“Making Time”

A Sermon Preached at First Presbyterian Church

By Dr. James R. Henery

 Sunday, June13, 2010

New York State’s resident folk singer, Pete Seeger, who turned 91 in May and living in Beacon, NY, popularized this morning’s sermon scripture in 1968 with his song “Turn Turn Turn—to everything there is a season.”

It’s a scripture that is read at all sorts of occasions, often at memorials.  Seven verses with 14 antithesis suggesting 28 different experiences, all connected under the umbrella of  “for everything there is a season.”

Let’s read together, Ecclesiastes 3:

“For every thing there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.  A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build up, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time for love and a time for hate, a time for war and a time for peace.”

A husband and wife were in the attic, doing spring cleaning.  The man came across a ticket from a local shoe-repair shop, and he looked at the date, and it was some ten years ago.  She said, “I can’t remember ever picking up the shoes or whose shoes they are!”  So he said, “Do you think that they’ll still be in the shop?”  She said, “Probably not, but go.”  He goes downstairs and hops in his car and takes off to the shoe-repair shop and walks in and hands the ticket to the man behind the counter with a straight face, saying, “I’ve come to pick up my shoes.”  The man at the counter said, “Well, just a minute, and I’ll go back and look for them,” and he disappeared into a dark corner of his shop.  A couple minutes later, he called out, “Yep, they’re back here!”  The husband called back and said, “No kidding?  That’s terrific!  And after all this time?”  The man came back to the counter without the shoes and said, “They’ll be ready tomorrow.”

Time is our answer even excuse for doing or not doing things, for many of our dilemmas or situations, as if we can really control days or tomorrows, as if we can really make time.

Ecclesiastes is perhaps the only scripture that prompts or establishes the polarity of daily events that we face—just a certainty of what is to happen but no power to change what is going to happen.

There is a season, a time—but in this particular scripture, it’s not about a calendar.  It’s not about a day or an hour.  It’s about an experience that tells us that something happens, and after that, everything is different.  We have a context in which we begin to formulate where we were and what we are about.  After that experience – not time, but an occasion – we then see things/hear things/think things differently. 

This eloquent list in Ecclesiastes 3 is a universal collection. It’s a list of things in some kind of an order, but we’re not so certain whether or not there was any intention to that – we don’t even know who wrote Ecclesiastes – but there seems to be an affirmation that this list is about all of the conditions we are likely to experience.  In Hebrew, the word time in this particular text is the word ayth.  It is not about chronology or duration.  It does not even mean a dimension or an entity.  It means, rather, a moment.  It means a happening.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to agree with it or like it, but it is simply a term for “something comes about whether we like it or not.”

We ask each other, reflectively – “Do you remember the time…?” or we say, “We had a great time.”  “We had a lousy time.”  That’s what Ecclesiastes is about: the occasion, the experience.

This splendidly poetic Hebrew scripture, which we sing about and quote is about the appropriation of time in all areas of our living, with the understanding that without the opposite—without the appreciation of the contrast between love and hate, and peace and war—that we never truly experience life in its fullness.

And sometimes that distance, that uncontrollable litany between what is and what is not, between what we want and what happens creates an uncomfortable dimension of time because we would like to make it something else, something more malleable, something positive.  We all know that a minute of exuberance, of pure joy seems to last shorter than our misery which seems to last forever at times.

Now, in some Hebrew translations of this Ecclesiastes text, the adjective before the word time is proper: “There is a proper time.”  I like that – proper.  I like some things that are “proper” (“a certain sense of rightness or correctness”).  Our society and culture doesn’t necessarily do things “properly” any longer.  Not that I have problems with men wearing ball caps in restaurants… but wearing them backward?  It doesn’t seem proper.

Even making proper time in order to do something, fix, correct, amend, make right.

The verbal contradictions in this scripture highlight the space between the occasions – the space between the extremes, the space between the opposites, the space between the continuums of what we truly know happens in our lives.

We live in that space, and, most profoundly, the ability to remember and to appreciate and to accept the contradictions that every day and every experience bring us… this list displays that.  It even brings us a mirror of the spiritual and, perhaps, secular in our humanity 

We live in the space between birth and death, joy and mourning, embracing and separation, seeking and losing, speech and silence, love and hate, peace and war.  We try to make time in all of our busyness, all that we are about every day, we are locked into that space between the extremes, and there’s an awareness that it’s the in-between times that make all the difference – where there is a time to really and effectively live.  Not the inordinate ends of a day or a lifetime or of a relationship or a war.  We live in the middle portion, where the sacrifice and the struggle often reaches its disparate height or serious dimensions.

We don’t easily remember, sometimes, the beginning or the end, but we certainly do passionately remember and relive the middle of our experiences.  We know the waiting and the anguish and the turmoil and the sadness.  We know the joy and the love because it’s in the middle where it sucks our energy out.  A calendar may give us a beginning and an end, but life itself happens in the middle.  That’s part of making time.

We do make time for all of those actions and reactions in Ecclesiastes.  Whether we like it or not, they all happen.  We are the recipients of each condition: birth, death, planting, harvesting, weeping, laughing, love, hate.  We are placed in the middle – squarely – of life, where, oftentimes, it is not the end result that causes us so much pain, but finding our place and our comfort and our balance in the middle, where we live.  There is a time, even more profoundly, to remember and to reflect on our interconnectedness – of all those daily experiences at the moment when something happens, when we remember someone’s love, someone’s joy, someone’s pain, someone’s life, someone’s embrace; and in doing so – when we remember – life becomes intimate, tangible – even fragile.  Our time is a perpetual connection to memory.

It is as mathematician/philosopher/spiritualist/scientist Pythagoras wrote:  “Time is the soul of the world.”

We try desperately to make time, although we like to call it time management and we invent pithy phrases to help us either tolerate time or avoid the reality.  We say, almost flippantly, that we have “too little time” or “too much time.”  We “buy time,” “waste time,” “spend time,” “kill time,” “lose time,” “find time,” to make time.

But not so often do we say that we live time?

Perhaps we live in mythical time.  We talk about when the “right time” will come; when the “best time” will arrive to do certain things; when, finally, we have the time to enjoy – not to worry; when we have time to do something.  We talk about “time to be happy and content and comfortable,” and then it always seems to be something that gets in the way – that interrupts that time, that expectation – and painfully, regretfully, we learn that we cannot control time or the consequences of any occasion.

Making time for what end?  For what purpose under heaven, turn, turn, turn.  And the list goes on:  we know the conditions for they are ours:  birth and death, war and peace, planting and harvesting, weeping and laughing, each filled with a huge spectrum to experience the depth of we call life.  And yet the profundity of this list is that we can take any condition, any opposite and spend a lifetime just making time but not really living it.  A similar sounding phrase known to lots of military people is marking time—the ability to stand and march but never go anywhere, just stand still and march.  Maybe that is what happens sometimes with making time—but no purpose or place to go. 

My favorite play of all time is Thornton Wilder’s Our Town,  with lots of subtle reference to keeping time:  the stage manager often refers to his pocket watch, the time of day, the train that goes through Govers Corners, New Hampshire.   There is an unsettling scene at the end of the third act that the first theater goes didn’t like. Pretty radical for 1938 (and Wilder was criticized for it).   Many of the main characters, now dead, are sitting in an imaginary cemetery and watching a funeral procession coming.  Emily is among those watching and asks the stage manager if she can go back and re-live/do over a day in her life.  She chooses (she’s now 28) to be 12 years old.  So she goes back to her home and she’s upstairs, yet to come down to breakfast, and her parents are just chatting, going on, getting ready for breakfast, calling up to the “birthday girl” to come down, and she’s amazed at how young her parents look, particularly her mom.  She’s watching her parents get ready, and she says to the stage manager, “We don’t have time to look at one another, do we?  So all that was going on, and we never noticed?”  Then she asks perhaps the most profound question in all of that incredible play.  “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?  Every minute?”  The stage manager, in a New Hampshireish quip, says, “No.  Maybe saints and poets.  They do a little.”

Making time and we all do or at least try.   Ecclesiastes suggests that between all of those incongruities we experience every day, if we would just pay attention to each other and what we do – birth and death, weeping and laughing, silence and speech, love and hate, war and peace – that in the convergence of all of those, we can find mystery and beauty and purpose of life—and still be able to make time for each other.  Amen.