Sermon: “Awkward Movements: When We Must Find the
Right Time, Part 1”
Jonathan Arnpriester, Chandler United Methodist Church
January 3, 2016 (First Service)
Ecclesiastes 3:1-13
There is a time for everything,
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; yetno
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.
Everybody survive Christmas all right I guess? We do survive Christmas now. I will tell
you we will do things just a little bit different today. I have had the cold. That is not
really it, the cold has had me this last week, and it has not let go yet. Either that or I
have reentered puberty and my voice is cracking. Please forgive me if I cough. I am
not going to stand at the door and greet folks. Afterwards, I am going to avoid people
as much as I possibly can. And if I run into you please tolerate an elbow bump and a
pastor whose head is floating on the end of the string about eight feet up. I feel like I
am wearing a balloon for a head today and decongestant does that to me.
We have talked about survival I suppose through Christmas. We just live through the
happiest times of our year, Christmas time, and we tack on to the end of it is just the
way it is with the Roman calendar laying the way it does. What follows Christmas time,
one of the happiest times of the year, is year-end celebration, year-end grieving, and
New Year’s. It is one of the most melancholy times of the year. It is emotionally one of
the most difficult time frames for us to go through. We build to Christmas, right? All
things brighten, things glow. The darkness is overcome by light. There is loads of
hope, loads of good cheer. Ebenezer Scrooge is changed. The Grinch's heart grows.
Christmas carols speak about a holy night when Bethlehem is the place for all who live
in darkness gather looking for light. Hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee
tonight. And then comes New Years.
I find New Year's to be depressing. Something of a non-event dreamed up by
restaurants, bars and grills, the makers of Cold Duck and party stores. Another year
has ended. Another year has begun. You are older, you are one year closer to your
end. Happy New Year!
New Year's Eve parties reveal the sadness of the season. Why? Why do so many of
us get together on New Year's Eve and celebrate by getting drunk, unless there is
something that we need to mask, like a New Year's depression.? Another year is over.
More about ourselves we have not changed. More about ourselves we kinda know we
never will change. Flip the page on the calendar, whoopee, it is 2016.
Our Scripture is appropriately depressing, but perhaps it is instructive. It is poetry from
the biblical book of poetry; the prophetic words of Ecclesiastes, for everything there is a
season and a time for every matter under heaven and suddenly we are hearing that
wonderful song from the sixties by the Birds, through every day turn, turn, turn and of
course that does violence to the text. Is that weird for me to say? The Birds did to
Scripture, what pop culture always does to Scripture, and that is take about half the
message and make a point of it and leave out the rest. I thought these words were
beautiful until I went to seminary and learned how to read the Bible. Funny how that
works. You think the Bible would just agree with everything the culture wants to do to
make money, but that is not the case. I read these words in Ecclesiastes and I do not
read them has necessarily happy words; they are amazingly dark. A time to weep, a
time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance. A time to embrace, refrain from
embracing, keep silent. A time to speak, a time to love, a time to hate, a time for war
and a time for peace. Everything has its time as swiftly as the seasons roll along. And
if Scripture stopped there, like the Birds stopped there, all might be well. Time passes,
seasons roll along. There is a time for this; a time for that: blah blah blah. Isn’t that just
nice.
But after considering the passing of time, Ecclesiastes goes on in his poetry. What gain
have all who work from their toil? I have seen the busyness that God has given to
everyone. What Ecclesiastes is saying is, where does it all lead to? What good comes
of it.? Look back at 2015. If you are like most of us you made 12 car payments. Yay
for you. You painted the bedroom and the bathroom. You tore up the linoleum from the
seventies that was in the mud room and you put down tile. Yay for you. You
shampooed the carpet, you hosed off the windows and maybe clean them with a little bit
of soap. So what gain do you have from your toil? There is a time to live there are
seasons of life. Yes, there is a time to write checks. A time to paint bedrooms, a time
to care for the carpet. A time for Democrats. There is a time for Republicans. There is
a time to live. There is a time to be sick. There is a time to die.
How old do you suppose the person was who wrote these words? Do you think they
are a young buck sitting in their dorm room being cynical about the world? I remember
a guy in my fraternity who was about 19 at the time. He said his old man gave his life to
General Motors sacrificed his health, his marriage, his happiness. And what good did it
do him when GM laid them off and then cut his pension? Or are these the words of an
embittered resentful older person who has been cast aside by the company, sitting
alone in an apartment with the telephone that no longer rings? What gain have the
workers from their toil? Seasons come and seasons go. It is Greek time here,
unending cyclical. This is not linear time, beginning and end. This is cyclical time, you
are on a rat race. This is ceaseless ticking of time, not moving upward toward God.
Not moving forward. You are a rat in a cage, breathlessly running, turning the tread
wheel to nowhere.
Oh, it is nice to say there is a time to plant and a time to pull up what is planted. A time
to be born, a time to die. These things seem to have meaning to us because we are
rats on the wheel. I have seen the busyness that God is given to everyone. God is
made everything suitable for its time. Moreover, God is put a sense of past future in
their minds, but they cannot find what God has given them. Lovely, huh? The Birds
missed it. I do not think it would have made all that great a song. The writer is not just
talking about how time passes, bringing boringly trudging each season, followed by
another, a time for this, a time for that. The writer is telling us there is a right time for
every matter under heaven. There is a right time to speak and a right time to keep
silent. It is a passage that ponders the problem, the struggle of finding the right time for
what needs to happen.
I remember one of Aesop's fables. The point of it is, it is a great thing to do the right
thing at the right time. Is that not what education is all about training in discernment of
the right time. Everything, when you think about it, is a matter of proper timing. When I
call up my financial planner who connects me to the stockbroker, is it a time to buy or is
it a time to sell? What is the right time? The doctor will tell you that timing is everything
in diagnosis. If a patient comes in too early, the physician cannot quite discern the
complaint because the description is unspecific; it is difficult to pinpoint, the complaint is
vague. But if a patient waits too long, the illness has progressed too far and it is too late
for treatment. Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and the almost
right word is the difference between a lightning strike and a lightning bug. Same could
be said about the difference between the right time and the almost right time.
I have been reading a book by Gary Willis, it came out about a dozen years ago. It
really impresses, it is on leadership, really impresses upon you how a leader is not only
someone who has talent, but someone who has the right talent at the right time.
Winston Churchill was the right man for England in the time of war, but he was not the
right man in a time of peace. And so we speak of man of the hour and we think of
World War II and we think of Neville Chamberlain. Remember Neville Chamberlain?
He was the right man for a time of peace. He was pursuing peace, trying to find peace
in Europe, while Hitler was roaming around invading Poland. Neville Chamberlain was
the man for the hour, but it was not the right hour. There is a time to make peace, but
that was not it. In all things: birth, death, love, war, planting, harvesting, there is a right
time.
I live next door to a man who was a wood worker for most of his adult life. He might
have even started when he was a kid; I do not know. I was given some wood and I put
it in my garage and he happened to be over one day and I asked him, hey, what you
think about this wood? And he went over and looked at it. There was some Cherry
wood and some Walnut, a little bit of Oak. I picked up one of the pieces that I thought
was going to be a great piece of wood, and he held it, banged it on the ground. He said
it was going to split. I said, how do you know that? He said, cause I was a wood
worker for thirty years, it is going to split. So I get to working on it in the following weeks
and I am trying to make it a top for a box and I am working it, and I am working it, and it
splits. He was the right man. He knew what was going to happen. That is not the right
piece of wood to use for that purpose.
Aristotle advises that we take care of moderation. It will help us know the right time for
action, but I think Aristotle gets it wrong. I do not think moderation is really the answer.
There is something calling to us that asks us to listen in a way we do not know how to
hear. We build computer models. We put up an institute of public policy. We hire
economist, consultants. We go see astrologers. We call psychics on the hotline. There
is a whole pseudoscience, we call it futurism, to predict and prognosticate, trying to
know the right time. Young people are leaving the church because it does not give
them the answers that they want. And yet psychics are making a killing in California
telling young people what they want to hear. It is always the right time when there is
profit involved.
As our year changes, we have had a huge dose of futuristic prognostication and as the
presidential election comes, it is going to get worse. What we want to try to do is predict
the future and pick the right person to lead us into it. What we want to know about 2016
is, what time is it? What makes this the right time? So we work to try to figure it out.
We argue, we post on Facebook. We listen to politicians. We call our stockbroker. We
listen at the donut shop. The truth of the matter is we do not know what time it is.
Ecclesiastes has a phrase for all of our attempts to predict, for all of our attempts to
understand and control. Ecclesiastes said, it is the sin of being self-centered, call it the
vanity of vanities. Says, knowing what I know about our desire to control the future. We
can also call it evil, because the desire to know the future, to read the future, is so deep
we are almost about to call it good. And that is what makes sin, evil; because when we
call what is sin, good.
Trying to control the future, trying to read the future, so we can profit in the future; this is
dangerous ground. Ecclesiastes, while agreeing that there is a right time for everything
also says very clearly, that only God knows. How is it possible for us to know the right
time? That is the question of Ecclesiastes chapter three and it answers that question --only God knows the time. It is beyond us to fully know the appropriate time for anything.
And the point of all this is; God is God and we are not. We normally think about our
distance from God, in terms of knowledge and in terms of power. But Ecclesiastes is
saying, in this New Year's depressing text, Ecclesiastes tells us to think about the
difference between us and God in terms of time. As a preacher, I have learned through
the years that there is what teachers call a teachable moment. That sacred unknown
moment when a listener becomes a learner. When the eyes, which were dull, light up.
The fire comes on. You see it in the eyes. The heartbeat is quickening and it is the
right time for that person to learn.
The way I figure it, my observation through the years is about eighty percent of the time,
what I teach is the right information at the wrong time. Oh to be granted the wisdom to
know the right time, when the student is most receptive ready to learn what I long to
bring. But after two and a half decades of doing this, I know about as little about how to
predict and prepare for that time as I did when I first tiptoed into ministry as a first-year
seminary student. The older you get, I think, the more you see how often that you have
done something right, but you have done it at the wrong time. That is the question that
is worth a year of pondering.
The challenge of any long-term relationship; is now the right moment to say something
or is now the time to keep silent. Think about your primary relationships, is that not one
of the biggest challenges we have? The other person in the relationship is talking; they
are not saying it the way you want them to say it. They are not saying it the way you
see it. Should you speak up and correct them and make sure they get it right? Is this
the time for that? Or is this the time for you to zip the lip and listen and hear with your
heart? Oh, if you can figure that one out, let me know. It would be wisdom to know the
right time. Oh, if you are going to be a parent. Start thinking about times, times when
you want to say something to your young person, your child, your young adult, your
adolescent, you want to say something, you know that you have the right word for them.
But is this the right time to say it? You have the right word. It sounds good in your
head, but speaking too soon and they think you are lecturing and they shut down. And
they give you the eye roll and they are not listening because it is the wrong time. Oh, to
have the wisdom to know what time it is.
But you are not God. It would be great wisdom to always know the right time, but
Ecclesiastes tells us that it is greater wisdom to live in the reality that we are finite
creatures. There is too much outside of our ability to control; and too much outside our
ability to predict; and the right time is a mystery to us and always will be. It is in God's
hands, not ours. The New Testament writers often speak of Jesus as God's gift to us at
the right time. Which is odd for us to hear. We have just celebrated Christmas and we
are on our way to Easter. We receive him and we kill him. We receive him at the right
time, but we cannot read the time, so we destroy him. For while we were still weak, at
the right time, Christ died at the hands of the ungodly,
Paul speaks of the fullness of time, he says when the fullness of time had come, God
sent his son in order to redeem so that we might receive redemption as children of God.
Jesus came at the right time, which is something only God knows. And in
graciousness, God makes our feeble fumbling time, about eighty percent of the time it is
the wrong time, but God makes our time, our attempts at time, into God's time. In
certain wonderful gifts of moments, God catches up and raises up our untimely actions
and graciously mysteriously forms them into the right time. The right thing, at the right
time. One word of our hundred catches and is remembered. The intent of our heart is
heard, in spite of our words, our failings, our failure to understand the time. Christmas
is just such a time, the right time. Mary and Joseph did not know it as they went about
paying their taxes, visiting relatives, getting engaged, having babies, that it was the right
time, God knew.
When a young couple comes to me thinking about marriage, I cannot count how many
times I have heard young couples say, well we are waiting to be married until it is the
right time. And we are sure that it is the right time. And what I say to couples is, forget
it. It is never the right time for marriage. There is never enough money. There is never
enough time. You never have enough security. You are never certain. Best to just join
hands close your eyes and take the plunge.
Poor things. They may have scored 1350 on the SAT. They might have been to great
colleges. They know so much in their head, but they are confusing knowledge with
wisdom. So many of them know so much, but they do not know the right time. And
many of us, who also so plan and program our lives, we expect life to be a series of
linear actions: A leads to B leads to C leads to D. Right actions in the right time. Right
actions in the right time. Right actions in the right time. Yeah, tell me about your
marriage. Were you sure when you got married, absolutely positive, and have you
remained sure all the way through? If you would tell me yes that is the case, I am going
to tell you, you are a liar. Many who got married at the wrong time will now confess that
from God's great grace, their bad timing was transformed into God's right time.
So the message of Ecclesiastes is, you go on about your life, you are eating and you
are drinking and you are taking pleasure in what time you have left. Then one day you
will look back and wonder of wonders, your life will be filled with things happening at the
right time. You did not even know it at the time. But it happened that way. The truth
that I have, I have to tell you, is not truth that modern people want to hear. That you
and I are not God's unto ourselves. We cannot know the right time. We live with a lot of
mystery and yet there is good news. Wherever life takes you in the coming year, the
seasons of your life are held in God's hands, and by God's grace, in God's time, it will
be well. Thanks be to God.