For Everything a Season

I write this at the Reader retreat at Pleshey where our leader, the Revd. Lizzie Hood, has taken us though ways of looking at time: times past, present and future. In fact, one exercise was to divide ourselves into those who feel they are more concerned with the past, those for whom the present is all-important and those who spend much of their time looking ahead. Where do you fit in this?

All views of time are necessary. Our whole Christian story is based on the past – the Old Testament scriptures with their looking towards the coming of the Messiah, then Jesus’ life on earth, his death and resurrection: indeed, many years of history.

Yet we cannot ignore the present. That is where we are, where we can grasp the present moment, a pattern set by Jesus Christ, in his miracles, in his ‘I am…’words. God describes himself as ‘I am’, surely an image which evokes the present.

Nor can we avoid at least some vision of the future, both personal and wider. Our whole ethos of life encourages us to work towards the future: education, career, retirement…and we look, sometimes with fear, on the coming events in the world, echoed in our daily prayers.

This last weekend has encapsulated all these aspects in our Harvest Festival, where we celebrate the provision of crops, the harvest of earlier sowing and toil and we look to the future, particularly for the work of Mission Direct, through the Bishops’ Harvest Appeal.

Let us continue those well-known words of Ecclesiastes as we give thanks for the seasons of nature, the seasons of life:

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 keep, and a time to throw away;

a time to keep silence and a time to speak. Amen