Welcoming and Time

Ecclesiastes 3 has been read at numerous funeral over time. It’s considered one of the wisdom books of Scripture. What’s most refreshing about the book of Ecclesiastes is that it doesn’t insult the reader by sugar coating life. It presents life and death grounded in reality. And chapter 3 is no different. You are probably most familiar with the first eight verses:

“For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven:

² a time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted;
³ a time to kill and a time to heal;
a time to break down and a time to build up;
⁴ a time to weep and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn and a time to dance;
⁵ a time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
⁶ a time to seek and a time to lose;
a time to keep and a time to throw away;
⁷ a time to tear and a time to sew;
a time to keep silent and a time to speak;
⁸ a time to love and a time to hate;
a time for war and a time for peace.”

What I love about this passage is forces me to deal with the full range of life. It reminds me in no uncertain terms that there will always be some good stuff and some not so great stuff. That’s life. We don’t get rainbows and unicorns all the time. Nor should we expect them.

As a country, we ebb and flow through various times. Some times are better than others. And other times are down right horrible. And that even varies depending on who and what group of people we are talking about.

Right now it feels like we are in a time of stuckness. I don’t know what else to call it. It seems as though the prophetic voices in our midst are speaking very clearly about the path we are on, and yet no one seems to be listening. Or maybe that’s not even the case. Maybe it’s more of a situation in which the voices of the prophetic aren’t even being heard at all. They are being drowned out by a multitude of other voices designed to be overwhelming and exhausting.

And so we sit in a time of stuckness. The best way to describe this is to say that we are in a transition time. What worked before no longer works. And it’s not clear what time we are moving into yet so we don’t even know what to try. And so we are stuck. Waiting. And humans are particularly bad at waiting. Especially humans in a culture focused on immediate gratification.

So what do we do?

We wait. We listen. We welcome. We keep proclaiming Good News. We keep offering hope. We keep living the way of peace. We keep inviting to a better way. We keep voicing a vision.

This past Sunday was a busy Sunday at Christ Lutheran Church. We had the church picnic after worship. The bishop made a visit and preached. And we had special music. And it all went great. But the thing that stuck out to me was something that I watched take place. It was something that I knew in an instance captured the very essence of Christ Lutheran. There is a young child about 1 1/2 years old who is adorable. And they have been known to just walk through the center aisle of the church during worship. They did this again on Sunday. This child was walking up the aisle, and stopped at one point, turned and saw a person that was new. They paused and the I watched the child walk over to the visitor and put their hands up in the air in the universal sign of “pick me up.” And the adult did and put the child on their lap. It was a precious moment that crossed multiple divides of the world – race, age, etc.

That’s the embodiment of the vision of hope that I have in this time of stuckness. A toddler who is able to move from what was into where we are heading. May we all be that child. May we all be the adult. May we all witness it playing out and be moved by it.

For everything there is a season.

A time to wander the aisles and a time to be held;

A time to be stuck and a time to move forward;

A time to proclaim and a time to be silent;

A time to be prophetic and a time to just let it play out;

A time to experience joy and a time to mourn;

A time to have things go well and a time for everything to fall apart;

A time to pay attention and a time to turn it off for your own wellbeing;

A time to see through the performance and a time to play your part.