If I Could Save Time in a Bottle...

If I Could Save Time in a Bottle…

Devotional for the United Church of Christ Science and Technology Network

March 31, 2018

Rev. Dr. Ruth E. Shaver

[God] has made everything suitable for its time; 

moreover, [God] has put a sense of past and future into their minds, 

yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 

—Ecclesiastes 3:11, NRSV, alt.

Holy Saturday is an odd day in history. Looking back from the next day, or 50 days later, or roughly 2000 years later, we can see that this was a “Schrödinger’s tomb”* moment: either Jesus was dead, as the events of Friday testified, or Jesus was alive, as Jesus himself had promised. The disciples, women and men alike, went with the testimony of time and experience, only to be mightily surprised—or, as the Gospel of Mark says, traumatically ecstatic—the next morning. We know because of the way history has unfolded that Easter Sunday was a pivot point in time. The world was categorically different after that Sunday morning than it was on the previous Friday because Jesus who had died is now alive and at work in the world.

I wish someone had saved that Easter Sunday moment of time in a bottle. I would like to go back in time to be there, though I’m not foolish enough to think that I would behave any differently than any of the Marys or Peter, James, or John. I’m sure the same thing is true of all the moments in my life that I sometimes wish I had saved in a bottle to revisit; however, I’ve finally figured out that I would likely go back to being the exact same me as I was when I made those choices, so nothing would change…I’d still make the same choices. As I celebrate the beginning of the last year of my fiftieth decade on Earth, I have perspective that I lacked at 19, 29, and even 39; I can look back down the arrow of time and see that all those things I did when I was younger that I might otherwise like to change have made me the woman I am—far from perfect and still a work in progress, but competent, compassionate, creative, and curious. And I’m finally okay with that because I like who I am. It’s amazing what time can do.

Time is one of those mysteries that human beings have tried to explain since we started asking “Why?” Philosophers have tried to define time as either concrete or relative, even as scientists have tried to figure out if time is part of the fabric of the universe—one of the four dimensions of space-time, for example—or if it might be best defined as the increasing entropy of closed systems posited by the Second Law of Thermodynamics and thus an intrinsic part of the laws of the universe. According to thermodynamics, when energy is added to the system, entropy is slowed, stopped, or reversed, which means that time can’t be an absolute marker…but it’s still the only way we have to judge what has happened and is happening, and also what might happen in the future. I love this idea, personally, because it fits with what we experience: left unattended, most things tend to fall apart, whether physical structures or relationships, but when we put energy into the buildings we love and the social systems that are meaningful, be they churches or marriages or parent-child relationships or friendships or whatever, those things do not deteriorate. Human relationships are just as subject to the laws of thermodynamics as all the rest of the existing universe.

Which brings me back to the resurrection. Our eternal God had to have expended an unbelievable amount of energy to reverse the entropy of death. I think about it from my scientifically literate perspective and I can’t begin to process the megatonnage of a nuclear weapon that might possibly have that much energy. Thirty years ago, that almost turned me away from faith entirely. But time has a funny way of bringing clarity, especially when that time includes a lot of study and a lot of maturing. Once I realized that, as the author of Ecclesiastes notes in the verse above, I can’t know everything God has done from the beginning to the end no matter how much science, or history or religion or music or art or math or anything else, I study, I began to realize that I don’t need to know how the resurrection happened. That is WAY, WAY, WAY above my pay grade. I’m not even supposed to know that the resurrection happened because it’s a matter of faith, not knowledge. I’m called to believe that the resurrection happened. It does help, however, to know that there is a chance, infinitesimal though it is, that the resurrection was one of those “epiphenomena” that happens because quantum mechanics and probability tell us that nothing (including, it turns out, the existence of particles that travel faster than light!) is absolutely impossible.

In God’s eternal time, I’ll eventually find out. And I’m okay with that. Though it would be nice if in the second half of my life that starts today, we’d get a little closer to figuring it out!

Prayer: God of all time, thank you for the mystery that is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Help us to remember that time is from you, and that whether we live on Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday, or any other day, it is your time. You have made it so that we cannot save time in a bottle, but must live every day with hope and joy because in this time, we believe that the tomb will be empty tomorrow, just as it was empty on Sunday after that in-between Saturday. And thank you for birthdays that mark our time on Earth. May we take each one as a gift and a challenge to live the next year even more for you. In the name of the yet-to-be and already Risen Christ, amen.

*Thanks to Mr. Church Guy for the Schrödinger’s Messiah image by Kevin Frank!

Rev. Dr. Ruth Shaver is the Interim Senior Pastor of First Church of Christ Congregational, United Church of Christ, in North Conway, New Hampshire, and a Sinai and Synapses Fellow in the Class of 2017-2019.