Diane and I are getting ready to move back to our old home in Collinsville, just 20 miles from campus. Last weekend Diane posted a photo of what she called my “future office/tool room.” That’s a good description. Down in that basement place, near the furnace, I hope to write a commentary on 1 Peter but also use my many tools for man-projects. I’m a blue collar guy. The focal point of the “office/tool room” is a large analog clock. For younger people, an analog clock is the old style clock, a circle with numbers and two hands. I can’t take time to explain it now.
I was delighted last weekend by a short article written by Deb Olin Unferth of the University of Texas. “The clunky digital clock…jerks along, stopping every minute…. Falsely implying that time is a series of snapshots, a stop-action film rather than the seamless flux that it is. On the elegant analog clock, meanwhile, time swells and recedes, like waves and seasons and life. The hands evoke the rotation of the earth, the movements of celestial objects, the cosmos” (New York Times Magazine, 14-15). I think of Genesis, “The evening and the morning were the first day,” the second day, and so on. Night and day, sun and moon, seasons… did God make us and redeem us to be dominated by digital jerks?
Scholars observe that how we think about time reveals more about us, our assumptions and beliefs, than how time really is. “How we keep and segment time, along with the value we attached to these segments, are already culturally-specific expressions of ideology” (Wei Hsien Wan, The Contest for Time and Space in the Roman Imperial Cults and 1 Peter, 28). Really, how often do we need to know the exact time? Sometimes, but not most of the time. I tell my students that some of their most appreciated teaching and preaching will be showing how Christians view time differently than those around us. “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke (a legalistic digital clock) of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).
Jesus said to Peter, “Could you not watch with me one hour?” (Matthew 26:40). You think they looked at their digital clocks? I’m retiring to my big basement analog!
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