For Everything There Is a Season
Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church
A warm welcome to each worshiper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today.
As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation.
943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkway.org
Order of Worship
May 26, 2024
Trinity Sunday
10:00 a.m.
*You are invited to rise in body or spirit.
Prelude
Greeting and Announcements
Mission Statement: We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.
Call to Worship:
God’s love is poured out on God’s world.
From the foundations of time, God’s love is woven into all things.
When we cry "Abba, Father!", God hears and lovingly responds to us.
Thanks be to God who forgives and lifts us up.
Now we are called to be born anew!
Open our hearts and our lives that we may truly be born with hearts aflame with God’s love. AMEN.
*Hymn Holy, Holy, Holy #64
Prayer of Confession:
God, You know everything about us.
Every word we speak,
every thought we think,
every deed we do—
You know them all, even before we do.
So take a good look at me now.
Look deep into my heart and soul.
Point out the things that displease You,
the thoughts and actions I need to change.
Show me how to live as You would want me to live.
Amen.
Assurance:
Our God knows us all by name.
Our God knows what we lack.
For we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
In Jesus’ name, God’s works are revealed to us again. Amen.
Scripture Reading Ecclesiastes 2: 1-11
The Futility of Self-Indulgence
2 I said to myself, “Come now, I will make a test of pleasure; enjoy yourself.” But again, this also was vanity. 2 I said of laughter, “It is mad,” and of pleasure, “What use is it?” 3 I searched with my mind how to cheer my body with wine—my mind still guiding me with wisdom—and how to lay hold on folly, until I might see what was good for mortals to do under heaven during the few days of their life. 4 I made great works; I built houses and planted vineyards for myself; 5 I made myself gardens and parks and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. 6 I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. 7 I bought male and female slaves and had slaves who were born in my house; I also had great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. 8 I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and of the provinces; I got singers, both men and women, and delights of the flesh, many concubines.[a]
9 So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem; also my wisdom remained with me. 10 Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them; I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure from all my toil, and this was my reward from all my toil. 11 Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.
Sermon For Everything There Is a Season
Friends, this is the penultimate sermon I’m going to deliver from this pulpit, and it’s also another go at Stump the Preacher 2024. This sermon is a response to a clergy friend of mine who, when asked what she always wanted to hear a sermon about, responded “make Ecclesiastes sound less depressing.” Well, I’ll certainly try. And I think the best way to make this book less depressing is to look at it as a caution against complacency, and a call to action.
Ecclesiastes is one of those books that rarely gets used in worship services, and shining a light on books like that is a huge part of why I love doing Stump the Preacher so much. Ecclesiastes is nestled into the Old Testament alongside four other books of writings: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and Song of Solomon. Notably, we believe King Solomon wrote at least a portion of the content in four out of those five books. His father, King David, went down in history as a renowned musician. Solomon is remembered for, among other things, being one heck of a wordsmith.
Because Ecclesiastes so rarely sees the light of day at church, many of us don’t know the content of the book very well. My guess is that if there’s one segment from Ecclesiastes you are familiar with, it’s Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8–”for everything there is a season.” I’ve preached on it at length before. I’ve read from it at nearly every funeral I’ve presided over. It’s the basis of a Byrds song. Y’all know it. That portion of chapter three marks a distinct turning point for Solomon, when he starts to see the light. And if all you know of this book is those eight verses, then you may not understand my friend’s question. What’s so depressing about everything having an appointed season?
Well, what was becoming incredibly depressing was Solomon’s life. Son of the renowned King David, and conceived following David’s scandalous affair with Bathsheba, Solomon had an odd start to life, but was dealt an excellent hand. In social psychology, we use this term “thrownness”. It’s what you were “thrown” into at birth, and it’s one of only a few things you can never change about yourself. For many, their thrownness impacts their entire life. A person in Solomon’s day who was born to peasant parents had a 99.9% chance of being peasant class themselves, and with that came food insecurity, poor housing and sanitation, grueling labor for low or non existent wages, and a short life span.Very, very rarely, someone like Bathsheba could stumble into a circumstance that changed the entire rest of her life. But that was the fringe exception. A child born to a king could have many, many problems throughout his life, but money was unlikely to ever be one of them.
On that front, Solomon took the path of least resistance for years. He watched the money keep rolling in, and he found ways to spend it–palaces, lavish parties, exquisite food, and the company of a thousand women. The Kardashians could take notes from this guy.
Well gosh, that doesn’t sound so bad. And it wouldn’t have been if Solomon hadn’t been so wise and intelligent. A guy with half the brain power could have passively let the party go on and on until he died on a giant pile of hundred dollar bills on the marble floor of his mansion with a stomach full of steak and champagne and a beautiful woman fanning him.
But Solomon, in his wisdom, couldn’t keep ignoring the void in his soul. A pain he couldn’t mask with money forever, especially because money was at the very root of the problem. And this is where the very depressing part of the book comes in, reaching its apex in this morning’s scripture lesson. His behavior was lazy and foolish, and everything he owned was ultimately worthless. He knew he couldn’t take any of the trappings of wealth with him in the end, and that his life would be meaningless if he didn’t get out of his infinity pool and do something.
But before Solomon, or anyone else, can step outside of the box they were born into and take action for meaningful change, first they have to care. And man is it hard to get people to care. Especially when their thrownness shields them from a lot of the world’s hurt.
I spent the weekend talking about this concept, but from a different angle. I serve on the Conference Committee on Religion and Race, also known as CCORR, and Friday through Saturday we had a retreat in Syracuse so we could have a long, in person meeting to iron out our goals for the next year. What I’ve loved about my colleagues on CCORR is their willingness to say the quiet part out loud. In polite conversation, no one is supposed to question Solomon is his bazillion dollar palace eating caviar while people are starving and homeless a hundred feet away. After all it’s not like Solomon stole all that money, he inherited it from his parents. And it wasn’t his fault that his neighbors were destitute. It didn’t make him a bad person because he was privileged, so why shouldn’t he get to enjoy what he had? We won’t criticize the top 1%, we’ll just make sure we keep the poor and oppressed in our thoughts and prayers.
CCORR is a place where we challenge that politeness because thoughts and prayers aren’t enough on their own, and we don’t want the Church to become an aloof and irrelevant institution to our neighbors. And while there are many evils in the world for us to take on, we can’t tackle them all at once and expect to change things, so we focus on the social sins of racism and white supremacy.
Six years ago, the UMC rolled out a curriculum called Imagine No Racism, a small group course that could be taught in a month and a half, and that was modeled after Imagine No Malaria, an older Methodist initiative that focused on distributing bed nets in sub Saharan Africa to fight the malaria epidemic in that part of the world. Just like how Imagine No Malaria’s goal was for every person who needed a bed net to get one, the goal with Imagine No Racism was for everyone in all of our churches to take the class, and get educated on overt and covert racism, white privilege, implicit biases, and some steps to move forward.
Our goal now is to get our churches to do something. Even in the year of our Lord 2024, we still have churches reporting to CCORR that they’re not going to engage with Imagine No Racism, because there’s no people of color in their church, so they don’t need to talk about that. Like Solomon at the beginning of Ecclesiastes, a lot of us succumb to the temptation to follow the path of least resistance, enjoy the privileges we have, and do nothing to help our neighbors. But Solomon’s big breakthrough in this book happens in the very next chapter, in the words we’re so familiar with, when he realizes that for everything there is a season, and that honoring the natural order of the world requires action on his part. We have to tear down and build up, we have to love the good and hate the evil, we have to throw away stones and gather them together, we have to mourn the suffering we see, and then help the world get to a place where, if there’s going to be partying in a palace, everyone will get an invitation.
Just like how Solomon couldn’t help his thrownness, that he was born into royalty, we can’t help our thrownness. We were born with a skin color, with a gender identity and national origin, in the place we lived, into a socioeconomic class. And we live in a world where being born with light skin gives you an advantage over your neighbors of color, even if you still struggle in this life. Our next goal on CCORR is to plan out a sequel class to Imagine No Racism, where, now that we’ve all imagined it together, we collectively ask, now what? And then we act.
If you, like Solomon, ever have moments where you feel depressed because the world is burning and nothing ever seems to change, know that you feel that way because you’re a good person. That’s Jesus talking to you through your conscience. Listen to him. The solution to that world-weary depression is no small lift, as Solomon discovered himself. But we immediately start feeling better, more spiritually fulfilled, and more at peace with life when we actively address our neighbor’s pain instead of ignoring it out of convenience. And none of us can fix the world on our own, but it doesn’t mean we can’t go do something, because now is the season for that.
Amen.
*Hymn Spirit of the Living God #393
Offering
Offertory
*Doxology #94
*Prayer of dedication
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer
Ageless one, who created time
And is sovereign over its every passing moment –
Be near to us at this turning of the year.
Help us to look back and celebrate all you have done
And all you have accomplished through us
To build your kingdom of justice and peace.
Empower us to also face the disappointment
And holy frustration of the change we have yet to see
And the injustice that continues to rob so many of their future.
And above all, fill us with your Spirit
That we might look to the year ahead with hope, determination and love
For we need your perspective as we continue to work with you
For an end to poverty, and a future for all.
Amen.
— from the Christian Aid website.
Our Father, Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Lead us, not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.
*Hymn Lift High the Cross #159
Benediction
Postlude
Staff
Natalie Bowerman Pastor
Betsy Lehmann Music Director
Joe White Custodian
Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant
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