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“‘Tis the Season,” Rev. Jason-Paul Channels, 11/15/15

“’Tis the Season”
A sermon preached at
Heart of the Rockies Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Fort Collins, CO
Rev. Jason-Paul Channels
November 15, 2015

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
For everything 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 to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

Seasons. So often when we use that word we mean those sections of the calendar years that are either broken down by specific dates or delineated by how we experience the change in weather around us. As someone who has only ever lived in places that experience all four weather seasons the idea of four distinct experiences makes sense. I know what each means and doesn’t mean. But what about people who live in places that only have two distinct seasons…wet and dry or light and dark or one season of hot and hotter or cold and colder? How do they understand the use of the word seasons?

Our text today is one that is well known both as a biblical text and a culturally shared phrase…”For everything there is a season…” Between the bookends of birth and death life takes place and there is a lot that can happen. The text delineates the idea that life both changes from point to point, but also in someways that life is often lived in the extremes. Kill-heal, laugh-cry, tear-sew and so on and so on. In fact the text does not include a season for being in between; a “time to be ho-hum and a time to be ok.

The writer Anne Lamott in her book Operating Instructions includes a story that I think captures some of that tension of life in between as she shares a story about a friend of hers who took her two-year-old to a lake resort one summer. They stayed in a rented condominium, and the mother put the baby to bed in his playpen in one of the rooms, closed all the blinds and the drapes to make it dark, and went into the next room to do some work. A few minutes later, she heard her baby knocking on the door from inside his room. He had managed to get out of his play pen, and had pushed the little button on the doorknob and locked himself in. He was calling to her in the pitch dark, “Mommy, Mommy,” and she was saying to him, “Jiggle the doorknob.”
But of course as a two-year-old he didn’t speak much English, but after a while he understood that his mother couldn’t open the door, and panic set in.

The tiny child began sobbing. There he was in the dark, this terrified little child. Finally, the mother did the only thing she could think to do: she slid her fingers underneath the door, where there was a one-inch space. She kept telling him over and over to bend down and find her fingers. Finally somehow he did. So they stayed like that for a really long time, on the floor, him holding onto her fingers in the dark. He stopped crying. She wanted to go call the fire department or something, but she felt that her touch was the most important thing. She kept saying, “open the door now,” and every so often he’d jiggle the knob, and eventually, after maybe half an hour, it popped open.

How often in life do we swing from extreme to extreme, calling the fire department to knock down the door or crying in panic and fear instead of putting our fingers under the door and waiting, or holding on to the fingers that can reach us from far away? How often do we get to claim a season that is full of life and joy and relationship and love but also has rest? How often do we get to be in a season of building and growing and exploring that is also a season of contemplations and witnessing of the life around us?

Resolving this tension is tied to how we choose to engage the seasons of our lives. Aside from the first season of a time to be born and a time to die nearly every other time mentioned in this text involves a choice. We can decide when to plant or when to uproot or when to kill or when to heal or when to weep or when to laugh or when to mourn or when to dance.

Seasons of the year move by and we move through them with no ability to stop them or change them, but seasons of life move by and we have some ability to adjust them or redirect them. How we approach life and what reaction or season we choose is something that each of us is an agent in. Now hear me clearly…I am not saying that if we just decide it is a season of joy instead of sadness that it somehow magically happens because the faith fairly taps us with her wand. Just like you can not make it be 80 in the winter just because you don’t like snow, we can’t just wish a change to happen. What I am saying is that we have a role in being intentional about the ways we respond to and engage with the seasons that surround us.

For instance, when we read the couplet “a time to keep and a time to throw away” (3:6).
Everything that you now own will one day be thrown away. That does not mean you should throw it all away now. But perhaps it DOES mean that you should take care to think about what you cling to too tightly.

Since Halloween we have entered the “holiday season” which should really be called the “Extended Christmas Season” since the focus immediately turns to Christmas. Christmas music is on the radio, consumer shopping has focused on Christmas for weeks (in some store even before Halloween), decorations, Christmas planning and publicity have drowned out all but a few other messages in our public culture.

We started off this week in the middle of November and the first part was filled with news about Christmas. It was a great tie in for the sermon. In case you have missed it Starbucks took the snowflakes and reindeer and trees off their “Christmas cup” and went with a plain red cup this year. And some people did nothing at the first of the week but declare that Starbucks is trying to remove Christmas from the season.

I think that would have still been the news through the weekend but the week of course ended with something much more important than whether Starbucks cups has snowflakes on them. I was going to finish out the sermon this week talking about how there are a lot more things in the world that are calling to us to be concerned about as Christians than this. And that if we cared half as much about living in a more Christlike way as we did about our superficial coffee cups announcing our faith to the world, we might actually be making a difference that changed the world. But a different question has come up following the world-wide attention on the violence in Beruit, Baghdad, and Paris…How do we understand this polar-opposite viewpoint of seasons when we want to be both at the same time?

How do we categorize the season and our lives when we have things to celebrate…new relationships, births, friends, job changes, family, the beauty of the world around us, the simple acts of kindness from a stranger and at the same time want to mourn the violence in our world, the loss of a friend or a loved one, the grief we still carry in the face of time or opportunities gone by, the destruction of our earth, the polarization of peoples and viewpoints, the invisibility of people because of their class or religion or race? How can we hold these seasons in tension? These opposing feelings and experiences?

The answer I believe lies in the life of community we are called to live in as Christians, That through our intentional shared life together as the church we are able to live out this variety of responses at the same time. That together we can think more about the season of life that people in our world are in rather than the season on the calendar or where we are personally. That through this community we can decide it is not the Christmas Season, but the “Live Like Christ Season” That as Christians concerned about the seasons of life of others we can be working for a fair living wage for retail and factory workers, child care providers and other workers. We can be speaking up when we need to halt the human-imposed effects of global warming, human trafficking and unequal access to education. We can be working to ensure the coffee we drink is grown and harvested in ways that care for the planet and those who work to bring us that coffee.

As the church we can also mourn with those whose time it is to mourn and dance with those who time it is to dance. We can be standing with people all around the world who are living in violence and fear bringing comfort and compassion and hope and life into their lives. We can see our neighbor beside us no matter their class, their race, their job, their cultural value. We can work to tear down divisions within our communities and build unity amongst people. As the church we can sit in silence beside a brother or sister in crisis and we can speak into the silence about those around us whose mental health issues are being ignored and marginalized. We can keep the things that are life-giving in our world and throw away those that only work to leave young people embarrassed by their bodies, or people trying too hard to obtain them as possessions, or keep us locked in cycles that only serve to drain our love for life.
As the church we can speak to the achingly obvious need for peace in the world and fight to stop those who claim violence as the means to their end. We can do all of these things because as a community of faith, as a community of believers, as a community of Christians that is what God has called us to be and do.

We can do this without ever having to worry about what color of cup our ridiculously over-priced coffee is coming in.