Text: Ecclesiastes 3:1-13 There is a time for everything, THE SIMPLE GIFT A Sermon by Avena A. Ward St. Pauls United Church of Christ Chicago Illinois January 1, 2012 and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil this is the gift of God.
Sermon There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to deck the halls and a time to put away all those decorations, a time to shop for gifts and a time to pay off the credit cards, a time to bake cookies and a time to make resolutions to work off all those extra pounds gained from eating them. Happy New Year, 2012! A lot has changed. And a lot has stayed the same since that poem from Ecclesiastes that I m parody-ing today was committed to written form. This is one of the best known Biblical poems in both secular and religious circles. It comes from a unique little book that is not like any other book in the Bible. Ecclesiastes is one of those texts, that falls into the category of wisdom books, alongside Job, Psalms and Proverbs. The author of Ecclesiastes claims to be a son of King David, and so it has often been attributed to Solomon. But there are many reasons to believe that it was written long after Solomon lived. The author refers to himself as Koheleth, a Hebrew word that is sometimes translated as Teacher and sometimes as Preacher. This book teaches us less about God and more about the nature of what it means to be human and live in God s world. There s an undeniable thread of cynicism that winds its way through Ecclesiastes, that has caused some peopleto question whether this book belongs in the Bible at all. Koheleth, the Teacher, begins his observations by setting us up to understand that most of our human striving is vanity. It s like an exhaled breath on a cold winter s day. It appears as frost, and then dissipates into the air without leaving an impression. In spite of this, Kohelet never condemns human striving as sinful. He writes with compassion for God s human creatures. The poetic passage we read today was made popular in the mid 1960s. Pete Seeger set it to music and the Byrds recorded it. Those of us of a certain age remember it by the name Turn! turn! turn! If you re not familiar with it, you can hear it again on YouTube. With its reference to turning, it always connects in my mind with the Shaker song, Simple Gifts, which I included as our thought for preparation. It also connects in a weird way with a line from the UCC Statement of Faith that I memorized as a confirmand: God calls us in holy love... and sets before us the ways of life and death. In a swinging rhythm of contrasting experiences, the poet Koheleth names those ways, activities that make up the stuff of life and death. Activities that -- when we re in the middle of them -- can be seem earth-shatteringly important. We pack each one with expectations and ascribe to them profound meanings. But expectations leave us disappointed. And, the poet observes, the meanings we give to important events vanish not long after we work so hard to create them.
The couplets that Koheleth uses to define the seasons of life might seem, on first reading, to cancel each other out. But, in fact, the way they re written, they act to create a kind of perspective. They engage not so much our intellect, as they capture our imagination so that we see things as we imagine God might see them. Through the swinging, spiral structure we see that there are patterns to life that are common to all people and are part of the nature of human existence. That perspective is available to us fleetingly, when we use our God-given gift of the consciousness of past and future to give us some distance. And then, the pen of the poet helps us imagine those activities as the movements of the dance of life. As Kohelet says, each of these activities is a step on the path that God sets before us. But each of these activities is also appropriate in its time. We all have experienced trying to force ourselves to move into a new path or activity when the time isn t right. It just doesn t work. We can push with all our might, but there will be no gain from our rushing it. And we often lose our balance from pushing. From Kohelet s perspective, it s not worth it to rush and push. For even the activity itself -- when it s done -- leaves no lasting impact. In Ecclesiastes, there s no sense of progress in the right direction. And there s no moral judgment inherent. According to Koheleth, birth is not better than death nor peace than war. But there is a time for each thing. It is the turning and swinging of the dance itself that -- for brief moments -- allows us to experience the gifts of God, of finding joy and delight right where we are in what we re doing right now. But this experience can t be gotten by scheming and striving. We can t achieve it except by going with the flow, by accepting that God has created us to live in a state of contradiction and tension, and invites us to dance in it. That s one of the hardest things for human beings to do. Especially because God has given us the ability to sense the past and the future. With that ability we scheme and control. We seem compelled, based on the past, to determine how to be to face the future. But the poet discourages us from forcing things, or clinging to an outcome. In Ecclesiastes, there is much resonance between the Koheleth, the Teacher s, view and the Buddhist perspective on life. Buddhists learn from the dharma -- the natural law that sustains and upholds the universe. They let their experiences of life -- of bumping up against this law -- teach them, much as Koheleth does. Koheleth s observations are that human life in God s world is an ephemeral thing. In his view, as in the Buddhist, there isn t any afterlife in which to redeem oneself. There is only the present. This is the place where Koheleth gets out of sync with most Biblical theologians. He keeps coming back to the same conclusion: we should work hard in this life and be satisfied with what we have done. Our passage today says, we can find joy in the simple things of life-- in eating and drinking and celebrating with friends. And that joy is available to us, even in the most difficult experiences of life.
One thing that s missing in Ecclesiastes -- for me -- is stories and examples. So here I share a well known Buddhist story that I believe would be a good example of what Koheleth is saying, because it speaks of the good we can learn, even the bleak seasons of life. This is known as The story of the mustard seed : There was a woman whose young son became ill. She cared for him as best she could, but he ultimately died. And when he did, this mother did not give in to grief. She continued to seek a cure for his sickness, carrying his body from one healer to another doctor, asking if they could bring him back to her. Finally one of the people she visited referred her to Gautama, the Buddha. Because she would do anything to get her son back, she went to him and asked if he had any medicine that could bring her son back. Mustard seed, Gautama told her. She must bring mustard seed, but the mustard seed would only work if it came from a home where no one had died. Not a mother or father, sister or brother, or child. Desperately, the woman went to all her neighbors asking for mustard seed. And they pitied her and gladly offered it to her. But when she asked if anyone had died in that household, she had to leave without the seed. Because there wasn t one household that hadn t suffered a loss. At last, tired and discouraged, the woman climbed to the top of a hill overlooking the town. There she sat down and cried. And as she sat, darkness fell. She sat and cried long enough to see that the lights of the city flickered and went out. And then and there it came to her that this is the lot of all human beings. They are born and then they die. And it dawned on her how selfish she had been. She d been so focused on her goal of saving her son she hadn t recognized that there was a time to be born and a time to die. And, as she transcended her own sorrow, she was able to get up and bury her son in the forest. Compassion awakened in her for all of those people who had suffered loss, and she realized that by giving up her striving she gained her own enlightened life. The teacher Koheleth says that God has made everything beautiful in its own time. And God has made us capable of perceiving that beauty. In those moments of enlightenment, when we are able to see the beauty, we receive the gift of the wisdom of God. We can t expect ourselves to ever fathom all that God knows about the past and the future and the meaning of it all. Or about the significance of time. But we can delight in those fleeting moments of enlightenment. That delight, Koheleth says, is what God wants for us to experience. I invite you to sing with me that Shaker Song, Tis the gift to be Simple : Tis the gift to be simple, Tis the gift to be free Tis the gift to come round where we ought to be And when we find ourselves in the place just right Twill be in the valley of love and delight. When true simplicity is gained to bow and to bend we shan t be ashamed. To turn, turn, will be our delight, Till by turning, turning we come round right. (Shaker Elder Joseph Brackett)
God is compassionate and God is generous. In the New Year that lies ahead, may you enjoy the simple gifts of life, wherever the dance leads you! Amen