Between Times

We waited and it never happened. After all that careful storage of dustbins in the greenhouse, along with other potential missiles lying about in the garden, the hurricane passed us by. Spring and Autumn have always been unpredictable times. Allowing for the anomalies of climate change, they are still thought of as transition periods between the more predictable seasons of summer and winter. They are ‘between times’.

There are two ‘between times’ in the Christian year. One of them falls towards the end of the calendar year and the other at the end of January or in early February. We are coming into one of these ‘between times’ now. It is known as the Kingdom Season. It precedes Advent, as it corresponds, in a calendar sense, to the season of Epiphany which precedes Lent.  The Kingdom Season is a time of preparation for a further time of making ready – making ready for the coming of God’s Son into the world and of his embracing of the human condition.

What is the Kingdom? Jesus speaks of it often, and yet it is easy for it to be relegated to the realm of hopes and dreams, a kind of Nirvana. But the kingdom for which we pray when we say ‘thy Kingdom come’ is about the grittiness of life in the present and about the uncertain future which we all face.  Both are as real as the humanity which God embraced in Jesus. The Kingdom is about making real the presence of Jesus Christ in the here and now. It is about creating real hope in a seemingly hopeless world. It is about the things which can be changed when we human beings put our knowledge and gifts to the service of God, rather than using them to prolong or sustain the fantasies which keep us going – which make achievers and ‘do’ers’ of us, rather than people who appear to be doing nothing, who seem to have failed and are written off as a burden on society. The reverse side of success is not failure. It is shame.

The Kingdom Season is therefore a time for taking a second look at our immediate surroundings, because this is where the Kingdom of which Christ speaks is being shaped. It is shaped by the people we fail to embrace, or even notice, most of the time. They are the elderly person who passes by every afternoon on some routine errand which is the high point of their day. They are the Big Issue seller. Whatever views a person holds about how the Big Issue operates, or about those who work a particular patch, selling it day after day in the streets is not the way most of us would choose to live our lives. If we are fortunate enough to work from home in a beautiful part of the world, sometime between 5 and 7pm on a weekday evening, we might think of the millions travelling uncomfortably on trains and motorways as they return from another day spent doing a dull or unrewarding job. All these people are the Kingdom waiting to happen. They are the Christ we must embrace.