Making All Things New Ecclesiastes 3:1-13, Revelation 21:1-6

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…

I was listening to National Public Radio Thursday
and heard that the Berghoff Restaurant, a 107 year old Chicago landmark
will be closing in February.
After working there 55 years, current owner Herman Berghoff, age 70, wants to retire.
He’s going to lease the space to his daughter who runs a catering business.
The Berghoff was begun by the current owner’s grandfather, also Herman,
who immigrated from Germany and opened a place where he would give away
sandwiches for free to anyone who would pay a nickel for a mug of his beer.
When asked to reflect on the landmark’s closing, Michael Santiago, longtime maitre’d
said, “Nothing lasts forever.”

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…
Restaurants open, restaurants close.
A baby is born. An old man dies.
A year begins. A year ends. A year begins again.
It does seem a cycle, this life of ours.
Was Michael Santiago right? NOTHING lasts forever?
That’s what the author of Ecclesiastes would have us think.
His premise is that EVERYTHING is part of the cycle,
that EVERYTHING, good AND bad, comes and goes,
and the best we can hope for is something tasty to eat,
something satisfying to drink,
and a little enjoyment out of our daily work.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad sentiment.
In fact, the older I get, the more I appreciate that kind of simple expectation.
Teenagers are terribly critical of parents and others who seem to have settled
for so little in life.
From their vantage point they imagine that there are so many exciting things to do;
so many dragons to slay and citadels to conquer
and they can’t wait to write their names indelibly across the sky.
They imagine that they will never let themselves get so boring as we!
For example, a few days ago, I asked my daughter Katie
if she had any New Year’s Eve plans, and she replied, “Not yet.”
So, joking, I proposed we do what we did as a family when she was a little girl,
gets some hats and noisemakers and pop open a bottle of sparkling cider about 8 p.m.
She sneered at the thought and with great condescension said,
“That’s all you guys EVER do!”
And it’s true! Kathryn and I have never celebrated New Years Eve with much flare.
We’ve been more content to spend the evening quietly.
After all it’s only another year. Just one more year in a cycle of years.
What else should we expect?
A little to eat. A little to drink. A little satisfaction out of our daily toil.
It’s not such a bad way to look at things.
Those teenagers will learn.
Wait until they get a mortgage!
You’re born, you live, you die - everything is part of the cycle.
Planting, reaping, laughing, weeping, love, hate, peace, war.
And, to further quote the author of Ecclesiastes,
“There is nothing new under the sun.”
OR IS THERE?

John, writing in exile from the island of Patmos, one of the Greek islands,
offers us in Revelation a different vision than the author of Ecclesiastes.
In John’s vision, life may be cyclical on the surface,
but there is, in his view, an overarching linear movement,
a grand progression from beginning to end,
a broad sweep of eternity which INCLUDES the familiar cycles
but is not LIMITED by them.
We are bound by time, but John, in his faith,
understands that God exists outside of time.
And while we experience life in cycles: birth, death, joy, pain, peace, war,
we are, by God’s grace, related to a Creator who stands outside the cycles.
Our perceived reality may be that there is nothing new under the sun,
that one year follows another, follows another, follows another,
but John’s vision is that God is always in the process of making all things new.

Ecclesiastes is classified in the Old Testament along with Proverbs
as “Wisdom” literature.
Though it claims a connection to King Solomon
literary evidence suggests it was written much later.
The author does break new theological ground when he writes that it’s possible
to find satisfaction and not just drudgery in work.
But, overall, he comes across sounding more bored than satisfied.
“Vanity of vanities” he likes to say. “Everything is vanity.”
Bored – maybe cynical.

You know what he REALLY sounds like?
He sounds like an upper middle class preacher
who lives off the largess of a benefactor or two
and has nothing to challenge him, nothing to excite him,
nothing to make him sweat OR dance.
He enjoys his meals, a good bottle of wine every now and again,
and he is the center of his own universe.
He’s the kind who proclaims loudly to any who’ll listen
that the only experience worth having is HIS experience,
the only thing worthy of trust is that which HE can taste, touch, see, hear, or smell.

But the author of Revelation, this seer identified as John, is very different.
First of all, he’s in exile for some reason on an island.
We don’t know details, but we know what “exile” means.
It means that he’s cut off from familiar surroundings,
cut off from people he loves,
cut off from his routine frame of reference.
Furthermore, he’s obviously writing to people who are suffering persecution.
Because John has such a flare for imagery in his writing
the book of Revelation seems, at first glance, very mysterious.
But scratch beneath the surface and it’s not mysterious at all.
It only SEEMS mysterious because it’s written in code to confuse an oppressor
in much the same way slaves in the South would sing songs to one another
that sounded to white masters like simple hymns of faith
but which, in fact, carried hidden messages of defiance and freedom.

John is writing in a turbulent time
to fellow Christians who are severely persecuted by Rome.
He doesn’t have the luxury of reclining with a glass of wine
to write poetry or to wax eloquently on the “vanity” of life.
His mission is to interpret the signs of troubled times and find in them hope.
His task is to look beyond himself,
to break out of the narrow box of his own experience, his own senses,
and discern what God is up to.

If he were the author of Ecclesiastes he would say to his suffering audience,
“Look, that’s just the way it is. You win some, you lose some.
It’s just plain old bad luck that you happen to be stuck in a down cycle.
Just accept it. That’s all you can do.”
But John is given the gift of being able to see beyond immediate circumstances:
beyond the upside of comfort and the downside of pain,
beyond the upside of joy and the downside of grief.
He knows about cycles. But he knows that just because we are limited by them
it doesn’t mean God is.
God revealed that to him – God revealed that to us all – in the birth of God’s son,
in the interjection of God’s self into human history.
No, that’s not entirely true.
Despite the witness of Ecclesiastes that life is just the same old thing over and over
the Jews had known ever since God made covenant with Abraham
that God chooses to stand with one foot in eternity and one foot in human history.
Jesus was simply the once and for all confirmation of that;
the final, unambiguous, BIG BOLD LETTERS spelling that out.

The birth of Jesus in a specific place, at a specific time, to specific parents
was the clear indication that we aren’t just fish in a pond swimming round and round
instead, we’re fish in a river swimming toward a destination.
And John tells us in his grand, metaphorical way what that destination will be like.
Though we may FEEL trapped in the cycle of birth, death, love, hate, peace, war
at times more sure of God’s absence than God’s presence,
there will come a time when it will all be made clear.
There will come a time when it will be evident what, in Jesus, God has already begun.
Now we see only glimpses of it. Now we only catch bits and pieces of it.
Like a conversation overheard through a closed door
or brief activity caught in the corner of the eye.
But there will come a time when God’s presence among us will be clearly revealed
and we will drink deeply from the spring of the water of life.
UNTIL THAT TIME, we have to be vigilant
that we don’t get sucked into a cycle of despair or cynicism.
It’s easy to do. Especially as we get older and think we’ve seen it all.
That’s why we need teenagers around us!

You may have seen the story in the paper Friday about Farris Hassan,
a 16 year old boy from Florida who got so into the idea of “immersion” journalism
that, without his parents’ knowledge, he traveled over Christmas break to Baghdad.[1]
Farris, who is of Iraqi ancestry but who was born and raised American,
went to Iraq because, as he wrote in an essay, he wanted to “experience during my
Christmas the same hardships ordinary Iraqis experience every day,
so that I may better empathize with their distress.”
His mother, though clearly proud of her son, reacted understandably saying,
“I don’t think I’ll ever leave him in the house alone again!”
And, while the potential danger of his trip has begun to sink in,
Farris still told reporters, “You go like, to the worst place in the world
and things are terrible, but when you go back home you have such a new
appreciation for all the things you have there,
and I’m just going to be, like, ecstatic for life!”

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new!”

1 American Youth Disappears to Make Perilous Trip to Iraq. Charlottesville, VA: The Daily Progress,
Section A, pp. 1, 9, Friday, December 30, 2005.