The Sermon that Never Was

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"Year of the Bible" Q&As and Sunday Sermon

Here's the question and answer from yesterday:
What is the Teacher’s conclusion at the end of Ecclesiastes? (Ecclesiastes 12)
Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 13 Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. 14 For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.

And here's the question of the day:
Fill in the blanks: “Strengthen me with ______, refresh me with _______, for I am faint _______” (Song of Sol 1)



"The Sermon that Never Was"
****NOTE: I call this the sermon that never was because we had a little emergency in church during the sermon and I only got 1/3 of the way through it.

PRAYER OF ILLUMINATION
Please pray with me: Gracious God, you have the words of eternal life. As the Scripture is read and preached, empower us to hear it with humility and openness, so that hearing it, we respond with courage and conviction. A men.
As I began to consider what passage from Ecclesiastes to use for this week’s sermon, I immediately eliminated chapter three. I thought: we’ve all heard those verses before—a time for this and a time for that—over and over again, usually at funerals.


INTRO TO SCRIPTURE READING
And so I began to reread the other 11 chapters of Ecclesiastes, looking for something else to preach on. Between you and me, I have to confess I didn’t get too far before I started to get a little depressed. Ecclesiastes is a book that I KNOW some of you delight in for its down to earth tone, its simplicity, and its cutting away of the fluff. But me? It just makes me crazy. I am a glass half full kind of person and Ecclesiastes feels like a glass half empty kind of book.

Since I couldn’t bear to read much more of the book, I decided to take the easy way out and just use Ecclesiastes 3. Call me a chicken. Call me a coward. In this case, the shoe fits, and I’m wearing it.

1 There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: 2 a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, 3 a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, 4 a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, 5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain, 6 a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, 7 a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, 8 a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. 9 What does the worker gain from his toil? 10 I have seen the burden God has laid on men. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

The grass withers and the flower fades but the Word of the Lord endures forever.

I realized that though I’ve heard these words a million times, I’ve never put much thought into them or studied them very closely. But now I have. And I’ve discovered three things that I never realized before that have given me a much greater appreciation not just for this chapter, but for the whole book of Ecclesiastes.

#1
The first thing I discovered is that this list is not so much full of things that should or should not happen, but things which WILL happen. I don’t think the guy who wrote Ecclesiastes is saying that God WANTS there to be a time to kill or a time to tear down or even a time for war. I think what he’s trying to tell us is that all these times are going to happen. They are inevitable.

There will be times when all you can do is weep; there will be times when all you can do is hate; and there will be times when all you want to do is give up. It’s a part of life. And “there is a time for everything . . . under heaven.” But there will also be a time to laugh and a time to love and a time to not give up.

Ecclesiastes is telling us that we’ve got to know what time it is. It’s our job to figure out whether it is a time to weep or a time to laugh. It is a time to search or a time to give up? Is it a time to keep or a time to throw away?

In God’s eyes, it may be a time to plant, but all WE WANT to do is uproot. In God’s eyes, it may be a time to mend, but all WE WANT to do is to tear. Our instinctive reaction in a given situation is not necessarily how God’s wants us to react. So we’ve got to know what time it is so we know how to respond to the situation.

#2
The second thing I’ve discovered is that there actually is a little bit of hope hidden inside all of the pessimism of Ecclesiastes. It really is tucked in there, squirreled away. It’s sitting there waiting for some folks to come along and dig it out.

Here’s the thing. Seasons have beginnings and ends, right? It’s the last day of August, though right now it feels a bit more like the last day of October. Summer will soon be coming to an end. The green leaves will slowly change their colors, and we will know it is the beginning of autumn.
Seasons have a beginning and an ending. That means a season of weeping, for example, has a beginning AND an ending. This is important for us to remember because when it is a time for—or a season for weeping—it seems like there will be no end. When it is a time of mourning, it’s hard to believe there will ever be a time to dance and rejoice again.

The hidden comfort in this passage is that for every season of sorrow or sadness, there will be an ending. And that will be followed by a time of gladness again.

It also serves as a reminder that a time for peace will end and a time for war will begin. But Ecclesiastes tells us that each season has a beginning and an ending—giving us hope when a time for tears seems endless.

#3
And the last thing I realized after reading this passage is that we wouldn’t know the joy of birth without the pain of death. We wouldn’t know how much of a gift birth is without also knowing the gift of death.[1]

This chapter contains fourteen sets of opposites—experiences on the opposite ends of the spectrum. We wouldn’t be so grateful for the healing if we didn’t know what it felt like to be wounded. We wouldn’t know the sweetness of peace without seeing the ugliness of war.

Any attempt by us to try to change the rhythm of life—birth and death, love and hate—is in vain because time is in God’s hands. The seasons of our lives are under God’s control. And we can find comfort in the sense of order and stability He provides for us. There is a beginning and ending to every season.

We know that “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” Our job, then, is figure out, with the help of the Holy Spirit, what time it is, or rather what kind of time it is. Our job is to look for the hope that God always has tucked away waiting for us, even inside the pages of a grumpy book like Ecclesiastes!

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

[1] Towner, NIB Commentary