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Karen Hollis | Oct 29, 2023
Stewardship 2: Time
First Reading: Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
For everything, there is a season.
Very little is as simple as “good” or “bad.”
It is more often a question
of who and of when,
a why or a how.
There are times for the birth of something new.
There are times to welcome death.
There are times to plant seeds for those to come
and times for harvesting the long labor of others.
There are times when destruction is necessary, or at least unavoidable, and there are times when healing is possible.
There are times to create art and times to tear it down.
There are days where only weeping will do; others for laughing. Some days we can only mourn, others we dance. We ebb and flow our way in community.
Sometimes we long to be in the arms of another,
other times we need the intimacy of solitude.
There are times for seeking a way through the impossible, and other times for accepting our losses.
There is a time to hold on and a time to let go.
There are times when some of us need to be silent
and times when the rest of us must speak.
Love has its time and hate has its place.
Conflict must be accepted;
and peace welcomed in due time.
May we listen our way into and out of each season,
with Wisdom as our guide,
forcing nothing outside of its time,
receiving everything for what it is,
trusting Love’s companionship,
Gospel Reading: Mark 6:30-34
The message bearers returned from their journeys and with full hearts told Creator Sets Free (Jesus) about all that they had done and taught. There were so many people coming and going all around them that they did not even have time to eat. So Creator Sets Free (Jesus) said to them, “Come with me, and we will find a quiet place in the wilderness to rest for a while.” Then they left in a canoe to go to an out-of-the-way place to be alone and rest. But the people saw where they were going and ran ahead of them. They came from all the surrounding villages and were waiting for them when they arrived. As Creator Sets Free (Jesus) climbed out of the canoe, he saw the great crowd of people, and his heart went out to them again. He saw that they were like sheep with no shepherd to watch over them. He stayed there with them and began to teach and tell them stories about Creator’s good road.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be reflections of your word to us today, in Christ’s name we pray. Amen
Our time is precious to us. Even more so because time is strange. It seems to be fleeting, like the steam that evaporates from our morning coffee, an event in the day that seems to be over too quickly . . . time can also drag on forever without an end in sight. We have any number of time-saving devices in our homes and out in the world, with which we interact daily . . . while they may be helpful in some ways, they also add a level of complexity to our lives and even remove a layer of connection between us and our tasks or one another. Past and future are also strange. We might find ourselves trying to reach back through time to retrieve things that we lost along the way, or busily plan and fret or obsess over a future that has yet to arrive. We hurry up and wait endlessly. At times in my life, I’ve sat back and looked at my relationship with how we structure time in work a week and weekend. It’s the same thing over and over again, like a top spinning out of control. Am I forever bound to the forward pointing arrow of time? Where does my agency come into play? Where are my choices?
Time is also strange from a scientific point of view. Stephen Hawking wrote in his book, A Brief History of Time, that in the equations describing the expansion of the universe, the math doesn’t care if time is going forward or backward, whether the universe is expanding or contracting. The only thing that matters is the very practical detail that life exists in the universe that expands with time moving forward.1 Other philosophers and theologians like Paul Tillich discuss time with a past and future as a kind of human construct because everything actually happens in the now . . . in the eternal now. 2 We talk about an event like the moon landing, which happened 54 years ago . . . but if you remember that event, it’s still real in this moment (for those who were alive at the time). It’s not actually lost to history – it’s alive for us here and now. (PAUSE) We have a past and future because we connect with them in the PRESENT. Events always happen in the eternal present . . . and so they are always available to us in the present.
I’m often curious about Jesus’ relationship with time . . . or at least how he is portrayed. This man who knows his time is running out . . . he is both in a hurry – immediately moving from one thing to the next – and has all the time in the world to encounter people. His disciples often find him in remote places taking time for prayer. He finds a way to exercise boundaries and show up for the people he is called to serve.
The author we know as Ecclesiastes agrees that time is strange, even absurd. While we often read their words about a time for everything and feel comfort or a renewed sense that we can let go and the world will continue to turn, Ecclesiastes was actually writing with big questions about God and the purpose of life. We can think of them as the literary persona of a radical philosopher articulating evocative ideas that powerfully dissent from the mainline Wisdom.3 They ask questions like why are we here? What’s it all about? What actually matters as the world continues to turn? What matters when events come and go, we make plans that fall apart, the sun rises and sets endlessly and where does that leave us? What does it mean and what does it matter?
We can approach time with a million questions . . . we can also approach it with silence. The silence of a rock sitting on a hillside for millennia. I used to go for walks on Gabriola and marvel at the massive slabs of stone or the huge boulders that ages ago split off from the cliff and now sit on the hillside next to the path. I watch the seasons turn around them as they remain . . . perhaps not completely untouched or unchanged, but fully grounded, embodied, and present. Steadfast for centuries and millennia, what wisdom do they carry with them about time?
I walk past the boulder and make my way down to the beach, where I almost always find a rock to take home . . . or 2 or a pocket full, or a bucket of sand. So I have all these rocks, all these teachers, all these collaborators. There’s a well-known illustration that uses a jar and rocks. It’s about time management, you put the biggest rocks in first, representing the biggest priorities, there is plenty of room around the large rocks for smaller ones, representing other priorities, followed by sand and water. Always put the essentials in first, and there is still room for many other things.
In a similar way, we might ask the rocks or that which is steadfast within us:
(I placed the items into the large jar while asking the following questions)
Large Rocks
- what matters? where is it important to invest our time?
- what is our relationship with the present moment?
Small Rocks and Sand
- what do we choose? what do we not choose?
- where do we show up?
- how do we respond to crises? or when our plans come apart?
- what is the role of the seasons in the way we experience time? what is the role of sunrise and sunset? or our breath?
Water
- How do we receive God’s GIFT of time, that fills all the crevices of the eternal now that is present with us throughout our lives? God bless us in the present moment, that we may always find ourselves here. Amen.
1 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time. p. 143-4
2 Paul Tillich. The Eternal Now. p. 131
3 Alter, 673