- Tree Time
Recently I learned that trees, like animals, have a central nervous system. Trees even have a brain! (Sort of.) And just like in animals, messages are sent via electrical impulses that travel along a tree’s nervous system. So if the leaves need to send a message to the roots, that message is sent via these electrical impulses.
In animals - including humans - those impulses travel with amazing speed. When your brain sends a message to your foot to take a step, your foot responds almost instantly. Then, if you stub your toe, the impulses that tell your brain that, “hey, that hurts!” travel back just as quickly.
In trees, however, those impulses move about one-third of an inch per minute. For a large, mature tree, it could take several hours for that impulse to travel the length of a fully grown tree!
Clearly, trees view time differently than animals do.
It reminds me of the Ents in the Lord of the Rings books. Ents are tree-like creatures; and for them, time indeed moves at a different pace.
At one point, the hobbits are waiting for the Ents to decide whether or not they are going to help them. The Ents discuss the matter, and the hobbits wait. For hours.
Finally, Pippin says, “They must have decided something by now.”
But Treebeard - leader of the Ents - replies: “Decided? No, we have just finished saying ‘Good Morning.’”
The hobbits are astounded. “But it’s night time already! You can’t take forever!”
But Treebeard just says, “Now, don’t be hasty…”
There are trees on earth which have lived for thousands of years. I’ve walked among trees in the San Gabriel Mountains just north of here that are 2,000 years old. I haven’t been to the Bristlecone pine forest in the White Mountains, but some of those trees are estimated to be 5,000 years old.
Meanwhile, in Utah, there is a forest of quaking aspen trees which are all connected by a vast root system. Since they are connected and are all genetically identical, the 40,000 trees in this forest are technically all one living organism. And even though individual trees have come and gone, this organism as a whole is estimated to be 80,000 years old.
- Moses Waits
I’m thinking about this, because in our first scripture reading, it says that God called Moses up to the mountain. And once there, Moses waited six days while a cloud covered the mountain; and on the seventh day, the Lord spoke to Moses.
And then, the scripture says, Moses stayed on the mountain for forty days and forty nights, before descending.
Well, who has that kind of time?
God does, obviously, but what human?
How can any of us be expected to wait that long for God?
When compared to trees that are 2,000, 5,000, or 80,000 years old, our lives are short. And when compared to God, who is infinite - well, it’s incredible that God even pays any attention to us.
But God does pay attention. And any time we experience sorrow, or injustice, or oppression, or struggle, God pays particular attention.
It was because God paid attention to the Hebrews, and their cries of suffering, that God called Moses, to deliver the people from their bondage and suffering.
God noticed. God heard their cries. And God was with them.
But why did Moses have to wait so long?
Seven days of waiting on the mountain, followed by 40 more days and nights… all in the midst of forty years of wandering in the wilderness…
- Kairos
One thing about time in the Bible… It is indeed measured in different ways.
In the Bible, there is chronos time, and there is kairos time. Chronos and kairos are two Greek words which both mean time, but different aspects of time.
Chronos refers to the hours, minutes, and seconds that pass by. In athletic contests like track or swimming, time is kept, and it is precise, down to the tenth or hundredth or thousandth of a second.
That’s chronos time.
But if a particularly significant event occurs, like the breaking of a new world record, people might speak about what a significant moment in sports history it is. And when they speak about it being a significant moment - that’s kairos time.
Generally speaking, the Bible is more concerned with kairos time than with chronos time. The Bible uses descriptions of time to mark the significance of the event - not to state specifically how many hours, minutes, or seconds have passed by.
So when the Bible describes creation as taking place in seven days, or Moses waiting for God for seven days, or Moses then spending forty days and nights on the mountain, or the Hebrews spending 40 years in the wilderness - we aren’t meant to interpret these things literally, as we would the minutes and seconds it takes for a runner to cross the finish line.
These are symbolic numbers that give meaning to kairos moments - significant moments in the story of God and God’s people.
And I could present other examples: the forty days and nights it rained while Noah and his family were on the ark; and the forty days and nights Jesus spent in the wilderness, which is actually the scripture that will be our focus next week…
So when it comes to time in the bible, the seconds, minutes, hours, and days, all start to blur. It’s a different way of measuring time. Kairos time has the ability to speed up, or slow down. It can even hit pause.
- Transfiguration
The other scripture we read this morning is Jesus’ transfiguration. The story of Jesus’ transfiguration is deliberately presented in the gospels in a way that echoes Moses’ time on the mountain. In many ways, this story presents Jesus as a “new” Moses, a new deliverer, sent to rescue God’s people.
In contrast to Moses’s time on the mountain, the story of Jesus’ transfiguration seems to happen rather quickly. Matthew uses words like “suddenly,” and phrases like “while he was still speaking,” to imply that things happened in rapid succession. There’s a sense of urgency here, because Jesus’ mission was urgent, and time was running out.
Yet I do wonder how long it all actually took. This is clearly a significant kairos moment, an event during which time both speeds up and slows down. Moses actually appears, and so does Elijah, and how can that happen in a chronos time frame?
It’s all so frustratingly wonderful.
The hobbits were frustrated with the Ents, and how they viewed time, and the disciples were often frustrated with Jesus, and the timeline of the kingdom of God. The disciples actually got impatient with waiting.
Flipping through the pages of scripture, we find other instances when humans were baffled by how God perceives time.
Most significantly, we have 2 Peter 3:8, which says that “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” I feel like that is true when comparing humans to trees, but how much more true that is when comparing humans to God!
The lifespan of trees is one thing. The lifespan of stars in the universe, and the amount of time it would take to travel to them, is even more mind-boggling.
- Your Time Is Now
Imagine you could travel to the stars in a rocket ship. It’s not too hard to imagine, because it happens all the time in movies.
But consider this: when we sent people to the moon, it took about 3 days for them to get there. But to travel to Mars, that same rocket ship would take about seven months. And what about traveling to other stars, other solar systems beyond our own?
To travel to Vega, one of the closest stars to earth, it would take 465,000 years. And to Deneb, a star much further away but still bright in our sky, it would take 37 million years of traveling by rocket ship to arrive there.
And we haven’t even left our own Milky Way galaxy yet. What about all the other countless billions of galaxies?
Clearly, travel to other stars is not feasible.
In the movies, the solution to this is to imagine that we can build ships that travel at the speed of light. Well, even traveling at the speed of light, it would take 2,000 years to reach Deneb. And to reach any one of the countless galaxies beyond our own Milky Way, it would still take millions of years, traveling at the speed of light.
The psalmist, in psalm 8, wrote the following:
“When I look up at your skies, at what your fingers made—the moon and the stars that you set firmly in place—what are human beings that you think about them; what are human beings that you pay attention to them?”
Indeed.
And yet, God does pay attention to us. In this vast universe, God decided that creation wouldn’t be complete unless YOU were a part of it. All those stars and galaxies, all the trees that live for thousands and tens of thousands of years, weren’t enough.
God wanted you.
These are big thoughts. And one might want to spend seven days or forty days on a mountaintop pondering them. It may take that long to "be still and know," as the psalmist says.
...and it may take that long, or longer, to seek out how God might be calling YOU to help bring about the restoration of all things, to help bring wholeness to this fragmented world.
After all, this is your moment. This is your kairos moment.
In a universe that is billions of years old - a universe that will exist for billions of years to come - your time is now...
That kind of wisdom, that deep realization, only comes if you wait for it… while sitting beneath an ancient tree...or under a star-filled sky...or overlooking ocean waves crashing onto shore...or in a quiet sanctuary where generations before you have prayed and worshiped.
And with that wisdom comes a joy that is deeper and more profound than any joy you've ever known.
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