4-7-19 “A Time for Every Matter”

4-7-19     “A Time for Every Matter” 

   Do you remember how, as a kid, the year from one Christmas to the next, or from one birthday to the next, seemed to pass so slowly? At the same time, while the school year seemed to never end, summer vacation was over in a heartbeat. That was the exception to the rule, though. Every other measure of time we had seemingly lasted forever, simply creeping along. 

   One of the downsides of growing up, of becoming an adult and of growing older, is that that is the slow march of time is no longer a a problem. While time continues to march at the same, steady, regular pace at which it has always progressed, our perception of its pace changes as we realize we have fewer years ahead of us than behind us. Most days go by quickly, each week seems to come and go in a rush, the years just fall off the calendar as rapidly as the hair falls out of our heads - or at the very least turns gray - and the treadmill of life keeps moving us forward.

   For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. As a kid I grew up listening to the band The Byrds singing this song, clueless to the fact that they were singing scripture. That song came out when I was five years old, 54 years ago. How many seasons have passed in those decades? 

How many “turn, turn, turns” have we made over those years? In Solomon’s days, when he wrote these words that eventually made their way into a book in the Bible called Ecclesiastes - part of the Wisdom Literature - and that some three thousand years later, become a #1 single on the pop charts, there was a clear delineation of seasons. Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter aligned with rainy season and dry season, with planting season and harvest season. There was little else to be concerned about then. Now, we can never really be sure what season it is. Besides the craziness of the weather we’re seeing because of climate change that brings warmth in Winter and cool in Summer, if you really want to see confusion in the seasons we need look no further than in the world of sports. Right now, baseball season is going on, as are soccer, basketball, and hockey seasons. Golf season is in full swing too - if you’ll pardon the pun. Auto racing at all levels is driving on and the Kentucky Derby of horse racing season is only four weeks away. 

   Some seasons seemingly never end. 

When, for example, does Ohio State football season end? I know they play their games between August and December - except for a Spring practice game that draws 100,000 fans and a bowl or playoff game in January - but when does it ever end? Even now, the local paper and TV news are reporting on the ages of the coaches, the newest recruits, how good will the receivers be this year, who will win the ongoing annual Quarterback competition - it never ends. Armageddon could happen, the moon could blow up, and pigs really could learn how to fly, but if OSU signed a 4-star recruit that would be on the front page of the paper! It never ends!

   For many of us in this modern, industrial, tech-savvy world, we have lost touch with the seasonality of life. We want what we want when we want it. 

We’ve come to believe that no time is off limits and the lines between busy and rest, work and play, have become increasingly blurred. How far are we from the rhythms and "pleasure of our toil,” as the scripture phrased it? What is the cost to ourselves, to our relationships, and to our planet of this frantic pace? How has our denial of the passage of time and seasons of our lives created an anti-aging sentiment as well as the worship of everything “fast” and the sense that immediate gratification is “normal,” or worse, not fast enough?

   No matter what season we’re in now, with the possible exception of the aforementioned OSU Football season, that season will eventually pass. There will be seasons of joy and seasons of suffering, seasons of certainty and seasons of change. That is how the cycle of life was created, it’s how life was intended to be lived. Our time on this planet, like that of every person who has come before us and likely every person who comes after, is but for a season. 

   Verse two reminds us that there is a time to be born; a time for giving birth, a time for new life, and there is a time to die. Our time, our season here, is limited. No ones lives forever. Whether or how we embrace that fact is a matter of faith, but not embracing it or denying it won’t change it. Life is but a season. 

In reading this verse I’m reminded of the story I read at some point of a set of twins in the womb before they were born. The twins are talking to one another, and in a question that presages a similar question most of us ask much later, the one twin asks the other, “Do you believe in life after birth?” The womb was the only life they had ever known and they feared what might come next.  

Just as we all passed from the womb to the world yet have no memory of that time and that transition, so one day we will pass from this world to what’s next. 

Our faith tells us that there is something more after this season, but what that looks like is as unknown to us as this life was unknown before we were born, even as we have developed our ideas and our desires about that. Perhaps the coming transition is not unlike moving from the womb into the world.

   There is a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted. Last week I shared with you some thoughts by Father Richard Rohr about what he refers to as the two halves of life, and how in the first half we tend to define our safety, security, and self-worth by our careers, our accumulations, and our family. 

In the second half of life we realize that who we are - our worth or self-worth - can never and has never been defined by those things, but rather have been and always will be defined by our relationship to God as God’s beloved children. In the first half we plant and we plant and we labor and we labor to make a name for ourselves, to accumulate stuff, and we wonder why we’re working so hard, and in the second half we come to realize that the seeds we planted then won’t sustain us now, that it is the seed planted by God within us that carries us forward - and that that has always been the case. 

   A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up. Like many Christians, I struggle with the idea that there is a time to kill, but I recognize that there are times of killing, and of healing. Jesus came to show us a time of healing, and was ironically, killed for it. But I think this verse points to the seasonality of relationships as well as life. The people who are my closest friends now are people I didn’t even know fifteen years ago. Most of the people I was close to as a child are no longer in my life. There are times when relationships die, and times when they’re healed, times when they break down, and others when they’re built up. And as resurrection people - a people for whom the central belief of our faith is that resurrection follows death - we know that even a relationship that dies has the potential to be resurrected, if we cultivate a season of healing, of building up - both in our selves and in our world.

   A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. We can’t, regardless of how hard we try, shield ourselves from the times of weeping and of mourning. Our faith doesn’t promise us that in the seasons of our lives we won’t experience pain, hurt, and loss; it promises that we won’t go through them alone. Just as God is present with us in the times of greatest joy in our lives, God is also present in those seasons of suffering, of sadness, of sickness. God, who knows our joys and our celebrations and who, as Lord of the Dance, revels with us in those exuberant times, also embraces us for the slow dance of sorrow that visits each of us at different times. Death is always followed by resurrection, God always brings a restoration, in its season. That God promises us.

   Then Solomon writes that there is a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing. There is much to consider in this verse, when we think of the biblical context. King David, Solomon’s father, wanted to build what would be God’s Temple in Israel, but God wouldn’t allow it. As great a king as David was - the greatest in Israel’s history - David was not allowed to be the one who gathered the stones together that would construct what would be considered the dwelling place of God. That task, that honor, was given to Solomon. Was that honor denied David because of his sin with Bathsheba? Some have suggested that, but a close look at Solomon’s life reveals that, even as wise as he was considered to be, his sins were no less than those of his father. Perhaps this verse suggests that there are times for action, and there are times for rest, times for doing and times for contemplation. Stones are important symbolically in scripture - stones were stacked or made into altars throughout scripture to mark places as holy. 

A young David killed the Philistine giant Goliath with a sling and a stone. Jesus faced the temptation of turning a stone into bread for his sustenance while in prayer and meditation in the wilderness and told the people on Palm Sunday that if his followers were quiet even the stones would cry out. Perhaps Solomon is also suggesting that there will be times when we are called into the embrace of friends, and other times that what we need is time in our own wilderness, where the stones cry out and the only embrace we need comes from God.

   A time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time of love, and a time of hate; a time of war, and a time of peace - all of these speak to me the idea that in creating our world, in setting our planet to spin upon its off-center axis, God wanted us to know that life is to be lived in the midst of that which we don’t and won’t understand, and that that is okay. As modern science has brought us amazing technological advancements, as modern agricultural science allows us to have whatever food crop we want any time we want it, as modern medicine has extended life to the point that there are more nonagenarians and centenarians (people over 90 or 100 years old) in the world today than ever in the history of our planet, these verses remind us that we do not know the mind of God. And that even as we seek, or are tempted, to eat more and more from the tree of good and evil in our own little Edens, the seasons God set in motion in the beginning will go on, with us or without us, and even in spite of us.  

   And then our scripture concludes:

What gain have the workers from their toil? 

I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. God has made everything suitable for its time; moreover God has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.

   Whether we are at a point in our lives where the seasons seem to pass slowly or whether they are seemingly gone as soon as they arrive, it is a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere, for us to remember that our God is the God of life, and that our God is a God of love. And even as we go through seasons of sorrow and sadness, of joy and gladness, God goes with us, giving us the gifts of life after birth, of resurrection after death, and the promise to come alongside and walk the Way with us, that we may take pleasure in our toil. 

May it be so for you. Amen.