Time in a Bottle 11.16.2023

     If you are of a certain age then the title of this essay evokes a particular song, the voice that sang it, and the circumstances of your life when you first heard the song or began to identify it with some noteworthy circumstance or situation in your life. How human beings create associations between seemingly unrelated phenomena—and when someone says they remember “exactly what they were doing when JFK was assassinated” or “on 9/11”, those memories are memories of the full loop of the communication event. If you were not there, someone showed you and someone told you. How those connections become memories should be an important subject to any communicator. You, preacher, are a communicator. You and I help our listeners to make connections between Scripture’s witness to God’s work and their own lives. 

    As preachers, we tell a story to which we are not eye or ear witnesses. Our preaching is a part of the long chain of Spirit-led tradition, exegesis, faithfulness, and explanation. Like many other events which we consider to be true—any event that predated our own birth—we hold them true even though we were not present and are not historic witnesses. 

    The connection which is at the heart of preaching is the communal memory of God’s people. The Church is the collective repository of the redemptive story of God working in Christ to save His fallen world. Until the last century, no one ever thought that there was any other way to communicate the past besides and beyond a faithful chain of witnesses. Our cultural technopolyistc society deludes us into thinking that we can in some way, bear participatory witness to things far away and long ago. This trend has eroded our trust in the broader story-telling traditions which have conventionally shaped human belief and established the trajectory for the witness of the Church.

    Technology has always aided the proclamation of the Gospel. For the production and distribution of scripture, the Church adopted the new technology of the Codex rather than the conventional scroll as the medium of transmitting Gospel/Epistle/Apocalypse. In this format, the ongoing story of Jesus and His Church became our New Testament. At the same time, the Church incorporated a technique of abbreviating certain significant terms in these works in a fashion that came to be called Nomina Sacra. The entire textual memory of the Church is marked by these two “containers.” These are bottles in which time— the Apostolic memory of Jesus is kept. God’s word to us in a specific format, on specific materials read, recited, treasured, transmitted, and retold by the Church. In so doing we re-voice as well as incarnate the Word who became flesh, once again allowing Him to be known in every generation by the proclamation of His story. We tell the story not merely for personal reflection but for the distinct purpose of declaring the faith defined, defended, and proclaimed, from the very beginning of the Church. 

    And this Sunday you and I will join in this ongoing witness.  Paul exhorted us in words first written to Timothy— “Preach the Word!” In so doing we are filling the bottle of time from the deep well of the Church’s memory. Yet we do not merely save time in a bottle, we pour it out anew whenever we tell the story of Jesus, inviting others to share in the unfolding promise of His gospel.