Sermon Dan Neary
A Time for Everything Under the Sun
This is the 4th of 7 sermons in our series in Ecclesiastes.
I’m glad that Dr. Hobson suggested this series… and I’m glad that he is walking with us in this series.
We like his preaching. We would like to hear more of his preaching.
I’m not so sure we can take more of his singing!
Those who were here last week remember that Dr. Hobson submitted this Rolling Stones song as the ode of chapter 2.
This is certainly entertaining… but Dr. Hobson is really on to something here.
The sentiments that come from a plain reading of Ecclesiastes are more in line with the songs the world sings that the songs the church sings. “Someone has pointed out that Ecclesiastes often finds a welcome audience in the humanist’s university classroom, but it is carefully avoided by many Christians.”
We Christians tend to sing happy songs about good things… about God, and His blessings, and His goodness, and our relationship to Him. I like happy songs; I’m in favor of happy songs.
The world’s songs, on the other hand, are often not so happy. Even the ones that sound peppy and happy are often not so happy when you listen carefully to the lyrics.
It turns out that there is a Rolling Stones tune for many of life’s big questions. When it comes to time, there are at least a half-dozen or so (The Last Time, Out of Time, Good Time, Good Times – Bad Times, We’re Wastin’ Time, Time is On My Side, Time Waits for No One).
The message isn’t always the same. Time is On My Side (that sounds like a good thing)… but then Time Waits for No One (that seems to resonate a bit more with our text in Ecclesiastes).
Ecclesiastes sounds more like popular music than the happy Christian songs we tend to sing.
We need to be careful. Sometimes it is really easy for us to enter into a Christian cocoon. Christian music, Christian friends, Christian decorations for our homes, we even begin to speak Christianeese. Listen carefully, please, I am very much in favor of all those things… but the danger is that we become so isolated that our messages, even our lives, become irrelevant to the world in which we are to be salt and light. We have to be careful that we don’t become so isolated, so deaf to the regular questions of living and struggles of life without God, that we are without a voice to our neighbors and coworkers and families.
I’m not suggesting that we live lives that dishonor ourselves or our God by trading wholesome habits for destruction. We won’t be serving beer and cigarettes during our fellowship time. But we need to listen, watch, and understand.
These days “more and more people are struggling to keep their heads above a rising tide of pessimism about prospects for the future. To be sure, a handful of optimists predict a better, brighter tomorrow. Still, the mass of humanity remains less than convinced. A hundred years ago [in the modern era], faith in human reason and progress was probably at an all-time high. Today, it [seems] as low as ever. There are growing doubts as to whether the world can ever solve its problems on its own. Ecclesiastes speaks to this condition. It well expresses the profound disappointment that people feel when they realize that life should be better, but isn’t.”
Before we leave this classic rock era… one last song.
The Byrds released this in the year of my birth. Apart from the words that make up the title (Turn Turn Turn) all the other words in these lyrics are pulled directly from Ecclesiastes chapter 3. 42 years ago, the Byrds understood that these words in Ecclesiastes resonate with regular people.
So… on to these words in our actual text.
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: 2 a time to be born and a time to die,
A time to be born… and a time to die.
Of these fourteen couplets… the first three are along the same lines.
• Born – Die
• Plant – Uproot
• Kill – Heal
We all have a time to die. Try as we might to deny it, ignore it, avoid it, put it off… these lives as we know them, in these bodies, will come to an end. Maybe by accident, maybe by disease, often in a rather natural way after a long life… we all have a time to die. We just don’t know when that is.
Well… actually… we can know when that is if we’d just visit www.deathclock.com. I visited and answered a few simple questions and found out that I’m scheduled to leave this world on June 15, 2053. The good news is that it is a Sunday… so I know I’ll be right here with you whom I love so dearly! The clock calculates that I have over 1.4 billion seconds… and it ticks them off in countdown fashion.
I played around with the site… understanding a bit about what was under the hood (some simple statistical regression to produce an actuarial formula that estimates mortality). Some of you may want to be careful about visiting the site. For kicks I added several decades to my age, knowing that it would place me off the edge of the actuarial tables.
It informed me with a little pop-up that said “I am sorry, your time has expired. Have a nice day.” You’d want to be sure you were prepared to have your computer tell you that you are, or at least should be, dead!
At first it was sort of fun to see that I had over 1.4 billion seconds… that seems like a lot. But then a strange thing happened: I started watching the clock tick down. And I would think “there goes another second I can’t have back… and another… and another…
And I was faced with the reality that what was ticking down before me was only a good guess based on a formula… that the actual total number of seconds is only known by God… but that clock was dead-on about one thing: I have a finite number of seconds in this life, and the number is getting smaller… second by second.
A time to be born and a time to die…
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance
I have to ask, “Dr. Argue, when is it time to dance?”
The text says that there is a time and season for everything. Everything… a full rich life with all kinds of experiences… a robust life, lived fully.
It seems to me that the trick is to get the timing right. Sometimes it seems so easy to get out of phase. That we get things backwards and we’re doing the opposite of what we should be doing.
When you say time to a musician, we think in terms of rhythm. There something wonderful about locking into a grove. Life ought to be like that… a rhythm to be born and a rhythm to die…
But get that rhythm out of phase, and it is like clapping on the wrong beat. We get out of phase. When we should be planting encouragement and uprooting discouragement, we get out of phase and do it the other way around. When we ought to be putting to death our old, rotten ways and nursing righteousness to health in our lives… we get out of phase and do it the other way around… killing righteousness and nursing back to health our rotten, sinful, ways. We laugh at what is disgusting and evil when we should weep.
When should we dance? Here’s an idea: I think we get circumstantially out of phase. Take, for example, this very circumstance: church. When we are together reflecting on and singing about God’s goodness and greatness, we probably ought to dance… but some of us seem habitually out of phase and would rather mourn in church (at least the looks on our faces seem mournful).
14 couplets of polar opposites… and each has a time. Commentators will say that the numbers here 14 couplets (7 X 2 X 2) is a significant indication of completeness. From birth to death and everything in between. All of it intentional. All of it work.
No… it is not yet time for me to be silent.
Our country is torn today in regard to whether this is a time for war or a time for peace.
The text brings us back to this rhetorical question that we’ve seen before in Ecclesiastes, “in the grand scheme of things, what good is all the toil?” Here there is an answer “God has given us a burden (task, calling, work) and he has made it beautiful (or good) it its time.”
The text also explains that it is God who gives us this urge to wonder what there is outside of time. I wonder what is beyond the seconds that keep ticking away… never to be had again. The text explains that it is God who put eternity in our hearts, a longing to know something beyond time in this life, in this world, in these bodies. Yet, alas, we only have a spark of eternity in our hearts; we cannot fully comprehend eternity. We cannot “fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
So we take this time and understand that it is a gift from God. We honor God by enjoying the gift he gives us. We honor God by living life to the fullest. By being satisfied with His gift.
This reminder of God’s sovereignty is powerful: “I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it.” It reminds us that any part we have in eternity comes from our alignment with Him. We are reminded that we are neither puppet nor parasite. We are not merely running in program mode set in place by a grand puppet master. And we are not without resource to add or subtract from our own lives and enjoyment. But we are invited to join God in His work… not adding nor taking from His work, but joining Him.
So what? What can we take away with us from this passage?
It seems clear that this passage, like all of Ecclesiastes, is meant to make us think. It is meant to call us to a reality check. We’re called to wrestle with our humanity, this fallen world, and what God has to say about it.
“It’s about life in a fallen world. Ecclesiastes says we can deny it, fight it, hide from it, and even try to make sense of it. But we can’t escape it. The only meaningful response is to live in it one day at a time, fearing God and cherishing as best we can the stuff of which life is made – food, family, work. These are gifts from God’s hand.”
So what? So we enjoy the gifts God gives us. We worship Him by living full, robust, even happy lives. We examine ourselves and the rhythm of our lives.
We ask ourselves, honestly, are we honoring God by living full lives well. Are we treating this gift of time as a precious gift? Are we living lives in relationship with God, or are we toiling for ourselves… which ends in vanity… meaninglessness?
More importantly than asking ourselves, let’s ask our God. Let’s be open to God, through His Holy Spirit, to speak to us… revealing where we can live more fully and thus honor God. And let us rely on that same Holy Spirit for continued guidance, and strength, and courage.
It is normal, I suppose, when we stop and think along these lines, to have regrets… to wish we had done things differently, to have different priorities. In that case, take some comfort from the idea of that clock that is ticking away the seconds… sure they are gone, never to be redeemed… but they are gone. The gift that we have now, right now, is the gift of the time we are enjoying today and will enjoy tomorrow. So where different priorities are called for, make a fresh start today.
Let’s pray together this morning.
Father, thank you for your gifts of time, and calling, and work. Give us grace today to know that our time is in Your hands. Our lives are in Your hands. Give us grace today so that we can live our lives fully in such a way that we honor you. Guide us, Holy Spirit, to an enjoyment of this precious gift of life.
