Editor’s note: This is an amazing post. It fits with the one about theology and science becoming friends. It also quotes Nitsche as did Zadok Malesi in his post about meaning in life and is an explanation of the circular nature of time. (The only understandable one I have ever read.) And the phrase “already-but-not-yet” is worth the time to read and comment more than once. All in one post. Thank you, Taylor.
Note: Taylor first preached this Sermon in February 2023, at The First Baptist Church of Worcester. It has been adapted for the blog.
Already-but-not-yet: the Jeremy Bearimy of it all –
A Sermon on Time and Identity and Unconditional, Eternal Love
By Taylor Bolton Hall
We are all different iterations of self throughout our lives. I know that right now, the me that I am writing these words is worlds different than the me I was nine years ago when I walked through the doors of First Baptist Church for the first time. That me was different than the me who lived in Italy only two years prior, and different from the me contemplating whether to stay at The College of William and Mary before that and the me that chose the unique and intimidating and exciting path of going to boarding school and the me who was shy and afraid of going to soccer practice alone when I was 10 and the me that took my first toddling steps off a ledge and onto my face, only to get back up and try again, and the me that was born, wide-eyed and incredibly chubby (I weighed 10 lbs. 3 oz. at birth) in the stillness of a 3am winter morning.
The older I get, the more that time passes, the harder it is sometimes to reconcile the me of today with the past Me’s. And I think this is common. We, humans, are temporal beings. We are born, we live, and we die in what feels like a very one-directional manner. And though our identities are made up of all of the we’s that came before, we can’t always see that. We have a hard time being and remembering all versions of ourselves at once. Often, we feel alienated from our childhood selves; we are seemingly so far away from the innocent yearning to know and propensity for awe that comes with the newness of self. We can’t remember why we made certain choices as a teenager, only remembering that it felt very important at the time. And we don’t yet know who we will become as we make our way through the twisting pathways and seemingly infinite choices that make up our human existence. We are even sometimes mired in a version of self we don’t or can’t yet love and aren’t able to see beyond it.
God understands this human predicament – the temporality of human existence – because that is what the incarnation is. God by definition is infinite and eternal, and therefore atemporal – existing outside of time. The incarnation is a sacrifice from our atemporal, eternal, infinite God, who came to experience the finite-ness of a mortal human existence. Beginning as a vulnerable baby born in a manger, God decided to march through life, growing and learning alongside humanity, even unto the precipice of death and beyond it, all for the redemption of humankind.
But Jesus’ incarnation and subsequent sacrifice on the cross brought about the promise of God’s kingdom. Gerhardus Vos and other theologians describe the already-but-not-yet-ness of God’s kingdom – that is, the idea that “God’s kingdom was inaugurated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and thus there are both ‘already’ and ‘not yet’ aspects to the Kingdom of God.” God’s kingdom is here but not yet realized. God is atemporal. God and God’s kingdom exist outside of this linear progression of time that we experience on Earth. God both chose to become incarnate, experience a finite and temporal human life, and sacrifice his only begotten son in order to redeem humankind, and God always did and always has and always will be making that choice because God is atemporal and infinite. Humankind has always been and always will be saved. Just as God sees and is all iterations of Godself at once, our atemporal and infinite God sees every iteration of our human selves at once. God can see the already-but-not-yet of each of us, just as the promise of God’s Kingdom is already-but-not-yet.
Because God sees every iteration of self that we are and will be, God loves us unconditionally and profoundly. As the Psalm 139 says,
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
God never struggles to love us because God sees all of us, everything we are and were and have been and will be again and God loves us in ways that we can’t always love ourselves. And I believe we have trouble understanding God’s unmovable love for us and trouble loving ourselves in that unconditional way because we are temporal beings, because we experience time in that linear way, moment by moment, and we can’t always understand that we are and always have been and always will be every version of self. All the days of ourselves were written in God’s book before any of them came to be – the already-but-not-yet-ness of us that God has loved and will always love, eternally.
There is a wonderful bit in the show, The Good Place, that captures the already-but-not-yet of it all in such a beautifully comical way. I don’t want to spoil the show for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, because the reveal at the end of Season 1 is one of the greats, but let me set the scene for you in a non-spoilery kind of way. We have an eternal being and a sentient AI speaking to four humans in the afterlife. This eternal being, played by the inimitable Ted Danson, is explaining the concept of time. He says, “Things in the afterlife don’t happen while things are happening here, because while time on Earth moves in a straight line — one thing happens, then the next, then the next — time in the afterlife moves in a ‘Jeremy Bearimy.’ Time doubles back and loops around and ends up looking something like the name Jeremy Bearimy in cursive English, so that’s what we call it.”
Now, if you’re having trouble imagining this, as would be very reasonable, I’ve included a visual aid for you here:
You see the looping and doubling back and criss-crossing of Jeremy Bearimy, the way that things happen simultaneously and also in order in a cyclical, circular, all-at-once and one-by-one kind of way? This, Ted’s character asserts, is time.
When faced with this idea of time as a Jeremy Bearimy, the character Chidi, who was a philosopher during his lifetime, asks what could possibly be in the dot above the I – the unconnected tittle that would seem to mark a piece of time that’s not cyclical or connected to the rest of the Jeremy Bearimy. And Ted Danson replies, “This is Tuesdays, and also July. Oh, and sometimes it’s never. Sometimes that dot is the moment when nothing never occurs.” Chidi’s response, and your response may be as well, “That broke me. The dot on the I broke me.”
What Chidi is getting at is, we as humans don’t have a good understanding of time. We do experience time in a linear manner, one thing happening after the one before it, moment after moment, giving us this feeling of progression, of movement. We feel that we grow and change and mature as we move through time – and we do. We feel that the we that we were as children and the we that we are now are separated by a gulf of time itself, unable to communicate or exist in the same space.
But time isn’t actually linear! We know from Einstein, and other great science minds who have tested and proven his theories, that time isn’t actually a steady drumbeat of exact intervals, moment after moment in a progression – at least not in the way that we think it is.
Einstein’s theory of relativity essentially states three rules, which have a great impact on how we understand time. Now, stick with me here through a brief lesson in physics – I promise there’s a point and it will all come back around, as everything does:
The first assertion is, there is no “absolute” frame of reference. Every time you measure an object’s velocity, its momentum or how it experiences time, it’s always in relation to something else. [This is the whole thing about sitting on a train and seeing an adjacent train pulling out of the station. If the movement speed is constant, you can’t actually tell which train is stationary and which is moving.] Second, the speed of light is the same no matter who measures it or how fast the person measuring it is going. [No matter how fast you move, the speed of light will never change]. Third, nothing that has mass can go faster than light.
Okay yes, we’ve likely all heard some version of these assertions before, but what does that actually mean vis-a-vis time?
Well first, if the speed of light is always the same, that means an astronaut moving very fast will experience time slowing down relative to earth. You all might remember the famous example that many of our science textbooks contained. We have a set of identical twins. One is an astronaut, and he goes into space, traveling near to the speed of light for many earth years. During his trip, the earth twin ages and grows old, but when the astronaut twin returns home, he appears only to have aged a few months. He comes back 35, while his twin is 65. This is what we call time dilation.
It also means that gravity impacts time. Gravity is a curving or warping of space. The more massive an object, the more it warps the space around it. So if you have an atomic clock at the top of a mountain and one at the bottom of the valley, the mountain clock will move faster than the valley clock.
So what we’re saying here is that while the difference would be miniscule, a minute in a valley would be longer than a minute on a mountain top, and that a year on earth could be a few months on a spaceship moving near the speed of light. Time, by the definition of physics, cannot be and is not strictly linear. The astronaut twin’s month is happening at the same time as earth twin’s year. We are not bound by the strictness of linear time.
Another way to look at this is Eternal Return, a concept explained by Friedrich Nietzsche. He states that every action we have done or ever will do has been done before, over and over again, and will continue in this manner into eternity. Also known as, “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
As one blogger on Medium put it better than I could have done, “Essentially, Eternal Return states that our lives and the lives of everyone are just huge loops. If everything can happen at once, then everything is happening infinitely. There is no sense of past, present, and future with eternal return because there is no sequence of events, but rather an endless repetition that follows the same sequence every time. Time doesn’t move forward; it orbits infinitely. Eternal return dictates that you, in the present tense, are simultaneously all your past and future selves as well.” Nietzsche and Jeremy Bearimy would have gotten along.
So what does this mean? How could this muddling of the concept of time help us love ourselves? Let me use one last bit of science to make this point. We know that time isn’t linear and that different iterations of self and existence and reality must exist at once. Just look at the night sky.
When we look up at night, we see a sky filled with objects from every inch of time. We see light from 8 minutes ago to billions of years ago, generated by and reflecting off of objects that we see every day – the star that gives us life and stars that have already exploded and long ago turned into black holes. And they exist at once. When we look at the sky, we are seeing into the past. And theoretically, if we went far enough away from Earth, and looked back, we could (and would) see into our own past. It all exists at once.
As we look at the sky, we’re seeing a patchwork of times layered upon one another, the same way that God looks upon us as sees a patchwork of self, one iteration layered upon another into the quilt of self identity – or the elements that make up our own night sky, black holes and stars alike.
As I said in the beginning (or maybe am saying right now, or possibly have said forever), God never struggles to love us because God sees all of us at once, everything we are and were and have been and will be again. All the days of ourselves were written in God’s book before any of them came to be – the already-but-not-yet-ness of us that God has loved and will always love, eternally. Because God knows the wide-eyed child born in the stillness of a 3am winter morning, and God knows the we that we will become and every step of ourselves in between. God knows the mistakes we make and the lessons we learn and the pain of the hard times and the redemption of growth and reflections that we make upon the moment of our deaths, and God loves us. And I believe that if we see ourselves as God does, as the child and the elder, as the broken and the healed, as the us in depths of despair and the us at the most triumphant and joyous moments of our lives, and every version of self in between, that we can hopefully look upon ourselves with compassion, that we can know and understand that we are worthy of that unconditional, eternal love from God, and also that sometimes-elusive love of self. For we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and we always have been. Amen.
