For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 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 to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he 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.
Ecclesiastes 3.1-13 (NRSV)
A person would have to be living on the moon to have not heard the expression, there’s a time for everything. One writer characterized the “seven seasons” of life this way:
Spills of Infancy – Everything goes to the floor as you play the game of “I drop; you pick up”.
Drills of childhood – Spelling drills, multiplication drills, bible drills - The lessons drilled into your head by your parents and teachers.
Thrills of the Teen Years - The feeling of immortality, roller coaster rides, dating, acne.
Bills of Adult living – Work, bills, Marriage, bills, buying a house bills; car, bills, raising children bills, bills and lots of bills. I asked a friend who had just become a father for the third time how it feels to be a father of three; he replied, EXPENSIVE!
Ills of the Hills - When the excitement of the mid life crisis lands you in the hospital.
The Pills of Over the Hill - One for arthritis; one for high blood pressure; one for this and two for that.
Wills of Old Age – I will get up, I will get up, No, I will not get up.- Uhmm, can I get some help to get up!
Everyone can identify with those ills, pills and wills. We laugh, but only because they are our common experience. There is as much frustration with being in one stage, knowing that the next is coming. In fact, we know that is the case, as verse 11 tells us [God]…hath set [eternity] in their heart.…
We are different from the plants, insects and animals in that we sense the existence of eternity, and the abstractness of God. Animals and plant life simply respond to the moment and its environs. If there is food they eat it and enjoy it; if there are competitors for the food, they fight for it. They exist and reproduce without regard to antiquity or posterity. They are the true existentialists, living in the moment.
Man is different; man asks the question, why? Man can focus on eternity and we want to know the meaning of life. We want to know why we are here. We search for that meaning, and when we cannot know it, we manufacture it.
Recent history provided the French revolution, and the accompanying philosophy of humanism which dominates America today. We scoff at French reluctance to enter the Iraq war with us, but we little realize how they are already possessors of our most precious American territory – our minds. Humanistic existentialism, which began in the Renaissance, is taught in our schools and by a predominance of media programming. We still have our American slogan: “In God We Trust”. Unfortunately we only say it; our real trust is fully leaning on our ingenuity, imagination and technology. That’s where the real stuff of our living takes place.
The trouble with that is we don’t really know where that living will take us. We may call all the shots of our lives – live in charge, but for what? In the end, we have been born, lived fifty, seventy or a hundred years, and then, like a blip on the radar screen we disappear. To what end, says the philosopher? Why am I here? Am I just another piece of vegetation to populate planet earth?
Without getting too “text-booky” this morning, allow me to define this thing. A fellow preacher expressed it well:
Twentieth-century French Existentialism requires an authentic acceptance of total meaninglessness, especially in the face of our own mortality. But then it offers the creation of our own meaning by the free act of deciding. Its creed is "By choosing this totally meaningless and irrational act and direction for my life, I become the creator of my own meaning."
“I become the creator”; sound familiar?
12How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! 13For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: 14I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
Isaiah 14.12-14
The only answer the world’s best philosophers agree upon is that we are here and we are of little consequence. We will conquer that part of the universe we can while we still exist as a species, and then at some cataclysmic point in the future, human beings and planet earth will cease. It may be an explosion that we bring upon ourselves with technology, or SARS or AIDS…but we are coming unglued and someday will perish. And then there will be no one to judge. When the last one dies it is over. That is one end (the very hopeless and meaningless outlook) of why we are here, and doesn’t even really say “why”.
The other extreme is the Eastern religions where you are born, live trying to do better than your last incarnation, and then die with a certain amount of karma. If the good stuff you died with is more than the bad, you reincarnate into the next life a little better, a little higher than the last.
Finally, after many many generations of trying, you live a perfect life, hurting no one, and you don’t have to repeat the cycle – you just cease to exist, oblivion!
Either way, annihilation or reincarnation, the philosophy of existence apart from God leaves no purpose, no meaning. These are the extremes. People who live in the extremes tend toward one of two philosophies of life.
a. Hoping against hopelessness is characteristic of those who sense there is nothing, but hope they’re wrong. They are swept along in life by trends, fads or possible loyalties. Much like a stock broker will diversify to cover his losses; a person without hope actually hopes to stumble upon a future – without hope, and hoping!
b. Those who have accepted existentialism’s fundamental tenet of meaninglessness are those who live for this moment, generally gathering everything they can materially. They understand in the end it is meaningless, but scoring the most points is their meaning. Ted Turner doesn’t really care about money; it’s just the way the score is kept in big business.
How can people think like that?
A question that has crept into my mind all my life whenever this topic of “why” is discussed is, why do people think on such a hopeless plane? Even Christian people sometimes get caught in the trap of feeling like life is empty or meaningless.
One of the reasons is the extremes. We have many of them in life, and they get our attention.
Positive Extremes
If you start at the beginning of my first television memories I recall each week Michael Anthony would show up at someone’s door with a check for a million (tax-free) bucks. Only one condition, don’t try to find the giver. How extreme is that? In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, Tin Man, Lion and Scarecrow are all looking for the perfect way out of their problems.
In a more current sense we have seen the rise of the X-Games, extreme stunts with skateboards and bicycles. There is a show on Animal Planet exploring the most-extreme animals, snakes with the biggest mouth and longest fangs, the crocodile hunter getting closer than is comfortable to some dangerous beast. We watch Fear Factor for the most extreme grossness a human can stand for $50 grand. We watch American Idol to see who can stand the most public humiliation before cracking – and who will have instant fame and fortune.
What’s positive about these? They are all in the hunt for the biggest, most expensive, extravagant experience, possession or position. They are extreme! They all say, I will ascend high above everyone else.
Negative Extremes
“Negative” brings to mind the painful reminder that some of our dear church family and friends have gone home to be with the Lord. Burying two brothers in a month’s time takes its toll on any family or church family.
I have heard it said in many ways over the years about being a pastor, “I wouldn’t have your job for anything.” “How can you stand being there in all that loss and death?”
I cannot speak for others, but as for me, the worst part of the negative extremes of a pastor in ministry is not when people die or have disease or disability; it is when members of a church deny their faith. The absolutely worst part of being a pastor, or part of the church of Jesus Christ is when people who claim to be born again do things so totally against the clear teaching of Scripture, and then act like they’ve been wronged if they are held accountable for it. It destroys the fellowship in a church body and it tears the heart out of someone like me.
I have seen that before; it has caused many hours on my knees, agonizing in prayer for both the sinning member, and for the hurting church fellowship. It takes all the focus off loving and caring for members, and places it on the negative extreme of broken relationship.
Dostoevsky wrote: God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up. But what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. That’s what I think.
Now, these are the extremes. Solomon knew all about extremes as he wrote Ecclesiastes. He’d tried everything under the sun and knew that the extremes were not where you find happiness or meaning.
Living Between the Extremes
If you were listening closely when we read the text you may have caught the reality of understanding that the extremes are just a part of life, not the purpose or sum total of life. Solomon said that there is a time and season, a purpose under heaven for everything. You can’t add to or detract from God’s purposes as He allows or even sends the extremes; but there is this, God has made us for living between the extremes.
11He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. 12I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life. 13And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God. Eccl 3.11-13
While I sat and meditated over this message my computer got bored with me. My screen saver is set up so that if I don’t do anything for 10 minutes it will switch to a slide show presentation of all my family pictures. As I watched the screen wondering about living between the extremes, two pictures came up.
The first was of Fleer Road where my Mom and Dad once lived. The street was in full bloom, dogwoods, azaleas and Bradford pears. It was a perfectly sunny day.
The second picture was of the same street the day after our once-in-a-hundred-years ice storm (2003). Trees were lying across the road, power lines dangerously snapped and the most desolate site since Dr. Zivago.
The two extremes reminded me of more. Every family picture, old and new painted a new picture of extremes. There was my cousin Gary at around 8 months with nothing but a baby towel and smile. He looks much different now. There was another extreme picture we took four years ago in New York, of leaves turned crimson and yellow on Northern State parkway. New York City is a cement jungle surrounded by foliage as beautiful as North Carolina. There was a picture of the neighbor’s cat, cute and patient just waiting on my porch, staring at the bird feeder. Extremes all!
Now, the extremes are just that, bad and good in our understanding. The two pictures of Fleer road were wonderful and awful. But they in no way measure the life of the two dear people who lived there. I have known them for nearly 59 of the 63 years they’ve been married. They’ve had their share of extremes…
…the day Dad quit his job rather than compromise honesty.
…the day Dad almost split his leg in two with a hand axe.
…hearing Mom cry out in the middle of the night with one of those leg cramps.
…feeling the embrace and kiss and wet tears on my cheek from Dad the day I arrived back from Vietnam.
…and more, just like you’ve got more.
But, in all, those are the extraordinary moments, the extremes. For the most part their lives, like yours, like mine, are lived between those extremes. We live…
…paying bills
…driving to work
…diapering when we’d rather be sleeping
…giving
…eating breakfast
…looking for the child who’s stayed out too late
…praying on the run
…being honest
…loving without thinking about it
I heard from another dear friend in Florida. Elwood Baker and I go back more than 20 years. He is a loving preacher who has learned to live between the extremes. A few weeks before I met Elwood two of his grown kids were in an airplane accident. It was a beautiful Sunday morning and Elwood was about to begin services when the call came. His kids had begun a takeoff in a small four-seater with another couple. The winds shifted and flipped the plane on its wing. When the tip of the wing contacted the ground it began to flip over and over. The plane was demolished in flames. One of Elwood’s children was being life-flighted to Tampa, and the other to Gainesville…two of the best burn units in the country. There was not much hope for either.
In the midst of this extreme moment, Bro. Baker (as everyone knows him) took to the pulpit and finished the service, asking God for the lives of his beloved children. God answered that prayer, and although the next year was consumed with he and Cathy trading time between the two hospitals, both children survived.
It was an ordeal not many have had to live through. In it all there was faith. In it all there was humor. My friend Elwood lives with an understanding of what it is to be between the extremes. I always suspected that of him. Last year’s Christmas card from him confirmed it for me. After sharing the usual news about his ministry (he still does interim pastorates, humor banquets – and sweeping of the floors if required), he told me about Cathy’s new diet. He said, with a twinkle in the eye, I’m certain,
We both are doing great physically. Cathy has lost a total of 62 lbs. I told her, "Young Lady if you ever leave me, I’m going with you!"
This should be required reading for any philosophy major. It covers living between the extremes.
Or you could look at it this way; about 2000 years ago the two most extreme events ever occurred separated by three days. On Friday, the Son of the living God, Jesus, hung on a cross and gave His life for our sin. They put Him in a borrowed tomb; the extremity of calamity. The One who loved us more than anyone else could was dead, killed by our sinfulness; this was the extremity of human possibility for sin and self-injury.
Three days later came the other end of extreme possibilities, the man, Jesus, rose from the dead! It tells us in the Bible that in between those two extreme events Jesus descended to Hell and preached liberty to the captives.
All of us have had extremes. We have had both wonderful and awful things happen. In other times we have had extreme blessings. In all we are called to live between the extremes, to live in the liberty Jesus preached to us as captives; to pick up and move on. These things teach us to know that the Lord provides seasons for all things, and our main task is to enjoy what He gives and do good with our lives.
There are critics who live only in the extremes, never between. They live for the high times, and desert when the bad times come. That’s not a child of God in action. Do you choose to be a child of God, living and moving on between the extremes? If so, there’s a place for you here. There’s a place for you when you open your heart for Jesus. You live between the extremes, and when the extremes come, He will be there in your heart to walk through the valleys with you, and shout on the mountains with you.
