Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
August 22, 2010
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, Psalm 102:23-28, Revelation 21:1-6

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 • For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 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; 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; 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 tear, and a time to sew; 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.

Psalms 102: 23-28 • Long ago you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you endure; they will all wear out like a garment. You change them like clothing, and they pass away; but you are the same, and your years have no end. The children of your servants shall live secure; their offspring shall be established in your presence.

Revelation 21:1-6 • Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”
And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.”

I. BEGINNING

Take a moment and imagine for yourselves a different world. Imagine a world in which cell phones were used solely for making phone calls, smart phones had keypads on them with actual buttons, where Google and YouTube are separate companies. A world in which people made long distance phone calls on their telephones instead of via the internet.

Imagine a world where the idea of a mixed-race man with an Arabic-Kenyan name being elected president was a laughable idea. Where Bulgaria and Romania are not in the European Union. Fidel Castro is the President of Cuba. Serbia and Montenegro are not separate countries. Saddam Hussein is still alive. A world in which nearly 17,000 people have not died in the Mexican drug cartel wars. A world in which the North Koreans have not detonated two nuclear weapons in tests.

Imagine that daylight savings time begins at the beginning of April and ends at the end of October. A world in which people are not worried about Swine Flu (or the Bird Flu, for that matter).. A world in which oil is about $45 a barrel. Television is broadcast on an analog signal and is viewed primarily in low-definition.

Imagine that Pluto is still considered a planet. It is easy to get a mortgage, often with no money down. The economies of most of the nations of the world are relatively intact.

Imagine a world where women’s jeans don’t come with back pockets. No one wears Ugg boots. UPN and the WB have not merged to become the CW. Michael Jackson is still alive and no one has ever heard of Justin Bieber.

Can you imagine such a world? It shouldn’t be too hard: it was four years ago.

II. THE INEVITABILITY OF CHANGE

A lot can change in four years. A lot is going to change in four years. That is an inescapable part of life. Especially life in college.

Today we begin another year together as a community. Another year of classes and study, of internships and work, of friendships and relationships. Another year of change.

For those of you who are new, it is perhaps somewhat difficult to imagine just how much change you’ll go through over the next few years. Change in ways you probably haven’t even realized yet.

You may come in as a republican and leave as a democrat. You may come in as a liberal and leave as a libertarian. You may come in as a socialist and leave as an anarchist. As a fundamentalist and leave as an evolutionist.

You may not change any of those things, of course, but what they mean to you may change. You’ll find some aspects of your life that you thought were so important that suddenly seem like trivia. You’ll find yourself really valuing things about yourself that you never gave a moment’s thought to before.

For those of you freshmen who don’t believe me, talk to one of the upperclassmen at fellowship after services. You won’t even have to find a senior. You can ask a sophomore if they’re the same person they were a year ago.

That’s what college is for. That’s what this time in your life is for. I’ve often said that if you come out of college thinking and feeling exactly as you did coming in, then you haven’t done it right. This is an important time in your lives. This is the season of change.

Our life is one of seasons, of course. The passage we heard read earlier from Ecclesiastes describes the seasonal nature of life. There is a time to be born, a time to die. A time to plant, a time to pluck up what has been planted. Ecclesiastes is one of a number if instances of “wisdom literature” in the Bible. It is probably more cynical than most and often speaks to the fleeting nature of human wisdom, even the fleeting nature of our lives.

For we understand that if our lives are seasonal, that implies change. We look around us and see that the world does not remain the same from winter to spring to summer to winter again. It’s amusing to me, by the way, to see how many people on Facebook have had posts complaining about the heat, when only a few months ago they would have welcomed this heat, if only to melt the feet of accumulated snow from the Snowpocalypse and Snowmaggedon. Times change.

III. CHANGE AND FEAR

Now, I’m not going to pretend that that prospect can’t be frightening. In fact, it often is. Particularly for people who treasure their certainties. And in my observation, there are few people more certain in what they know than college freshmen. Just ask one. By an interesting corollary, there are few people less certain in what they know than college seniors. Just ask one.

But where there is a comfortable reliance on certainty, there can be great resistance to, and thus, great fear of, change.

I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising. Predictability is an important aspect of survival. Our ancestors had to know that whenever they went to a certain river or lake the water was clean and the fishing was good. They had to know where they could reliably go to be free from attacks by saber-tooth tigers. They had to know that the foods they ate the day before wouldn’t poison them today. Predictability is an important element of being able to be safe and secure. And that meant staying alive.

When things change, we become frightened, because that means our world is less predictable. Now, that fear can manifest itself in ways that are both big and small. One long-time community member used to become upset if we changed the office furniture downstairs. It’s a good thing she wasn’t around this summer.

Others didn’t react well to the change in Daylight Savings Time, or the introduction of instant replay into baseball. Or the new Facebook layout. Whatever that happens to be this week.

But we often see that fear manifest itself when it appears that our social order itself is changing. Reflecting on immigration, one American politician wrote:

In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned… they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not, in My Opinion, be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious. … [They] will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Now, it turns out, that that quote was said by Benjamin Franklin about German immigrants over two-hundred years ago. As an English-speaking descendant of German immigrants, I think Mr. Franklin’s fears might have been… misplaced. But it reflects a consistent anxiety that we have about the changeable nature of the world in which we live. Changes in social structure can do that to us.

Now, imagine the changes we encounter are in ourselves. How much stranger and more unsettling could that be? There are fewer more upsetting questions than the question of wondering who we truly are. And a process of change where many of the assumptions about ourselves will become challenged, can be unsettling.

There are three basic responses to this process. The first is to hunker down and become rigid in your thinking, your beliefs, your attitudes. You continue to insist on the things you used to feel or believe regardless of the evidence or regardless of your own suspicions and doubts. You hope to muscle through the doubt by denying that it exists and by proclaiming a view of yourself and the world that you hope neither you nor anyone else will examine too carefully.

The second response is to assume that because everything changes, nothing is of any value. You adopt a kind of nihilism that is cynical and pessimistic. That scorns any values system because it sees everything as relativistic and therefore, as equally meaningless. You go through life doing whatever you like without much regard to what kind of person that makes you or without regard to what you actually believe or feel, deciding that believing or feeling require too much work.

Or there is the third way.

IV. CHANGE AND GOD

At the end of the Book of Revelation, a book full of a lot of fantastical (and very misunderstood) imagery, there is one of the most beautiful passages in scripture anywhere:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

What’s interesting about this beautiful meditation on the coming of the Kingdom of God is the emphasis on newness: the new heaven and the new earth. The new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. An emphasis on the changed nature of the world: death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more. “For the first things have passed away…”

And then it continues:

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.”

There is a reason why most people who have had time to actually look at Revelation conclude that far from being the most frightening book in the Bible, it is one of the most hopeful. Because in it we read these beautiful words, but we also hear this striking sentiment: “See, I am making all things new.”

All things new. It seems that a significant part of God’s purposes revolves around change. A new heaven, a new earth, New Jerusalem, the old things passing away, and all things being made new.

What we can take away from this passage is not just hope for the future but the realization that while we often think that change will take us further from God, when we ground ourselves in faith we see that God is in the very change we encounter.

The changes that we go through in life are of God, they are not apart from God. I am one who believes that the creating activity of God is not a one-time thing, happening eons ago at the dawn of the Universe. Creation is an ongoing process, witnessed everywhere in the dynamism of the world. In the evolutionary process and the tremendous diversity it has yielded, in the continued growth and reflection of the church, in our own personal journeys of self-discovery, growth, learning, and change we see God’s creating work continuing.

God is not apart from the change. God is in the change.

V. END

These four years of college are an important time in our lives. For 18 years, very well-meaning people have told you who you are. Parents, family, clergy, friends, teachers. They’ve helped to shape your identity as part of the community you were raised in. But here in these four years, you get to ask the question: is any of that true? What does it mean to me to be a liberal, a conservative? What does it mean for me to be a Christian? And the answers to those questions may surprise you.

But those answers are little God-moments, little moments of Creation as the person you are is being formed and reformed, as clay being reworked by a potter.

And it’s nothing to be feared. For in addition to change being of God, there is something else that is a great comfort. No one has to go through this time alone. You are surrounded by a community of love and support. A community that gives you the space and the time to wrestle with these difficult questions. A community that will be there for you, to listen, to share, to help you to reflect. A community that will give you the love and support to know that you are welcomed and loved no matter who you decide you are. That’s what a Christian community is for.

And so we begin another year together. A season. A time for this purpose. A year of new hopes and new challenges. A year of new opportunities and possibilities. A year of change. But in that year, we shall find ourselves continually surrounded by love and grace, found within this community and received from the God who says to us, “See, I am making all things new.”