Uncertain Times

October 16
by Rev. Emma Chattin

First Reading

Ecclesiastes 3:1-15

For everything there is a season,
and a time for every purpose 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; 5a 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.

Second Reading

From Richard Rohr in Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

Our age has been called the age of anxiety, and I think it’s probably a good description for this time.  We no longer know where our foundations are.  When we’re not sure what is certain, when the world, and our world view, keep being redefined every few months, we’re going to be anxious.  And we want to get rid of that anxiety as quickly as we can!  Yet, to be a good leader of anything today – to be a good pastor, a good bishop, a good father, a good mother… (you fill in the blank) .. you have to be able to contain, to hold patiently, a certain degree of anxiety. Leaders who cannot hold anxiety will never lead you to any place new.  That’s probably why the Bible says so often, “Be not afraid.”  (I have a printout that notes the phrase appearing 365 times!)

If you cannot calmly hold a certain degree of anxiety you will always be looking for somewhere to expel it.  Expelling what you can’t embrace gives you an identity, but it’s a negative identity.  It’s not life energy, it’s death energy.  Formulating what you are against gives you a very quick sense of yourself.  Thus, most people fall for it.  People more easily define themselves by what they are against, by who they hate, by who  is wrong, by what is wrong, instead of by what they believe in and who they love.

I hope you see from this common pattern how different the alternative is.  If so, you might catch anew the radical and scary nature of faith, because faith only builds on that totally positive place within, no matter how small.  It just needs an interior “Yes” to begin….  (That is the foundation)… and that is why faith is always rare.  Religious group-identity all too often becomes its replacement.  We don’t have to find and live from a positive loving place.  We can just go to church.

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Uncertain Times

We live in uncertain times.
Hurricanes.  Wildfires.  Floods.  Historic droughts.
Tornados. An earthquake…. in Virginia!
Gay Pride… in Elkton!!!
Woah…. I did NOT see that one coming!

Not all unexpected events are bad….
And while there may be some in this very Valley who will be quick to blame any destructive natural event on some sort of divine judgment for this perceived wrong…
or that perceived wrong… such divine assignment of responsibility
is nearly as old as the hills and the volcanoes that made them.

Humanity is all too quick to search for some sense of sense in the face of the senseless, some certainty in the face of uncertainty.   Truth is, most ancient religions regarded God (or the gods) to be controllable- placated, manipulated, through ritual and human sacrifice.  Around the time of Abraham, we see a shift in sacrifice from human to animal… sheep… goats… offerings to please God… to garner God’s attention and favor….good things were automatically the result of some blessing…
and bad things were seen as some judgment or disfavor…..
Later still…. certain rituals and prayers were offered, perhaps to insure positive outcomes through divine intervention.

I’m not sure Divinity is so controllable by our actions.
But I do believe humanity is quick to fill in the blanks of what we don’t know
(as well as the spaces surrounding the general uncertainty of life) with God’s name.
And I think that’s kind of a cheap shot.

When I worked as a hospital chaplain, I would wince inside when I would hear a pastor, when, confronted with the questioning anguish of a parishioner over the death of a loved one, reply with the simple platitude,  “Well… It’s God’s will.”  What an easy way out of a difficult moment.
What an effort by one to appear to have all the answers
– and to do so by pointing the finger elsewhere.
For me the answer was always the hard one…
the simple admission of ignorance…
“I don’t know why this happened.”

We live in uncertain times.
Socially, financially, politically, economically, environmentally.
We are in an uncertain place… and it feels uncomfortable to us.

I know all of us here have experienced sudden events, events that have carried us, almost always unwillingly, into new territory, into uncertain places, places where we feel we are no longer in control, or where we are reminded that we were (and are!) never really in control.
The loss of a job… an accident… illness… the death of a loved one…
the loss of a home…. … the incarceration of a loved one…
or yourself… having your rights taken away from you…
being the victim of violence, crime, abuse…
broken relationships….
Places where we feel we have lost our points of reference.

In fact, any time any number of people are gathered together, this is true.
Look around the room, any room that you happen find yourself in with others, and sometimes you can feel the pain… the questions… the anxiety… the fear…  the ache of a sadness so deep that it defies words….
all residing behind the eyes and in the hearts of those who surround you.
And maybe that’s why it is important for us gather together from time to time.
To share the uncertain times, the sheer uncertainty of life,  and to witness, to be silent reminders, monuments to one another, that survival in the face of improbable adversity is indeed possible.
And that our worst moments in life  can sometimes leave us changed for the better rather than the bitter.

I know that all of us here have experienced events that have caused us to wonder about the order of our universe…
Events that have disturbed us… gotten our attention….
losses that have ripped our hearts out and shaken (perhaps destroyed!)
the foundations of our world and our beliefs.

We live in uncertain times.
But it isn’t the events that make our times uncertain.
The events themselves merely serve to remind us that we have, that we do, and that we always will live in uncertain times.
Nothing is certain about life.
Except death. (and maybe taxes)

We may think back fondly to when we went to the moon, forgetting all the while, that our passage there was not a forgone conclusion at the time.  It was far from certain.  It was a great risk, and it took sacrifice (emotional, financial, and physical).  It was dangerous.  People died.
But people also lived, landed on the moon, and took us – took the whole world! – along with them to a new place.
But it wasn’t certain at the time,  and any historical event that seems to us a certainty or a foregone conclusion now, was simply crafted that way after the fact.
Nothing is certain- and I think it behooves those of us who may be older (but not necessarily wiser) to remind our youth that we have been here before.

Oh… not in this particular place.
This time in which we live is indeed new and pretty uncomfortable to me.
No, it is the fact that we have always lived through uncertain times, and survived, and despite what 24 hour news and media outlets, as well as some televangelists would have you believe….
this is generally normal, and uncertainty is pretty much a human condition and a fact of life.

Again, I think this an another important aspect of socially gathering to discuss the times in which we live.
And the times in which we have lived.
To share our own history… of bomb shelters… school drills for what to do in the event of a strike by Soviet nuclear missiles…
Not one random bomb, mind you, but a whole sky-full of targeted missiles, missiles that seemingly could come our way on the whim of a single itchy trigger finger.

We didn’t live in fear- but we did live with fear.
We lived with anxiety… and I think that’s an important lesson to learn:
living with anxiety and uncertainty, holding it in tension with our existence.

Yes, some celebrated when the Soviet Union collapsed and we were told it no longer posed a threat to us (if in fact it ever did) and then, of course…
other things happened…. new events …
and we found new threats…. and completely new fears
— fears that we could not have even imagined only a few years earlier.

But I would suggest that it is not necessarily the events,nor what the events do to us that matter, but rather, what we do with those events within our livesthat really matters.
Most unexpected events take us to places that most of us would rather not go, and certainly not go willingly.
They take us to liminal space, or threshold space, a place where we have left the old, the familiar, and still, we have not yet moved on to the new.

A workable psychological definition of liminal space is: “a place where boundaries dissolve a little, and we stand on the threshold, getting ourselves ready to move across the limits of what we were into what we are to be.”
It is also a place where there is uncertainty regarding any continuity of the way things were.

Again, I would suggest it is not what happens to us, but rather what we do with what happens to us that really matters.
It is not uncertain times that define usbut the certain qualities that enable us to move through such times.
This is a lesson we learn constantly, and it is one we may teach ourselves without ceasing over the course of a lifetime.

How many of us want to control what happens to us?
Control the unexpected.  Be honest.  And we also know people who not only want to control what happens to them, but to control everything else around them, including you.

These people

– and all of us are one of them at one time or another! –

are seeking to avoid uncertainty, uncertain times.

Do we have any aircraft pilots here today?
Now THAT is definitely an exercise in uncertainty and faith. Oh… there are long flight checks and the effort to control as much as earthly possible, and if you are the one in the plane, sensibly so.  But even on a good day, when you can see all around you, when you can see all your familiar landmarks and points of reference, it still requires a lot of faith and certainty in yourself just to slip the surly bonds of earth.  But if you want to fly long and far enough, you will eventually have to be prepared for the other times… the uncertain times…
night, or when the weather is bad…
the times when you cannot see anything, when you loose sight of all your points of reference and you must fly on instruments, trusting that the runway will appear beneath you WHEN and WHERE you believe it to be, and that your plane is pointed and positioned as you believe it to be.
You must have faith in the abilities of your aircraft and your capabilities as a pilot.
Now that is some pretty deep faith in a place of complete uncertainty.
There is phrase used to describe a behavior exhibited by some pilots called chasing the needles.  It is the desire, when flying by instruments, to keep all the gauges “just so”, in familiar places, places where the pilot is comfortable with them.
Of course, that also diverts focus from actually flying the aircraft, and leads to constant corrections in the desire to control over and under compensation.
It is also regarded as a byproduct of anxiety.

Fear and anxiety is a luxury that a pilot cannot afford.
A pilot I knew once told me about experiencing fear in that uncertain place.
He said “You have to tamp that down pretty quickly or it will seize you and freeze you and your fear will bring about the very outcome that you fear the most.”

Uncertain times, times when something truly new happens to us…
Such times take us to liminal space, and liminal space can be fearful, threatening, and uncomfortable.
It is new space, a place we have never been before.
It is an uneasy place, a place where we are at our most vulnerable.

Yet some gifted spiritual teachers regard it as a teaching space.
It is, after all, the place most religious rituals are artificially designed to take us.
The boundaries are thin there, and we are at our most reachable.

Reachable by what?  Ah, now that’s the question, no?
By God… by the Spirit of Divinity… by the great mystery….
by the human spirit… by the spirit of change moving within us…
by the better angels of our nature.
Something powerful and mysterious can undoubtedly happen to us in that uncertain place.

Would we really want to exist in a place where nothing ever happens to us?  Nothing ever changes?
Maybe some would regard that as heaven.  And maybe it is.
There is a song by the Talking Heads that suggests just that:

The band in Heaven plays my favorite song.
They play it once again, they play it once more, they play it all night long.

Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.
Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”

Humanity has always lived in uncertain times, and in the place where things happen.

It took me a long time to figure out that this passage from Ecclesiastes is not a an instruction, it is not prescription, it is not permission or an excuse for bad behavior, but rather…. it is a warning… it is a caution…
It is a caution about life.  It is also a spark of hope.
There Is a time for every purpose under heaven.
These things WILL happen.
They will happen to us.
They will happen around us.

The two verses that always challenged me the most?
A time to kill.  This is also an example of how the nuances of translation may impact our understanding (moments of which there are many in the Bible!).  You can see this for yourself  by looking at the consistency of balanced phrasing  in the poetic style of this part of Ecclesiastes.
Born/die, weep/laugh, and so on.
But then we have… kill/heal.
Mmmmm.  That sounds a bit odd, no?

The original Hebrew word used means to wound with deadly intent.
It’s a nuance, but a significant one.
I know of one translation that shifts what has become the more familiar wording to “a time to hurt, and a time to heal”.  Regardless, hurting happens in this world.
So does killing.
That doesn’t mean we condone it.
It DOES mean that it happens.

I recently watched the biography of George Harrison by Martin Scorsese.
This quiet former member of the Beatles spent a lot of time in India learning meditation, ways of finding peace within.
And in the bio, his second wife Olivia told of the time an unstable person had cracked off of the wing of an angel statue on the grounds of their home and tossed it through a window in the middle of the night, entering their home screaming with a knife in hand.
And how George was at the top of the steps, screaming his mantra at the top of his lungs…
how George and the attacker fought on the staircase, with George being stabbed multiple times, and having to defend himself using potentially deadly force in return.

A time to hurt.
It happens.

The second verse that has always challenged me:
A time for war.

War will happen.  It has, it does, it will.
This doesn’t mean we can’t oppose it.
Humanity’s history is regularly punctuated by war of one cause or another.
And it’s not like we have learned from our experience.  Even in our recent history.
World War I, the war to end all wars, and then WW II, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Persian Gulf War, the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war
— with the later two still being hot.
And these are just a few of the wars that our nation has been engaged in!
At any given time there are dozens of significant wars and conflicts going on all over the world.  War happens.  It has, it does, it will.
This doesn’t mean we can’t oppose it.
Because indeed….
Peace will happen as well.

There are some certain thoughts I would like to leave you with this morning as we move through these uncertain times…
Some of our greatest moments in history have been preceded by times of great uncertainty.

When you feel the desire to control the environment around you, check your own anxiety levels.
Rather than living in the moment as life lifts you up in wonder, you may simply be “chasing the needles”.

When horrific things happen to us, we are challenged during such times not to allow what has happened to us to define us.

No guarantees come with life, nor do answers, quick fixes, or even readily apparent cosmic reasoning.
Life itself is a risk, and Life, itself, is a fatal condition.  For each one of us.
Or, as Jim Morrison said, “No One Here Gets Out Alive”.
And here…. LIFE… this is where Things happen.

Do not let uncertain times make us uncertain people. In uncertain times, seek certainty within, however you may define or experience that.

Understand the qualities that DO define you, the things that you love, and the things in your life that cause you to say within “Yes.”
Or…. perhaps… taking a cue from “When Harry Met Sally”… “Yes.  Yes…. Yes!  Yes!!  Yes!!!  Yes!!!!!”  Life energy.  Positive energy.

Oh… yes… and…. Be not afraid.