Sunday Sermon: Ecclesiastes 3 sermon do-over

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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. Amen.

SCRIPTURE READING: Ecclesiastes 3:1-11
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.

SERMON-INTRO
For those of you who missed the excitement last week, we didn’t quite get the whole way through the sermon. All week long, I was planning on this being a “do-over” sermon. I was going to enjoy the break from writing another sermon—it’s hard to do this every week, you know. So I was just going to recycle the sermon that never happened from last week.

And then life got in the way.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had an Ecclesiastes 3 kind of weekend. I’m not exactly sure how to explain what I’m feeling other than to say it’s an Ecclesiastes 3 kind of weekend.

On Friday came the news of a pastor-friend of mine passing away from cancer. He was the father of one of my camp friends and was very kind and welcoming to me when I joined the Presbytery.

Then on Saturday I had the honor of performing a marriage. The bride and groom both cried as they recited the vows they themselves had written. It was a very touching service.
Then came the news of Wyatt’s tragic death and I went through all the emotions you go through when something terrible like that happens.

THEN, I began to prepare for the baptism of Diann’s granddaughter which we will be celebrating right after the sermon. Performing a baptism is one of the privileges of being a pastor that I enjoy the most.

So you can see, it’s been an up and down weekend. It’s been an Ecclesiastes 3 kind of weekend, with a time for everything under heaven. And I can’t just preach the same sermon that I was going to preach last week. Things have changed; life has changed; I have changed.

So I took that sermon from last week, tore it apart, and put it back together again. And I think, because of the last couple of days, I have a better sense of what Ecclesiastes 3 is all about. And because so many of you have been going through the things I have, I think you do too.

#1
This chapter of Ecclesiastes contains fourteen sets of opposites—experiences on the polar opposite ends of the spectrum. If we didn’t know what it felt like to be wounded, we wouldn’t appreciate what healing is all about. And we wouldn’t know the sweetness of peace without seeing the ugliness of war.

So it would seem that though we might prefer the more pleasant halves of these opposites—planting and healing and building—we couldn’t appreciate them without the less pleasant parts of life—the uprooting and the wounding and the tearing down.

What happened to Wyatt was awful, something nobody deserves. And I’m sure the first thing we all did when we heard the news was to say a prayer for his family. And the second thing we all did was to say a prayer of thanksgiving for the safety of our own families. Experiencing death gives us a renewed appreciation for life.

I plan on attending my friend Wayne’s funeral tonight. And I know one of the statements that will be made is that Wayne’s baptism has been made complete in his death. I know they’ll say it because that is a line I regularly use in the funerals I perform. And though you might think it would make me sad, it actually just seems right to celebrate the beginning of Miss Elizabeth’s life with her baptism this morning and the completion of Wayne’s baptism in his death this evening. That’s an Ecclesiastes 3 moment.

#2
Now, surely this list of opposites is not a list of the things God wants to happen. It is a list of things which WILL inevitably happen. I don’t believe God WANTS everything on this list to happen. I don’t believe God wants there to be a time to kill or a time to tear down or even a time for war. I think what the guy who wrote Ecclesiastes is trying to tell us is that all these times are going to happen. They are inevitable. These phrases are simply a part of life. And “there is a time for everything . . . under heaven.”

And sometimes you will have an Ecclesiastes 3 kind of weekend when the weeping and the laughing and the mourning and the dancing all happen at the same time. And you’re left with jumbled up feelings and feeling pretty confused.

As we prepared for the wedding yesterday, talk turned to Wyatt’s situation. And I watched the bride and groom struggle with wanting to be happy on their wedding day but feeling so terrible for his family at the same time. Sometimes, you will have an Ecclesiastes 3 kind of experience and you just have to get through it.

#3
And you get through it by remembering that each of these phrases is a season. Seasons have beginnings and ends. Summer has been great, but now we are coming to its end. Fall will begin just as summer is ending.

So 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 of 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.

Here is the hope and comfort hidden in this passage: for every season of sorrow or sadness, there will be an end. And that will be followed by a time of gladness and rejoicing, if we can only hang on until the next season begins.

CONCLUSION
There’s something about Ecclesiastes 3 that makes us take a step back and look at the big picture of our lives. We go so caught up in the little details of our lives that we forget that there is an ending to the season we’re in and the beginning of another, for better or worse.

And we may be in a phrase we don’t understand or that is painful. And we wonder when it is going to end. And we might even wonder why.

But Ecclesiastes also tells us that “God has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” I think there are some things we are not meant to understand. God has given us the ability to understand eternity and all things, but sin has broken us so that we cannot understand it. There are just some things we are not meant to understand.

The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us that 11 “God has made everything beautiful in its time.” It’s hard to see the beauty in the midst of some of the phrases in this chapter, but somehow, somewhere, God will make everything beautiful.

Let that bring you some hope in the middle of darkness. Let that promise bring you hope and comfort during ALL the seasons under heaven.

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