December 28, 2025

Ha‘olam

There are a lot of reasons many of us will be glad to say goodbye to 2025.  Among them is that it’s been difficult to watch the news without closing our eyes and releasing a sigh that is both an exclamation and a prayer: “God, have mercy.”  Among the atrocities we have been horrified to hear of: a man who gunned down several people at Brown University last week, killing two and injuring nine others. There have been 30 deadlier shootings in the U.S. this year, including one at a high school homecoming celebration in Leland, Mississippi that left seven dead.  And it’s not just in our country.  Just two weeks ago today two gunmen killed at least 15 people and injuring 42 others at a Hanukkah gathering at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.

In Matthew’s account of the visitation of the Magi, we read that, “When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.”  That verse has a deep and sickening resonance in these days.  Herod would make a fine figure to grace our evening news.  And when we read in the same account that Mary and Joseph fled the country and became refugees in Egypt to save the life of their child, it is a story ripped from yesterday’s headlines. Today, we also see people fleeing their countries in fear or hopelessness, and so often being turned away, sent back to danger or even torture . . . “No room in the inn.”

There certainly seems to be a timelessness to the irrational shedding of blood, and the heartless dismissal of refugees.  When the author of the words we read this morning from Ecclesiastes said that, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” and, “He has made everything suitable for its time,” it’s hard to believe that includes a time for such inhumanity and lack of compassion.

We embark upon the year 2026 like refugees from the past.  Terrorism, war, natural disaster have changed our world.  The homeland of security, the ordered world in which we once lived, has been washed away, and we find ourselves wandering through a strange land of traumas and questions.  The beginning of the year is a good time for hard questions.  It’s a time when the world itself seems to stop spinning for a moment while we catch our collective breath and look back to where we have come from, and then ahead to where we are going.  So, here’s a question to ponder while we sit on the doorstep of 2026: what in the world are we doing here, and what is the Lord Almighty doing?  I would not be brash enough to attempt an answer in fifteen minutes on this Sunday morning, but I’d like to start turning the gears in my head and think out loud about it, if it’s OK with you.

These verses from Ecclesiastes are a great place to start.  They’re transcendent words that don’t try to sell you anything; they just open up a little hole in reality and take a peek inside.  By far, the most fascinating of all the words here is this one in verse 11: “He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put ha‘olam into their minds . . .”  That’s the Hebrew word in the original texts: ha‘olam.  Here’s what I like about that word.  All of the best Biblical scholars of our age can’t agree on just what it means.  That’s the kind of thing that sends chills up my spine.  I love it when God turns out to be smarter than William Hertzog.  The New Revised Standard Version, from which we read this morning, translates this single word as a phrase: “a sense of past and future.”  Any time you find a single Hebrew word translated into a nebulous phrase like that, you can bet it’s a lulu of a translation problem.  That’s clearly one of the choices, though.  And it’s certainly an appropriate one for us as we approach January first.  We can’t begin to tackle the nagging questions that rise up in us like a raging sea without a “sense of the past and future.”

The past is the source of both our fears and our hopes.  We have borne witness to grief, catastrophe, brutality, and callousness. and we know just how hard and cruel the world can be.  But we have also seen the triumph of the human spirit, the victory of courage over difficulty, and the shining example of those who have passed in majesty before us like tall ships, showing the way through dark waters.  All too often, I think, we fall into either despairing over the traumas of our age, or idealizing our past and thinking of ourselves as the chosen ones.  It is terribly important, as we sit here pondering our place in the scheme of things, to look back, and in our looking back to never succumb to the tyranny of selective vision.  We must see the dangers in order to prepare ourselves, we must see the evil in order to battle against it in our own hearts, and we must also see the beauty in order to lift it up and celebrate it.  Perhaps that’s the genius of “For everything there is a season . . .”  It reminds us that it’s all there, and all has to be accounted for.

But we also need a sense of the future.  We need to consider our own, personal futures (Lord knows, I need that), and we need to reflect on the future of this great enterprise we’re part of – the Divine human experiment, if you will.  Indeed, it is our concern for the future, the future that our children and our children’s children will inherit, that offers hope in the most hopeless of circumstances.  In Richard Attenborough’s famous film, Gandhi is on a hunger-strike to stop the violence between Hindus and Muslims. A Hindu rioter comes up to Gandhi and throws a piece of bread at him saying, “Eat!  I am going to hell – but not with your death on my soul.”  To which Gandhi replies, “Only God decides who goes to hell.”  The rioter then explains how he killed a little Muslim boy by smashing his skull against a wall after the Muslims killed his own little boy.  Gandhi tells the man, “I know a way out of hell.  Find . . . a little boy . . . and raise him as your own.  Only be sure that he’s a Muslim, and that you raise him as one.”  The story is telling.  It reminds us that the only way to redeem our own futures is to put in our hearts the love that is born of a sense of the eternal future.  Maybe that’s the power of another translation of this word, ha‘olam.  It’s sometimes rendered as eternity.  If the Lord places eternity in our hearts, then we each have the chance in any moment to see the whole “world in a grain of sand,” or the whole future in the eyes of a child.

But my favorite word used to translate ha‘olam is world.  God has placed the world in our hearts.  Therein lies the greatest hope for us.  The world has been put in our hearts.  I take that to mean that when a hurricane swept across Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba a couple of months ago, we were compelled to close our eyes and breathe a prayer that swelled up from our own broken hearts.  And more, we were moved to open our treasure chests and to reach out with whatever hands we have to people whose spirits were dashed against the rocks.  People all over the world have poured resources into relief efforts for war refugees and when disaster has struck.  Untold tens of millions of dollars have poured in from people like you and me everywhere.  And members of this church have donated generously to our local food banks and to domestic and global relief efforts through our contributions to the UCC.

God has put the world in our hearts, and that’s a wonderful thing.  All too frequently, we forget that it’s there.  It’s so easy to think of international conflicts as too big and too complicated for us to do anything about, and therefore to care much about, or to consider people of other nations and religions as so vastly different from us that we have no common bond with them.  But those are illusory thoughts, and when the bombs drop, or the ocean rages, or the heavens crash against our brothers and sisters across the globe, or people come to our land with hope in their hearts we realize it.

Ecclesiastes says God has ordained that “there is a time for every matter under heaven,” and “has made everything suitable in its time.”  How do we square that with the heartless work of earthquakes and storms?  How do we square that with a world seemingly bent on mutual destruction?  How do we square that with the personal traumas of dreams deferred and hearts broken too early?  And how do we find our own place in the world, or comprehend the Lord’s place in it?

Well, as for the Lord’s place, apparently that’s intended to remain something of a mystery.  Ecclesiastes says that we “cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”  I guess, for whatever reason, that’s just the way it’s supposed to be.  Where is the Lord of Heaven and Earth?  I believe that Lord is, at a minimum, with the poor, in a tent camp with a Syrian refugee family, on the South Side of Chicago with a mother grieving for her son cut down in the streets.  That mother’s tears are ancient.  In response to Herod’s slaughter of the little ones, Matthew quotes the prophet Jeremiah:

“A voice was heard in Ramah,

wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;

she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

Rachel eternally weeps for her children, and that’s where you can expect to find Emmanuel, God with us.

And as for our place in the ageless story?  Well, the Lord has put ha‘olam into our hearts and minds.  And that gives us at least a good starting place for figuring out where we fit in the whole thing.  We have the past to serve as a guide.  Let us never forget its lessons, or fail to treasure its wonders.  We have the future to give us hope.  Let us never falter in our determination to help our children find a way out of the hell that might otherwise be left to them.  And, wonder of all, we have the world placed in our hearts.  Let us never let go of it.