For Everything There is a Season
“For everything, there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…a time to keep silence, and a time to speak…” (Ecclesiastes 3:1,7)
A lot of my vocational identity is centered around speaking, preaching in particular. It was the first thing I did to signal my entrance into ministry in the denomination in which I am ordained. In that tradition, if a person feels called to ministry, the first step is to preach an “initial sermon”. It’s no surprise then that preaching became central to my identity as a minister.
Since that first sermon over 20 years ago, I have come to love preaching, from preparation to delivery. It’s not always easy, but, most often, I experience it as a labor of love. Lately, however, it’s been particularly difficult for me to pull together anything in the way of a sermon. I have found myself frustrated and discouraged that I just can’t seem to find my mojo, let alone any joy in this activity that I have loved. Eventually, I concluded that I just don’t have a lot to say right now–no special insight or particularly prophetic vision—at least not enough to fill up a 15-20 minute sermon. It occurred to me, in the words of the wisdom teaching from Ecclesiastes, that maybe this was a “time to keep silence”, rather than “a time to speak”. I had a sermon I had agreed to give for a Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration, and after that, I vowed not to accept any invitations to preach outside of my responsibilities at Pullen for a while.
Every week since then, someone has invited me to preach, and every single time I have politely declined. But it has felt strange to do so. I wonder if I’m really allowed to say “No”. Do I really have the luxury of taking a break or am I bound by some divine contract to do it as long as I am physically able? Sometimes we’ve done a thing for so long that we feel some sort of moral obligation to continue. We feel bad for stopping or changing course. But Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is a season for everything. In observing the created world, we learn that seasons come, go, and return again. Though we might wish for one season to remain, we understand that we must eventually release it to the natural order of things. At least for a while. As part of the created world, our lives also pass through many seasons. It’s okay to release some things to the past in order to be fully present in the season that one is entering, even when we are releasing things with which we closely identify.
When the pandemic first hit, we were forced to press pause on many things that had been part of our regular routine for years. We stopped going to the office, to school, to the gym, to church. We stopped traveling, stopped eating out, and stopped meeting in person. Some of these activities resumed within weeks, but for others, it took a year or more. Having developed new habits in the interim, when institutions reopened and activities resumed, we were faced with questions that we hadn’t allowed ourselves to consider before: “Do I want to do this? Do I need to do this? Will I return to it, or will I remember it as something that was a part of my life in a past season?”
Pandemic aside, these are good questions to ask ourselves from time to time to help recognize a change in seasons and give ourselves permission to embrace whatever season we find ourselves in. We need not worry that we are somehow betraying our identity simply because we’ve changed our habits or the way we show up in the world. Part of the beauty and character of all creation is its ability to change with the seasons.
It’s quite possible that I’ll return to a more robust preaching schedule in the future, but I’m not really worried about that now. I’m content to sit in the silence and soak up all that this present season has to offer.
