sunday's sermon: a reflection

This past Sunday Mandy preached from Ecclesiastes 3.1-14. The first eight verses are the famous "everything has its season" poem, offering a telescopic look at life. There's a time for bad things and a time for good things in our lives. In hard times, this poem is comforting: "Nothing lasts forever." The corollary holds true for when good times mark our lives; "Nothing lasts forever," and we shouldn't expect those good times to last forever. Life's full of good things and bad things, and the good times are teases: "If life is so chaotic and uncertain with the promise of suffering, what can we hope for?"

Much in our lives is far from ideal. Even those who seem to have it so easy partake in the chaotic nature of the human existence. Life's full of trials no matter who you are, no matter your station in life. It's easy to assume that life is one or the other, to see our lives as full of hardships while everyone else seems to have the Easy Road. This is a blind assumption. We all have the shit we have to deal with; some people are just more open about it than other. Life is a patchwork of joys and sorrows, and there's no way around it. Buying into "If only..." thinking, that if only "this" or "that" were different, things would be okay, does an injustice to the nature of reality. Pursuing our "If onlys..." and putting our hope in them leaves us grasping at straws; and if we're so lucky to get what we've been hoping for, we find ourselves just hoping for more and wondering why we're still searching for that magic bullet to make things all right.

In Ecclesiastes 3.9-14, we're told that God gives us beautiful things "in time." These are temporal gifts, but that makes them no less gifts. The best thing we can do in a life marked by chaos, uncertainty, and both joys and sufferings is to enjoy the good things while we can and do good until the day we die. These temporal gifts, whatever they may be, never satisfy, because God has set eternity in our hearts. We burn with a longing for eternity, even if we don't see it at the time. We plug things into our lives to deliver what we crave, but the efforts disappoint, because while we're filling our lives with temporal blessings, our hearts are craving something far beyond that. What we're ultimately searching for is that which we often can't even fathom, and because we're too nearsighted to see it, we think what we need is more power, more pleasure, more security, more prestige. But all these things vanish like the wind: you can be the most popular, sexiest, wealthiest man one year and then be forgotten, downtrodden, ignored, and ugly as all get out come next year. What we ought to do, then, is to focus our lives on what our hearts crave, union with God, and enjoy those good things he gives us while we can.