For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.
There is a time to kill and a time heal.
This verse, I knew, was going to be the hardest to write about because that phrase 'to kill' is such touchy one. In my Jewish study Bible, it's even worse "to slay" which brings about all sorts of systematic visions of movies like Braveheart, Gladiator, and Hot Shots: Part Deux. Our current culture has the most distinctive dualistic relationship with death and violence. On one hand, we do everything by every means to avoid death and dying, but on the other hand, we are fixated on death to the point where we consciously or unconsciously slow down for car accidents, rewatch injuries during athletic contests or even subject ourselves to the vilest forms of 'entertainment.'
What is it about death that makes us feel squeamish and fascinated at the same time?
A few years ago I attended a Halloween party that was bacchanalic in its embracing of gore and violence. I was shocked by how much Halloween had changed from a "boo! - Oh, that's a good one" kind of funny, to explicitly portrayed violence through the haunted house which featured decapitated corpses staggering from a casket, to pools of fake blood running across the cement floor. It doesn't seem that long ago when Friday the 13th was the scariest movie of all time, but kids don't even notice a movie like that any more. There's no realism. There was no realism until a series came out in the mid 1990's - black listed of course - called the Faces of Death which were live video footage of people dying.
Now, we don't even have it blacklisted: it's on our own news services, whether religiously inspired beheadings, suicide bombers driving planes into buildings or car accidents happening too fast for the mind to comprehend. America has become immune to violence and it is a sad, depressing thing. Many of the kids I have asked "Why do you watch this stuff?" respond - "If it's happening to someone else, I can be thankful it's not happening to me."
So, our world is inundated with death and the fear of death and we sink further and further into the presumed safety of our own little worlds, inside our texting devices, in front of our television screens, typing furiously before the computer monitors hoping and praying that the angel of death is, like a moth to a street lamp, more attracted to the light of the outside world . Our relationships suffer; we become a society ruled by fear of the other. Remember what it was like to shake hands with everyone without the thought of 'swineflu' running through our brains. Our fear of death is killing community life one village at a time.
There is a time to kill but I believe it's not killing of another person; that, to me, makes no sense, but the killing of our ego - the killing of our pride, the death of our fear; phobicide. What would happen to this world, to our nation, to our village, to our families and selves if we moved past the fear of death to open the door of abundant life which is in community with other people. What if we murdered our television sets and took steps outside the front door for hours at a time. What if we wrote letters again, called people on the phone just to hear the sound of their voice? What if we began to heal our society from the inside out learning to forget the fear and find ourselves in the middle of a family of humanity? What if?
The dualistic nature of Ecclesiastes 3 is no more apparent than in verse three. "A time to kill, and a time to heal; (an alternative translation from Hebrew is: A time for wrecking and a time for repairing). A time to break down and a time to build up.
"Breaking down" can mean a multitude of things.
1. To cut something up into manageable pieces. "Can you break that down for me?"
2. Something most football players despise. During my football years, the coach would blow his whistle where we would then run in place as fast as we could until he blew the whistle again and yell "Break down!" which would see us then fall to the ground as fast as we could then rising attempting to not be the last one to stand again.
3. To extemporize rap-style. i.e. In the immortal words of M.C. Hammer "Break it down, now."
4. To flatten card board boxes. When I worked at Radio Shack, this was the main focus of my job. I always wanted to be a great salesperson. I would study the specs for all of the electronic gadgets - the robotic toys, the CD players, all sorts of needless necessities that kids crave - and then every time someone would come in to buy a computer or any other high end product, the store manager would approach the customer, relieve me of my prospective commission and relegate me out the backdoor to break down cardboard boxes. I grew so frustrated with him that I pretended the boxes were him and I punched them time and time again. He only caught me once. It was especially embarrassing because I had drawn a picture of him on the cardboard box and talking to the box while punching it saying things like, "Oh, you think that's funny, stealing my fifty dollar commission? How funny is this? Do you like that? How about a double kick to your face?"
There's a time to kill cardboard boxes, I guess.
But the breaking down that Ecclesiastes calls for, I believe, is the breaking down of walls of pride. And oh, the walls that we build are hard. The only thing that seems to have any sort of success against our walls is a word of forgiveness. I, for one, would rather have the wall than speak of forgiveness sometimes.
Sometimes our sinful self would rather kill a relationship than to work through the difficult times of confession and forgiveness. Mark Steele has an interesting view on how human nature works. From his book Half Life/Die Already
There have been too many important decisions to count in my life -
but six are instrumental to this story.
The first of which was the transition from offended to teachable. My assumption had been that this would be an evolution - something that would grow in me over time without much effort on my part. This was, of course, ridiculous, because offended is easy and teachable is a state of being about as attainable as invisibility. I had assumed I was teachable because I was sometimes teachable, but of course, this also meant that I was at other times offended. This is not a decision. This is a state of stuck. I had always hoped that in every instance where I experienced tension between these two states oppositions would eventually merge into one reality.
No Dice.
It became evident that change would not come until I began deep introspection in every aspect of my life. The first aspect: When things did not go my way, how did I respond to disappointment? More often than not, by holding on to the offense. So funny. I have hurt so many people in so many different ways and, because I understood what I intended, I think the wounded should leap over tall buildings to forgive me. But when the hurt is done to me, I think the wounder should pay. I don't actually say this, because that would be un-Christian. I instead imagine lengthy conversations that are awkward for them and rewarding for me and when I am finished with the imagination, I have less hair and a pit of acid in my stomach. In certain seasons, I have carried unforgiveness, and it has tangled and soured in my stomach like spilled milk in a shag rug. Many ask me: Why do people keep hurting me? But I think this is the wrong question. Maybe when wounded, we should ask,
What am I refusing to learn?
In other words, why am I refusing to learn to forgive. I think at the heart of healing or building up is forgiveness. We heal others by giving the gift of forgiveness which truly is the gift of life. If my spouse has erred in some small way, I could hold that transgression against her thereby giving me a sense (albeit false) of power over her, but at that point, our married existence is being strangled, losing air, losing life - it is being killed. But forgiveness opens the airways, it allows new life to begin. It allows us to take the fear out of marriage and gives us renewed zeal to begin again.
A time to kill - I'm being a bit terse but - try and kill our love affairs with electronics. Turn off the tube - talk to the family; share life with the neighbors.
A time to heal - Speak, write - lay down the cell phone.
A time to break down - unforgiveness; it is extraordinarily easy to retain forgiveness, to hold the power of life or death over a relationship
A time to build up. Experience new life in within the bounds of forgiveness.
Have a great week.
Reid
