There’s a season for everything and a time for every matter under the heavens: 2 a time for giving birth and a time for dying, a time for planting and a time for uprooting what was planted, 3 a time for killing and a time for healing, a time for tearing down and a time for building up (CEB)
The
medical student—a young man about to become a doctor—couldn’t believe his
eyes. In the midst of his home country
Liberia’s civil war in 2004, soldiers wounded from battle began pouring into
the hospital that he was stationed at. He recalled, several years later, "One
of the soldiers was not happy with how a nurse was taking care of his wound,
and he slapped the nurse. A doctor came
over, to speak with the man. The soldier pushed his head through a window.” As The Atlantic
put it, this doctor:
“Explained
that the attending physicians refused to treat the soldiers after the incident,
and that many physicians subsequently fled the country, forcing the hospital to
shut down. "The minister of health
at the time was the only surgeon in Liberia. And he was teaching anatomy, so he
had a very strong influence over the medical students," (he) said. The
sitting president, "through this minister, appealed to us to keep the
hospital open. So we, the medical students, took over the hospital." At the
time, this student had just advanced to his third year (in medical school). He
was a student on a pediatric rotation, and he instantly became the head of
pediatrics.”
After
becoming a full-fledged attending, the doctor told of having to perform so many
operations outside of his field of specialty, including even operating on his
newborn daughter when there was no other surgeon in the sub-Saharan country who
could perform the procedure that would correct his child’s birth defect.
Everywhere
around him, he saw a health system that had been broken down—or that had not
been built up to begin with. The time to
be broken down was over. The doctor
switched fields completely, moving from being a general practitioner to
practicing surgery, and he is now the chief surgical resident of a 270-bed
Christian hospital in Cameroon.
There,
despite low pay and relatively little prestige, he and 25 other doctors
practice their craft.
There,
lives are saved so that they may be built up again.
This
is a new, but relatively brief, sermon series for us to begin 2013. This series is only three weeks long, which I
think is about as short as a sermon series can be and still be called a series—otherwise,
it would just be a two-volume set, right?
But we’re going to give the trilogy look a try for the rest of January
as we press forward with a new year of being church together. And the purpose of this series is to take a
very famous and well-loved poem—the “To everything there is a season” stanza in
the third chapter of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes—and in it see where
we are headed as a church. A lot has
changed in this past year and a half since I had the great blessing of being
called by you to be your pastor, and so just like when I first arrived here by
offering the “Ashes to Sunlight” sermon series, I want to touch base with all
of you once more as we look at what possibilities there are for us as a church
in the increasingly rapidly changing cultural and religious landscape that is
the Pacific Northwest. The challenge is,
just as the author of Ecclesiastes often looks back, we must, by nature of
where we are, look forwards!
The
Liberian doctor’s story is a dramatic one, but one whose drama should not
overshadow its relatibility to us as a church community. Because spiritually, even if not physically,
we have been there! Spiritually, we were
in the situation that many third-world hospitals are in physically—lots of
worry that we did not have the means to meet the needs of the community in
which we lived.
And
believe it or not, misery loves company for a reason. There are lots of other churches in the same
boat we were and are in—wondering how we can speak to the spiritual needs of a
new generation of believers who feel starved by the lack of spiritual nutrition
in today’s day and age.
The
writer of Ecclesiastes—traditionally believed to be King Solomon, the son of
David—would definitely have been one such person today. He is the author of immortal lines like, “Vanity,
vanity, all is vanity!” “time and chance happens to us all,” and, “Eat, drink,
and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”
If
books in the Bible were Winnie the Pooh characters, Ecclesiastes would be
Eeyore. If books in the Bible were Dr.
Seuss characters, Ecclesiastes would be the Grinch. If books in the Bible were Sesame Street
characters…well, you get the idea.
And
as much as we might want to write of Solomon today as a Debbie downer, he is becoming
increasingly a part of our target audience for today. Because he’s also someone who, I think, wants
to be optimistic, even if he cannot manage it all of the time. And I say this precisely because of this poem
in the third chapter of Ecclesiastes.
The
Second Great Awakening-era Methodist theologian Adam Clarke had this to say, in
part, about the poem:
God has
given to man that portion of duration called time; the space in which all the
operations of nature, of animals, and intellectual beings, are carried on; but
while nature is steady in its course, and animals faithful to their instincts,
man devotes it to a great variety of purposes; but very frequently to that for
which God never made time, space, or opportunity. And all we can
say, when an evil deed is done, is, there was a time in which it
was done, though God never made it for
that purpose…It is worthy of remark, that in all this list there are but two things which may be said to be done
generally by the disposal of God, and in which men can have but little
influence: the time of birth, and the time of death. But all the others are left to the option of man,
though God continues to overrule them by his providence.
What
Adam Clarke is saying is that, much how Solomon himself would likely see
things, what is done is done, and it is that way precisely because that is how
God created the world to be. But, he
says, we always have the option of doing all other manner of things. There is a time to plant and a time to sow,
but we are the ones who actually choose when to sow and when to reap. God gives us the time and will to do so, but
whether we actually do…well, that’s up to us.
And
I absolutely, without a doubt, believe that God has given us this time as a
time to build up after having been broken down.
Much like the world itself, we are capable of rising from the ashes of
fire and dust and creating a new thing! Just as Adam went from being mere dust and dirt to being living merely through the breath of God, so too is it so for the church!
I
warmly encourage you to attend the Annual General Meeting in two weeks’ time,
because that is precisely what we will be discussing and voting on—creating a
new thing…two new things, really. One is
a change to our Constitution to reflect how one formally becomes a member at
FCC. I am so, so proud to say that we
have had four different households in the past two months come forward in our
membership sessions to say that they wish to join us, and I want our
Constitution to accurately reflect the journey folks now take to become a part
of the body of Christ.
The
other new thing is a change to our bylaws over how our Board is
structured. The changes are not huge—there
will still be most of the officer positions you recognize—Moderator,
Vice-Moderator, Member-at-Large, etc., but we are proposing combining some of
the officer positions in order to help make the board more nimble, flexible,
and responsive.
But
enough with the boring stuff. You’ll
hear more about it in my State of the Church address at the Annual General
Meeting, where, much like the President’s State of the Union address, I expect
you to give me a standing ovation after every three sentences. (In fact, why doesn’t that happen already
during my sermons?)
To
everything, there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.
A
time to be born, and a time to die.
A
time to plant, and a time to sow.
A
time to kill, and a time to heal.
And
there is a time to break down and a time to build up.
Thank
God for that. For that time is nothing
less than one of God’s great gifts to us.
Let us use it well as we move forward in this new year together.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
January
13, 2013
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