Our first reading today - Ecclesiastes in Greek or Qoheleth in Hebrew - is a part of the Wisdom tradition in Israel’s scriptures. It is a common reading read in funeral liturgies. In this reading, a wise person reflects on different times in his life: a times of death and birth, times of killing and healing, times of weeping and laughing. There are times and seasons in the way nature and ecology functions. There are times and season in our lives. While each time and season may seem to happen randomly, the underlying significance of this reading today is that there is a divine purpose for everything that happens in our lives. We are reminded in the sovereignty of God, the creator and ruler of heaven and earth. I think one of the things we have learned during this pandemic is that there are so many things that are beyond our human control of things. We may have a smart phone in our pockets that is more powerful than the computers that put the man on the moon. We may have advanced technology that many of our us could not have imagined as children. But there are many elements of our existence that are beyond our control. We cannot conquer time. God appoints each moment. Indeed, our lives here on earth are a mixture of joy and sorrow, of pleasure and pain, of harmony and struggle, of life and death. Each season has an appropriate time in the cycle of life. Nothing stays the same.
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