Friday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Wooded hillside and creekbed

There is an appointed time for everything,
and a time for every thing under the heavens.

In 1959 Pete Seeger wrote the song, Turn,Turn,Turn based on this passage from Ecclesiastes, adding only the words, “ I swear it's not too late.” The band, The Byrds made the song briefly famous, and some of us old folks still remember their plea for world peace.

But Qoheleth's poem is less about world peace than a teaching about life and its mysteries. There is a time for everything. And the wise person knows the time.

In its original Greek language, the word is not chronos but kairos. Chronos refers to the hour of the day as calculated since midnight or sunup or whatever. It counts the hours by number.

Kairos refers to the moment or the season when something is appropriate. There is a time for bawdy jokes but not usually at a funeral. There is a time for mourning the dead but not usually during a cocktail party.

A wise person knows the time and acts accordingly. Some might call it “common sense” or maturity and they would not be far wrong.

But the road of wisdom is a long one and, even among sensible adults, there may be hard discussions about the time. Should we invest in new projects or save our money for another day? Should we now wage war or peace? Is it time to invite immigrants or exclude them?

Many people remember British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement in dealing with the tyrant Hitler in 1938. Even today his stance is regarded as cowardly, foolish and insane. The time had come for all-out war -- or so it seemed to many – and nations threw themselves with terrible energy into the worse war in human history. Seventy years after the fact, we look back and wonder why anyone hesitated to enter that war.

But it’s never easy to know the time. Should we have invaded Afghanistan after 9/11? And Iraq a few months later? Is it now time to withdraw from that chronically troubled part of the world?

Qoheleth understood there is a time for everything under heaven and the sage knows the time, but he also knew that awareness is given by the Spirit of Wisdom.

With this song Qoheleth teaches us to pray continually that we will know the time, and act accordingly.