By the Way: ‘For everything, there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven’
By Jeff Lackie on August 5, 2023.
Once upon a cynical time, I operated under the assumption that ‘life was hard, and then you died.’ It was a widely held assumption among people I worked with, and it became the simplest way to make sense of what I (and others) imagined was a senseless world. The world hasn’t changed – but I have. As I grow into a deeper engagement with my faith, and as I become more attuned to the grace of God that is an integral part of the whole created order. So gradually, I am letting go of some of my cynicism, but it is hard to escape centuries of experience (and untold generations of religious tradition) that try to explain how God orders the universe … and more importantly, how our role in Creation may or may not be defined. In the church, we use words like Sovereignty and Providence – ten-dollar theological concepts that mean God is in complete control, and will ensure that we have all we need when we need it. I’m careful with words like this, mostly because I came late to my vocation, and I’m still trying to work out what they really mean – but also because the idea of an all powerful, all knowing, all everything God has been used as a weapon against folks who dared to think differently. The church has a colourful history of pursuing these ideas in an ‘us-against-them’ fight for control of the universe. Yes – I see the irony of an institution wanting control of something they claim is controlled by God – but that’s a message for another column. My path to a less cynical view of the world runs through the third chapter of Ecclesiastes… you know; ‘For everything, there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…’ And now that you have ‘that song’ in your head, I’ll challenge you to look up the original (Ecclesiastes 3:1-15). The third chapter doesn’t say anything about Sovereignty or Providence (the bible doesn’t give us these concepts at all, except in the abstract). No, Ecclesiastes talks about the big, broad patterns of life, and acknowledges that things happen and – in the end, God being good – things will continue to happen. The lesson is not ‘life is hard and then you die,’ but ‘life is hard, and then wonderful, and then complicated … and God is God.’ The notion that God has determined the course of our lives is less important than the understanding that God is a constant presence and potential source of comfort throughout the changing and often baffling patterns of life on earth. The plan, you see, is one that saves not just you and I from the inevitable and abrupt end of our days. The plan, revealed in Jesus, is that the whole pattern of Creation might be relieved from its groaning, grinding cycle of good, bad and everything in between – relieved and refreshed by the Sovereign, Provident, Creative God whom it is our pleasure to know and serve in Christ. Rev. Jeff Lackie is the minister at St. John’s Presbyterian Church 11-10
