What’s in a moment
Olympic season once again draws us in to the heart-pounding drama of elite athletes competing for victory in events that are decided by millimeters and hundredths of a second. A thirty-year-old swimmer, seven years removed from setting the world record that she still holds, is startled to lift her head from the water and see that she has won gold. A young tennis phenom and a storied veteran – both leaving the tournament before the quarterfinals. Of such highs and lows are audiences built, ad sales multiplied, and reputations shaped.
It seems that “it all comes down to this one moment,” as announcers are fond of saying. Yet in many ways, it isn’t about that moment at all. That moment is simply a reflection of a thousand moments that have preceded it, made up of drills and practice sessions, weight training and nutrition counseling, competitions won and lost in so many venues over years and years. I may happen to catch Katie Ledecky winning again, perhaps now with one of the top 20 times in the women’s 1500-meter freestyle swim, but that record of records says more about who Katie Ledecky is than the one moment that I see this week.
In the Christian community, we rightly find heart-pounding drama and breathless excitement in what God has done in Jesus Christ. His life, death, and resurrection are “the moment” in which we experience God coming to us with grace and forgiveness and a spirit that shapes our lives. In the power of Jesus’ resurrection we see that God has conquered the power of death, so that we can live freely, giving our lives away to others in the confidence the our lives are held forever in God’s love. Thus in baptism we have “died to sin” and been “raised to newness of life.” Jesus is the focal point of that good news in our community. Thank God!
Yet God’s work does not only come down to “this one moment.” Rather, we know that Jesus is of God because the apostles who wrote the New Testament saw in Jesus what they knew God had been doing all along. In the miracle of creation, in setting out the nations of the world with their own territories, in the calling of Abraham and Sarah and in taking Israel out of Egyptian slavery in the Exodus, in the challenges and promises of the prophets, in the lessons of defeat and the fulfilled promises of rescue – in all these ways and times, God had been faithful to who God is. God is the one who holds all the universe together in a coherent life, who defeats those – even among God’s own people – who try to undo that unity, and who comes to different peoples at various times in a multitude of ways. Because the apostles knew God’s presence in all those ways, they recognized God’s presence in Jesus, too. None of these is “this one moment” for the whole world, yet each one speaks to the oneness of God in creating such moments for the whole world.
Each time we raise the name of Jesus in our community, we can also be celebrating the many ways in which God has had a moment with others in the world. They may not share the Jesus moment with us, but God has shared a moment with them just as surely as with us. That consistency of God’s says more about who God is than any one of the individual moments in which God has come to us. Thank God!
-Peter A. Pettit, teaching pastor
