The Times of Your Life

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
May 18, 2008
Confirmation Sunday

The Times of Your Life
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
John 8:12

The reading from Ecclesiastes is one of the most familiar
passages in the Bible.
I grew up singing the words back in the 1960s,
when I was in Confirmation Class:
the folk singer Pete Seeger had set the words to music
and the rock group The Byrds made a hit out of it
with their song, “Turn, Turn, Turn”.

“For everything there is a season,
and a time for every matter under heaven.”
That’s the reality of life for all God’s children.
There is life and there is death.
There is good and there is evil.
There is peace and there is war.

The word Ecclesiastes is Latin,
a loose translation of the original Hebrew title of this book,
which was Qoheleth, or “Teacher”.
This book was a lesson from a teacher to his students,
students who were probably
about the same age as our Confirmands.
The book itself is part of the collection of books
in the Old Testament that we refer to as “wisdom literature”.
And there is a great deal of wisdom in these eight verses.

There is a time to be born
and a time to die.
That’s reality.
Each of us is born,
and each of us will in turn die:
Some from old age,
others from illness,
and still others from accidents.
The fact that our lives on this earth are finite
reminds us, even when we are young,
that each day is a gift given us by God,
a gift to be used in service to God.

There is a time to plant –
that time is right now - spring time,
the reawakening of God’s earth all around us.
And then comes the time to reap the harvest.
But I am guessing that Qoheleth, the teacher,
taught his students that
there is no such thing as instant gratification,
that reaping doesn’t follow planting
without a great deal of tending, watering,
feeding, weeding, and nurturing.
Whatever seeds we plant require patience and work
in order for there to be time of reaping.
And we are forever planting seeds:
seed of change, seeds of new ideas,
seeds of hope, seeds of peace,
seeds of love.

The next stanza is a tough one
for us as disciples of Christ:
There is a time to kill;
Of course there is a time to heal,
but a time to kill?
How do we reconcile this with the Sixth Commandment,
that we shall not kill?
And how do we reconcile this with Christ’s calling us to peace?
Perhaps the teacher was referring just to animals:
that there was a time to kill them for food, or for sacrifice.
But the reality was that war was all too common in the centuries
that led from Moses to Jesus.
Perhaps the teacher was thinking that
there was a time to kill enemies of the Lord God.
Certainly that is not what Jesus teaches us, though.
One of the most important lessons
I hope the Confirmands learned this year
is that the Bible is filled with difficult lessons
that require us to work them out.
The Bible is not a rule book with passages that we can point to
and say, “oh the meaning is clear.”
We read the Bible,
praying for guidance by the Holy Spirit,
and then we talk about it,
study it,
and try to learn from it,
because the BIble is a living book,
and it is always teaching us something new.

We’ve got a similar struggle with the next passage:
that there is a time to break down and time to build up.
Paul taught us that all things should be done to build up,
so what do we do with this verse?
I read it as reminding us that there is a time
to tear down the old, to turn from old ways,
ways that no longer work,
and think about new ways, new ideas.
We don’t like doing that:
we tend to be far more comfortable
with the ways things are, the status quo;
we don’t like change.
Of course, there are times when we are called to
build on the foundation that is already there,
but we must always remember that the Holy Spirit
is forever blowing through our lives
and the Spirit often is there
to blow away the stale and worn
and make way for the new.

Last week we talked about the need to break down
the barriers of sexism, and racism.
We need to break down the barriers of homophobia
and xenophobia, the fear of foreigners and foreign things.
We are called to break down barriers that trap people in poverty,
or in hunger, or in joblessness, or hopelessness.
We are called by Jesus to break down any barriers
that get in the way of our building up God’s Kingdom.

I have found that with age,
I have come more and more to appreciate the importance
of the lesson that there is a time to weep:
There is a time for feeling deep emotions.
We Presbyterians, especially those of us,
with Scottish heritage, struggle with this,
as though we are proud of the moniker,
“God’s frozen chosen”.
But there is a time to weep:
to weep for a loss, yes,
but there is also a time to weep for beauty,
for joy,
for love,
for the sound of a baby crying.

In the same way there is a time to mourn
when we suffer any loss,
not just when a loved one dies,
but when a friend moves away,
when a relationship ends,
when a job is lost.
Over time the Spirit helps us to pick ourselves up
and carry on with life.
We go on, filled with cherished memories,
and eventually find ourselves
once again ready and able to dance.

How should we read the next stanza:
“There is a time to throw away stones,
and a time to gather stones together”?
This is more than reminding us that there is a time
for clearing a field of stones
so we can plant it,
and other times to gather stones to build a building,
a wall, or a well.
I read in this passage a reminder of our responsibility
as stewards of God’s creation that there is nothing wasted
in God’s earth,
and that we are to use wisely
all that God has entrusted to us –
and that nothing should be wasted.

There is a time to embrace
and time to refrain from embracing.
In our multi-cultural society,
I think there is a powerful lesson here
of the need for us to learn about other people and their cultures,
to learn that in some cultures an embrace or a hug
might be welcome,
while in others an embrace is not welcome,
a handshake is not welcome,
even looking at someone in the eye is not welcome.
We are called not to impose our own cultures on other people
and other societies,
but to learn about other traditions
and respect them, so we will know when to embrace,
and when not to embrace.

The next two passages work together:
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep
and a time to throw away;
There is a time to seek new things and new ideas
but then there is a time to let go of things,
ideas, sometimes even people
if they are not helping you grow in faith.

There is a time to keep silent
and time to speak.
We talked this year about how we sin not only
in the things we say and do,
but also in the things we fail to say
or fail to do.
When we stand idly by without taking action
and without speaking out
when there is wrong right before us,
we are committing the sin of cowardice, of weakness.
We have a responsibility to speak up and speak out,
even if we what we say is unpopular,
even if we find ourselves in a minority,
even if bullies try to snuff our words and actions.
History is filled with too many stories of
hideous wrongs done as people stood silent,
whispering, “someone should say something,
or do something.”

And of course there is a time to love,
that is the life Jesus calls us to:
loving God with all our hearts and souls,
and loving our neighbors as ourselves.
But is there a time for hate?
Jesus certainly does not teach this.
But perhaps there is, if it is a hatred of things
that get in the way of God’s love, God’s mercy,
God’s righteousness,
Christ’s grace.
There may be times when we need to feel hate,
and outrage to help us summon up the courage
not to stand by silently in the face of an obvious wrong.

And, unhappily there are times for war,
It is fitting, however, that the Teacher ends with peace
for that is God’s hope for us,
and the life Christ calls us to.
It is the life our Confirmands have chosen
in professing their faith in Jesus Christ:
It is the life each of us has chosen
in our own professions of faith in Jesus Christ.

In an article I read the other day, a Methodist pastor,
Kelly Lyn Logue, put together another pairing
that should be a part of the times of our lives.
She says that as we go though life
we should have times that are “results-oriented”
where our goal is to accomplish something:
to feed the hungry, to pray, to teach, to sing.
But there should be others times that she says should be
“transformation oriented”,
when we quiet ourselves
and open ourselves more completely and thoroughly
to the Light of the world,
so that we might never walk in darkness.
(Christian Century, April 22, 2008, p. 19)

Let us welcome our newest members
as they join this community of faith
in this joyous time of their lives.
Let us welcome our newest brothers and sisters
with a warm embrace.
Let us welcome them with words of encouragement and love:
In the words Paul spoke to the Philippians:
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again, I say Rejoice....
And may the peace of God,
the peace which surpasses all understanding
guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus
this very special day, and always.”
Amen