During the Watchnight Service I read a story adapted from a work by Barbara Brown Taylor.  The story began like this:

“Once upon a time – or before time, actually before there were clocks or calendars or Christmas trees – God was all there was. No one knows anything about that time because no one was there to know it, but somewhere in the middle of that time before time, God decided to make a world. So God made a world – this world – and filled it with the most astonishing things:”

We find it hard to imagine a time “before time”.  Everything we do is governed by the clock.  Hours and minutes and seconds mean so much to us – they control our lives.  The clock regiments us into arriving at work together and going home together, it tells us where we should be and when and for how long.  This precision with time keeping is a more modern invention than we might imagine.  It was not so long ago that the sun dial was the only real means of telling the time of day and even it was useless on a cloudy day and of course at night.  The first time-pieces driven by a clock work mechanism mimicked the sundial in so far as they only had an hour hand; minutes and seconds meant nothing, they hadn’t even been invented!

Time however, is not the constant that we think it is.  A number of years ago scientists took two ultra precise atomic clocks, put them onboard two different high speed military aircraft and flew them in opposite directions around the world.  When the two aircraft landed a day later there was a three-minute time difference between the clocks.  I can’t explain why.  I can only say that time has a mysterious quality to it.

Thankfully not all cultures are quite so obsessed by time as we are.  In the Old Testament the passage of time is frequently marked out not in years or months but by people and events.  Frequently we can read expressions like, “In the year that King Josiah died” as if it should be common knowledge when that happened.  Time is marked out by defining events.  Curiously enough, our present age, though obsessed by the demarcation of time also takes its mark from a defining moment in history – the birth of Christ, even though we cannot be sure exactly when he was born.  Certainly we celebrate his birth on 25^th December yet the Orthodox Church celebrate the birth of Christ on 6^th January.  We cannot be sure what year he was born – it may have been six years earlier than we presently calculate.  And in that move from the years B.C (before Christ) to A.D (Anno Domini, in the year of our Lord) there is no year Zero.   There are defining events but time itself, the years and months and days, are imprecise and sometimes even meaningless.

Why then are we so obsessed by time?  We get agitated if the train leaves five minutes late.  Our boss is displeased if we arrive late for work in the morning.  If the Minister’s sermon is too long we might miss the bus home!  We get stressed to the eyeballs trying to get everything to fit into today because it will be too late to do it tomorrow.  We measure our productivity by how much we can get through in a certain length of time and feel constantly pressured because of the lack of time we have to do the many things we have to do.

Certain days of the year take on significance in our lives.  For instance, we would feel disappointed and upset if everyone forgot our birthday.  When we are young being three and a HALF is vitally important to us.  When we get to be forty something we wish we were 21 again.  And when we get to be 90, being 90 and a HALF is vitally important to us once again.  And yet there are many people in underdeveloped countries who do not know when their birthday is and do not know exactly how old they are.  Their quality of life is not diminished just because they do not perceive the passage of time.

It puzzles me why we make the New Year so significant.  What can be so special about just one day?  The 24 hours of this day are the same as the 24 hours of yesterday.  The sun rises, the sun sets and we do all the things we have done before.  It is strange that Christians who worship the eternal God should be so obsessed with time.  “A thousand years to you are like one day,” says the Psalmist.  Time is for God something that meanders on with no beginning and no end yet we are fixated with the tiniest slices of time, one day, one hour, one minute, one second.

As curious as it may seem, perhaps it is not time that is so important to us at the New Year as much as the defining moments in our lives.  Maybe it’s a sense of past, present and future, a sense of history, even our personal history that matters.  Past, Present and Future feature strongly in the scriptures.  Jesus speaks often of the presence of the Kingdom of God amongst us here and now, he also speaks of it as still to come in the future, he also speaks of the Kingdom having existed from before time began.  There have been several Christian denominations that have tried to work out the day and time of the Lord’s return and as we are all aware they have failed to get it right.  “No one knows the day and time,” says Jesus, which makes me think that the Lord’s return is nothing to do with time but everything to do with defining moments in history.

Even in the Old Testament we have that sense of past, present and future.  The “God of our Fathers” is a recurring expression indicating the presence of God amongst the generations of times gone by.  God is with them in the present through the Ark of the Covenant then the Tabernacle and finally the Temple in Jerusalem.  God is with them in the future through his everlasting promises and covenants.

Maybe that is what the New Year allows us to do – to define where the future starts and to consign some things to the past. 

Tonight, George Square in Glasgow will be filled to overflowing with people celebrating the New Year.  The scene will be repeated the length and breadth of our country.  By and large they will be young folk who perhaps because of their younger years have fewer defining moments within their lives.  They will celebrate the moment in time.  But for those of us who have a few more years tucked under our belts, perhaps the New Year has more to do with reflecting on those defining moments in our personal histories.  Looking back on the events which have brought us to this day and realising that the God, for whom time means nothing, has been with us in those defining moments of our history.  And if he has brought us safe thus far we can trust him for the future and the defining moments of our lives, which have still to come.