Preacher: Stella Hayes
Introduction
Good morning. My name is Stella and I am a member of this congregation. Ecclesiastes has long been my favourite book in the Bible and I have often bemoaned there is too little attention given to it so Emily (our wonderful minister and my beloved daughter) asked me to do this sermon on Ecclesiastes because, as we know from her recent series of sermons on the minor prophets, she likes to give some attention to the less well known parts of the Bible.
Thursday Night Bible Study (Leunig, The Woes of the Whirled)
We are actually working our way through Ecclesiastes in the Thursday night Bible study and having some pretty interesting discussions so I want to acknowledge all those in our group who are being whirled around by this book with me and who have given me food for thought. We are only up to chapter 5 and haven’t quite sorted it all out yet… so this sermon is definitely a work in progress. When our Bible study group have finished the whole book and we have it all sorted out, we will let you know… Meantime, I take full responsibility for any confusions in this sermon.
Background of Ecclesiastes
So a bit of background…. Ecclesiastes is one of the 5 books in the Old Testament called the Wisdom Literature, the others being Job, Psalms, Proverbs and Song of Songs. Based on language and composition, it is estimated that this book was written around the third century BCE, give or take a hundred years or so… well after the era of the minor prophets we have been learning about in recent months. It was probably written when Israel was part of the Greek Empire… one of the many empires that have come and gone in Jerusalem over the years. The Word Ecclesiastes comes from the Greek word meaning “one who addresses an assembly” and is usually translated into English as Teacher or Preacher. The Hebrew word is Kohelet. There are suggestions the book is written by King Solomon, (note in the first verse “the words of the Son of David, King of Jerusalem”) but it is more likely it was written by a Teacher, a Kohelet, adopting the persona of Solomon as a literary device because Solomon was one who was famous for his wisdom, wealth, and accomplishments, topics this book explores and dismantles. Solomon reigned around 600 years before Ecclesiastes is likely to have been written. Much can be debated around all this, but I would rather get to what the book is actually saying.
Opening Sentence (Leunig Mist)
So the book opens with “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Or other translations say “Meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless.” “Meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless.” Most people would not expect that to be a Biblical quote. I first read these words in my late teens and fell upon them with enormous relief and, like teenagers often do, I wrote them out and stuck them to my bedroom wall along with other quotes and pictures. I did not first hear these words in church but came upon them as I valiantly tried be a good Christian and read my way through the whole Bible. Chapter 1 of Ecclesiastes is not in the lectionary of any church I have ever been to… and I have been to a few.
Hevel
The Hebrew word that is translated into vanity or meaningless, is “Hevel” which literally means vapour, mist, smoke… a beautiful metaphor for something that despite appearances is fleeting and insubstantial. Hevel, hevel, all is hevel. The word is used 38 times in the book of Ecclesiastes. “I have seen all things done under the sun and all of them are hevel, a chasing after the wind.”
Depression (Leunig Cars on Freeway)
In our study group some suggested that the person who wrote this was depressed. In my younger years, I probably was often depressed so is that what drew me to it? Possibly. But what is depression anyway? In our culture, depression is pathologized, it is seen as a mental illness. Now I am a psychologist so am part of the mental health industry that frequently conveys the idea that people are depressed because they have distorted ways of thinking or a chemical imbalance in the brain and cognitive behavioural therapy and antidepressants will cure the problem. Now I am not totally opposed to this view and a lot of people find it very helpful. But there are other ways of understanding depression. People like Scott Peck in his classic book, “The Road Less Travelled” argue that depression is a healthy normal part of growth because growth inevitably involves the letting go of something. Jesus spoke of spiritual growth involving dying… “unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies… it won’t produce fruit… and so forth. Thomas Merton puts it, “in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed identity”. I think much of the Christian message is that we must undergo many deaths if we open our lives to be transformed by God. And deaths involve some degree of sorrow, so sorrow is an integral part of the rhythm of transformation. And of course, there is our ultimate death, which Kohelet writes more directly about in subsequent chapters … death being the same fate that overtakes us all, whether wise of foolish, rich or poor, righteous or wicked, In chapter 2 he says, “the wise man, like the fool will not long be remembered, in days to come, both will be forgotten.” Koholet repeatedly encourages us to take the reality of death to heart.
Deconstructing Sources of Identity and Meaning (Leunig Lies)
It seems to me Kohelet is writing about many of the things we construct our sense of identity and meaning on that ultimately, in the light of our mortality, are hevel, meaningless, a chasing after the wind. In Chapter 1, our reading for today, he particularly targets our belief that if we work hard and do the right thing, we will make a difference… “what does man gain from all his labour at which he toils under the sun, generations come and generations go but the earth remains forever.” He also targets the idea that accumulation of knowledge and wisdom will make you happy…“For with much wisdom, comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.” Like many white Australian parents, my parents endeavoured to instil in me the Protestant work ethic and the value of education and I did largely buy it … study hard, work hard, and you will have a happy and worthwhile life… but in my late teens I experienced this pressure as a heavy burden and also came to have my doubts about this formula for living and so came adrift and felt depressed. Hence, stumbling across Ecclesiastes felt like an enormous relief. It didn’t feel like the depressing rant some see it as, but as someone articulating what felt more truthful and in that truthfulness lay some hope.
The Heavy Burden (Leunig man with sack)
I felt that “heavy burden God has laid on man” that Koholet writes of. So what exactly is it, this heavy burden? It seems to me Kohelet is talking about our consciousness of our existential predicament… that despite our yearnings for some expression of ourselves that will have some lasting impact, despite our desires to create something of value, we are ultimately helpless creatures doomed to die and be forgotten. And despite all our study, most of life will remain a mystery to us. In chapter 3, Kohelet writes, “I have seen the burden God has laid on men… he has set eternity in the hearts of men yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
Other quotes I stuck to my bedroom wall as a teenager included verses from Persian poet Omar Khayyam whose famous Rubaiyat often parallels Kohelet:
“The Worldly hope men set their hearts upon,
Turns ashes – or it prospers and anon,
Like snow upon the desert’s dusty face
Lighting a little hour or two – is gone…
And…
“Into the Universe and why not knowing,
Nor whence like water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it as wind along the waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.”
It could be argued this painful awareness of our confusing and precarious predicament is in part what the Garden of Eden story is on about … the story of the Fall, when we chose to act on the basis of our own conscious purposes to take something that looked good, when we disobeyed God and picked from the tree of knowledge, we became aware of our nakedness, became aware of our vulnerability, and God told us we would die.. “from dust you are and to dust you will return” and thus we were expelled from paradise, condemned to pain and hard work, and inevitably, a sense of loss and existential anxiety.
Psychoanalysts argue that we construct defences against our feelings of loss and our primal anxiety about our mortality and helplessness, our “dustness”, and it is these defences that form our character, a character that can help us cope and function in society. Whilst we will inevitably do this, Trappist monk, Thomas Merton would call this character we form our “false self,” describing it as “ The shallow I that can be possessed, developed, cultivated, and pandered to, the centre of all our strivings for gains and satisfaction”. Ernest Becker, in his classic book “The Denial of Death” argues that we deny our mortality by endeavouring to create some sort of immortality project or hero project where we feel we are participating in something of lasting worth, where we can feel somehow significant, special even… but he says that it is usually these hero projects, which although are aimed at doing good, paradoxically bring more evil into the world.
It seems to me that Kohelet is deconstructing the bases of these false selves and hero projects Merton and Becker describe. He is stripping away many of the illusions and diversions we live by, dismantling the false hopes and expectations we may have of life. This can feel really uncomfortable and disorienting, even depressing for some, but Merton would argue that until we do this, true faith in God is not possible. To quote Merton:
“Absurdity is the anguish of realising that underneath the apparently logical pattern of a more or less well organised rational life, there lies an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, indeed apparent chaos. This is what immediately impresses itself upon the man who has renounced diversion. It cannot be otherwise, for in renouncing diversion, he renounces the seemingly harmless pleasure of building a tight self-contained illusion about himself and his little world. He accepts the difficulty of facing the million things in his life which are incomprehensible, instead of simply ignoring them. Incidentally, it is only when the apparent absurdity of life is faced in all truth that faith really becomes possible. Otherwise, faith tends to be a kind of diversion, a spiritual amusement in which one gathers up accepted, conventional formulae.”
According to Merton, faith means accepting that the things we really need come to us only as gifts and our true selves are “not of our contriving but come from God.” This is the grace that Paul often refers to. We do not earn or deserve grace. In Corinthians Paul writes, “But by the grace of God, I am what I am”. This is definitely humbling and personally, I find it enormously freeing. I am reminded of Jesus, who about 300 years after Kohelet, said,
“Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Ecclesiastes, like the whole of the Bible actually, offers no easy formula for living to give us certainty and control. The Bible is certainly no self-help book. But I find Kohelet offers a good antidote to the stressful pressures our culture can put on us. Kohelet is not telling us to totally give up and do nothing because it’s all useless anyway. As chapter 3 says, “there is a time for everything and a season for every activity…. and he has made everything beautiful in its time.” But perhaps, as Merton argues, “We ought to stop taking our conscious plans and decisions with such infinite seriousness” .Kohelet does suggest we enjoy the more simple pleasures such as eating and drinking and friendship… and in subsequent chapters he offers a few rather random titbits of wisdom along the way. At the end he concludes the matter with “Fear God and obey his commandments for this is the whole duty of man.” Which after 12 chapters of poetic dismantling can feel a bit anticlimactic, but hey, after all, what are these commandments?. Jesus sums them up with “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Or as Michael Leunig, (whose pictures have been illustrating this sermon and who I am sure was a contemporary Kohelet), puts it, “Love one another … it’s as simple and difficult as that.” And perhaps it is only love, that when we die, will endure.
