Time For Something New - Ecclesiastes 3:1-8


My brothers and sisters, let us begin by just acknowledging that for many of us here, this seems most clearly a time to echo the words of the Teacher in Ecclesiastes: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” and most specifically, “a time to weep” and “a time to mourn.”   For those who have walked in the sanctuary and looked around, and reflected on the services held in there, the weddings, the graduation Sundays, the baptisms, the funerals, the Christmas and Easter and all other special programs…each and every Sunday morning and Wednesday night services, the grief can seem overwhelming.  There is loss and there is sadness…and God gives us space for that…He gives us time for weeping and mourning.
He gave that to the Hebrew people in exile who felt that everything had been lost…their homes, their temple, their towns had been destroyed by the invading armies.  I reflected on that in my devotional thoughts yesterday morning as I reflected on the damage in our communities, our homes, and in particular to our church building, by the invading storms of Florence and Michael.  The Hebrew people, in their mourning, though had moved beyond grief and sadness to feeling that God desired their destruction by sending in the invading forces who not only destroyed all that they had but also hauled them into exile away from all that was familiar.  In exile, they feared, they would become a dispersed and forgotten people until they were no more.  Into that devastation and depression Jeremiah spoke these words of God: “’For surely I know the plans I have for you,’ says the LORD, ‘plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.’”   In those words, we hear what God intended for the Hebrew people…and what God intends for us.  It is not our destruction…it is not our dissolution.  What God had in store for the Hebrew people…what He has in store for us…is a future…a future not filled with sadness and regrets…but a future filled with hope and promise.  And we know this for sure…nothing can thwart the plans of God.  There is nothing that we can do, and nothing that can happen to us, that can keep us from being all that God intends us to be or interfere with all that God has planned for us.
What, then, are we supposed to be doing?  How do we move out of the time for weeping and mourning?  We know that if we are to live into God’s future, we cannot stay there.  A future filled with hope and promise is not a future filled with constant sadness.
It begins by remembering the past, cherishing the past, but letting go of a tight grip on the past.  To move into the future that God has in store for us, we have to be willing to join Paul in “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead…”   That is what God’s Word conveys to us from start to finish.
In the book of Genesis, God comes to Abram.  Abram grew up in the town of Ur.  It was what he had always known. Abram’s dad, Terah, had packed up his family in Ur and headed to Canaan, ready for a new adventure.  They never made it to Canaan, though.  For one reason or another, they stopped in Haran and settle there.  Life became good…life became familiar…life became comfortable.  Into that comfortableness…into that familiarity…God spoke.  God said to Abram, “I want you to take your family, gather them together, gather your resources, and I want you to pack them up, and I want you to set out and go to a land I will reveal to You.”  Another way to put it would be to hear God saying, “I want you to leave everything that you are familiar with, all the ways in which you have become familiar and comfortable, and I want you to leave them behind because I have somewhere new for you to go.  You never been there before, I’m not going to tell you exactly where it is now.  I just want you to trust me enough, Abram, to let go of all you know here, and be willing to go to this new place I am sending you.”  And, probably with some tears at first flowing from his cheeks, Abram did just what God asked.  His trust in God in this new adventure, was significant enough that when the author of Hebrews reflected on the faithful of God’s people, Abram’s willingness to go, lifted him to those worthy of mention: “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.”   God, in Abram, invited Abram to go out and become part of this new thing that God was about to do…calling a people His own.
Years later, God’s people, as we discussed, found themselves drug away from everything familiar into exile. We reflected earlier on God’s response through Jeremiah…the promise of a hope-filled future.  Isaiah also seeks to offer words of hope and encouragement to those folks who had seen their lives shattered.  God, through Isaiah says, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
One of the conversations that I have had in the community over the last month, as, believe it or not, it has been a month since Florence slowly crept ashore, was to ask, “how things are coming along?”  Often the response I would get was that things were “getting back to normal, or at least a close to normal as they can get.”  We would then start talking about how things would never be the same as they were before Florence—that things might “get back to normal” but that it would be a “new normal.”  Things will be different…even if the houses we live in or the jobs we have were left untouched, those around us were not…and we see that.  Even if we were physically untouched, emotionally and mentally things have to have shifted for us.  If they have not, then we are among those who have eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear.
As God set out to offer words of hope and assurance to His people whose lives were in disarray, part of that promise was that things would never be the same again.  God promises them an abundant future, but it is not going to be like the past they remember.  He promises to restore them, but in that promise is that God is about to do a new thing.  The people are going to be blessed.  They are going to be restored.  Yet it is going to be in a way they do not remember and haven’t experienced before.
John’s vision, as shared in Revelation, was offered as words of hope to a people who again found themselves uncomfortable and distraught.  God offered this entire vision to John for the early Christians who found themselves under great persecution—they felt destroyed…as I have heard so many say over the last few weeks, “I am destroyed.”  Yet to those under the thumb and heel of Rome, and to those of us who have felt the weight of Florence and Michael pressing us down, God offers words of hope…words of promise that the destroyer will not win…and as God’s Revelation to John comes to a conclusion, “the One who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’”
My brothers and sisters, the God we worship is not a God of destruction and death, that is all part of our fallen world.  The God we worship is the God of Life…the God of Wholeness…the God of Healing…the God of Restoration.  After all, we should expect Him to be, for He is also the God of the Resurrection…and even then, we don’t know how that will look, “we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”
My brothers and sisters, we know that God is going to restore our church because it is not really ours, it is His.  What it will be like, we do not yet know, but this we do know, God is doing and is going to do a new thing.  And when what God is doing is revealed, it won’t be what it always was, but it will be even more of a reflection of His Perfect Kingdom than it was before….and when that happens, we will find ourselves moving from a time of weeping and mourning to a time of laughing and a time of dancing.  Thanks be to the Lord our God who has always been about doing a new thing—from Abram—to Jesus—to Us!
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

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