Bless to Me: Seasonal Blessings
Ecclesiastes3:1-8; Psalm 90
August 16, 2020
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/pySl7iGLlO0
Pastors often lead funerals for people they didn’t know. My first funeral at Emmanuel happened in September a few weeks after I arrived in August. I met Joe M in the hospital one afternoon and he died the next day. Sometimes a person leaves the church, but they don’t join another church, so the family calls me to request a funeral. Sometimes, I have only known the person in a very limited capacity, visiting them in a nursing home or hospital. I conduct the funeral regardless, but it feels different when it is for someone I actually got to know well.
In the last 10 years here, I’ve helped to lead 20 funerals for people at Emmanuel and 4 for members of Gethsemane Karen Church. Almost all of the Emmanuel funerals were for people I had come to know and love. When I asked you to share your memories of the last decade with me this week, several of you named the departed saints whom you still miss. One of the things that I have gained by sticking around for 10 years is a deeper appreciation for the great cloud of witnesses present in every church, the people whose talents and energies and personalities helped to shape the community into what it is today and in fact, whose presence is still actively felt. When you talk about Audrey or Pickett or Roy or Jennie, I know who you mean because my time overlapped with theirs. But you also mention people I never met, like Craig or David B or the Ralphs, and I am aware of their legacy as well.
We live our lives in moments and days, but we also live through seasons. Here in New York, we get four seasons every year. Some places in the world experience two primary seasons – a dry one and a wet one, in my childhood in Ghana, we called it the “rainy season”. I lived in Florida for a year. It was 85 degrees on Christmas Eve that year. I have lived in other places where there were no autumn leaves and no snow. I missed them both.
The writer of Ecclesiastes recognizes 28 common human experiences, some of which, like planting, plucking, gathering and throwing away, might be connected to the seasons of the year. There’s a verse in Genesis 1 that I have always loved. Describing the creation of the sun and moon and stars, God says “Let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years.” The Biblical writers understood that creation has a rhythm. They did not know that the earth turns on its axis and revolves at a tilt around the sun, but they knew that the patterns of light in the sky were connected to the seasons. They understood that humans are as connected to that daily and seasonal rhythm as the rest of creation.
We began worship with Psalm 90. In the New American Standard translation, verse 12 reads “Teach us to number our days that we may present to You a heart of wisdom.” One of my college English teachers had that verse in that translation at the top of her syllabus and I never forgot it. Of course, she was trying to impress us that numbering our days as students involved staying on track with assignments and tests and deadlines. But Ecclesiastes suggests that we number our days in many different ways. If only my college self had read to the end of Ecclesiastes. To that English professor, I might have pointed out chapter 12 where it says “be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body.”
Biblical wisdom, it seems, is knowing what time it is, whether it is the right time for weeping or laughter, for dancing or mourning, for studying or something else. It is knowing how to receive of the days and the seasons allotted to us and to use them well.
Our reading ended before verses 11, which says “God has made everything suitable for its time; moreover God has put a sense of past and future into their minds.” We live our lives in seasons. We can remember winters of the past and anticipate that winter will come again, even when it is summer.
But beyond the seasons of the year, are the seasons of each life. The seasons which Ecclesiastes might describe as a time to seek, a time to lose, a time to keep, a time to throw away, a time for love and a time for hate.
The seasons of life include the stages of human development – like infancy, adolescence, and middle age. My 87-year-old uncle recently shared a meme that says “I don’t know how to act my age. I’ve never been this old before.” That is true for every one of us at every stage. Life continues to teach us, sometimes even more than we might choose to learn. We are helped to act our age by the rituals that come with marking milestones. The pandemic is disrupting some of that. Graduations, weddings, births, deaths, and retirement – the ways that we usually mark such occasions help us understand what time it is and transition into a new stage. They help us attend to the meaning of the occasion and act our age, or live within the season at hand. But this is not the time for gathering together and we are feeling that loss.
We also know something about how to act our age, how to know what time it is, because we live in community. We observe others. In relationship with older people, we anticipate what life may be like in our future. Younger people teach us how the world has changed and what it means to live in their now.
This week, I heard from several of you who shared memories. I was struck that newer people tended to share memories of their first encounters with Emmanuel. They mentioned what was for the rest of us probably a typical Sunday morning worship or another activity in which we had participated many times. It was a reminder that we each step into an ongoing stream of life at different times, and that our presence together shapes life for each other.
“Teach us to number our days that we may present a wise heart.” Numbering our days involves recognizing what time it is, caring about the moments and seasons of life to live all of them well.
Joan Chittister is a theologian, author and speaker. In her book There Is a Season, she tells this ancient story:
"Where shall I look for enlightenment?" the disciple asked.
"Here," the wise one said.
"When will it happen?" the disciple asked.
"It is happening right now," the wise one answered.
"Then why don't I experience it?"
"Because you don't look."
"What should I look for?"
"Nothing. Just look."
"Look at what?"
"At anything your eyes light on."
"But must I look in a special way?"
"No, the ordinary way will do."
"But don't I always look the ordinary way?"
"No, you don't."
"But why ever not?"
"Because to look, you must be here. And you are mostly somewhere else."
To look, you must be here. And you are mostly somewhere else. Biblical wisdom knows the value of being here and now. Celtic spirituality with its attention to the seasons was a way of saying “be here now.” Be here and enjoy the season of home-grown tomatoes now.
In pandemic, some of us are being forced to be here more and that may help us to look. Because we are looking, some of us are seeing basements that need to be de-cluttered and walls that want a fresh coat of paint. Because we are looking, some of us are seeing beauty in our neighborhoods. Because we are looking, some of us are appreciating the strengths of our family members and maybe becoming more aware of what we don’t like about ourselves.
“Teach us to number our days,” the psalmist says. “God has granted us a sense of past and future,” the teacher writes in Ecclesiastes. Numbering our days together, you and I have accumulated 3650 of them. Ten years of relationship as pastor and congregation. Knowing what time it is, sensing the importance of milestones, I invited you to share some memories of the last decade with me this week. Let me offer these back to all of us.
You remembered:
Hospitality – receiving a warm welcome at Emmanuel, you felt listened to and valued as an individual whose story was worth taking the time to know
Medieval Feasts, 100-mile potlucks and farmer’s markets
Youth in leadership on Maundy Thursday and the living Advent wreath last year
The boiler breaking down . . . the other boiler breaking down . . . . the first boiler breaking down again
Ken Graham’s 90th birthday gift to us of a projector and screen
Standing with Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter and against gun violence after the shootings at the Pulse Nightclub and Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas High School
Making Room for Grace in the form of a new nursery, library, choir room and bathrooms – I never saw so much excitement over bathrooms!
Emmanuel women and men in the Women’s March in Albany 2016
The gift of new matching chairs for the sanctuary
Mission trips to Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic
Baptisms with children watching from the very edge of the baptistery
Repeated requests to keep tissues on hand in the sanctuary
Retreats at Silver Bay and the farm in Berne and with Emmanuel Friedens
Trips to peace camp, to the border and Biennial Meetings
The beginning of Godly Play and Family Matters
Discussions about books like Just Mercy and The New Jim Crow
Little man stories – especially the time he moved his grandmother into the sanctuary
Stars over our heads in the sanctuary during Advent 2019 and angel wings another year
The Seven Last Words banners
Hosting the Karen and Kachin congregations, which included visits from missionaries Dan Buttry and Duane Binkley and bi-lingual worship services and after-school tutoring
Michael’s concerts and cabarets
The silent monk’s version of The Hallelujah Chorus
And walking in the pride parade and hearing people on the street say “thank you” to us and feeling SO proud to be a part of an inclusive, loving church
Your memories of course triggered many of my own. To share just one, I remembered my first Easter at Emmanuel. Because I was the new pastor on the block, I was asked to preach at the FOCUS Sunrise service. Early morning is never my best time. Somehow I messed up my alarm and thought it was an hour earlier than it actually was. When I realized the time, I went dashing out the door without my coat. You all know how cold Easter sunrise can be. I made it in time to preach. Then we all went back to Emmanuel for breakfast. But this was the year that the sausage cooking in the kitchen triggered the smoke detectors and we couldn’t get the fire alarm to quit sounding. My first Easter, so of course, the fire department showed up! I thought we were going to have those seizure-inducing lights strobing all through Easter morning worship. It was a close thing, but David M eventually climbed onto a very tall ladder and physically dismantled the smoke detector and people who arrived for worship at 10:00 never knew a thing.
That one memory encapsulates so much of our life together – I’ve shown up breathless more than once, we’ve dealt with unexpected challenges on many Sunday mornings and other days, and talented, creative people among us have helped us make it through with good humor.
The psalmist says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may be wise.” And “satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love” and “prosper the work of our hands.”
We live best in the here and now, but God has placed within us a sense of the past and future. Today I give thanks for the past 10 years with you and I anticipate God’s continued blessing on our next chapter. Bless to us, O God, these people and all our relationships and all the seasons we share. Amen.