Ecclesiastes
3:1-15
February 24, 2013
For
everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up
what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build
up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to
gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain
from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to
throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to
speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
What gain have the workers from their
toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with.
He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of
past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done
from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them
than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is
God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. I
know that whatever God does endures for ever; nothing can be added to it, nor
anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe
before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and
God seeks out what has gone by.
Back in 1273, the great Thomas Aquinas, the theologian
most responsible for wrestling Christianity out of the Dark Ages and into the
Renaissance, had a vision. It changed everything for him.
Aquinas had already written one of the greatest Christian
books ever, his Summa Theologiae, and
he was in the process of working on his opus, his greatest work. But then he
got deathly ill. Something happened to him in that illness. He saw God, or
heaven, or the future, or something. Whatever it was, it overwhelmed him. He
said little to anyone about it, other than to comment that it was beautiful.
As he got healthier, everyone expected him to continue
his writings. They wanted to read what came next out of his great mind. But he
wouldn’t write. People begged him, but he just never got back to work. His
assistant, Reginald, kept bugging him about it. Finally, Aquinas said to him, “Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have
written seems like straw to me.” All that
I have written seems like straw… Here’s perhaps the greatest Christian
writer of all time, and his words seem like straw, like the stuff you place on
the floor of a stall for cows and sheep to poop on.
To understand how monumental this
statement was, consider what Aquinas did. Prior to him, Christianity had been
trapped in hundreds of years of stale, inward-looking, insular theology. It had
ceased to speak to the realities of life, and instead had devolved into
platitudes. Then Aquinas began reading Aristotle, whose works had come again to
Christianity through the Muslims. Christians had ignored the writings of
Aristotle for 700 years. When Aquinas read Aristotle, he realized that he was
being given a whole new way of considering Christianity. So he wrote. His
writings revitalized Christianity, and spun movements that would eventually
become the Protestant Reformation and so much more.
How could Aquinas consider his works
to be like straw? All we know is that whatever Aquinas saw, it put everything
into perspective for him, including the value of his own writings. In that
moment Aquinas understood the deep messages of Ecclesiastes.
Our associate pastor, Connie Frierson did a great
introduction to Ecclesiastes last week, and this week we continue the journey
into wisdom. As Connie mentioned, this book is wisdom from someone who has
lived long and tried everything. In sports terms, he was a grizzled vet, the
kind of person who deeply understood the game, even if he’d lost a step. He was
like Gary Roberts or Bill Guerin for the Penguins, Jerome Bettis or Hines Ward
for the Steelers. They taught wisdom to younger players, whether or not they
listened.
The writer of Ecclesiastes had lived so much of life
thinking that this or that mattered. He had pursued the ways of wealth,
promiscuity, self-indulgence, power, influence, and so much more, yet toward
the end of life he realized that life wasn’t about the things he thought it was.
This writer reminded me of an old pastor I had lunch with six or seven years
ago. I had asked him, looking back, if there was anything he regretted in his
ministry. Without hesitation he said, “I
wish I had spent more time with my family. My wife made it so easy for me to
focus on the church and spend all of my time there that I just wasn’t at home
much. I look at my kids now, who are adults, and I realize that they needed me
more than the church did. I wish I had spent more time them.” This is an
Ecclesiastes wisdom statement.
The grizzled vet who wrote Ecclesiastes understood, late
in life, what really mattered.
There are two really great insights Ecclesiastes has, one
of which Connie talked about last week. She talked about the idea of hebed, which is the Hebrew word
translated as “vanity.” Vanity is not a good translation. The best word is
something like “vapor.” Personally, I like the term “mist,” which is similar. It
basically means that life is like a mist that cannot be clearly understood or
seen, and that is temporary like mist. It is sort of similar to the Buddhist
idea that life is illusion, although it’s not quite the same. Basically the
writer of Ecclesiastes is saying that you can never fully understand life,
capture life, or live it perfectly. Whatever you think is the essence of life,
or the meaning of life, is fleeting.
This idea leads to the other great insight, which is from
our passage: Life has a rhythm that we
can either live into and find meaning in it, or struggle against and lose
meaning
There’s a reason our passage is read so much at funerals.
Funerals are a time when people are confronted with the way life really is, and
it can be a time when people are most open to the deep wisdom of Ecclesiastes.
Of course, that’s sometimes, but not always. There are a lot of people who hate
funerals and avoid them like the plague. And even among those who do go, often
they tune out the service as they sit there, treating the service like it’s the
equivalent of taking a spoonful of cod liver oil. That’s truer of those who are
younger. As you age, you tend to gain a greater appreciation for the importance
of funerals. They help us deal with life as it really is.
We read Ecclesiastes at funerals because this passage has
some really important messages to tell us about life,… and death. First, it
reminds us that there is a Divine Purpose to everything. It’s just that God
doesn’t really tell us what that purpose is. We are invited to live according
to God’s purpose, and to find a way to fit into God’s purpose, but what that
grand purpose is God keeps to God’s self. God doesn’t consult with us. I don’t
think it’s because God doesn’t want to tell us. I suspect it’s that as hard as
we might try, there’s no way we could begin to even partially understand it. It
would be much like trying to explain to a fish how life is lived on land. The
fish can’t conceive of things like cities, farms, roads, and factories, and the
fish can’t even speak or think like we do. Maybe we could talk to a porpoise,
which isn’t a fish, but we’d have to find a common language first.
At times we all struggle against the way the world is—against
God’s purpose—especially when people close to us die, or events happen that
have no explanation: a child, a parent, a husband, a wife, a friend, a mentor
dies unexpectedly, and we ask “why?” God doesn’t really answer why, even if we
ask it a million times. Or at best God gives us glimpses of why. And what makes
it even harder to ascertain why is that the times we are most likely to ask
“why” are the times we are least able to hear God’s answer. We put constraints
on the answers, demanding that God answer the way we want, that God fit the
explanation into our view of life.
Back in 1991, when I was an associate pastor, I received
a visit one day from a troubled young man who wanted to know “why.” I had been
working in my office, and the secretary stepped in and said, “There’s a young man
here who wants to see you. He looks really troubled and upset.” I told her to
send him in. Before I could even introduce myself he said, “Why does God let
good people suffer and die?” That’s not an easy question to answer even with a
lot of thought, but it’s especially difficult to answer right out of the blue. I
took a step back with him, asked him his name, told him mine, and then I asked,
“What’s happened to you that’s causing you to wonder? It’s obvious that something bad has
happened.” He said, “I don’t understand why Senator John Heinz died yesterday in
a helicopter accident. He was a really good man. Why did he have to die?”
He told me that he had been a college intern in Heinz’s
senate office, and that Heinz was one of his heroes. We talked for about an
hour, and then he left. I don’t think that anything I said helped. I’m not sure
that there was anything that I could have said that would have helped. The
problem was that he really didn’t want “God” answers. He didn’t want to hear
anything about the promise of Heaven, he didn’t want to hear anything about how
God created the universe, and he didn’t want to hear about trusting in God.
He didn’t want to hear the kind of answer that
Ecclesiastes gives, the one that talks about how there is a time for everything
under heaven. He didn’t want to hear that people die in helicopter accidents,
just as people die of cancer, heart attacks, pneumonia, violence, and suicides.
The fact is that people die, and that’s what Ecclesiastes reminds us of. In
fact, that makes it harder for us in our age is that people tend to be really
healthy and live long lives in comparison to people just 100 years ago.
100 years ago people died from things that have been mostly
wiped out, such as whooping cough, tuberculosis, polio, and yellow fever.
People died from scratches and injuries that today are minor. In the days of
Ecclesiastes, people were lucky if out of six children, two made it to
adulthood, and one made it to the ripe old age of 50. People died from injuries
from everyday tasks. For example, think about the process of stretching wool so
that it can be spun into yarn. A woman would take a ball of sheep’s wool and
pull it apart, while thrusting it up and down on a cluster of sharp nails
gathered together on a block of wood and pointed upward. If a nail got rusty,
and the woman punctured her finger on it, she could easily die of tetanus. No
one would even know where the disease came from. Death is hard for us today,
and we’re relatively well protected from early deaths. Ecclesiastes reminds us
that death happens, as do wars, mourning, tearing, and weeping, as well as
peace, laughing, dancing, harvest, and life.
Going back to Heinz’s intern, I’m not sure what kind of
answer he wanted, but it was clear that nothing I could say was going to make a
difference. He had questions, but he also placed restrictions on the kinds of
answers I could give. He wasn’t ready to delve into God’s purposes. He didn’t understand
the wisdom of Ecclesiastes before Heinz died, so how could he understand
it afterwards?
The truth is that Ecclesiastes exposes us to a truth,
which is that this is just the way life is, the way it’s been since the
beginnig, and the way it will be for centuries. Still, the message of Ecclesiastes
isn’t just about the hopelessness of the way life is—that life is nasty,
brutish, and short (in the Enlightenment philosopher’s, Thomas Hobbes, words). The
deeper message of Ecclesiastes is that if you find a way to live within the
realities of life, it can be beautiful, pleasant, and long. But this requires
finding a way to fit into how life is, rather than beating your head against
life, wondering why it isn’t the way you want it to be.
True wisdom means learning how to fit into life and all
its wonders. This fitting in ultimately means finding balance in life, and that’s
the great message of this passage: that life is a balance
The human tendency is always to the extremes—“more is
better,” “extreme is supreme.” The fact is that humans have always tended
toward excess, and excess always leads away from wisdom. That’s the problem of
addictions. They lead us away from wisdom by making us slaves to an
ever-increasing need for more: more
booze, more drugs, more sex, more gambling, more work, more… whatever it is
that we seek more of. There’s a reason, too, why Jesus says that it is easier
for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to
get into heaven. Wealth is more, and increased wealth is increased “more,” leading
us to lose our sense of compassion for others as it propels us to seek more and
more security. Ecclesiastes teaches us that the pursuit of more leads us away
from the deep, rich life God wants for us, but keeping everything in balance
leads to God’s joy.
I love Ecclesiastes because it gets right to the heart of
how to live a really good life, even if it doesn’t necessarily fit with the
world’s wisdom. It recognizes that storms, winter, conflict, weeping, and even
death are all part of life, but so are sunshine, summer, peace, laughing, and
life. It recognizes that eating, drinking, and pleasure are gifts from God, as
is our work. Finally, it recognizes that there is a purpose to everything, even
if you can’t figure it out. Our task isn’t to figure it out,… it’s to just live
it out.
Amen.
