‘The Teacher says: My appointed time is near. I am going to celebrate the Passover with my disciples at your house.’”

My appointed time is near. In other words, Jesus knows he is going to die soon. We still use this euphemism today to mean someone is near death. “If it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go.” The noun here is ‘kairos’ and is different from the word we use to measure and keep track of time, ‘chronos.’ Kairos can be used in the same way, but it also has the sense of appropriate time, season, in the fullness of time, ripeness. It can refer, as Jesus does, to death, but it can also refer to a chunk of time; an hour, a month, a year, a season (both in the sense of a person’s life and the seasons of the year).

Yet, it also hearkens back to another usage of ‘time’ in the Old Testament; to refer to “the year of the Lord,” “the day of the Lord,” the day of God’s judgment or action. This is almost certainly Matthew’s intention, and, thus, we are not just talking about chronological time, but Kairos as God’s time. God’s time is the time when God acts, the time when we can look around and see how the Spirit is working in the world. It is my belief that we are in a Kairos moment, a moment of God’s action, right now; here in the US and around the world. The Black Lives Matter movement and the Poor People’s Campaign calling for national attention to the poor and oppressed on whose behalf God fights. The protests in the streets are growing as more people see the unjust treatment.

The Milwaukee Bucks, although they might not use this concept, saw God’s action and acted along with it. They staged a wildcat strike; a strike that didn’t have the approval of the union. The rest of the players scheduled to play that evening followed suit. However, they didn’t stop there. As a condition to return to playing, they used their power to negotiate for use of NBA stadiums as voting super-centers. They used the power they had to help others. Now that taking a knee, as Colin Kaepernik did, has become acceptable, they saw they needed to take their protest one step further. That took courage.

God is calling us in this Kairos moment to that same courage. To educate ourselves, to learn what is needed, to protest, and to go beyond protest. Protest is just one step in advocating for the marginalized in our society. It is an important step in creating awareness and letting our voice be heard. But it is rarely enough. The students who sat at that lunch counter in Greensboro, endured taunting before they were arrested. Once the original sitters were arrested, new protestors arrived to take their place. The police did not expect that. This happened again and again over the course of several months. Every Saturday, they’d come back, get arrested, get bailed out, and be back again. It wasn’t a one and done thing, there had to be something extra. Like the NBA, the students worked with the mayor to ensure that the transition would be peaceful.

God is calling us to protest AND go beyond protest. Not to violence, but to creative advocacy. God is calling us to use the power we have to serve the marginalized, to serve God’s people. I was in front of our mayor’s house protesting the fact that an off-duty cop who had murdered Desmond Franklin had not yet been arrested. One of the signs put the struggle we’re in succinctly:

It’s not Black versus white; it’s ALL of us versus racism.

Because racism, systemic and structural racism, is at the core of America’s founding and at the core of its culture, economic system, and even voting procedures. Until we recognize this truth and learn to deal with the heinous actions and attitudes of the past, we will stew in racism and all its consequences and effects. We must take this opportunity God is calling us to, this Kairos moment in which God is acting and come to terms both individually and corporately with the racism that is so natural, we can’t even see it.

It’s not Black versus white; it’s all of us versus racism.

All of us.

The time is ripe. Are you in? Will you join the movement of God’s Spirit by acting in this Kairos moment? I hope so, because, honestly, it’s long past (chronos) time.

B