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, 7 a time for tearing and a time for repairing, a time for keeping silent and a time for speaking, 8 a time for loving and a time for hating, a time for war and a time for peace. (CEB)
“A Time to Tear, A Time to Sew,”
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
A Time to Be Church: Ecclesiastes and
Envisioning Our Promising Future, Week Three
The
way the news article put it, they thought it would be the worst place to have a
church. People wondered if this
particular parish in Manhattan’s Times Square could even survive its
surroundings.
Because
this was not the Times Square of today, but of 35 years ago, and then, as NBC
bluntly put it, “Times Square was ripe with drugs, pornography, and prostitution.”
But
the priest who took over Saint Malachy’s in 1976, rather than proposing to
shutter its doors, reached out to the community, to the business owners, to the
theaters, and yes, to the owners of the pornography stores.
And
the church lives to this day. Not
because, I truly feel, of any miraculous act of God, but because a place with
drugs and sex workers…well, isn’t that the best place to put a church? If we were to actually follow Jesus’ model
and completely go for broke, wouldn’t the church plant its parishes where they
are needed most, rather than wherever the money happens to be?
It
is a metamorphosis that speaks to our own story as a church as well.
This
is the final installment of a 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!
I
have to admit that I was surprised when I moved here at a number of the
concerns facing the Longview-Kelso area.
I arrived right in the midst of a protracted labor dispute between the
ports and the longshoremens’ union. I
would see meth cooks riding around on bicycles with opaque water bottles that
housed their ingredients, as the friction and motion from the bike mixed them
together. And I have seen what happens
when a high birth rate combines with high unemployment. The number of impoverished children we have
in our community is obscene.
I
don’t say all of this to knock on Longview—after all, it has become my home as
well, and I love it here. I say all of
this because denial is much more than simply a river in Egypt, and our
struggles as a parish do, I think, mirror the struggles of our hometown as a
community. In both cases, we worry that
our best days are behind us—those of you who have been here long enough
remember this church’s heyday in the days of Jim Whitaker, but you also
remember the days before the mills began huge amounts of layoffs.
And
so we hurt, just like the town around us.
But
you’ve got to be kidding if you don’t think this wasn’t also the case for
Jesus, or even for Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes. Upon Solomon’s death, Israel immediately
began a decline in the starkest possible sense—there was a revolt, and Israel was
divided into two between Solomon’s son Rehoboam and the chief overseer of the
crown’s forced laborers (its slaves, basically), Jeroboam. A prophet even took a piece of fabric meant
to represent Israel and tears it up into twelve pieces to represent the twelve
tribes, and he hands ten of those swatches over to Jeroboam.
No
wonder, then, that Solomon, in all of his wisdom and foresight, would want to
include a line about there being a time to tear and a time to sew in his poem
here. That time to tear was almost upon
his own kingdom! And, in many ways in
Israel and the Middle East today, we’re still working on the sewing together
part.
But
here’s the insult to injury, the final kick in the ribs—the reason people gave
Rehoboam for their revolt was because he had promised to redouble the “yoke of
Solomon” in the form of heavy taxes and heavy punishments. But the man leading the revolt against this “yoke”
was the man who had helped implement it as Solomon’s chief slave driver—Jeroboam! It would be like a politician, after winning
their election by savagely eviscerating every possible thing about their
opponent’s private life, suddenly pushing for cleaner campaigning rules!
It
isn’t a radical metamorphosis. It is a
tearing up of a kingdom between two villains—there are no good guys in this
story. And so we might forgive Solomon’s
own jadedness thoroughout Ecclesiastes—if these are the people surrounded
himself with, I might well become a cynic, too.
But
as I’ve returned to each time in the past two weeks, this poem also proves that
such cynicism does not—and cannot—define Solomon.
There
is a time for every work under heaven, he writes—not just the stuff he likes to
do, not just the stuff he knows will happen, but for everything, there is a
time.
Including
a time to change. In life, in the world,
in the church…there is a time to close your eyes, gather your courage, and take
that leap of faith into something brand new, that leap of faith that mandates
that your feet leave the ground.
I’m
a Kansas City Royals fan, born and raised.
I’m very patriotic about my hometown in that way. And to be
completely honest, I think our current general manager is terrible at
his job. I’m talking as bad as Bill
Bavasi, all you Mariner’s fans.
But
he did say something about a trade gone awry that actually has stuck with me
for a number of years. He said, “If we aren’t
making any mistakes, then we probably aren’t trying very hard.”
In
my time here thus far as your pastor, we have tried a few things together that
haven’t quite worked out, like the Sunday evening ACTS prayer service and the plan
to supplement the band with a choir of fire-breathing platypuses.
And
that’s part and parcel of being the church together—sometimes, the spaghetti
won’t stick to the wall. Which means
that there is a time tear those things down and to build something new back up.
After
all, 35 years ago, people said a church couldn’t survive in the Times Square
center of Manhattan. And guess
what? People say the same thing about a
church in the center of a town—that’s us!
People say that all the growth happens in the suburbs and the exurbs as
metropolitan areas geographically expand into more and more land. People say that churches in the center of
towns are finished, because the model of folks coming into town for church no
longer applies.
But
it doesn’t have to be that way. Trust me
when I say that if we offer a church life that actually speaks to people where
they’re at, rather than where we think they should be, and if we create the
kind of atmosphere where people feel safe enough not only to entertain their
faith but their deepest doubts and fears about it and be guided rather than
scolded, then we’re doing something right.
There
is no one-size-fits-all vision for church growth. But here, we’ve taken our own steps towards growth. And those steps haven’t involved installing a
light show, or putting Lori on a drum kit with a kick drum, high hat, and
snares, and we haven’t yet installed a mechanical platform that allows me to
ascend into the sanctuary on a cloud of dry ice like in Iron Chef. Believe it or not, there are other ways of
evangelizing and growing that don’t involve all the bells and whistles.
Because,
in the end, it’s the message that matters most.
It’s why Jesus could get away with coming to Earth when He did, far from
the era of instant news and smartphone technology and social media. In the end, no matter how you package it, the
Gospel is the Gospel.
In
other words, while it matters how you package it, it matters far more how you
live it.
And
that, too, is something that Solomon allows us time for. For there is a time to build up, there is a
time to love, there is a time for peace, for seeking, for keeping, for
embracing, and healing, and speaking out.
And
I know that there is a time to be the church.
Because all of those things are us being the church.
That’s
our time. That’s our calling. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
January
27, 2013
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