God’s Perfect Time - January 1, 2023

If you are like me, then you have spent the better part of the past week in a cookie and cheese-induced daze. Every home I have visited over has offered a spread of cookies and cheese, front and center, for guests to enjoy. If Advent is a time for waiting and preparation, then the week between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day is a time for bloatedness and antacids. A time for raised blood sugar and a time for stretchy pants. A time for smoked sausages and crackers and a time for soup-based casseroles with fried onion topping.

Each year the time between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day feels like a time for muddling. Work schedules are less structured, end-of-the-year reports are due, and if you’re lucky, you have a few moments to reflect on the previous 365 days before you look to the next 365.

In the church we mark time with our liturgy. Even in a modern, free-spirited service like The Way, there is a liturgy; a pattern for how we worship and share our lives around Christ’s table of Grace.

There is a welcome and opening song, then an offering, prayer, another song, scripture reading, and finally the sermon. After the sermon, we confess our sins, receive a meal from Christ, sing, benedict, and depart. The next week, we will do the same thing again. For as free-spirited as this service is, there is predictability about everything we do. A time to sing and a time to pray. A time for more coffee and snacks and a time to reflect on the mercies of God. Even as the year rolls on, and the seasons move, and our circumstances change, our liturgy remains steady.

Your week may have gone to the dogs or your life may feel as though it is spinning out of control but come Sunday, we will gather to sing, pray, and give praise to the One through whom creation took shape.

A time for everything.

A time to plant, to kill, to tear down, to weep.

A time to uproot, to heal, to build up, to laugh.

Consider the past year.  Maybe you made 12 car payments, a painted bedroom, finally repaired the leaking faucet in the kitchen, and replaced the couch no one would sit in for fear of not being able to stand back up.

Our scripture lesson invites us to consider what we have gained for our labors. From your laboring this past year, what did you gain?

A time for bills and housework.

A time to live.

A time for frustrations, doubts, vacations, and fancy dinners.

A time to die.

Ecclesiastes is considered wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible. The author, a poet, captures the nature of human existence in its rawest, most limiting, yet all-encompassing form. Every event has a time and season. The good and the bad have a place within the human existence. The wise will discern how to act: a time to speak and a time to keep quiet, a time for action and a time to stay put.

We spend much of our lives planning and waiting for the perfect timing, trying to control things outside of our control as we attempt to move as our own gods through life, thinking that we have the ability to control the cosmos or set the stars into motion.

Do not get me wrong. My calendar is planned, uncertainty makes me uncomfortable, and my family will tell you I over plan to the point of planning out the fun of spotinanity.

A mentor of mine tells a story of when he was speaking at a theology conference in West Germany in the 1980s where he ran into a student he knew from his campus who was studying abroad. The two began to discuss the tension between the East and West. The student stated that from what she had seen and heard the Berlin would be falling within weeks. My mentor, kindly mocking the student’s optimism, repeated back the talking points he had read in the paper and heard during the evening news – nothing would change within the coming decade he said. Two weeks later, after returning back to the comfort of his campus in North Carolina, the wall fell.

The world tells us that wisdom is always knowing the right time but Ecclesiastes says that wisdom is to accept our finite creaturely status and face the facts – there is too much outside of our control for us to control much of anything.

Time, the right time, is in God’s hands not ours.

The Apostle Paul wrote, “While we were still weak, at the right moment, Christ died for ungodly people.” Christ came at the right time, and at the right place – a time and place that still baffles us today. That is what we remember, celebrate, and proclaim at Christmas. Mary and Jospeh did not fully know, but God knew.

We wait for the right time, for things to be perfect, and in the process miss out on the life God has given us.

I counseled a couple at the height of the pandemic as they prepared to get married. They changed the date and venue of their wedding three times, wanting the day to be perfect. Finally, I told them I had yet to officiate or attend the perfect wedding. The rain will come, you will forget the rings, or the caterer will poison your guests. “Pandemic or not,” I said, “you will never find the perfect time.”

The wisdom of Ecclesiastes tells us to continue on our way, eating and drinking and taking pleasure in what we have (and as of late, that is cookies and cheese), and one day we will look back, and by the grace of God, it is the right time.

We, you and I, for all our strengths and abilities are not gods and will never know the right time. The best we can do is mark time in the ways Jesus instructed us: in worship, around Christ’s table, and in remembering that the author of time has called each of us beloved, forgiven, and free. The good news is this – wherever we are headed this year, in the seasons that lay ahead of us, we are held in the hands of God, and by God’s grace it will be well.