Monday morning is the time when I look at the lectionary texts suggested for the upcoming Sunday. I read them over; study commentaries and start looking at worship possibilities. By Tuesday morning (on a good week, when nothing out of the ordinary happens), the bulletin is ready to go and sent to Sheila. What I find in reading the scripture texts and letting them sink in during the week, is that they tend to shape my perceptions of life … or they shape my actual way of living.

This week was no different … on Monday morning I got up early and read this week's texts. There was the story of Jonah, the reluctant prophet sent to the people of Nineveh to call for their repentance … giving them a time line. There was the word of Paul imparting to the people of Corinth a sense of urgency – the appointed time is now! And then, the appearance of Jesus in the Galilean countryside announcing that the time had come – the time of God's kingdom was being ushered in. Even though we tend to read the same texts on a three year cycle, there is always something different that stands out in their re-reading. Towards the end of the week I looked back at the different ways these texts have struck me … one year it was the theme of repentance, another it was our reluctance to take on the role of being prophet, yet another our need to be right. This year what stood out for me was the sense of time involved in the texts.

It was with that in mind … a sense of time … that I attended this year's Martin Luther King, Jr. breakfast sponsored by the YMCA. The speaker at the breakfast was Monmouth County Prosecutor, Luis A. Valentin. In remembering the legacy of King, he said: "Never say that words do not matter." Words do matter, particularly when they are uttered in the authority of God's timing. Jonah discovered that the hard way. Reluctantly sent to the people of Ninevah to call for their repentance he went … determined to fulfill God's command, but at the same time determined not to do it well. Jonah reminds me of the childishness in us all. Think back to your childhood days … did you ever do a chore for your parents … fulfilling their order … but maybe washing the dishes but deliberately leaving a bit of food residue on the plates while slopping water all over the place? That's Jonah. Jonah discovered words matter … he issued the most watery of injunctions to the people of Ninevah, and much to his surprise … in the timing given to them, they listened and repented. As Valentin spoke I thought of the words that have influenced my life over the years … of how the words spoken by well known people have affected my life, as well as the words of people not so famous. Never say words do not matter.

With a sense of timing, both God's time and clock-ticking timing, I came to the church on Tuesday morning to set up my laptop computer and video projector so that the four year old preschool class could watch the inauguration on-line. Given the celebration of the previous day I could not help but connect back in time to 1963. In August of that year, just as I was about to enter first grade, Martin Luther King, Jr marched on Washington and spoke those famous words: "I have a dream." Some of you were at that march. Twenty years later I went to Washington to participate in the anniversary of King's march on Washington. I can remember reflecting on the difference twenty years had made … now, participating in the march was relatively easy and mostly an accepted thing. We had come some distance in seeing King's dream realized. Yet, at the same time, I was reminded we weren't there yet – the next day I shared my reflections in worship, only to catch a fair amount of complaints from congregation members who did not think such activities were appropriate for the church to be part of. And now, twenty plus years later we were watching the inauguration of Barack Obama. I admit to wondering what would a four year old know about such things … that question was put to rest as the Obama's were introduced and the four year olds began cheering and chanting his name. (One could hazard a guess as to the political bent of their parents.) More importantly, these kids were already growing up with a sense of history and timing … at whatever level they were capable of they knew this day was something big and different.

It was a day when one could grasp that we walk in the timing of God and in the example of Jesus Christ … when we know we are connected to the time Jesus ushered in as he called those first disciples. We read in Marks' gospel this morning the first words of Jesus: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." Remarkably he can proclaim good news even as his cousin John sits in prison. It is because he brings the ultimate good and blessed news – that God's time is breaking into time in a new way. It is the fullness of time … ripe with possibilities.

We stand in the stream of this God time: We are reminded that we are called to bear the good news to others, that God will act in God's time. We don't have to be at our best or most effective for God's Word (word with a capital W) to be heard in our words. It can help … but as Jonah found out, God will make a way with us or in spite of us. And our words do matter as they are spoken in the context of God's Word.

We stand in the stream of this God time … even as we live in the streams of historic or clock time: We are sent out in the fullness of time to proclaim the Good News. Living in God's time calls us to make the choices that lead to repentance, to a new ordering of our lives. It calls for us to make a response, to take action. The call of Jesus to the first disciples connects us to our calling.

As we stand in the stream of this God time we also give thanks for the witness and service of those who dare to remind us of this reality … those who call us from the day to day plodding of our clock time to life lived in the Good News of the kingdom of God. We give thanks for the prophets who sting us with that reminder … for Jonah, for the famous of our history. We give thanks for those who are willing to speak the words that will in time bring about a new ordering of the world. We give thanks for the everyday people … for faithful witnesses, for parents who bring their children for baptism so that their children might know, for parents who drag their kids out of bed on Sunday morning, for children who drag their parents out of bed on Sunday morning. Above all else we give thanks for the faithful witness of Jesus Christ … for it is in his example that we live in God's time and can go out into the world to proclaim what is truly good news.

May the history of this week remind us of something that is always true: that now is the time!