January 1, 2006
Second Sunday of Christmas
Year B
Title: A Season For Something New
During this part of the year, from the latter part of November or through
the first part of January, preachers throughout this country have a
difficult dilemma—we’re sort of caught in a bind because we’re being
compelled to welcome two different new years celebrations, two
different beginnings during a short 5-week span. On the one hand, we
preacher types are always trying to remind people that most of the
Christian church begins its new year, not on January 1 but on the first
Sunday of Advent, which was about five weeks ago, in late November.
The sacred calendar begins with the church’s anticipation of Christ’s
birth, the waiting period, one of two anticipatory periods in the holy
calendar of the church, the other being the Lenten season. I remember
spending a lot time early on in my preaching career during Advent,
trying to push my first congregation in Spokane, Washington to think
that way, to think about aligning our personal rhythm into the more
sacred rhythm of the church…but I think I was only try to convince
myself to do this—I mean, to be honest, I don’t make my new year
resolutions on the first Sunday of Advent! That’s late November—and I
have to get through the holiday season, I have to be allowed to eat as
much as possible, and as badly as possible, and to put off my new
exercise routine as long as possible, and so January 1 is just a lot more
attractive date to begin these sorts of new habits. And, to be frank, late
January is also just a much better time to feel depressed about
breaking all my New Year resolutions than is late December, so I’m
good with January 1 being the beginning of another year, a more
secular, less sacred new year.
But it does say something that most of us don’t make our resolutions,
our new year commitments, on the first Sunday of Advent—the reality is
that we Christians live with two new year celebrations, and, more than
likely, we still tend to think of January 1 as the real beginning of the new
year. Well, nowadays I think that’s fine, of course, because of all the
selfish reasons I mentioned earlier, but I also think its fine because it
reminds us of how tethered we really are to this world, to its rhythms, to
its calendar, to the ordinary tempo of human life. I think those human
rhythms are part of the reading we heard a few minutes ago from the
book of Ecclesiastes, whose writer is considered the great realist and
maybe great cynic of the Bible. There is nothing new under the sun,
the writer says, all is the same, the great rhythms of life repeat
themselves over and over again, and they sweep us all into their
cadence. This book is one of my favorites, and it always has been, and
it was especially a favorite of my youth, because it gave voice to all my
doubts about God and the meaning or maybe meaninglessness of life—
it still does that for me, really, though time has tempered some of that
youthful cynicism.
The writer of this ancient book constantly questions the justness of this
world, and whether or not our actions really matter in making the world
better—there is a deep skepticism throughout the book of
Ecclesiastes. And yet there are also moments in the text that call on
the reader to continue to do actions that are just and good, despite the
unjustness and lack of reward that may come from those good choices.
In the end, Ecclesiastes simply reminds its readers that just because
the world is unfair and life is unfair that doesn’t mean that you and I
shouldn’t be fair in our dealings with the world, with life, and with
others. Just because the world has not done us right does not mean
we are not to do right by the world—that seems to be how the tension is
resolved in this cynical and yet wise book.
But it’s interesting that the resolution of that tension, the focus on being
good even if you don’t get rewarded for being good, that is found here
is not what we tend turn to when we go to read this particular book—we
seem to look to the passages that tether us to this world, that name the
rhythms of our real, lived lives in this world. And these words that we
just heard minutes ago, they’ve been read at a million funerals, and
heard millions of more times through Pete Seeger’s song, they remind
us that there are some simple facts in this world, moments of life and
death, of breaking down, and building up, times of embrace and to
refrain from an embrace, a time to laugh and a time to cry—a season
for everything, the writer says, moments that must be gotten through,
moments in our lives that we humans will gratefully bless, and other
moments that we can only muster the courage to curse. It is what it is,
the writer of Ecclesiastes seems to say, there are simply moments, both
good and bad, that must be lived through, must be embraced, and the
acceptance of that reality, the acceptance of that rhythm, even that
repetition found within our lives, with eternal dance of between light and
shadow, the acceptance of that reality will make all the difference in our
lives. The acceptance of this world’s rhythm, those moments and things
which joyously and yet also painfully tether us, that tie us, to this world,
the acceptance of these moments makes life livable because, I think, we
can then anticipate the shadow in the midst of our moments of light, and
we can also expect the light in the midst of our moments of shadows, in
those moments of personal crucifixion.
I’ve been doing some reading on the life of Friedrich Nietzsche in
anticipation of the class we’ll be having in the spring on Nietzsche’s and
Soren Kierkegaard’s different understanding of faith, and I was
reminded of an interesting belief that Nietzsche proposed later in his
life. As a way of trying to value the whole of our lives, with all of its joys
and sorrows, Nietzsche argued that everything in our lives will eternally
recur to us, forever in eternity—the life you and I are living right now,
down to our very decision to come here this morning, our decision to sit
in the pew we are sitting in, will be a moment that will be eternally re-
lived forever. Think of it this way—you and I will repeat being in this
service on January 1, 2006 forever, your life as it was will be repeated
forever. Listen to how Nietzsche puts this idea to his 19th century
readers:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your
loneliest loneliness and say to you: “ This life as you now live it and
have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times
more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy
and every thought and sigh and everything unutterable small or great in
your life will return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—
even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this
moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned
upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the
demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous
moment when you would have answered him: You are a god and never
have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession
of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The
question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and
innumerable times more?” would lie upon your action as the greatest
weight.
Now, this isn’t a particularly Christian way of understanding of eternity
and its not even really a Buddhist [or Hindu] understanding of
reincarnation—this idea is its own thing, but its call to us, its challenge
to us rings true—can we accept the rhythms of life, birth and death,
sorrow and joy, the tearing down and building up, that Ecclesiastes
speaks of? Could we affirm our lives completely, and live with the
choices that have shaped us, and be OK with living this exact life over
and over again? Each of these moments, good and bad, have all
contributed to who you and I are at this moment, the person that God is
shaping out of all those beautiful and cataclysmic moments that have
and will shape our lives. Can we say with Dag Hammarskjöld, the
former UN Secretary General and a Christian, can we say this prayer
with him: “For all that is, thank you, for all that is to come, yes”? Can we
say accept and affirm all of life, can we accept all the seasons and
times of our lives, both good and bad, and say yes to them? For both
Nietzsche and Ecclesiastes, the answer was yes, though they use
different arguments to get to that “yes.” Could we affirm our lives with
the way they are, rather than the way we think they should have been
or even the way they should be? I can’t help but think that their answer
is right, that yes is the answer that is most true—arguing with reality, the
way things really are, is always a losing argument, but only 100% of the
time (Byron Katie).
And yet, I can’t help feeling a little trapped by this yes—is there really
nothing new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes tells us, or even as
Nietzsche argues in his idea of eternal recurrence? I mean, is there no
way to break out of the cycle of birth and death, joy and sorrow,
laughter and tears—can we not break the cycle, the rhythm of life—and
how about God? Can’t God break the cycle of repetition? Well, the
reality is that much like life, the Biblical answer to that question is
complicated. The second passage we have from the book of
Revelation is an answer to Ecclesiastes cynicism, to his truth that things
never really change—here we have a passage in which something new
is happening, something does change, a new Jerusalem, a new city,
comes from above, and it is a place where tears are wiped away and
the cycle of birth and death is broken—“death is no more” writes the
visionary of Revelation. The sea is no more, the writer says, which for
the ancient Israelites, was a symbol of chaos and that which was
uncontrollable in nature.
As much as the recent trend in some forms of Protestantism is to take
Revelation’s vision as literally being about the end of the world, the
reality is that overwhelming witness of the church, from the second
century to this day, has been to understand this book as being a
metaphor of God’s redemption of a persecuted church—a vision of God’
s triumph of peace and justice not just at the end of days, but in all
days, and in every age. And so here we are, with this passage saying
something different, that indeed we are not trapped, that God is not
trapped, by the rhythms of life, the repetition of life and death, joy and
sorrow, holding and letting go. Something new can happen: an
alcoholic can break her addiction, a warrior can lay down his weapons
for good, a murderer can be redeemed, and, even a dead man, carted
and shut away in a tomb, can live again days later—there are more
moments when life, death, and then life again, happens, and the rhythm
we’d had worked so hard to accept is broken, that we are born and then
die, are broken, and a new Jerusalem appears, a new thing happens to
us, wholly unexpected, wholly a surprise to us.
So, on one hand, according to Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under
the sun, only the rhythms of human life that we must come to accept,
and yet, on the other hand, there is possibility of something new
happening, of something truly new bursting forth in our lives, and in the
life of the world. That’s a profound tension in the Biblical witness—
nothing new ever happens, and yet it is said that a new thing can
happen, two truths that contradict each other, but ones that we are
asked to live with simultaneously, that are put side by side with each
other on this particular Sunday. And my experience so far is that both
are true—the hard work in this world is to accept life as it is, and yet the
world as it is, the brutal facts on the ground, so to speak, is sometimes
not always all there is—sometimes God can do something incredibly
new in this world, and sometimes, when push comes to shove, we too
can do something new and extraordinary in our lives and in this world.
Sometimes we do keep our New Year resolutions, and we make it to the
gym and we eat more vegetables and we lose some weight and give
more of ourselves away to the world, and we do more volunteer work,
and we love our children more, and we attend to our spouses with more
care and we finally break that addiction—sometimes it really does
happen, almost miraculously. A new thing can happen, of course, that
is the promise of end of the book of Revelation, the New Jerusalem—
but I also guess accepting the truth that we may quit the gym by late
January or not be as generous as we had hoped to be by September is
also one of those truths we get from the book of Ecclesiastes. Even
knowing that truth, that reality, I still think that making resolutions is a
sign that we believe that the world can change, that I can change, that
we can change, and that all of these vows to change ourselves are
signs of our hope that a New Jerusalem is possible, that transformation
is possible, that God can do a new thing in us and in the world. So, for
me, new year resolutions will be made, though I can’t promise they will
be kept, but that was never the point, the keeping of them—just simply
making those resolutions simply reminds us that a new thing can
happen, that this world can be changed, that the old patterns can be
broken and that we can change, the old rhythms can be interrupted and
transformed, and if that can happen, then maybe our lives can be
interrupted and changed and transformed as well. Amen.
