Seasons

“Were the Whole Realm of Nature Mine”

6. "Seasons"

Ecclesiastes 3:1-15

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

August 1, 2010

One of the aspects of living in Chautauqua County in which I most delight is the clear experience of all four seasons of the year. I would find it interesting, if we had the time, to go around the room and to hear each one tell not only which of the four seasons is his or her favorite, but why. I know, I know, for most of us it is hard to choose because all of them offer their unique glories. But I am going to ask you anyway by a show of your hands to indicate which season, if you had to choose, you would say is the one you like the most. Be aware that I am going to keep a close eye on you to be sure you do not vote more than once. And, by the way, there is only one correct answer to this question J!

Spring? Summer? Autumn? Winter?

Even more interesting to me would be to hear each of you talk about the favorite season of your life so far, and why. Would you say “the one I am in” or would you look to the past and say “when the kids were little” or “when I was king or queen of the hill at work”? I hope not too many of us would have to say, “I still am waiting for one.”

The purpose of the sermon series this summer is to look at what the natural world has to say to us about God and life and our lives. The Bible makes it own contribution to that, of course, and our creeds call it “the authoritative witness” to God. But beyond “the Book,” the natural world is scripture, too, with God’s imprint all over and through it and we are impoverished if we fail to exegete it every bit as much as we do the Bible. (That’s my $64 word for the day – exegete – to interpret or explain a text.) No less than our spiritual father John Calvin said that nature is not primarily about inducing in us feelings of beauty or peacefulness, though it may do that. Rather, the natural world is a gift of God and revelatory of God. It is a canvas on which we see God painted, a song sheet we read to sing praise to the Composer of all life. In contemplating nature, we contemplate and come to know God.

In his superb book about the seasons (in which he equates autumn with heaven, by the way!), Robert Farrar Capon says that “creators always tip (their) fascinating hands in their creations” and writes in his typically whimsical manner that

The Someone Responsible for snowflakes, for example, has a charming if

ungovernable love of variations on a theme; the Party that made the platypus

is not without a sense of humor; (and) the Conceiver of the insect world

has an inordinate, if not exactly fathomable, fondness for beetles.

(Capon, The Youngest Day, p. ix)

I like a poem by Pattiann Rogers that I believe in its way is about the exegesis of nature. (Parenthetically, I want to tell you that at yesterday’s memorial service for Marilyn Haglund, I made a decision not to use in my sermon any Mary Oliver poetry as, you know, I often do. But when Marilyn’s granddaughter from California offered her eulogy, she used two Mary Oliver poems. And Barbara Brown Taylor, in her sermon at Chautauqua on Friday, also put Mary Oliver to work. So, since others now are carrying that water, perhaps I can move on to other poets!) Hence, Pattiann Rogers, a nature poet who, in her poem Seeing the Glory, writes

Whatever enters the eye – shade of ash leaf,

Torn web dangling, movement of ice

Over the canyon edge – enters only

As the light of itself.

It travels through the clear jelly

Of the vitreo, turning once like the roll

Of a fish in deep water, causing a shimmer

In that thimbleful of cells waiting,

Then proceeds as a quiver on a dark purple thread

To pass from life into recognition.

The trick is to perceive glory

When its light enters the eye,

To recognize its penetration of the lens

Whether it comes like the sudden crack

Of glass shot or the needle in the center

Of the hailstone, whether it appears like the slow

Parting of fog by steady trees or the flashing

Of piranha at their prey.

How easily it could go unnoticed

Existing unseen as that line initiating

The distinction of all things.

It must be called by name

Whether it dives with triple wings of gold

Before the optic nerve or presses itself

In black fins against the retina

Or rises in its inversion like a fish

Breaking into sky.

Watching on this hillside tonight,

I want to know how to see

And bear witness.

“The trick is to perceive glory when the light (revealing the realm of nature) enters the eye,” Rogers says, “for how easily it could go unnoticed.” She wants to know how to see, how to exegete the natural world that is stamped with God and how to interpret its gospel, and then bear witness.

What witness can be bear from the reality that life in the natural world is divided into seasons? For one thing, there is an inexorability about the seasons of the year. However much we might wish to hold onto our favorite season, we cannot hold the next one back. Life happens as it does for, no matter how much we like to think we are in control of it, we are not. How often do we fail to learn what the current season of our lives may want to impart to us because we are pursuing or pining after another season?

Most of us do not relish the season of bereavement, for instance, but Jesus says, “Blessed are those who mourn”…those who allow the hurt and pain of life to touch them, who permit themselves to feel the depth of loss…for they will be comforted. Those who gloss over such a season will find themselves diminished by not learning what grief has to teach and the consequent gnawing discomfort beneath the surface of their lives sooner or later will become debilitating in some greater or lesser way. Ecclesiastes, a word that means “preacher,” says that “for everything there is a season…” There is, for example, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to weep and a time to laugh. Those who do not allow themselves to weep deeply will laugh superficially.

The various “pairs” in Ecclesiastes’ poem – a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted, a time to break down and a time to build up, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, and so on – these “pairs” are not so much choices as they are moments or seasons in life that are thrust upon us awaiting our discernment of them and our response. We cannot choose the timing of many of the significant occurrences in our lives as they are so interwined with and dependent on other threads and circumstances, but there is a choice in how we respond to them. No matter how much we try, we cannot turn winter into summer or spring into fall, nor can we make them last longer than they are going to last. Just so, we either can fight the current season of our life or try tenaciously to hold onto it when what we really need to do is to see it as part of the rhythm, or dance, of life.

Ecclesiastes’ pairs are not opposites that cancel one another out and thus make life futile. Rather, he says that because everything “under the sun,” because the seasons of our lives, can be fleeting, then “enjoying ourselves as long as we live” is not a matter of good luck (for winter will come to us as surely as summer) but a matter of skill and sensitivity, of dancing in and through and among the pairs – tearing and sewing, seeking and losing. All of these things, the preacher says, are essential parts of our lives. Just as there is no escaping spring, summer, fall, or winter – not even by going to Florida because you know the last snowstorm of the year will await your return to Jamestown – so are the various seasons of our lives tethered together for our benefit and glory.

I love when Ecclesiastes says that God has made everything beautiful in its time. The NRSV that we read today says that God has made everything suitable in its time, but the Hebrew word really is beautiful. There is a God-embossed pattern to the seasons of human life and to our lives and, sometimes in contravention to appearances, it is beautiful. We may not always think it so when we are in the midst of the hard and chilly seasons, but, even as the autumn harvest has its origins in the previous winter, a human being fully alive comes to be so by living into – not avoiding or averting or seeking to escape any of them – but by living into all of life’s seasons.

The challenge, of course, is that we cannot always see in the moment the divine pattern being weaved and worked in our lives. Thus we are called to live by faith and not by sight trusting that the God of beauty and order – winter, spring, summer, fall without fail – is pleased through the seasons of our lives to bring beauty, order, and grace to us, too.

Amen.

Return to the Sermons and Articles Page

Return to the Sermon Archives Page