"To everything there is a season and time for every purpose under heaven." This opening phrase of a biblical passage written some 2300 years ago has accompanied circles of wisdom throughout the centuries. It is a passage read often during memorial services or times when lack of understanding overwhelms our hope in being. It is a passage that communicates the underlying truth in our lives that "this, too, will pass"...and more...that there will be other times in our lives, that our lives move through events and periods of experience which ever expand our knowledge of all that is and can be.

"A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal..."One of my favorite movies is Inherit The Wind, the original version with Spencer Tracy and Frederick March. There is a scene when the God fearing, Bible thumping prosecutor, Matthew Harrison Brady, is put on the stand to testify as an expert witness for the Bible. The defense lawyer, Henry Drummond, who is trying to keep a high school teacher out of jail for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in high school, questions Brady on the age of a fossil found in the boring hills of the town. Drummond says the rock is about 4 million years old, Brady says it could not be older than 6000 years.

"A fine Biblical scholar," Brady tells the court, "Bishop Usher, has determined for us the exact date and hour of the creation. It occurred in the year 4004 BC." "Well, that's Bishop Usher's opinion" Drummond replies."It's not opinion," says Brady, "it's a literal fact which the good Bishop arrived at through careful calculation (which he then describes), in fact,"he continues, "he has determined the actual time of creation as having occurred on the 23rd of October, 4004 BC at 9 am."Drummond pauses for a moment, then asks, "Was that Eastern Standard time or Rocky Mountain time...it couldn't have been Daylight Savings Time because the Lord didn't make the sun until the 4th day....how long was that first day?" He asks."The Bible says it was a day." Brady answers"Yes, but was it a literal day, was it a 24 hour day, could it have been 25 hours? We don't know because there was no sun, could it have been a 25 hour day?"

The discourse continues until the Bible expert witness concedes that the first day could have been of indeterminable length. "It could have been 30 hours,"Drummond drives home his point,"it could have been a week, it could have been a month, it could have been a year, it could have been a hundred years, or it could have been 10 million years..." at which point a member of the prosecution team objected to stop the train of thought, but the message was conveyed....when we trap ourselves in literal thought we create an end to learning and time will pass us by as events go unnoticed and opportunities untapped.

Bonnie Thurston points out in her book To Everything There Is A Season that Hebrew scripture refers to a point of time as a "day", not necessarily a 24 hour day, but a period of time when something happens. What I thought was a clever rendering of Biblical interpretation was actually the more authentic reading of the first chapter of the book of Genesis. The days in the creation story are not literal 24 hour days. They are a period of time when something noteworthy happens. Instead of making the words of the Bible less compelling in its less than literate rendering of time, the poetic interpretation of "day" helps to ennoble the metaphoric thinking and bring back the mystery and grandeur of the creation of the world, unknown in time but honored in myth, what Joseph Campbell's reminds us is the literature of the spirit.

Time, in ancient Hebrew terms was measured by events in human history. The imaging of God in relation to the human being was recorded through events in time. The inheritance of religious values and social ethics occurred in the telling of stories and the celebration of sacred moments within those stories to be remembered, cherished and understood as holy.

Abraham Heschel, Jewish mystic of the 20th century, offers this wisdom: "a moment of insight is a fortune, transporting us beyond the confines of measured time. Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time."

"a time to break down and a time to build up a time to weep, and a time to laugh;a time to mourn, and a time to dance.A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together."

When our two close friends had died and the ashes finally delivered to us, a group of friends traveled to a favorite stream within a camping site where we had spent many times solving the worlds problems and our personal woes. We gathered at a particularly beautiful spot, filled with memories of past times, and intermingled the ashes into the running stream. My husband Nick and I found two large stones with in the stream. They are now bookends in our home. The songwriter of the two had written these lyrics: "I will bend, I will bow, but I will not be broken, all things in time, love is on my side, I will not be broken."

That which is eternal remains through time. That which is a part of our lives has its place in our history, never to come again, always within our hearts, ever a part of who we are in the time that we have and the eternity we know.

A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

a time to seek, and a time to lose;

a time to keep, and a time to throw away;

a time to reap, and a time to sow;

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

a time to love, and a time to hate;

a time for war, and a time for peace.

In the Building Your Own Theology course there is an exercise to draw a time line and put the date of your birth at one end and an estimated date of your death at the other end. The task was to then put a dot on the time line where you are today. Last year a resident theologian gave me a reading entitled "How will you spend your dash?". The author envisioned the way a person's life is dated on tombstones, in obituaries, in historical writings. The "dash" is the time between your birth and your death. Knowing that we make our own history in time, how will you spend your dash?"

Sermon Archive

Home Page