There are very few passages of scripture that are deemed to make good lyrics for pop songs. Boney M somehow managed to turn Psalm 137 into the hit song By the Rivers of Babylon – a rather glib, discofied reflection on second exile of Israel which can still pack a dance floor. Then of course there was Cliff Richard’s attempt to Christianise the millennium with his setting of the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew’s Gospel, which despite being the number one single at the turn of 2000, was famously described by George Michael as a “heinous piece of music”. But perhaps no setting of scripture to pop music was so successful as the Byrds 1965 hit Turn! Turn! Turn! with lyrics adapted from the passage from Ecclesiastes we heard this evening:
To everything
There is a season
And a time for every purpose, under heaven.
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep.
It was popular then, as this passage is still popular today (many people ask for it at funerals) because it rings true for people. It is part of that body of literature in the Old Testament that expresses timeless wisdom. Life is full of opposite experiences and wisdom comes in recognising which way the tide is flowing. And there is sustenance in being conscious of those opposites too, because it means that when we are in the time to weep, we know that one day will again come the time to laugh, when we are in the time to keep silence, there will come the time to speak, and when we are in the dark days of war, there will again come the time for peace.
But there is a way of interpreting this passage which many find very attractive, that is in fact rather dangerous, and that is as an expression of Stoic philosophy. Today we mostly use “stoical” as merely a synonym for “sanguine”, and there is something of its meaning in that. But Stoicism was a complex philosophical system that was popular particularly in the early centuries of the Common Era and is still present in certain New Age forms today. Essentially, the Stoics viewed the cosmos as an integrated whole in which all physical matter is animated by a material force called pneuma (which means breath). This force is the energy which holds all things together, permeating all things and causing the behaviour of all things. For Stoics, Pneuma is the rational force according to which all the material world is arranged and ordered. That may sound a lot like God, and the fact that pneuma is the word used in the New Testament for the Holy Spirit and that this force also sounds a lot like the Logos which the writer of John’s Gospel interprets as Christ, shows that Stoicism and Christianity have some seriously interesting points of overlap.
But there are also some important points of departure and the one that concerns me in relation to the popular interpretation of Ecclesiastes is, I suppose, that of fatalism. Since they viewed the world to be this coherent material whole, the Stoics felt that you couldn’t pick and choose what you would like to occur within the world. Everything that occurs is a necessary part of a whole which they believed to be good overall. Even the most terrible disaster will be seen to have its usefulness in the end. It’s rather like the modern equivalent that I hear an enormous amount when people express their belief that “bad things happen for a reason and everything works itself out in the end”. How are we to interpret that on this Holocaust Memorial Sunday? The Stoic interpretation of this passage says: well there’s no point resisting war, we just have to wait for the time for peace; there’s no point combating hatred, we just have to wait for the time to love; there’s no point getting upset about death, you have after all had your time to born…
Stoicism appealed to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius who said that “to be vexed at anything that happens is a separation of ourselves from nature”. One might suggest that the comfortable life of a Roman Emperor permitted for that kind of worldview and it might have been interesting to hear the opinions of his galley slaves, who, it seems to me, had just cause to be vexed at the state of the world! And that’s an important point, because what emerged in the encounter between Stoicism and the early Christian Church was the realisation that being vexed at the world, far from being an inappropriate and unnatural thing, was in fact an important part of the Christian vocation. Being vexed is the beginning of the kind of hungering and thirsting after righteousness that Jesus tells us is a blessed thing in the Sermon on the Mount.
St Augustine, who was particularly concerned to put some clear blue water between Christianity and all things pagan, puts it rather beautifully when he wrote that what is lacking in Stoicism is grief. The Stoics genuinely thought that wise people should not grieve for anything. Grief is, after all, an intense experience of being vexed. But grieve we must, says Augustine, because, as we find in St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, “godly grief worketh repentance to salvation”. For Augustine, the nature which Emperor Aurelius saw vexation as separating us from, is a disordered nature – created by God but fallen from grace and awaiting full restoration at the return of Christ. So it is fallen nature, or sin, that we must grieve for, because if we grieve for sin, then we will repent of sin, and slowly but surely the world will be reordered according to God’s plan. The kind of “Turn! Turn! Turn!” to which the Christian is called, is not simply resignation to the turning of the windmills of time, but the decisive turn from darkness to light. Augustine actually believed that the once and for all event of Jesus Christ, was a liberation from society going round in circles.
So that’s my concern with Ecclesiastes, that in acknowledging the reality of the time for war and hatred, for killing and for rejecting the human embrace, we don’t fully grieve over these things, for the failure they represent. We don’t fully grieve for death. And because we don’t grieve we don’t repent and work to shift the balance. Stoicism militates against us working to prevent war, challenging hatred when we or others are confronted with it, and working to resist our global culture of killing.
Fundamentally, the Stoics believed that you couldn’t shape time, you just had to live through it and there was no point getting vexed in trying to fathom any of it out. That’s what we have at the end of this passage from Ecclesiastes too, as the teacher questions the point of those who toil: “God has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end”.
Our reading from the first letter of Peter gives a very different view indeed. Like Augustine, Peter is so excited precisely because he is convinced that God’s purposes in the shaping of time have been dramatically and plainly revealed: “By his grace God has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead”. This enables the proclaiming of the Good News, which, in the power of the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, is radically altering people’s relationship to nature, to time, to other people, and to God. There is no room for fatalism now, the rest of Peter’s letter is a call to action, a call to witness and to the reshaping of the world in the light of the Resurrection and the gift of the Spirit.
That must be as true for Christians today. We cannot accept the Stoical beliefs that we encounter, perhaps in relation to the possibility of averting ecological disaster. We must believe that we can shape time since God has shaped time in the incarnation of Jesus Christ and continues to do so in the Holy Spirit through Church and World. And first we are called to grieve; we are called to be vexed – vexed at the realities of human sin that surround us: war, hatred, killing and rejection. The writer of Ecclesiastes is certainly right that in our fallen world there is a time for all these things. But there will come a time when God will wipe away every tear from our eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain. And the Spirit is moving us toward that time now in the love and compassion that we share with one another which springs only from our grief that the world is not as it should be.
So there is no room for fatalism in the Christian faith. It is important that we should be vexed!