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, 4 a time for crying and a time for laughing, a time for mourning and a time for dancing, 5 a time for throwing stones and a time for gathering stones, a time for embracing and a time for avoiding embraces, 6 a time for searching and a time for losing, a time for keeping and a time for throwing away (CEB)
“A Time to Be Church: Ecclesiastes and
Envisioning a Promising Future,” Week Two
The
gardens encompass an entire city block, standing as a tiny oasis of green in
the urban wilderness at the heart of downtown San Francisco. Locals and tourists alike will come from
around the Bay Area to visit the museums and restaurants that surround it, to
see a free outdoor concert played, or to simply lay down on the grass on one of
those rare, precious days that San Francisco sees a bit of sunlight.
Others,
though, will come for a very specific reason: the city’s memorial to Martin
Luther King, Jr. is there, and it stands as a two-story waterfall, as 120,000
gallons of water circulate through over and over, from the glass-like top to
the ground where you can actually walk behind the waterfall to see, etched in
stone, two of Martin Luther King’s greatest quotes, including this from his
famous “I Have a Dream” sermon of the book of the prophet Isaiah at our nation’s
capital:
No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until 'justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.
You
can reach out and touch the words themselves, immortalized in the bedrock of
the waterfall, and, honestly, it is many ways like walking into here every
Sunday: you can literally walk in, reach out, and touch history itself. What a wonderful gift that is.
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!
In
case you weren’t here last week (Go Seahawks?!), here is my basic gist of
Ecclesiastes:
The writer of Ecclesiastes—traditionally
believed to be King Solomon, the son of David—would definitely have been seen
as (spiritually starving) 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.
Yet,
being optimistic almost gets confused with naivete today. It is difficult for us to be optimistic, at
least as difficult as it was for Solomon, and he had a freaking palace!
And
so, I imagine, we may spend a moment or two this holiday weekend to reflect
upon the legacy of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, and marvel
at how far we have come, as a people and as a nation. We will feel heartened as a result, and we
will continue to go about the hustle and bustle of our day-to-day lives.
But
there’s something missing in that ritual.
Yes, we do right to seek out the legacy of a pastor and leader such as
Dr. King. But if all we do is reflect on
it and sit on it, we are doing nobody and nothing any favors, the least of
which is that legacy of Dr. King’s.
After
all, Dr. King proposed to move heaven and earth precisely because he could not
be satisfied with the status quo. He
sought not only to lose the shackles of a world segregated, he sought to seek a
world of equality and justice. I cannot
imagine that he would have been content with playing it safe, with coloring
within the lines, and with never making waves.
That’s
where we find ourselves as a church—not just us, but the entire church. We are cautious, afraid of losing what little
we still cling to. At a regional clergy
meeting I attended this week, the topic of the meeting was how the church can
minister to the millennials—essentially, my generation. And wouldn’t you know it, with me there, they
had a real, live millennial to talk to!
But
the worst part of the meeting was not having to rep an entire generation, but
hearing a colleague talk about all the churches they know who refuse to change
anything about how they do things, even though they know that in doing so, they
are signing their own death warrant as a congregation. They would rather die in the familiarity of their
cocoon than attempt resurrection.
That’s
not what the church is about. It’s not
what Dr. King was about. And most importantly,
it’s not what Jesus was about.
Jesus’
ministry only lasted either one or three years, depending on which Biblical
scholar you ask. Even for the divine Son
of God, there’s only so much you can do in that time…after all, as Solomon
himself says, time happens to us all, and it definitely happened to Jesus—he went
from being a newborn baby to a child teaching in the temple to a fully grown
adult. But he so changed the world that
I have to think that he absolutely proved true the notion that one year of
incredible beats however many years of mediocre.
In
order to find what we truly seek, we have to be willing to lose so, so much to
begin with.
That’s
what faith is, in a nutshell. It isn’t a
zero-cost proposition. Being a Christian
entails a certain amount of risk—not in the afterlife, but in this life…it’s the
risk that you might make your heart and soul vulnerable to a community that
pledges its love and support to you. It’s
the risk that you might actually care about other people in ways you never
could before. And it’s the risk you take
that any of that might one day cause you to rethink everything about the world.
There’s
a reason why it’s called a leap of faith.
You have to leave the ground at some point.
And
this is something I know this church has had to do in a big way simply by
calling me here. Doing so was your way
of saying, “God is not finished with us yet,” and I absolutely believe this has
been borne out so far in our year and a half together. We have engaged the community in new ways of
doing mission, of feeding schoolchildren and planting gardens; we have begun
new studies of Scripture and new ministries of music. We do so much precisely because we have had
to decide, as a community, to take the risk that a few years of awesome outweigh
many more years of dreariness, and I absolutely expect us to continue to do so
much, and to do even more.
This
is, I think, the message that the King Solomons of today, those who are starved
spiritually, could stand to hear from the church. Not the judgment, not the anger, but the
inane notion that we are here because we aren’t satisfied with keeping the world
as it is. We want to make it better.
And
sometimes making the world better means making ourselves better. Making the church better. Making the church into something that speaks
to people and continues to change lives.
This
time a year ago, I wrote on my blog about trying to preach in memory of Dr.
King for the first time in my ministry.
And in doing so, I realized a deep fear that I had to confront about myself
as a pastor and a preacher—that what I want from myself and from fellow clergy
is whatever it was that Dr. King took with him when he was shot and killed in
Memphis, Tennessee. Many of us try, in
our own ways and styles, to be as inspiring and impactful as him, but we are
mere shells compared to him. Competent
fakes, but fakes nonetheless.
The
church, though, does not have to be that way.
And if it sounds like I am lowering expectations for myself but not for
you, that is not at all the case. The
church is an amazing thing, an institution that has illuminated the world for
nearly two thousand years. And it has
managed that incredible feat precisely because it lives out, day and day again,
the maxim we focus on today from Solomon’s poem: there is a time to seek, and
there is a time to lose.
By
engaging in the seeking, we risk the losing.
It
can be no other way. Because if it were,
our faith costs nothing. Our faith means
nothing.
But
as we know…as we must know, it means everything.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
January
20, 2013
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