Ecclesiastes 3:1-11 "Time for Everything?" Scott Hoezee

We are none of us immune. We are none of us immune to the tyranny of the clock. Perhaps there is no better, or at least no more immediate, an example of that than this very sermon. Because here I am preaching to you the first sermon in our three-part look at stewardship. I've known for months that this series would be planned, coming as it does at the wise behest of our Stewardship Committee. Yet within the last two weeks I have grown nervous about this sermon. Why? Because I kept worrying about time!

As this service came together, I realized with a jolt that September 9 would be not just the kick-off for our look at stewardship but would include also a baptism, a profession of faith, and the Lord's Supper. I knew the committee would not want me to shorten the sermon so I fretted: how would we have time for all of this in one service? On top of that, this past week featured a Monday holiday, which canceled out the day when I do most of the research for the morning sermon, and so I knew that all week I'd feel a day behind.

Sound familiar? It probably does. Only the details differ but there are few of us who would disagree that the word "busy" is an apt description of our lives. This past week probably served as an unhappy reminder that the more relaxed pace of summer is finished. Once again we've hopped back on the treadmill as we cart our kids to and from school, all manner of after-school events, and a passel of church-related events as well. Because of all that some of you may be dreading this sermon. After all, if Rev. Hoezee plans on suggesting that we need to find time to serve God and the church more, then he just doesn't understand what real life is like for those of us who do not get paid for working in the church!

Is that what I am going to say? Does the stewardship of time have mostly to do with piling on sacred commitments instead of secular ones? Does being a good temporal steward mean being a holy blur of activity instead of some other kind of blur? The answer to questions like that is probably a little bit yes and a little bit no. True, if your life is so consumed with work and other activities that you can never say "Yes" to serving Christ's Church, that is a problem. Then again, if you are so enormously busy volunteering at church that you don't see your family much, then despite the sacredness of such activities, such a hectic schedule hardly makes you a good steward of time.

Clearly we are sailing in some deep and troubled waters this morning! So maybe a good place to begin would be with stewardship in general. What is stewardship? Listen: stewardship begins by recognizing life as a gift. Life is a gift from God, the Creator of all things, including of time. Life is a gift, and so we treat it as such, recognizing that when you receive a gift, the gift-giver typically has something particular in mind. When someone gives you a book, it is a fair bet the person wants you to read it, not put it on the bookcase to gather dust. When someone brings you a meal, they clearly expect you to eat it, not scrape it into the garbage can or let it grow green and fuzzy things in the refrigerator for weeks on end.

And when the almighty God of the galaxies gives us this thing called time, he clearly expects . . . what exactly? This one is not so obvious, is it? Novels are for reading, brownies are for eating, but time is for what? Maybe one reason we are less sure about this gift is that time seems to take care of itself. Time passes whether you're active or passive, at work or in a coma. We cannot make the clock tick slower, cannot slow down the earth's rotation. Also, time has a way of filling itself up with the normal activities required to grow up, get educated, and go to work. Like the Energizer bunny, time keeps going and going and going and going and it takes us with it whether we like it or not.

But if that is what we think time is, then just that may be the problem. Because in the Bible God expects us to do something to take hold of the times of our lives. Some while back we noted that one of the most startling developments in twentieth century physics was Albert Einstein's discovery that time is not a universal constant after all. Time is relative--it can be influenced by motion. All along it was assumed that whatever time is, it always ticks away at the same rate for everyone everywhere. Einstein said not so. The faster you move, the slower time passes for you as opposed to someone sitting still.

As it turns out, we can influence time. But the Bible seems to have known that all along. God, after all, sewed the Sabbath directly into the weave of his creation tapestry. For Adam and Eve observing the Sabbath was presumably not a problem--they knew a good gift when they saw one. They no more needed to be ordered to keep Sabbath than the average seven-year-old needs to be ordered to eat the candy bar you just handed her. Only after sin tainted our concept of time did God have to include Sabbath in a list of commandments because sin tempts us to let time take control of us instead of the other way around.

Although it may not be immediately obvious, that is the essential message of Ecclesiastes 3. At first glance those opening eight verses look like no more than a description of life. Sometimes people are born, at other times they die. So goes. Sometimes you've got reasons to weep and sometimes you've got reasons to laugh. That's life! This is a straight-forward set of observations. This is just a report. But that is not the nature of Ecclesiastes 3. True, there is an element of report and observation here, but as part of the Bible's wisdom tradition, this passage is mostly about developing the savvy which lets you take hold of life so that you can figure out what time it is. This is not so much a description as a prescription, not a report on how things do go so much as some advice for how things should go if you develop wisdom.

It's not merely that sometimes you cry and sometimes you chuckle but also that you need to discern when something is tragic and when it's funny. Some people cry over the proverbial spilled milk even though they laugh at serious things. They get teary-eyed when once again their lottery ticket was not a winner and so to distract themselves they watch a movie which pokes fun of people in wheelchairs and then they laugh their heads off. There's a time to weep and a time to laugh in life. Wise people figure out which is which!

Wise people know something else, too: they sense the punch of verse 11 which says that God has laid eternity on our hearts. We carry within us a sense that we were created for something more than just letting time happen to us. We were made for something more than just lamenting how fast time passes. They say that the older you get the faster time seems to go, and I've heard people complain about how unfair that is. Just about the time you get rolling in life, bam, it's over.

But if we had not been created for something better in the first place, we wouldn't lament that. Fish in the ocean don't notice the water they are swimming in--it's their natural element. It's only when fish get beached that they know something is amiss. So also with our relationship to time: if time's buzzing on by like a runaway train were the way things were supposed to be, we would not lament that swift passage. But God himself has given us a sense for the "something more" of eternity, and that's why we are often dissatisfied when time seems to just happen to us instead of something we can manage a bit more.

That same eternal sense needs to be in the driver's seat when it comes to a proper stewardship of time. Having a sense for the eternal should motivate us already now to use our time in ways consistent with God's eternal kingdom. Having a sense for the eternal can remind us of something else, too: this life is not all that there is and so we need not attempt to cram everything possible into what little time we've got left before we die. We do not need recklessly to grab all the gusto we can get since "you only go around once."

If we let our God-given sense for the eternal shape us already now, we can perhaps relax a bit. The entire concept of Sabbath depends on developing pockets of time when we are not producing anything but merely receiving God's goodness and grace. Sabbath is not just a one-day-a-week affair but needs to weave in and out of every day as we find it possible to spend time just being, just soaking up, just enjoying within the gift of time some of the other gifts we have received, which include family and friends.

God has set eternity into our hearts. So we clear the temporal space needed to pursue things that last, including the nurturing of marriage commitments, the proper raising of our children in God's ways, bringing the gospel in word and deed to our neighbors through the witness of the church. If we can never spend time together as spouses, if we mostly just say "Hi and Goodbye" to our kids as we pass each other in the doorways of life, or if we cannot remember the last time we were able to do something for the church, then the eternal sense in our hearts ought properly to give us pause.

But that eternal sense reminds us also that as Christians we believe there is more to come even after we die, and so it's not necessarily true that if we don't do something now, we never will. Of course, I realize that it would be easy to turn this in an absurd direction. If we have all eternity to explore the new creation, then you could allege that in a world as needy as this one, we should never take a vacation now--we can do that in heaven! But that would indeed be absurd. If reveling in God's creation is a feature to being made in God's image (as we will explore in tonight's sermon), then doing that has a proper place in both this life and the eternal life to follow. This is not an either-or scenario.

Instead our eternal sense tempers the sometimes mad pace we set for ourselves in trying to "do it all." The lure of pleasure is powerful in our culture. So we work hard to secure the money we need to pursue pleasure and then, once we secure certain pleasures, we sacrifice church attendance, commitment to a congregation, and service to God's kingdom in favor of being able to travel more, spend more time at a second home, or whatever else it is we pursue because we worry we will soon run out of time for such things.

In two weeks we will consider the stewardship of treasures, but I can tell you right now that the bottom line of that sermon will most certainly not be that we ought to have no treasures, no vacations or travel or cottages or whatever. Being a steward of something hardly means not having it at all. It's just that we need to be mindful, intentionally and thoughtfully mindful, of how we spend the gift of time, asking ourselves why we make some of the choices we do. If some of what we do is motivated by a terror of running out of time, we need to check ourselves against eternity, an inkling of which we sense already now.

The Bible tells us there is a time for everything, but that doesn't mean that we ourselves have time for everything. Our world's distorted view of time, shorn of God's eternity, will try to keep us always busy, always hopping, and yet always finally dissatisfied. The stewardship of time tells us it need not be that way--we can, by God's grace, enter the better rhythms of God's Sabbath. We can say "No" to certain pursuits in order to say "Yes" to other ones. We can cherish and celebrate the time we now have without only and always mourning how little of it we seem to possess. Someone once said that time is the fire in which we burn, that time is a predator, stalking us, hunting us down, determined to destroy us. Our sense of the eternal can help us avoid such a dark view of time. With God's help we can learn to cherish time. We can learn to use time wisely and to God's glory.

Precisely what that means may well imply almost as many different things as there are people in this sanctuary. But that this does have concrete application to your life and my life is certain. This very worship service re-enforces that. It has been a busy service, but just think of what we've done, what we've seen, and what we are about to experience at the Lord's table. We've seen examples of how things go in God's time and on the sacred journey that just is faith. We've seen the progression of baptism to profession of faith; the movement of God's promise to little Katie to Will's own promise which stems from his baptism seventeen or so years ago.

And now we move to the Lord's table where time and eternity meet in ways both mysterious and startling. We come again to the real presence of Jesus, who is Alpha and Omega; the one who was, who is, and who is to come. We ingest the power of his resurrection, that out-of-time event that just is Easter whereby our minds travel back to the distant past in order to open up the path to our hope-filled future.

As all of that past-present-future of God's salvation intersects with the mundane rhythms of this moment in the year of our Lord 2001, we see displayed before our very eyes the sublime truth that this time does not define us but the presence of our God in Christ through the Holy Spirit is what defines this time and all times. We are not helpless when it comes to finding the time we need to serve God and each other better. The water that dripped off Katie, the affirmation of Will's holy vow, and now this bread and wine are all tangible reminders of the gospel's real power. The gospel does change lives--its power is as real as the baptismal water is wet, as real as the sounds of Will's voice, as real as the food and drink that you will soon feel on your very tongues. We can make changes. We can be stewards of the time with which we've been gifted. We can do it by embracing the eternal now and so following the holy God in whose hands are held the times of our lives. Amen.