| The Right Time |
December 31, 2000 |
We have just lived through one of the happiest times of the year,
Christmastide.
And we are entering, what is for me, one of the most melancholy
times of the year, New Year's.
At Christmas, all things brighten, glow with hope and cheer.
Ebeneezer Scrooge, who had spent his whole life in miserliness, is
transformed at Yuletide.
Aren't we all?
Shakespeare recalls (in Hamlet) the tradition that at
Christmas, time is transformed; for one glorious night, all time is
redeemed by Christ's birth:
Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birrh is celebrared
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad;
The nights are wholesome; when no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.
Christmas carols speak of a "holy night" when, at
Bethlehem "the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee
tonight."
How different the time of New Year's.
I find New Year's depressing, a nonevent, dreamed
up by restaurants and makers of Cold Duck and party stores...
Another year has ended, another has begun.
You are one year older, one year closer to your end.
Happy New Year.
New Year's Eve parties reveal the sadness of the season.
Why do so many celebrate New Year's Eve by inebriation, unless to
mask New Year's depression?
Flip a page on the calendar.
Whoopie!
It's 2001.
Our Scripture is appropriately depressing, but perhaps
instructive, poetry from the biblical book of Ecclesiastes.
"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"
(Ecclesiastes 3:1-3)
There was a time when I thought those words beautiful, sung in
the sixties by the Kinks,
"For everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn,
turn, turn."
I thought these words beautiful, until I read them in context,
and beautiful though they may be, they suddenly revealed themselves
to be terribly dark.
"A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance...
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from
embracing...
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"
(Ecclesiastes 3:4-8).
Everything has its time, as the swift seasons roll along.
After the flood in Genesis, God promised,
"As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and
heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease"
(Genesis 8:22).
But such is not the conclusion of Ecclesiastes.
If the Scripture stopped here, all might be well.
Time passes, the seasons roll along, a time for this, then a time
for that.
Blah, blah, blah....
Nice.
After considering the passing of time, Ecclesiastes asks,
"What gain have the workers from their toil?
I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be
busy with"
(Ecclesiastes 3:9-10).
Where does it all lead?
And what good comes of it?
Look back on 2000.
You made 12 car payments.
You painted the bedroom and the bath.
You shampooed the carpet.
But what gain had you from your toil?
There is a time to live, yes.
A time to write checks,
a time to paint bedrooms,
a time to care for
the carpet,
a time for Democrats,
a time for Republicans...and a
time to die.
And with that time, a January wind blows through this ancient
poem.
This is Greek time, without beginning, without end.
A time to plant, a time to pull up what is planted, a time to laugh,
a time to weep...
a time to be born, a time to die.
We are, in this circular, ceaseless ticking of time, not moving
forward, onward, upward.
We are the rat in the cage, breathlessly running, turning the
treadwheel to nowhere...
a time to plant, a time to pull up what is planted, a time to be
born, a time to die...
and what gain have the workers from their toil?
How old was the one who wrote these words?
A youthful cynic, sitting alone in his dorm room, making
sarcastic comments about the rat race?
I remember a guy in my fraternity, about 20, say:
"My old man gave his life for GM, sacrificed his
health, his marriage, his happiness-- and what good did it do him when
GM laid him off?"
Or are these the words of an embittered, resentful
older person, cast aside by the company, sitting alone in an
apartment where the telephone no longer rings?
What gain have the workers from their toil?
Depressing?
It's about to become more so.
"I have seen the business that God has given to everyone
to be busy with.
God has made everything suitable for its time;
moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds,
yet they cannot find out what God has done"
(Ecclesiastes 3:10-11).
Lovely huh?
The writer isn't just talking about how time passes, boringly
trudges, each season followed by another, a time for this and a time
for that.
The writer says there is a right time for every matter
under heaven.
There is a right time to speak, and a right time to
keep silent.
It's a passage that ponders the problem of the right
time.
One of Aesop's fables says,
"It is a great thing to do the right thing at the right
seasons."
This is what biblical wisdom is about.
There is a right time and wrong time for everything.
Isn't that what education is all about, whether you are a
philosophy major or not?
Training in discernment of the right time.
Everything, when you think about it, is a matter of proper
timing.
What am I seeking when I ask the advice of a stockbroker?
Is this the time to buy, or is this the time to sell?
A doctor will tell you that timing is everything in
diagnosis.
If the patient comes too early to the physician, the complaint is
unspecific, difficult to pinpoint, vague.
But if the patient waits too long, the illness has progressed too
far, and it is too late for treatment.
Mark Twain said the difference between the right word
and almost the right word "is the difference between
lightning and a lightning bug."
The same could be said about the difference between the right
time
and almost the right time.
Recently, I read Gary Wills' book on leaders.
It really impresses on you how a leader is not only someone
who has great talents, but someone who has great talents at the right
time.
Winston Churchill was the right man for England in time of war,
but the wrong leader in time of peace.
So we speak of the "man of the hour," or
"an idea whose time has come."
There is a time to make peace, but Neville Chamberlain,
earnestly desiring to make "peace in our
time," even a time in which Hitler roamed,
demonstrated that there is a time to make war.
Chamberlain was the right man at the wrong time.
In all things-- birth, death, love, war, planting and harvesting--
there is the right time.
So, the philosophers sought those sensibilities whereby we might
know the right time.
Aristotle advises moderation as a key to knowing when is the
right time for action.
Today, we build computer models.
We erect an Institute of Public Policy, hire economists,
consult
Astrologers,
call psychics.
A whole pseudoscience has arisen-- futurism--to predict and
prognosticate, to know the right time.
As our century changes, we have had a huge dose of futuristic
prognostication.
We all want to know about 2001.
Is this the right time?
So we work to figure out, to predict the right time.
Ecclesiastes has a phrase for all of our prediction...
says it is a self-centered sin...
calls it the "Vanity of vanities."
Knowing what I know about our desire to know our future...
I'd go even farther, and call it evil... because the desire is so
deep we almost call this sin good.
Ecclesiastes, while agreeing that there is a right time for
everything, states very clearly, that only God can know it
(Ecclesiastes 3:11).
How is it possible to know the right time?
This is the question of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3.
Only God knows.
It is beyond us to fully know the appropriate time for anything.
God is God and we are not.
(Song: You're a God, and I am not, I just thought you should
know...)
We normally think of God's distance from us in terms of knowledge
or power.
Today, New Year's Eve, Ecclesiastes bids us to think of the
difference between us and God in terms of time.
As a teacher, I have learned that there is a "teachable
moment," that sacred, unknown moment when the listener becomes
a learner, the eyes light up--you can see it in the eyes-- the
heartbeat quickens, and it is the right time.
The way I figure it, about 80 percent of what I teach is the
right information--at the wrong time.
Oh, to be granted the wisdom to know the right time, when the
student is at last receptive, ready to learn that which I am longing
to teach.
But after a decade of teaching, I know as little how to predict
or prepare for that time as I did when I first tiptoed into the
ministry as a first-year seminary student.
The older you get, the more you see how often you have done
something right, but at the wrong time.
Either children too soon, or you missed a golden opportunity,
or jumped forward prematurely when you should have stood
still.
It would be wisdom to know the right time.
But you can't.
You are not God.
It would be great wisdom to always know the right time.
But Ecclesiastes says that it is greater wisdom to face the facts,
to accept our finite, creaturely status.
Too much is outside our ability to control and therefore to
predict.
Time, the right time, is in God's hands, rather than ours.
Thus, the New Testament writers often speak of Jesus as God's
gift to us at the right time:
"For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died
for the ungodly"
(Romans 5:6).
(See also 1 Timothy 2:6; 6:15.)
Paul speaks of the fullness of time:
"When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son... in
order to redeem... so that we might receive adoption as
children"
(Galatians 4:4-5)
Jesus came at the right time, time which only God knows.
In graciousness, God makes our feeble, fumbling time, about 80
percent of which is the wrong time, into his time.
In certain, wonderful, gifted moments, God catches up our untimely
actions into the right time.
Christmas is such a time-- the right time.
Mary and Joseph didn't know it as they went about paying taxes,
visiting relatives, getting engaged, having babies, that it was the
right time.
God knew.
When a young couple comes to me, thinking about marriage, they
often say,
"We're waiting to be married until we're sure it's the right
time."
And I say,
"Forget it.
It's always the wrong time for marriage.
You never have enough money, or security, or certainty.
So it's best just to join hands, close your eyes, and take the
plunge."
Poor things, many of them have so planned and programmed
their lives that they expect all life to be a series of right
actions at the right time.
Even though they scored 1350 on the SAT, they can't know the
right time.
But many who get married at the "wrong
time," today can confess that, in God's great grace,
their bad timing was transformed into God's right time.
You go on about your life, as Ecclesiastes says, eating and
drinking and taking pleasure in what time you have
(Ecclesiastes 3:12-13),
and one day you look back and, wonder of wonders, it is the right
time.
The truth I have to tell this New Year's is not one
that modern people want to hear:
You and I are not gods unto ourselves; we cannot know the right
time.
Yet, here is the good news:
Wherever life takes you in the coming year, the
seasons of your life are held in God's hand and by God's
grace, it will be well.
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