Ecclesiastes 3:1-13
New Year - Years A, B, C
I would have preferred this lection to go to verse 15. Verses 1-8 speak poetically about the duality of nature (one might say the duality of deity). There is creation and there is flood, the first day. There is the righteous anger of flood and the sorrowful repentance of rainbow. There is the cup of kindness that rejoices that not all is destroyed and the cup of drunkenness that sets family against family. There is one family of the ark and the multiple families of Babel. There are all families set apart from one another and there is a family chosen out from all the rest. There is a promise of abundance and there is such delay as to void any warranty. There is one child who is heard crying and there is one child who laughs. And on it goes.
To end at verse 13 resolves all this into plodding survival - eating, drinking, working.
To proceed to verse 15 opens us to all the dread and all the energy of the spark of life rubbing against life - to the fear and trembling of which Paul later speaks. It brings back the issues of time that will be with us until time is no more. The first 8 verses are better summarized with: There is what is past and there is what is to come and both work with one another in the cauldron of what is. What has happened this past year has happened and there is no changing it. What will happen this next year is not constrained by any part of the past. All this moves around the turning of the year and the turning of the reality of animal death to the mystery of what's beyond any turning.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/january2003.html
Would that we had a better sense of past and future. This is not to be able to outdo G*D, but to better find our place of “enough” which is an important source of happiness.
Our sense of the future is always rosier than our actions of the day warrant. We are very capable of taking a piece of today and extrapolating it into a utopia. We can conveniently ignore all the intended and unintended consequences of breaking relationships with one another over the slightest of slights that we let build up over time. A more realistic view of what a possible next step is in light of a much larger step that will then become possible is sadly lacking. We don’t educate for tomorrow by learning how to learn and teaching to the test will never prepare us for a new opportunity.
Our sense of the past is always truncated and revised according to what will serve us in the present. History books for elementary and secondary students are notoriously written from a perspective that justifies the power arrangements of the present. We could help ourselves immensely by sharpening decision-making based on what actually brought us to this current moment. Our tendency to turn inconvenient prophets into acceptable saints is long and storied. In so doing we remove their power and put it in the hands of the reigning paradigm.
There is a time and a season for every matter. That is now. This is not an easy place to live in. Note the dualities mentioned here that are available at every moment. This is the business G*D has placed before us—choice. Will you eat of one tree or another or none? Will you still walk and talk together in the cool of the evening, even of hard things and confessions, or not? Will you be your sister and brother’s keeper, or not? Will you be realistic about your past and practical about your future, or not? Will you expand those categories to our past and our future, or not?
If you saw your context being that of abundance to eat and drink and the ever availability of pleasure, would your choice to keep or throw away be different? Would you stay and work where you are or would you pick up and shift to other work?
These are not so much resolutions as foundations for being blessed and blessing. May this time next year find you more clearly blessed and more evidently blessing.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2013/12/ecclesiastes-31-13.html