Living in Kairos
REFLECTION FOR ALL SAINTS’ DAY - NOVEMBER 2, 2025
Rev. Sandra Nixon
So, who’s feeling a bit discomfited and discombobulated this morning?
Is it the time change, most likely? Or, if that hasn’t registered just yet, perhaps it’s the Jays’ losing the World Series? Or the Canucks losing (again).
Yesterday we held our Fair Trade & Artisan Market, during which I had several conversations with folks that went something like:
“So, do you have other plans today? Going to watch the baseball game?”
“Yes, probably. We aren’t really baseball fans, and we certainly aren’t Toronto fans, but this series is bringing us together - something we need right now.”
Yes, yes we do.
O Lord, how long shall we cry for help,
and you will not listen?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?The wicked surround the righteous;
and justice never prevails.
In these times, for some of us, riding on a collective bandwagon of national pride does help somewhat. It is a lighthearted mirror for the existential concerns we have for our country and the world right now.
Just so, the time change we collectively go through at this time of year is also a mirror - a concrete, physical experience mirroring a spiritual reality we also encounter at this time.
Today is the first day for us back on “standard time”.
As Melissa Kirsch, writer for the New York Times described it recently, these next few days are where “we find ourselves still grasping at the corn-silk tendrils of summer just as winter gets more insistent. An undertide of confusion persists: Evening car accidents increase, circadian rhythms reset, the moon’s out before dinner. We find ourselves in an “in between” space that is strange and destabilizing until we get used to it.”
Strange and destabilizing. A good way to describe this transitional time in our seasons and rhythms; also a good way to describe this season of remembrance we are moving through. And - I don’t know about you, but those words also happen to quite accurately describe my sense of the political climate at the moment.
Strange and destabilizing time, and times, to be sure.
The ancient Greeks experienced time in two ways. Chronos was the clock time that governs our lives: our waking, sleeping, and schedules - and the hour gained or lost. But they also acknowledged another kind of time: Kairos.
Kairos referred to a more figurative measure of time — the right time, the moment of opportunity.
In Christian thought, kairos represents a moment when God breaks into ordinary chronological time (chronos) to reveal divine purpose or invite transformation. Unlike the ticking of the clock, kairos moments mark sacred time — those moments charged with God’s presence and possibility, when human action and divine grace intersect, or, as it’s often described: “when God’s time meets human time.”
To live in kairos time then, is to be fully alive and awake to the present moment and its possibilities. The christian writer Madeleine L’Engle wrote: “The child at play, the painter at his easel, are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos.”
Kairos invites discernment and response: to recognize and act upon what God is doing here and now.
Today is another one of our days of remembrance - the traditional church festival “All Saints”. All Saints’ Day is a Christian celebration that honours all the saints — famous and officially recognized, and otherwise — those who’ve lived lives of faith and love, offering us example and inspiration for our living.
The UCC doesn’t make much fuss about saints. One of the things I love about the UCC is it’s theological tent is large, and this also applies to our thinking about saints. While we recognize and value the stories of some of the “canonized” saints from other denoms, we also talk about everyday saints, people we’ve known and even those who quietly go about sowing seeds of love and justice without any recognition.
Saints aren’t perfect - they’re human and still make mistakes. Which means that even we can be saints - be a light in someone else’s darkness; embody God’s love as treasure in earthen vessels.
In fact, when we talk about the “communion of saints” we are reminding ourselves that the church is bigger than just those of us here now; it includes all who have gone before us and those who will come after. At its heart, All Saints reminds us that we’re part of a spiritual community, joined together across time and place, and that not only are we not alone in the struggle, we are being accompanied by the living wisdom of those who have gone before and endured and persevered in times not that unlike our times.
At its heart, All Saints reminds us that we’re part of a spiritual community,
joined together across time and place
And this, like getting an a bandwagon of national pride, feels like something we really need right now.
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.The wicked surround the righteous;
and justice never prevails.
It can feel like this. This time we’re living in. This chronos time with its deadlines and deadly times.
Which is why we need to open ourselves to kairos time as much as we can.
Getting fully immersed in prayer or any artistic endeavour as Madeline l’Engle so elegantly describes, those things take us into kairos time, where God’s time and presence and purpose meets our time.
So, I think, does our intentional communing with the saints who’ve gone before.
When we take time to become fully aware of our connection with them in the spirit, we enter kairos time and God presents us with a kairos moment: where God and God’s purpose and possibility meet us.
The bible gives us a powerful example of this kind of “communing with the ancestors” kairos moment. In the story of the transfiguration (that’s found in 3 of the 4 gospels), Jesus takes three disciples - Peter, James, and John - up a mountain. The way this story often gets named (as “The Transfiguration”) tells you that often our attention has been on how, at a specific moment, Jesus’ face apparently shines like the sun, and his clothes become this dazzling, glowing white.
Then in the passage, as a kind of afterthought, we hear how this extraordinary event happens “while Moses and Elijah appeared and spoke with him”. Um, is it possible that’s actually the more extraordinary event? Jesus communing with the ancestors in kairos time, a kairos moment which, along with connecting past and present, does nothing less than confirm his identity and calling?
The writer and Franciscan friar Richard Rohr says:
We all need to feel and know, at the cellular level, that we are not the first ones who have suffered. We are all partners with both the living and the dead, walking alongside countless ancestors whose faithfulness and love show us a hopeful way forward.
—Richard Rohr
So I hope you will spend some time remembering your saints today - those who’ve passed and those who walk among us.
I want to leave you with this final observation, again by Richard Rohr, which I personally take great comfort in:
“Living in the communion of saints means that we can take ourselves very seriously (we are part of a Great Whole) and not take ourselves too seriously at all (we are just a part of the Great Whole) at the very same time.
We are in on the deal and, yes, the really Big Deal. We are all a very small part of a very Big Thing!
And that thing is something we become aware of, even if just fleetingly, when we enter kairos time. Habakkuk felt it:
Then the Lord answered me and said:
Be astonished! Be astounded!
For a work is being done in your days
that you would not believe if you were told.For there is still a vision for the appointed time;
If it seems to tarry, wait for it;
it will surely come;the arrogant do not endure.
but the righteous live by their faithfulness.
And so, at a time of the year when the veil between worlds and times feels “thin” already and easily traversed - we remember the saints, we ask God’s spirit to gather us, along with past, present, and future into a holy moment of the possible - and into an awakening - and deep assurance - that we are part of a story, and that our mustard seed lives do matter, to the story and to God.
Scripture:
Habakkuk 1: 1-5
O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not listen?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see wrongdoing
and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law becomes slack,
The wicked surround the righteous;
and justice never prevails.
Then the Lord answered me and said:
Look at the nations and see!
Be astonished! Be astounded!
For a work is being done in your days
that you would not believe if you were told.
For there is still a vision for the appointed time;
If it seems to tarry, wait for it;
it will surely come; it will not delay.
wealth is treacherous;
the arrogant do not endure.
Their spirit is not right in them,
but the righteous live by their faithfulness.
2 Thessalonians 1
Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing… as is your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring.
For it is indeed just of God to give relief to the afflicted when he comes to be glorified by his saints.
To this end we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of this call and will fulfill by power every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.