On Time
On Time
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
I’d like to begin this morning by thanking you for being in church on the Sunday after Christmas. With so many people traveling and generally enjoying the holidays, this is a notoriously light Sunday for churches. On the heels of the sanctuary being packed on Christmas Eve, it sometimes feels even lighter. I appreciate you making the effort to be here! It means a lot to me!
Having said that, I hope that I can reward your attendance with at least a few things to consider as 2019 draws to an end. Big things happened in 2019. Big things are on the horizon. How is it that we should think about such things? How is it that we should think about the passing of time?
Almost every year, my New Year’s text is from Ecclesiastes. If you were a child of the sixties like me, you became familiar with the gist of this passage because the group, The Byrds, took the words and brought them to life with the song, “Turn, Turn, Turn:” “To everything…turn, turn, turn…There is a season…turn, turn, turn.” If you are an adult who will turn 60 this year, then you have likely lived the truth of these words, yourself. Maybe you even occasionally have the song pop into your head as you journey through life and discover another new chapter along the way, another thing that you thought you would never do and here you are doing it or another thing you thought you would never see and here it is unfolding in front of you.
Ecclesiastes is known as wisdom literature. If you listen carefully, there is wisdom in these words. According to Ecclesiastes, there is a “right time for everything on the earth.” This is a hard won and hotly contested bit of wisdom in most of our lives. Early on in life, we act as if life is a buffet to be sampled at our pleasure. I’m all for birth but I’d like to skip death. Laughter is good. Weeping? Not so much… I don’t want to mourn. I want to dance! Let’s hear it for love! However, is there ever really a time to hate? We try our best to edit our existence and shape the world around us to our liking. Life, however, always has other plans. Life, it seems, is an all-of-the- above, maybe even, all or nothing, affair. As soon as life says it’s time to do “X” and “X” is something you don’t want to do and you check out…you stop living. You check out on life, itself.
Over time, through the hard won wisdom of lived experience, we realize that there really is a right time for almost everything. If you have ever really loved someone who was just so, so very sick and they’ve fought hard through round after round of treatment and they are exhausted, you know that there is a right time to die and you hope in your heart that it can be soon. You know the same thing if you’ve ever been hungry in the wild and killing a fish is what is necessary if you are going to feed yourself and others. If you’ve ever worked harder than you ever could have imagined you could work to save a marriage or a friendship you may know that for all that work to hold on, it is now the right time to let go. In short, life is full of the unimaginable. The wise thing is to be very careful to never say never. Sometimes, the unimaginable is necessary.
I am not making the case for being jaded or cynical or worn out and world-weary. What I am saying is that life is a complicated and convoluted journey. On that journey, we have the chance to make meaning—to live our faith—every step of the way. As human beings, we won’t always read things correctly. We will fall short. We will fail to live our faith. However, we won’t eliminate such mistakes by rigidly clinging to the list of things that we consider bad or unwelcome or awful that we would just never do. Good and bad and black and white are not generally how the world presents itself. There is a lot of gray. There is a lot of darkness. Sometimes, some of the most important light that we bring to life is born in the darkest of places.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been learning about World War 1. 104 years ago, as Christmas approached on the Western Front, German soldiers were in trenches on one side of “no man’s land” and French and British soldiers were on the other side of “no man’s land,” hunkered down. Literally, for months, the war had been stalled. The soldiers had been pinned down in place in the dirt and the freezing water of those trenches, surrounded by the bodies of their compatriots who could not be buried because no one could move. On either side, if a finger was raised above the parapets, that finger would be shot off. As those men huddled there, the artillery guns of each side pounded the other. It was one of the most horrific scenes of human history and those trenches ran for 400 miles. Hundreds of thousands of Europe’s best men died.
Then, it happened. It started with a flicker of colored light on the German side. The allies wondered if this was a trick or some sort of signal for an impending attack. After a while, the Allies realized what they were seeing: Christmas lights on tiny Christmas trees. This was confirmed when the Allies began to realize what they were hearing: the familiar melodies of Christmas carols. On the Allied side, some of the troops began to sing back. In German, French and English, the words were different but the spirt and sentiment was the same: “Silent night, holy night,” “Stille Nacht.”
Eventually, things grew even stranger when a lone German emerged entirely from the trenches and sang a solo that was so beautiful and pure that some of the Allied troops found themselves in tears. When he finished, there was an unending thunder of applause that almost made the men on all sides forget the thunderous hammering of the artillery that had filled the night only a few hours before. That was when men on both sides emerged from their trenches, crossed into “no man’s land” and met at the barbed wire. Germans and Frenchmen and Brits exchanged cigarettes. One Brit wrote home to tell his wife about the chocolates that a German soldier had exchanged with him.
One of the Germans brought out a soccer ball and suggested that the open space between the armies might make a terrific pitch. However, that’s when the officers of both sides “drew the line.” After both sides spent some time burying their dead, the men began wandering back to their trenches. What was interesting was that the battle didn’t really resume for almost a week. This was not an isolated scene, either. All up and down the 400 mile trench line, Christmas greetings were exchanged. Cigarettes were traded. Christmas carols wafted through the night.
Historians will tell you that these men in the trenches were in many cases not professional soldiers. Weeks or months before, they had been bankers and insurance salesmen and tradesman and farmers. They were husbands and fathers and grandfathers. Now, they were grizzled veterans who had seen the very worst of what human beings could do to one another. And somehow, without any conversation ahead of time, they had decided that there had to be more. They lit their trees. They sang their carols. They met their enemies. They did the unimaginable. Historians will also tell you that those in power quickly moved to make sure that such human connections across battle lines never happened again.
To those in power, these men were doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Imagine, though, how right it felt to the men involved—to be fully human for a little while, to have peace break out, if only for a week. For everything there is a season…a time to sing a carol and a time to head back to one’s trench.
In the end, it’s not hard to come to grips with there being a time for everything. What’s hard is figuring out how in the world to decipher what to do and when to do it. When I consider such things, I find myself remembering a saying from the Tao Te Ching: “When hungry eat; when tired sleep.” The meaning seems so simple. However, what is required to live this truth is to know when I’m hungry and know when I’m tired. I feel like I spend a lot of time sleeping when I’m hungry and eating when I’m tired—not just literally but metaphorically. It is so easy to not pay attention to what we are feeling and just reflexively do what we always do.
That’s the thing. Knowing when the right time to do something is may require us to be paying attention to what is actually unfolding around us. We are not the masters of the universe, acting unilaterally. (No one expected a German to sing a solo!) We live in a specific context. We respond in real time. Somehow, it is in paying attention to everything that is happening and being aware of the full range of my own choices—not just the ones that I’m comfortable making or expected ahead of time to make— that we might just have a real chance to help the right thing to happen at the right time.
I think that our challenge as we face the new year is to hold onto our sense of context. Each of us will have real choices to make, from who we vote for in important elections, to how we care for our family and friends, to which issues and causes we will invest with our care. Most of our influence will be local. Most of the choices that we make that matter will not be about things that happen on a national scale. Rather, we will encounter others, one person at a time. We shouldn’t assume that we understand where those people are coming from without doing the hard work of actually asking them questions and really listening to their answers. We will make our decisions, one choice at a time. We shouldn’t assume that we are making the right decisions simply because we are comfortable with our choices.
In the end, I think we pray. We pray that God will help us to go where we need to go and do what needs to be done. We pray that we will be more united and less divided. We pray that through our choices, a little more light might be brought into our sometimes dark world. We pray for God’s guidance in the new year.