Nothing New Under the Sun

Sometimes there’s nothing as significant as simply raking the leaves on a wind-swept day with your grandmother. She simply came up to me on Sunday morning, right after a lovely sermon, as I stood catching up with an old friend. It was in this setting of warm fellowship, within the familiarity of the church and church friends, that her idea bloomed up to me. And it did require going up, from her form their peering beseechingly to my stratosphere at above 6'3" altitude. The majority of the people are obliged to crane their necks to converse with my high lean figure, so this wasn't disrupting the expected. It had occurred to her in that atmosphere of reflected and deflected utterances of Christian love, rooted from everything spoke and mentioned in that high-steepled place, to accept the compellent nature of God's love and be compelled. To what end? To rake.

The next day I found myself waiting in the church parking lot: rake, jacket, gloves, complete with bagged lunch; all in hand for the days work. Talk was sparked with some comics between us, then pragmatics, everything else following and falling in between. The sharp notes of our voices rose and fell with every moment, noting the work to be done and cares of the moment, slowly weaving through to the level of the mundane lives lead from moment to moment, day to day. Yes, mundane, steady, expected, and yet completely magnificent. The magnificence of the everyday in and out, up and down, within and without. Her aged demeanor drove carefully and deliberately on the highways and low roads until we arrived at our first destination, my uncle's mother's small plot in the maze of American suburbia. We arrived, unloaded, and began the day's long work.

The initial fury of our sweeps and stows at the depthless leaves soon gave way to the rhythm of burying our hands into the piles to bring the remnants of last summer to the light of day, only to be plunged back again into the dark plastic wrap. As any work with the land demands, the work undulated with breaks for breathers and additional sacks for the flowing heaps of leaves. A glass of water and brown sugar oatmeal square later we had completely revealed the cold semblance of a lawn. We had both decided that a before and an after picture would have brought the full justice of the act but the conspiracy for good that day wasn't to be hampered by obeying the haughty regulations of PR work. Publicity and humility don't often agree.

As we pushed our meager tools and shuffling bodies back into the car and headed toward the next target for my grandmother's cunning campaign of unprovoked service. Unprovoked and unsolicited, she had set out that day to commit the terrible mystery of selfless charity, and the day would not leave that motive unquenched. The next task proved more difficult and by sight more intimidating, but it was to submit to the vigilance of our efforts all the same.

It was in the hindsight of that day, as the muted cascades of houses and trees passed my mind and the regular rhythm of the day had done its work, that I saw what great nobility and treacherousness belonged to it. Mundane work, a mundane day, everyday service, the everyday sacrifice that courts it. The wondrous damage of the gospel on the world commits itself in the most subservient, quiet ways imaginable. And the work of the day had not so much to do with doing, but in fact being. Being diligent, being charitable, being in prayer, being in love. The truth of the matter is that life is mundane, and is much of the time not anything but regular, rhythmic, earthly. The writer of Ecclesiastes lived dictated by the agricultural world, the world of farms and farming. The sun rises, sets, the earth turns, seasons come and go. What always remains is the work to be done.

What can we say back to the writer of Ecclesiastes, who tells us with such morbid fatality that “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun; Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time” (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10). There is truly nothing new under the sun for those who work toward good, and this certainty gives us great truth and trepidation, but also the possibility for great thankfulness. How long will the leaves stay off of the land? How long will the grass be cut and the weeds be pulled? How long will there be fear and violence, pain and separation? In the same moment that we catch sight of our urgent longing for goodness to come, and to stay, we find that it does come, and to our surprise, stays. The love of God has come, is come, and will come. It is often seen in the regular, the rhythmic, the earthly. God's love is nothing new under the sun, but it cannot grow old either, and it cannot die. The heartbeat of God's love turns on us with a breathing persistence, steady and sure. Yes, there is nothing new under the sun, and how much peace that may grant us! Let us give thanks for the steady beat of God's love in every moment.