Sermon: A Time to Give

 The transcript from my sermon for February 16, 2020 is below. Or, you can listen here.

I don't know about you, but every time I hear the reading that we heard this morning, my first thought goes to The Byrds' song, "Turn! Turn! Turn!" And if that's running through your head throughout the sermon this morning, that's not such a bad thing; go ahead and enjoy it.

 But one of the things that really stands out in this particular reading, one we see in verse eleven: it says "He has made everything suitable for its time. Moreover, God has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." God has ordered time. God has ordered our lives.

 We experienced that in the creation story where God takes chaos, darkness and nothingness, and brings order: day and night, sky and land, land and water, animals and humans. Creation is God's ordering of chaos, and the routines that we have in our lives order our chaos to a certain degree. Order grounds us, routine grounds us. We sometimes don't realize it. We can think, oh, I'm such a creature of habit, and that's a bad thing. But get out of your routine for a while, and it affects us; any parents out there who have experienced the last few days of Christmas break or summer break know exactly what I'm talking about. Those kids need that routine back, that sense of time and order that brings understanding and purpose and meaning to our days.

 And this list here in Ecclesiastes is a pretty big list of the things that are a part of the times of our lives. It's not just a rosy-cheeked list of the good stuff; we don't get to weed it out. That is the thing about the order of God's creation: it is complete, and we don't get to pick and choose which times we're going to participate in, which times we're going to sit out of.  Included in the list are a time to die, to kill, to hate, a time for war. These are things we don't like to think of as necessities in life, and yet in our broken humanity, they are a part of our lives.

 The speaker in Ecclesiastes is an interesting character. He's called the teacher, and if you try reading Ecclesiastes in The Message Bible, you might get a greater sense of the kind of just flat-out realism that that this particular person has about life. This speaker is telling it how it is and doesn't really pull any punches. It can kind of be a contrast to Proverbs, where we have these kind of nice nutshell sayings that if you do this, then this will happen.

 Ecclesiastes challenges those assumptions. Ecclesiastes is a little more what life is really like. And this particular reading was so important that it was read at the Festival of Booths, which was a fall festival commanded by God, celebrating God's care for the people of Israel as they wandered in the wilderness. So if you can imagine hearing these words spoken in remembrance of a time when order seemed far off, when certainty seemed far off, when God had promised the land and goodness and richness and milk and honey, and yet the people wandered in the desert, having to depend on daily rations of manna that came in the morning and were gone by evening. This is the kind of experience that today's reading speaks into.

 And the thing about the parts that deeply grieve us is that, without them, we wouldn't fully experience the amazing goodness of these parts: There is a time to be born, to laugh, dance, embrace, speak, love, a time for peace. Without death, life could seem an endless drudgery. Just a whole 'nother day in this world that we live in, short of God's kingdom.

 It reminds me of a woman that I used to get to share with in ministry: Jessie Mae Perdue. She was in her mid-90s when I met her, and we had arranged for groups of six to eight confirmation youth to visit Jessie Mae as a service of accompaniment project throughout the year. And the interesting thing about Jessie Mae is that her life probably tended for more experiences that we would consider negative: she had buried multiple children, lost a spouse, and had an upbringing that wasn't exactly rosy; she had come to faith by attending church with her aunt and uncle, her parents weren't people of faith. But Jessie Mae's faith was absolutely contagious. She spoke of God and God's work in her life in ways that I've heard very few people speak. She lit up. Her warmth and generosity oozed out, and her love for those kids was palpable. They went to visit Jessie Mae in an act of service, and Jessie Mae extended her life and her story and her love in a return of service as well. And the one thing I remember most particularly about Jessie Mae, she passed this last year, and when I would call to confirm that the students were coming, to make sure she was still up for it. We would get toward the end of the conversation, and she would say, "you know, Sonia, I'm so glad to be doing this, I'm so glad God is still using me. But man, I just wish He'd called me home." Life without death can become long. And there is hope in going into God's kingdom and being one in the love that is the kingdom of God that we all look forward to.

 We look a little more deeply, in this passage, in all of these contrasts. There are some that, on the surface, seem pretty simple, but when we get a little deeper into the translation, in the words used, there's more meaning than there might seem. In verse six, it talks about a time to seek, to look for, and a time to lose, a time to keep, and a time to throw away. For those of us minimalists in the crowd who have maybe spouses that aren't so fond of getting rid of things, this might seem like a really great passage to point to when you're cleaning out this spring. There's more to it, though; the "throwing away" in this passage is a pouring out in generosity. It is a being willing to let go of for the sake of something greater.

And it's a reference to the way God pours out good things for us. I think of a story I've heard of a child who had heard in worship of need, "Next Sunday, we're gonna be giving money for: fill in the blank." I think it was possibly another child who was ill and was needing help and parents who needed money. And this child came the next Sunday with their piggy bank and opened up the bottom and shook every last penny into the offering plate, knowing that it was going to help someone who desperately needed it. That's the kind of "pouring out" I think of when I think of this passage.

 Without giving, without the pouring out, the keeping can become hazardous when we are so worried about keeping what we have for ourselves, that we don't respond to the world in need with a pouring out of generosity and love in the way that God has poured out generosity toward us. It can be a little bit like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. Holding that ring, polishing it and how that grasping of something eventually destroys him.

 God has ordered our lives. And, in that order, there is a time for forgiving. In the life of this congregation, we have said that that time is now: "For Such a Time as This." We are calling upon each other to consider what we have, consider the amazing gifts that God has given us, and respond to build up for the future of ministry in this time in this place. We're asked to consider how we'll respond to that Capital Campaign and all of the ways that Bethesda is building for the future and continuing to pour out the love of God in Christ Jesus to a world desperate for a word of life. Jesus poured out generosity and love to all He encountered; Jesus frees us from sin and death to new life. Thanks be to God.