During this Advent time, a particular song speaks to me. Written by Pete Seeger in the late 1950s and performed by the folk-rock group, The Byrds, this song speaks to those tumultuous times now known as “The Sixties.” President Kennedy had been assassinated in November 1963. On March 7, 1965, John Lewis tried to lead a civil-rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge when they were assaulted and brutally bludgeoned by law enforcement. That day is now known as Bloody Sunday. The country was embroiled in an unpopular war. There were crises of a male-chauvinistic culture as women began to assert their rights. A drug cult arose. College campuses turned into hotbeds of protests and non-conformance.

The song that Seeger wrote and the Byrd’s made into a hit? Turn, Turn, Turn. It is intentional that this socially conscious and somewhat revolutionary folk-rock group would debut this song in 1965. I was in high school and immediately became a fan of The Byrds. The lyrics are lifted from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8.  

For everything there is a season,

And a time for everything under heaven.

A time to be born and a time to die.

A time to kill and a time to heal.

A time to mourn and a time to dance.

Can we Hear the Words?

With COVID-19 ravaging our nation with unspeakable death, much of which could have been avoided, we are in great grief. These are not “The Sixties” but we do have our own societal perils. On top of the grief of death, we face great pain from racial unrest and economic injustice. We have a planet that is crying out under the duress of global climatic pain. We have a health care system that is the best in the world for some and inaccessible for too many others. And we have rotten-to-the-core corruption in the highest places of our political system. Can you hear the words from Ecclesiastes?

 A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.

A time to love and a time to hate.

A time for war and a time for peace.

A time to keep silence and a time to speak.

Seeger in his lyrics added two dimensions to the words of the biblical writer. There was a call stitched into the verses:

 Turn, turn, turn.

And the plea: 

I swear it’s not too late.

Not Glitter and Glitz but John the Baptist 

If you belong to a church that follows the ecumenical lectionary, you are aware that before you can get to Bethlehem and the child in a manger, you have to first deal with John the Baptist, the voice that cries out in the wilderness and calls us all to turn, turn, turn. Repent! The Greek, metavoia, from which repentance is translated, literally means to turn your brain around. Turn you heart around. Turn your lives and ultimate concern around. Why? Because One is coming. God is at hand. Lest you think that John is just some aberration out in the wilderness, his cousin Jesus, in his first sermon, plagiarizes John’s sermons.

 The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.

Repent and believe in the gospel. (Mark 1:15)

Turn, turn, turn is the biblical message of this Advent season. As this 20th year of the 21st century is ending, one thing is clear. We human beings do not know how to live in harmony and in righteousness, that is, with justice, with one another. We have proven over and over to be unteachable; yet, the prophet and his cousin, Jesus, cry out, turn, turn, turn, for the sake of the world and all God’s children on this planet.

I swear it’s not too late.

Turn, turn, turn. Turn around your brains. Think differently. Unlearn long held self-protective and self-serving and self-destructive ways and embrace the ways of the One who is coming.

It is NOT Your Birthday! 

Turn, turn, turn. Perhaps a start right now would be to embrace that Christmas is not your birthday, even though too many in our affluent world celebrate as if it is. It is the birthday of the One who comes to save the world from us, and to save us from each other. Only the One who loves us as much as the God-made-flesh would love us enough to tell us the truth. So, what might we do to turn, turn, turn for the common good during these days?

With no intention to present my wife and me as some sort of righteous examples, we decided long ago to protest against the Christmas norms and to celebrate the One who comes by deploying our resources to reflect the rearrangement of the world as this One proclaims. Instead of participating in Black Friday and the annual spend-a-thon, we choose to deploy our resources for the work of the Haitian Timoun Foundation, which provides life-giving impact for the world’s most desperately poor, and for agencies here in Decatur who attend to the homeless and hungry here in Decatur. We do give money to our five grandchildren, but fifty percent must go to a just cause of their interest.

Harriet and I are not alone in this reorientation – turn, turn, turn. We know many others doing the same thing, and it is not just a seasonal thing. It is a new lifestyle where generosity extends for those whom God loves the most, the poor, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised, might have life to its fullest potential.

In him was life, and the life was

The light for ALL people.

In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,