Ecclesiastes 1:1-18
I John 2:1-2; 7-11
"....Yet I am writing you a new commandment that is true in him and in you,
because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining."
I have always found it curious when the book of Ecclesiastes is requested for the funeral
of one much loved. The passage chosen, of course, is the one popularized in the sixties:
For everything [turn, turn, turn] there is a season [turn, turn, turn], and a time for every purpose
under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die. Therein lies the relevance of the passage
to a funeral, I suppose, along with a mention of all the other times on our hands: a time to kill
and heal, weep and laugh, mourn and dance, love and hate, a time to keep and a time to
throw away (Is this what we're doing at the edge of an open grave?). The problem, theologically,
is that all these times are ticked off by Koheleth, the Preacher, as though they were on a par: all,
says he, is vanity. So then, taking this book of wisdom at its word, we are left with the futility of it
all, the purposelessness of human existence...left to say, as has been said of Koheleth's
philosophy: life is just one inconsequential thing after another, and then you die. I do not like to
read Ecclesiastes at funerals.
Rather, I read Ecclesiastes, in all honesty, in the midst of life's doldrums: in the middle of winter,
in the muddle of gray skies and too much rain, in the dark season which harries my fear of being
inconsequential and turns hours on end toward idle futility. On the days when I have had it with
running the human race and would just as soon retire to the solitude of my own mean thoughts, I
open the Bible to Ecclesiastes. As Louise Erdrich put it, "Ecclesiastes speaks to people in tough
binds, people with vendettas, a bone to pick, no dog to kick, the sour-grapers, the hurt, those
who've never shucked off their adolescent angst." It speaks to people for whom life is not fair...
and it is never their fault. It speaks to people for whom life is empty...and it is never their
responsibility. It speaks, in one way or another, at one time or another, to us all.
Though that fact does not stop me from wondering how the book of Ecclesiastes ever made it
into the canon: this is both mystery and miracle. For it is blind to God's purposes revealed in the
very pages on either side of its complaint, and is therefore bound to fate's indifference toward
human whining. Yet without the angst of Ecclesiastes included in the biblical witness, a part of
our humanity--the bummed-out part, to put it in Erdrich's words--would be less addressed by God's
written word. With it, there is not a part of our human cry which escapes God's understanding.
For in these verses, we are given to recognize ourselves as contrary, plaintive, parsimonious in
our gratitude, proudly arrogant in our conclusion that human existence is no more than a
throw-away prize, sadly accurate in our belief that life is simply unfair.
But we are given to recognize more. And the more we recognize in these verses, I believe
the more we understand the world Christ came to redeem.In the first place, given its insistence
on life's vanity, Ecclesiastes presents us with a perspective on human existence which both
mirrors the flatness of our secular culture and plays at the edges of our own faith when the
season seems bleak and we are at loose ends. Verse after verse, we are reminded of the
coincidence between belief in a God who is up to something in human history, and our being
given reason enough to get up in the morning...the coincidence between being bummed-out,
and believing in nothing much beyond our small selves.
For Koheleth, God either has no purpose in creation, or has so hidden the purpose from human
seeking that life has no shape, no direction, no order: "When I applied my mind to know
wisdom," he writes, "and to see the business that is done on earth, how one's eyes see sleep
neither day nor night, then I saw all the work of God, that no one can find out what is happening
under the sun. However much they may toil in seeking, they will not find it out; even though
those who are wise claim to know, they cannot find it out."
He is saying that he sees no hint of God's hand on human life. He is saying, for all of his
diligent efforts to find God out, he has been met with silence. Therefore, without a greater
purpose revealed in the little details of our days--our work and our play, our sleeping and our
wakefulness, our keeping and throwing away, our tearing and sewing, our loving and
hating--without a greater purpose revealed in and through these little details, none of it
matters. So you weep and laugh, so you mourn and dance, so you embrace and refrain
from embracing.
So you stay married or get divorced, so you have an abortion or carry a child, so you endure
the pain or put a plastic bag over your head: if there is no clue that God is up to something in
human history, one way or another, then any order or direction or purpose we may devise for
ourselves, any action we may take or refrain from taking, is vanity. Appearance. Our lives
may look purposeful to the world, but we are going nowhere...our hours may appear to be
productive, but emptiness overtakes us in the end. Because, you see, we've made it all up,
these lives of ours...and without the gift of truth and purpose given from outside our made-up
lives, when things get bleak, we are finally left with only darkness on our hands. Bummed-out
is barely adequate to describe the experience of living in the world without some hint of God's
hand in human history. "We are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass,
" Moby Dick's Ahab laments, "and Fate is the handspike."
Fate is the handspike. If in the first place, Koheleth presents us with a perspective on
human existence lived without purpose, and so mirrors the flatness of our secular
culture, Koheleth, in the second place, presents us with a perspective on human
existence which bears witness to the faith of a fatalist: life lived at the mercy of nothing
much, subject to the indifference of the universe, victim of circumstances beyond our
control. These times, you see, simply come upon us and we are not responsible: a time
to kill or heal, to weep or laugh, to mourn or dance. These times come upon us from
without, often strange and uninvited, and we are re-actors in a drama going
nowhere...which, nevertheless, may be namelessly blamed for our lot. Fate is what
Koheleth has left to believe in, if God has no purpose in giving us life, if God's purpose
is so hidden as to seem hideous at a glance.
Thus when the skies are more gray than blue, and life has taken a turn not to my liking,
and the road ahead is obsured by the fog in my mind, I turn to Ecclesiastes for company,
for a companion with which to rail against my fate...against all that is not my fault...against,
as one philosopher put it, "the impersonal and the antipersonal, pervading time and
space--determining events, and shaping society so comprehensively that there is no
escape....We live today," he concludes, "in unusually fateful times."
We live, I would say, in times when human actions are increasingly on a par...when the
rules by which we once lived are like cut-flowers in relation to the reason they once were
given...when actions are easily blamed on circumstances beyond our control--a distant
mother, a controlling father, a calculating boss. We live in a time when the time to be
born and the time to die have no coincidence with life's dignity...when a time to weep
and laugh are regulated by media's blitz...when a time for war and a time for peace hang
on opinion polls. Vanity, all is vanity! Hence, I tell you, the more we recognize our own
fateful times in these verses, the more we understand the world Christ came to redeem,
the more we understand the world in which we now live and our desparate need of a
Savior.
So turn Koheleth's perspective, for a moment, inside out and upside down, God become
human. Koheleth's angst, spread across these holy pages, must have made it into the
canon because, in the middle of our arrogant tantrums, lest we miss the point, God is
determined to address us...and in the muddle of our bummed-out lives Christ makes haste
to come to us...and at the sound of our sour-grapes God surely has a gospel to speak.
Without Ecclesiastes inserting our tantrums into the story of our redemption, God's entry
into the human condition may not have been low enough, empty enough, honest enough.
The metaphor which comes to mind is that of Reynolds Price, who reflects on being
forced, after becoming a quadrapalegic, to move at the height of a seated man.
"Upright as I'd been for five decades," he muses, "I'd been able to share King Lear's
neglect of the rawbone human misery that huddles beneath us. Reduced to its eye
level now as the homeless lay and crouched on sidewalks--and meeting their fuming
gaze as a standing walker seldom does--I comprehended more than before Lear's insight
on the storm-swept heath:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel....
Ecclesiastes is the earnest that God in Christ has exposed himself to feel what
purposeless wretches feel (for our wretchedness is splayed across these pages),
that God in Christ has addressed those who bide the pelting of this pitiless storm
(for our whining complaint is heard throughout these verses), that God in Christ
has come to defend us from seasons such as these.
Into the darkness of such seasons, Christ comes to shed light on God's purposes.
To be sure, the light of revelation, far from blinding us with its brightness, seems
barely sufficient. Nevertheless, its truth requires us to adjust our sight, still in much
darkness, toward every intimation of meaning in time. To wit: given the intimations
of meaning let loose in his birth, no longer can we speak of an impersonal fate playing
with our inconsequential days, for we are addressed by God-in-person reduced to eye
level and meeting our fuming gaze with a promised Kingdom. Given the intimation of
meaning let loose in his death and rising, no more can our vendetta be against God
because we must die, but can only be against ourselves for refusing, really, to live.
He is God's word to the bummed-out, to people in tough binds, people with vendettas,
a bone to pick, no dog to kick, the sour-grapers, the hurt, those who've never shucked
off their adolecent angst. He takes it all in and returns it to us redeemed by a greater
purpose than we could ever invent. For through him we are given to see not fate but
a destiny which is ours to deny, in him ...we are given to hear not silence but the sound
of judgment against our petty complaints...in him we are met with a purpose which will
not be denied its claim upon our little lives.
"Although Koheleth seems a basically sour sort of fellow," concludes Erdrich, "he comes to
hard-won affirmation. He takes what he can get...In his youth...he piles up wealth, beautiful
lands, orchards, buildings, hits the bottle, eats a lot of darkness. His wisdom increases through
grief, and he acknowledges the frustrating enigma that most of our deepest learning occurs
when we are humbled by suffering." His words ought not to be saved for our funerals, my friends,
but read in the midst of our angst, lest we doubt that God, at the height of our tantrums, meets
our fuming gaze with a grace which we do not deserve, with a destiny we could never intimate
without his light, with evidence of a Savior given for seasons such as this. Thanks be. Amen.