(Please read this Scripture passage first, before the homily.)
A couple I know buried their eleven-year-old son who had died in a freak playground accident at school. The boy’s headstone reads 1990-2002. The parents told me to look at the dash that separates the numbers. That dash tells the story of a young boy’s life in his family.
A time to be born and a time to die; a time to scatter and a time to gather; a time for this and a time for that. We have a union of opposites, of beginnings and of endings. The dash between tells the story of relationships, of life, of family, of work, of play. The co-Vid virus came and the virus will eventually end, but the dash in between tells of the pain, the suffering, the losses in family, friends and community, local and world-wide.
In the beginning God made them male and female: the dash in between says that God made all of us humans, even those between the male and the female. In Revelation, the voice declares himself the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning of the Greek alphabet and the end of the Greek alphabet, the be-all and the end-all of creation and of God’s love.
Ecclesiastes, or Qoheleth, considered the totality of God’s creative activity in the human terms of opposites, but the opposites include everything in between, the dashes that mark out the details of our lives. Did Qoheleth find everything hopelessly futile and empty in themselves or from his point of view? Did Qoheleth see only the opposites and miss everything in between?
Is the forest only the trees? Is life only the dates on a tombstone? Is the day only getting out of bed and going back to bed? Is work only punching a timeclock twice a day? Is the party only the door of welcoming and the door of departure? Do the opposites not hold the totality between the two extremes? Do we have better vision than Qoheleth?
Does God’s timelessness become boring for us, from beginning to ending? God’s timelessness can challenge us to see how our times fit into God’s timelessness as a letter fits into an envelope.
The dash of the boy’s tombstone says that the day he died he had asked his Mom to iron his favorite shirt for school. The dash says that he had two sisters and one brother. The dash spoke of his popularity at school. The dash spoke of his self-giving, his pleasant humor, his ease in sports, the love of grandparents and the challenge of parents. He came into our time, but has entered into God’s timelessness. From first to last, his life was not boring but colorful.
There is an appointed time for everything, but the appointed time is in God’s timely timelessness. Qoheleth invites us into this time to find that the opposites hold the reality of the totality. I would also add that God saw all he had made and it was very good.