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May 2000 Sermons
May 21, 2000 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanMay 21, 2000A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven: Ecclesiastes and the Modern WorldWhat time is it? Do you know what time it is? If so, how do you know? What measure of time are we talking about? Are we on celestial time or Eastern Standard Time. Or Zulu time? (This is the universal time of the pilots and the military, meaning Greenwich Mean Time.) I have often felt, as I know many of you do, that my life is governed by the clock. Which makes me think of an old George and Gracie routine--some of my fondest memories of TV as a child are of the George and Grace TV show. Perhaps you remember George Burns and Gracie Allen, the comedy team who played the patient husband and his scatterbrained wife. In one of their routines, Gracie told George that she called a repairman to come in to fix her electric clock. George responds, "Well what did he say." And Gracie relates the repairmen said, "There’s nothing wrong with the clock. You didn’t have it plugged in." Gracie replied, "Oh, I don’t want to waste electricity, so I only plug it in when I want to know what time it is." Time, that human construct, which is often self-referential. That is, it is hard to talk about time with out using the word "time." According to my Random House Dictionary, time is, in brief, the "duration of all existence, past, present, future; a period or periods; a system for measuring the passage of time." Have you ever plotted your time? Ever looked at how much time you spent doing the usual activities of most days? It can be quite an eye opener. I went to a New Ministry workshop the summer before I came here in 1995, my second year in full-time ministry. Every minister, especially those new to ministry, is advised to attend a New Ministry workshop when starting at a new settlement. Of the many things that were discussed and suggested, one that was emphasized was to keep track of how much time was spent daily on ministry activities, for previous studies have shown that most ministers spend anywhere from 50 to 70 hours a week and we should learn to develop good self-care habits so we won’t "burn out" as apparently often happens. So I have on a couple of occasions kept a close calendar of daily activities, and always find that I am astonished by how my days are used. One of the problems with this exercise in developing efficiency is how time-consuming it is to write down everything you do. We in these so-called modern times, and especially since the about the 1970s, have become absorbed in how to best use our time, how to be the most productive. I looked in one of my husband’s books on time use in business management, and was not surprised to see that in this early 1980s publication, there was no mention of time for quiet, for the soul repair that the word "recreation" implies. Time dominates our modern life in a way that it has never before in recorded human history. People talk about time in the most immediate terms, and I suspect strongly, we are far excessively influenced by the media messages that tell us from every page, radio and television program, that we need to do more, better, faster, if we are to have good lives. Don’t you believe it. For I can guarantee you that sum total of your life will be better if you have quality as a measure and not just quantity, which, after all, is what time is about. Just imagine how out of line such time efficiency thinking can get, for instance, an efficiency expert was reputedly hired to make a report on the New York Philharmonic orchestra. As a part of his report, he attended several concerts, then at long last issued his report, which read in part: "For considerable periods, the four oboe players have nothing to do. Their number should be reduced and the work spread more evenly over the whole of the concert, thus eliminating peaks of activity. . . . All twelve first violins were playing identical notes. This seems unnecessary duplication . . . Much effort was absorbed in the playing of semi quavers. This seems an excessive refinement. It is recommended that all notes be rounded up to the nearest quaver . . .No useful purpose is served by the repeating on the horns a passage which has already been played by the strings . . .It is estimated that if all redundant passages were eliminated, the whole concert time of two hours could be reduced to twenty minutes and there would be no need for an intermission." Naturally, this is poking fun at efficiency experts. No orchestra would ever really give up the quality of music for the sake of such misplaced efficiency related to quantity. In the famous passage from Ecclesiastes, even the subject for a rock song of my sixties generation, we hear the author, or Qohelet as he calls himself or herself (the name is feminine in form but is used with verbs that indicate the masculine), the writer says that there is a time for every matter, every purpose under heaven. So most readers have taken this passage to be some kind of positivist statement about the course of a lifetime. But, to the contrary, the whole of the book of Ecclesiastes does not give us such absolutism. Contrary, also, to popular belief, the writer, is coming from a cynical position. Bible scholars tell us that there seems little doubt that, unlike all the other the books of the Hebrew scriptures, this is mostly written by one person. Further, to understand this book, we need to think about its historical setting. The allusions within the text indicate that it is a later work (Don’t let the order of the books of the Bible trick you, for there is no oldest to newest consistency.) and most likely written around 250BCE to 167BCE, the time of the Maccabean revolt. There is also internal evidence that Qohelet was from the privileged class, and lived during a period of relative economic prosperity for the upper classes of Jewish society. (Harper’s Bible Commentary) Most of what the writer Qohelet says comes from his personal observation of the world, and reflects his own mental debates about the nature of life and the world and God. The overriding conclusions that he comes to are those that reject the popular wisdom of his day. Sounds familiar doesn’t it. The popular notion of Qohelet’s Jewish culture said that knowledge, wisdom, learning were the ways to find material and emotional security, but he says, "It doesn’t look like it’s true to me." So like many of us today, who have been told that if we do A-B-C, that, is follow the popular set of rules or ideas for how to be "healthy, wealthy and wise," that all will be as we want it. The gurus that sell this philosophy are innumerable, but the names Tony Robbins, Earl Nightingale, Zig Ziglar, Mary Kaye, are just the tip of the iceberg of those who claim to have captured the essence of a successful life in programs that are predominately about time management and positive reinforcement. I do not mean to suggest that there is no virtue in either time management, efficiency, or positivism, for I attempt to use all of them to varying degrees in my own life. My concern is for the way we as a society and as individuals seek to make golden calves--to use a wonderful biblical allusion--of them. To make idols of ideas or methodologies in the hope of finding a guarantee for the good life, for it simply will not work. Qohelet reflects on his own life and on life generally and comes to the conclusion that no matter what you do, you die. Remember, this is a time in religious history for the Hebrew people that does not teach the prospect of an after-life. Nation-building is the focus of the Hebrew scriptures; building up a store of knowledge is seen as the way to secure the nation. So for the writer, life is ultimately ridiculous. As Harper’s Bible Commentary states: " [H]he observes no discernible principle of order governing the universe, rewarding virtue and punishing evil the creator is distant and uninvolved, except perhaps in cases of flagrant affront like reneging on religious vows. Death cancels all imagined gains, rendering life on earth absurd. Therefore the best advice is to enjoy one’s [spouse], together with good food and drink, during youth, for old age and death will soon put an end to this relative good. In short, Qohelet examine all of life and discovered no absolute good that would survive death. Profit is thus the measure of life for him." Out of this enlightenment, as he saw it, Qohelet terms himself a teacher and seeks to pass on this knowledge. Perhaps the reason the Chapter Three passage from Ecclesiastes turned up in a rock song when it did, also has to do with people of that period being named the "Me" generation. Qohelet certainly would qualify as member of the "Me" generation. There really is nothing new under heaven when it comes to human awareness. We can see this pattern, repeated down through history, of people becoming progressively more dissatisfied as they become more prosperous, more comfortable. Why is it, for instance, that people often become much more giving and optimistic in wartime than in the peace and prosperity we know today? I have read a great deal about England from World War I through World War II, and I never cease to be amazed by the way the people dealt so nobly with various privations like rationing, and with the horrors of war, with the death and destruction, and many Brits will tell you that this was indeed a time of great cooperation, great sacrifice, and a sense of being together for a larger purpose. This is not to glorify war, but to point out that the necessity for moving outside one’s own self-interest, which the war years demanded, makes people behave with more dignity, with a greater appreciation for the present. We also can experience this collapsing effect of time and purpose when we have personal crises. I have witnessed this effect many times, and see that most people, while undoubtedly tried and tested, more often than not come through a crises stronger, with a greater appreciation for life, for the "little things" we often say. Learning that the "little things" are really what count. When I did my own time management, I found that my day was not nearly so much about the big things, and mostly a long series of little things. Brushing teeth, making coffee, telephone calls and messages, visiting people, writing various things, reading articles and books. Here and there during my weeks were the big things like marriages, births, or deaths, or the car breaking down, or illness. In some subconscious way, I believe, we expect there to be more of the big things, after all, that is the stuff we are conditioned to expect, what all the rules and regulations of life point to, so life can become less and less satisfying. That is when we get into our various troubles, more often than not, our moods that life is just not all that it’s crack up to be. The result of that is that we sometimes seek someone or something to blame for our dissatisfaction. Mick Jagger’s 1964 song, "I Can’t Get No Satisfaction," was and remains popular for the message is one that most people in western culture relate to. To much materialism, too little joy. We who gather here on Sunday mornings are seekers. We seek meaning for our lives. We want the time that will be our lives to count for something, though we are not always clear about what that "something" is. We know that we want our work to be valued, our efforts for family and friends to be valued, to be appreciated. This was what Qohelet was seeking too, and most of us will reach some period in our lives when we ask "What’s the point?" Like Qohelet in Ecclesiastes, we will usually come to see that there is a cycle of events in human existence, and we fall in those seasons of birth and death, and the seasons between our birth and death. We may ask, like Qohelet, how God figures into all this. Qohelet discovers in his ponderings that you cannot always rely on people, or the conventional wisdom. You cannot always depend on family or friends. You can get a great deal from study, wisdom, self-reflection, but there is still the sore point that no matter how much we might be lucky enough to glean from life, we are still going to die. So there it is. Like it or not. We are stuck with the system. He finds that neither wealth nor position nor safety nor religion guarantees any one of us a longer or better life, and that is perhaps for him and for us the greatest frustration For if we are honest with ourselves, and especially with our children, we have to say that no matter what you do, you may still not have a perfect, ideal, or wonderful life. And no matter what you do, you will die. While the writer of Ecclesiastes is primarily a cynic, he is also realist who views the options and comes to the conclusion that moderation is better than excess in all things. That being a seeker is hard, and not for the fainthearted and that ultimately ignorance probably really is bliss. The problem, he acknowledges though, is that you cannot chose to live ignorance. Seeking is a call, not a choice. Interestingly, the last Qohelet says, is "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." The close of Ecclesiastes is by two editors, according to Bible scholars, who conclude for Qohelet that readers are advised to, "Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man." Further, God will judge all that we do. With Qohelet, I believe there is a time for everything that will count for us. For whatever the length of time we will each have, our most important needs remain constant. And regardless of whether we get another opportunity outside this lifetime, we want this one to count for something good. This is the ultimate desire of every sentient being: We each want to be loved, and most of us want to be of use for good. Our ongoing seeking will teach us in very personal ways what is of the greatest joy and value to us in our lives, and to this end we can continue to read the lines of Ecclesiastes with reason and with hope, that there is indeed a time for every purpose under heaven. May 28, 2000 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanMay 28, 2000Remember MeI had a dear, dear friend, named Jack. Jack was a teacher of world literature, a poet, and, as he termed it, being the Anglophile that he was, a man with a "dicky" heart. He had a congenital heart abnormality which had made his mother cosset him so much that he claimed to have never had even a smudge of dirt on his body until he was thirteen and became rebellious. This dicky heart was like the sword of Damocles; a death sentence hanging there above his head, and that was how he had faced every day of his life. Some people with this constant reminder of mortality might have become religious mystics, or some might become dare devils, daring death to come even sooner. Not Jack. He became a comedian in the everyday way of being wonderfully funny, irreverent, always the reliable punster, the practical joker. We privileged enough to know him all loved him. Jack loved literature; he and I were graduate students in English together, but he was finishing as I was getting started, so we had about a three year friendship before he sailed off into his first Associate Professorship. But the second year in his new position, he was hospitalized with a serious complication with his heart, and the following episode, some four months later was his last. About a week after he died, I was surprised to get a call from Jack’s mother informing me she was sending probably the strangest request anyone would ever ask of me. So far she is correct. It turned out that Jack, understanding clearly that he was dying in those last months, had written instructions for his memorial service. He had made a list of names, many of them from the English department where we had become friends, and we were to be contacted to put together his memorial service. He had given a fairly detailed set of instructions for his mother, and provided a grand sum of money that provided most generously for the event. The service was to be held in a large hotel ballroom, with a sumptuous buffet and an open bar--he wanted to make sure the mourners had a good time, he wrote. Since he had requested cremation, he wanted the urn to be placed on the podium, so he would be in the midst of the fun, and then he wanted those of us who were willing and able to do one last thing for him. This is some of what he wrote in the letter his mother forwarded to the dozen people on the list: "You all know what a joker I’ve always been. The clown, the kidder, and I realize as I lie here in my bed that it was so people would notice me. I’ve wanted to be the funny man, the joy-boy, to get attention, and I believe, in part, that it was so people would remember me. "Now dear friends, I ask that you grant me this wish, help me in my last effort to make sure everyone who attends my memorial will remember me. No eulogies, no words of regret, no sad farewells. Just this one thing I ask, please tell jokes, tell funny stories, especially jokes about death and dying, and invite anyone who wants to tell theirs too." Now just to make sure we did not lack for material, Jack had spent some of those bedridden days writing down jokes; then we all searched the library and computer sources (such as they were in the early eighties) to gather as many as we could. Then we got together for a couple of sessions of sorting out the best ones including all of Jack’s. Here are a few that were on my list: -Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down. -Strange, isn’t it? Everyone wants to go to heaven but no one want to die. -My uncle died and all he left was an old clock. Shouldn’t be much trouble winding up his estate. -Someone said Jack drowned in varnish! What a horrible way to go! On the contrary. They say he had a beautiful finish! My favorite and of course it was one of Jack’s: A man goes off on a business trip, leaving his beloved cat in the care of a neighbor. A few days later he phones the neighbor to ask about his kitty and the neighbor says, "The cat died." The poor man is distraught and says to his friend, "Couldn’t you have broken it to me more gently? The first time I called, you could have told me that the cat was on the roof, the next time that the cat had fallen off the roof and wasn’t looking too well, and so on. I mean, it was such a shock coming like that." Sometime later he got a new cat he called Mittens and once again was off on another trip, leaving the new pet with the same neighbor. After a few days he called, asking, "How’s Mittens?" The neighbor replied, "The cat is just fine, but I think you should know, your mother’s on the roof!" I cannot fail to mention that Jack’s urn turned up in a giant sized Kellogg's Corn Flakes box; you know, the one with the red rooster on the front. I suppose if we were all as honest with ourselves as my friend Jack, we too would admit that we want to be remembered. After all, that is our most sure way to immortality, to be thought of, spoken of, written about. What I appreciate now about Jack’s wonderful, hilarious, unforgettable memorial service, was how right it was for him to have his memorial be the one he wanted, for he gave us that oh so important time to celebrate the life of one we loved. And I remember him fondly nearly every time I hear a joke. Jack did not entirely get everything his own way, though, for in spite of ourselves, the jokes having reduced us to tears over and over again, we could not but eulogized him a little bit, recall how much fun he was, recall how brilliant he was underneath all the teasing and kidding. How truly special he was in so many ways that we needed to remember and to talk about. This is the Memorial Day weekend, a time traditionally for remembering the men and women who died in war, a time for parades to honor the nation’s heroes, a day set apart for remembrance. I remember as a child that every little town had a Memorial Day parade, with flags and wreathes laid at war memorial markers or at the Town Hall. Nowadays, this is mostly a time for a getaway, a vacation weekend; and, while flags fly around many homes and public buildings, there are few parades, and the country seems to want to forget all the wars. Unfortunately, we would do better not to forget the wars, and those who have died in war. As George Santayana wrote, restating an Aristotelian thought: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Memorial Day, while most assume it arose from national patriotic fervor, and that is certainly part of it, is really a carryover from much more ancient traditions, such as Decoration Day that here first arose following the Civil War, and had its counterpart in most places in England and Europe. They usually occurred around the end of May. Ritual times for remembering the dead have long been part of the civilizations of the world. Every primitive tribe has such ritual days, and we have not lost the need for these ritual times ourselves, even if we think we do not need the old ways of doing them. I often decry the dearth of rituals in these days. We need ritual to uplift the important events in our lives, but more and more we dismiss the rituals we grew up with as out of step with the modern world, like the Memorial Day or Fourth of July parades, but we find at the same time a longing for more meaning. So while it may be necessary to move away from some of the older traditions, we might want to think about ways to reinvent them for the modern times, and not do away with them altogether. I know for myself that I need, and I believe we all need, ritual. Professor Tom Driver in his book, The Magic of Ritual, reminds us that there is a human longing for ritual that is deep, and often frustrated in our culture. He states that rituals are markers for us, that they lead us from one place to another on our life paths; that we look forward to rituals, and we mourn their absence if we do not have them. For instance, we have all heard about the increase in depression that goes along with the holidays. How much of that depression is a result of missed ritual? How many of us find that an important spiritual marker has been misplaced or lost, perhaps due to a death, or to illness, or even displacement if we are far from our homes or loved ones. We can feel abandoned and out of step with the world. It is often our rituals that remind us of our place in this vast history and in our families, and when we lose those rituals, we may in fact lose our way. I think Driver is right when he says that we are further frustrated in the effort to observe ritual by our culture. The modern notions of efficiency have led us to an ever increasing sense that we must get rid of whatever is not necessary in our lives to make room for the measurably productive. But maybe we have been led astray. Weddings, dedications, baptisms, graduations, funerals, memorials all are long standing points of ritual that still are important to families, though they appear to be much less important to the community than they once were. And though everyone complains about the commercialization of our traditional shared rituals, like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Hanukkah, those ritual times that are not commercialized are dying. And, as we see this weekend, few people observe Memorial Day in the way people thirty or forty years ago did? Or Arbor Day? Or Veteran’s Day? I believe deeply that because we must face this decline in shared times of ritual, we have to become more invested in the rituals of our homes and daily lives. But why is this necessary? It is, as Tom Driver writes, because ritual is transforming. Ritual is powerful, not just in the enacting of the ritual, but in the ritual's ability to pass on vast amounts of knowledge. Some of that knowledge, as Driver says, is essential to the survival of any species of animal, including human beings. Rituals carry meaning that goes beyond the language and they "generate intelligent responses"; that is they are taken and repeated as long as they speak to the inner being. Remembering is subtle sometimes; but sometimes memories touch us like the wing of a butterfly, sometimes they rear up and swipe at us like a raging grizzly bear. But in all ways such remembering is powerful for what is draws from us, and is yet another reason we need to keep our memorial traditions alive, be they public or private ones. Everything in life is not about sweetness and light, for it seems less valuable to us if we do not set the light apart from the darkness; the sweet from the bitter. And, yes, I know it is all a conundrum, this putting the good and bad, the happy and the sad in this juxtaposition. Tennyson said it so well: "Such a one I remember, whom to look at was to love." And, "This is the truth the poet sings,/That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things." Or the mid-19th century poet, William Allingham, who wrote: Four ducks on a pond,/A grass bank beyond,/A blue sky of spring,/White clouds on the wing;/What a little thing/To remember for years--/To remember with tears! Ritual celebrations to uplift all the markers in our lives are important, but of all of them, none is so important as to mark the losses to death we have known personally, and just so as a nation. There is one thing of which I am convinced when it comes to the loss of a loved one, and that is we never stop grieving for the ones we loved who died. Nor should we be expected to do so. Well-meaning friends and family encourage us to get on with our lives, to pick up the pieces, to move forward. They remind us that time heals all wounds. And we may tell ourselves all these things too. Certainly, we probably will find that some of these things will be true. But don’t let anyone take away, for no one has the right to take away, your right to grieve. We have heard so much about the five stages of grief in the last thirty years, that all too many people have come think that a person, a people, a nation should get on with the five stages and be done with it. I was at a memorial marker for Jews who had died in the Holocaust a few years ago, and I heard this woman whispering to her companion that while, yes, it was a horrible thing that had happened to the Jews, why couldn’t they just get on with things and put the past behind them. My inner response was, Why should they? I would have liked to ask that person to tell me how long is long enough to mourn six-million of your people who died so senselessly? Rabbi Harold Kushner talks in his book, To Life, about how Judaism puts a special "focus on sanctifying the ordinary, spotlighting the specialness hidden in the most commonplace events. Statistically, birth and death are everyday occurrences. Millions of people are born every day, and millions of other people die." "But when it is our parent who has died, our child born, our daughter married, we know that something special, something out-of-the ordinary is happening. We ask our religious tradition to teach us how to transcend the statistics, how to redeem the moment from the realm of the ordinary." When we set aside time for our national remembering or our personal remembering, we are doing a good thing. We are finding a way to show how we feel; a special statement of our love and caring. And for that we should always know to turn to our spiritual home, our community of faith. This is an important function of our Unitarian Universalism, just as it is important to Judaism and all other faiths. We honor our babies with dedications, we honor the joining of two lives in holy matrimony, we celebrated anniversaries of all sorts --we even celebrate and honor the groundbreaking for our new home, and when it is done we will bless the building--and we honor the ones we love who died. We honor the breach that death brings into the lives of families. And so it should always be, that we hear in each man, woman and child the words: Remember Me. |
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