Like a clock face with no hands...
How appropriate for a church, where we speak of eternity, of a God whose understanding of time is not like ours..."For a thousand ages in thy sight are like yesterday when it is past..." Christian hope involves looking forward to a time when there is no longer any time. A time of God's reign, and the eschatological banquet, God's big dinner party (I preached a sermon on that once)...and kairos time...I preached a sermon on that one too, during Advent...
So yes...a clock face without hands on the church tower makes a significant theological statement to the community. As our website says, we really ARE committed to living differently from the secular world. Our clock face says it all. Look ma, no hands.
Or, to tumble from the metaphorical to the downright literal about it, the Lupini Construction guys have been working on the clock tower this summer, up on the lift, drilling out the old mortar around the stonework, and they noticed the wooden hands on the clock had dry rot. So they took them off (before they fell off and landed on somebody's head), and they are going to make new ones. But there's another problem. The clock stopped working a few months ago (after running backward for a while after lightning struck the steeple three summers ago, which REALLY makes for some interesting theological/metaphorical conversation). So, if we could just find someone who fixes 140-year-old clocks in towers...
Okay, there's a sermon illustration here somewhere. Maybe not this week's sermon. But a clock face with no hands...that's gotta preach, one of these days.
But for now, it'll blog.
P.S. Look what I found! The clock hands! Two sets, actually -- there are clock faces on the four sides of the tower. Now, that'll blog, too!
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