Ecclesiastes and Pessimism
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Part 1 of the series “Texts Not Often Heard in Church”
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 2, 2003
Ecclesiastes 1:1-11; Mark 1:21-28
Ecclesiastes 1:1-11
1 ¶ The words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
3 What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south, and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow.
8 All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has already been, in the ages before us.
11 The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them.
INTRODUCTION
Maybe this has happened to you. You’re at a party. You’re having fun. You’re talking with a bunch of people and generally having a good time. Then you come across this one party guest. They’re standing against a wall with either a disinterested look or a depressed one. You try to engage them in conversation. ‘Great party, huh?’ ‘It’s alright.’ ‘Good music, though.’ ‘It’s derivative and boring.’ ‘Alright, the food is pretty good.’ ‘I’ve served better to my dog.’ You think, ‘What is with this person? Everyone else is having a nice time, everyone else is enjoying life—what is wrong with this guy?” No matter how much you try to be optimistic, they’re pessimistic. In earlier days, they would have called such a person a ‘sad sack.’ I guess now they’d call them a ‘downer’ or a ‘buzzkill’.
But you all know the kind. Almost as if they’re intentionally a downer. As if they willingly refuse to see anything good. It’s kind of a drag, isn’t it? I mean, when you’re in a good mood and someone else refuses to be. It’s hard to maintain your good mood when something like that happens.
II. THE TEXT
That’s kind of the attitude that a lot of people have about the author of Ecclesiastes. He’s sort of a downer, smack dab in the middle of the Bible. You read these great Psalms about heaven and God’s grace and glory; you read about the mighty deeds of the Book of Exodus; and the wonderful stories of the Gospel, as we heard before. And suddenly you get this guy… ‘Vanity of Vanities…”
A. Vanity of Vanities
We like to say “Vanity of Vanities” because that is how the King James said it and it resonates in English with us. What it really means, though, is “Meaninglessness–it’s meaningless!” That’s what Ecclesiastes is saying. The Hebrew words hevel h’valim suggest a fleeting reality. In fact, the word hevel, meaning ‘meaninglessness’ or ‘vanity’ is also the Hebrew name for Abel, whose life was but a fleeting breath, snatched by his brother Cain in an act of meaningless violence.
We encounter this text and we don’t know what to do with it.
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?
‘What are we doing?’ he is asking. What is the point of all this? Why are you getting up every morning and putting on a tie? Why are you showing up to class? What does this get you? It’s a depressing question. We have to do this for the rest of our lives. I remember when I first finished law school and got my first job as a lawyer–each morning I’d put on my suit and tie. I remember having this upset feeling that I was going to have to put on a suit and tie every day for the next forty or fifty years. I had to believe that it was worth it. It wouldn’t have done any good to have adopted an attitude like this.
A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south, and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow.
It’s fair to say that Ecclesiastes didn’t understand the whole concept of evaporation and condensation–why the sea never fills up. But that was his point: the sea will never be full. Even the things of nature seem to be in a vain and futile cyclical struggle.
All things are wearisome; more than one can express;
You know what you would do if you met this guy at a party: you’d clear out. You’d go back over to the chips.
the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has already been, in the ages before us.
We like to think that this is not true. We like to think of ourselves as the most advanced who have ever lived. (I guess we are the only ones with the automobile, I suppose. No archaeological digs have turned up any Fred Flinstone versions of those). The point, however, has little to do with technology. They would have witnessed growth in technology–from stone to bronze to iron. They would have seen how things improved. The point is: so what? This whole cycle has already been done. And then, perhaps the most distressing element of the whole piece:
The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them.
That’s the hardest one for us to deal with. Because even if we get stuck in lives that seem meaningless or in jobs that seem futile or events that seem cyclical, we like to think that we matter. And what does he say: “The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them.”
III. WHY WE DON’T READ THIS IN CHURCH
This is the first sermon in a series on texts we don’t often read in Church. I don’t know that I have to explain to you now why you haven’t heard this one as much. There are reasons we don’t read this in church. One, it’s depressing–and that’s not what church is about, right? We’re all happy here.
The other part is that it seems to conflict with our basic Christian beliefs. We view ourselves as an Easter people, as a people of the resurrection. We view ourselves as a people on the other side of a tragedy. A people who have received Good News: that the death and crucifixion of Jesus Christ was not the end of the story, the end of the story was on that Sunday morning with the empty tomb. By our very nature, we proclaim Good News, which would seem to imply that we are happy about this. That we have triumphed, that we are victorious. That we are on the winning side.
So it makes us a little uncomfortable to deal with scriptures like this. There’s a tendency to write them off–to say, “Well, that’s OldTestament.” The Old Testament was Jesus’ Bible–and was good enough for him. There’s a tendency to say, “Well, this is just ‘wisdom literature’ and wisdom literature has a fairly cynical view of the world.” If you’re good you get rewarded, if you’re not you get punished. It’s all very straightforward. There’s lots of wisdom literature in the Bible, though: Proverbs, parts of the Psalms. We don’t throw it out. But it does make us uncomfortable.
And all the more so because we live in a culture that tells us that we’re supposed to be happy all the time. Every single commercial that you watch on television is selling you happiness. Whether it’s because this new soda will taste better than anything you’ve ever tasted before, or because this pill will finally cure that nagging problem that you’ve always had. Or whether this product, or this experience, or this television show will be what you need…. It’s all designed with the presumption that what we need, and what we crave, and what we deserve above all else, is happiness.
IV. WHY WE OUGHT TO
So that being the case, why are we reading a text like this? What is the point of reading such a downer in church?
A. Because We’re not always happy
Well, the fact of the matter is that we’re not always happy, are we? It would be nice to pretend that when you’re a Christian everything just works out swimmingly. It would be nice to pretend that as Christians we have no problems with disease or death or with poverty or hurt. No problems with violence. That somehow we’re beyond all that. It would be nice to believe that somehow we’ve been given a “Get out of Grief Free” card by virtue of our baptism. But that’s not the way it works out, is it?
You all know that from your own personal experience that it doesn’t work out that way. We learned that as a nation September 11, 2001, we learned that again yesterday with the destruction of the Columbia. Our world is full of sorrow and grief. There are times when we feel we are caught up in an endless cycle of vain repetition. We look at the world around us and the endless cycles of violence and war. We talk about peace talks and diplomatic efforts and somewhere in the back of our heads is a voice that says, “Vanity of vanities… we’ve seen this one before.”
And so the reason that we need to hear texts like this is not so much to convince us that the world is a broken place–we know that. It’s to remind us that as people of faith we’re allowed to acknowledge that.
A friend of mine once told me a story about her own mother at the funeral of her father. My friend’s mother sat there sobbing and crying and saying “Why me? Why did this happen to me?” And people said to her, “You wouldn’t feel that way if you just had more faith.”
The problem with that is: when you ask the question “Why me?” that is a question of faith. You’re calling out to God, demaning that God be God. But we’ve so convinced ourselves that faith and happiness are tied up, that if we are the right kind of person only good things will happen to us, that we sometimes leave ourselves unprepared for when the bad stuff comes along.
We develop a lot of new music as a church. By far the most prolific kind of music that the church is developing is praise music. That’s great. But what do you do on September 12, 2001? It can be really hard to sing praise music on such a day. You want to sing a couple of laments. You want to sing a couple of songs that reflect how sad you are. And there are times when you are feeling that life is a struggle, that life is a cycle, and you want to know that somewhere else, someone who believed in the God you believe in, felt the same way. And that’s why Ecclesiastes is so great for us.
Because it wasn’t just that who ever wrote that wrote it. People write stuff all the time. But he got in the Bible! He got published! So it wasn’t just his idea. Clearly it said something to the people who received this text. It wasn’t the only thing that got said to them. They took the good stuff and the bad stuff and they understood that our human lives are the sums of all that experience. That is, we talk all the time about ‘lived faith’ but what does it mean to live your faith? It means that your faith is not merely something that’s there with you when you’re feeling good. That your faith is lived out even when you’re feeling sorrowful. When you’re feeling dejected. Even when you feel that the world has lost meaning. Your faith is there. And if you can say, ‘Someone else has felt this way before me’–then that’s something.
B. Because there are things to learn from such a perspective
But there are a couple of other things about that. There’s a lot going on in that text that we can use even when we’re not feeling like the world is a meaningless place.
A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. That says something promising about God’s providence. That says something promising about the created order and the world that God has given to us: that the world is enduring even when our lives are fleeting. That’s hopeful.
The wind blows to the south, and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. This creation surrounds us–it’s everywhere about us. Not simply in our own little corner of the world. We get a sense of the immensity of the creation. And that gives us a good sense of humility. And you know what? There are times when we need that. There are times when we need to be brought down a peg or two. To be reminded that we are part of a bigger picture, that we are part of a vast creation that God has put here for us.
And the last point. The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them. Human memory is faulty. Human memory is weak. There’s an old trick that law professors sometimes do in their Criminal Law classes. They’ll have someone come in in the middle of a class and begin arguing over a grade. And then push the professor down and storm out of the room. And the class will be horrified by what they’ve just seen. But then the professor will ask them to describe what they’ve just seen. Nine times out of ten, none of the descriptions will match: a tall black man, no a short white woman. Human memory is flawed and manipulable. We can change our memory if we want to. (If you’ve ever seent the movie Memento, you’ve seen a thesis on how we can change our own memories.) We don’t rely on human memory to preserve what is good about the world. We rely on God’s memory.
I don’t usually look to the White House for theological insight. But yesterday, the President quoted a very interesting passage of Scripture:
Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out the [starry] host and numbers them, calling them all by name, because he is great in strength, mighty in power, not one of them is missing.
The President went on to remind us that the God who numbers and names the stars and remembers their names, so that not one is missing, remembers us.
Even after a thousand generations have come and gone, and no one alive remembers that we were even here, God remembers. God keeps us. God preserves us.
V. CONCLUSION
So what do we say now with our new friend Ecclesiastes? There are times in life we are going to feel exactly like that: that life is meaningless. And it’s important to know that we find ourselves within a tradition that’s strong enough and deep enough to ask those kinds of questions, to make those kinds of observations, and to deal with the real pain of our human experience, sometimes those questions that we’re just struggling to answer. And then it reminds us too: be humble in the pursuit of faith: the world is much bigger than we are. But ultimately at the core of it is a God who creates us, who redeems us, and by his grace, sustains us in all things: even when life seems its most meaningless. There, too, we find God.
