Ending at the Beginning… beginning at the end
Ecclesiastes 3:1, 9-15
This Sunday marks
– the end of the summer
– the end of our time with Jonathan and Maureen as our Pastors of Youth Ministries
– and the end of our series on Ecclesiastes
Endings are important and endings can be difficult. But endings are also opportunities to step back and look at the big picture. This morning, I will let Ecclesiastes guide our vision of the whole, our vision of the big picture if you will. You may think that the choice of Ecclesiastes is an odd one for a moment such as this in the life of the congregation – noted as it is by some as somewhat pessimistic and gloomy,
but as I lived with the text in the past couple of weeks, I realized it actually had an important word for us.
Besides that, Ecclesiastes has been the source of our summer theme – focused as we have been on chapter 3 – For everything there is a season. For the entire summer each preacher was invited to focus on a small part of the text – a time for this or that – and so this morning in an odd or shall I say backward way – I will let the whole text guide this sermon – something we often do at the beginning of a series instead of at the end.
and so we end at the beginning.
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” – is a common phrase from this text. Another verse says, all is vanity or a chasing after the wind or a feeding on the wind. The Hebrew word here is hebel, or in the case of vanity of vanities, it is hebel, hebelim. Other words that come close to describing what is meant here are unsubstantial, momentary, profitless, or air like smoke that drifts away. The author of this text, Qoheleth, or the preacher, has applied his mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; and he says, “it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with,” and he continues, “I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.”
One can see why persons have named this text gloomy and pessimistic.
But wait – within this verse and others like it we can see part of the point of Ecclesiastes. He says that he has sought out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. Is this text not speaking of the limits of wisdom? I think so. Even wisdom, all the wisdom in the world only reveals so much…
Before I pursue that point further I want to shift now and examine the image of the wind in this text.
“All is vanity, a chasing after wind.”
Wind as you know is an important image in our scriptures. Winds in the scriptures, dry up the earth after the flood, God speaks to Job out of whirlwind, and in the story of Jesus and Nicodemus, wind and Spirit are intertwined – named as unseen and unpredictable.
I have a story about the unpredictability and power of wind. It was an August day in 1979. I was 14 years old living then on our dairy farm near Woodstock with my family. It was early evening – shortly after 6:00 pm, and I was feeding the rabbits that were housed on a grassy slope beside the barn. The air was completely still, hot and close and thick and green – unlike anything I had experienced before or since that time. I recall the perspiration that streamed down my body even though I wasn’t exerting myself. After feeding the rabbits, I went into the house and in that moment wind and rain erupted into the world. The floor of the house shook, the door in the kitchen blew open and the rain blew across the kitchen like a curtain. From the window, I watched our grain wagon roll through the barn yard and within minutes it was over. Everything was still again. I went out into the yard with my brother in awe of what had just occurred and we looked across the road to our neighbour’s place and saw with shock that their barn was no longer standing – it was simply gone.
Immediately our entire family piled into our truck and car and drove the mere kilometer to their place. The two hundred trees in their orchard were entirely uprooted; the 100-year-old pine trees in their lane way lay across each other like broken sticks. In a woodlot near by, tin from the roof of the barn was wrapped in the trees like fabric. Though
part of their house was also seriously damaged, everyone in their family was safe. Thanks be to God. This was the result of one of 4 F4 Tornadoes that rolled through Oxford County on that August day in 1979.
As with all disasters, the losses were serious. Over 350 homes were left uninhabitable; there were 142 injured persons and 2 deaths. But the other side of the story is that after the disaster, when we could breathe again, the community came together. Mennonite Disaster service arrived to help clean up and re-build homes. In our local community, neighbour opened up home to neighbour – so that everyone had a place to live during the clean-up and rebuilding. We simply took care of each other. But there is one loss when disaster strikes that tends to linger and that loss is a loss of a certain sense of security – the kind of security that says – these things don’t/won’t happen to me. Now if the sky is ever again dark and still and heavy in just that way …. anyone who experienced the effects of that Tornado will feel wary.
Yes, wind is unpredictable, powerful and sometimes truly destructive and frightening. As noted in Ecclesiastes, it is pointless to chase after it. And in John where Spirit and wind are equated we are reminded that we simply don’t know where it comes from or where it goes. This uncertainty and unpredictability especially when applied to the Spirit can be disconcerting. My own experience of being within a kilometer of a Tornado has always given the image of God’s voice speaking to Job out of a whirlwind an added dimension.
What does any of this have to do with Ecclesiastes?
Ecclesiastes is rooted and grounded in the realities of our life and our world – and does not gloss over or make pretty those realities. It says things that we know are true and would probably rather not think about most of the time, but occasionally these things occur to us and we feel compelled to wrestle with them and try to figure them out. We wonder what to do with the reality that often the same fate befalls the just and the unjust. Tornados don’t choose their victims based on who was living the most righteously at the time. There probably isn’t anything new upon the earth – really – wars and rumours of wars have occurred as long as recorded history as far as I can tell. Our time here is short (the older we get the more we realize the truth of that statement) and we should probably eat, drink and enjoy our labour if we can.
But why would it be important to include a text such as Ecclesiastes in the canon of our Bible? Many have asked this question. Apparently, it was one of the last ones to be included in the Hebrew Scriptures – written approximately 300 to 250 BCE. As far as we know it was written at a time when the classic Greek philosophies of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would have been permeating the culture of its day. In this context, a time of relative wealth and prosperity, it was easy to begin to imagine a world where human wisdom and not God ruled the day.
Ecclesiastes is a powerful text precisely because it claims that human wisdom has limits. In chapter 1:16, we read,
“I said to myself, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge,’ and I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind.
For in much wisdom is much vexation,
and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.”
As well, Ecclesiastes is powerful because it refuses to allow its preachers to cite platitudes that say simply that everything’s going to be okay. Speaking of saying “everything’s going to be okay.” I am reminded of a line in the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,
Sonny, the optimistic proprietor of the hotel in that movie, says more than once in the face of enormous obstacles – He says, “In India we have a saying – ‘Everything will be alright in the end.’ So if it’s not alright, it is not yet the end.’
I love that line.
But the Qoheleth, or the preacher in Ecclesiastes won’t let me say that or at least won’t let me say it easily. Everything that the preacher observes in Ecclesiastes as he makes his study of the human condition makes it impossible for him to say simply that everything’s going to be okay. Our experience tells us that lots of things are simply not okay.
< p style="line-height: 200%" class="MsoNormal">It is not okay that people are hungry in our world of abundance.
It is not okay that people are fleeing for their lives to refugee camps outside Syrian borders
and it’s not okay that people die of cancer.
We rightly resist saying that these things are okay. And so to summarize, Ecclesiastes is an antidote to believing that easy-answers can be provided by human wisdom on the one hand and it stymies the human tendency to desire God be to be a wish-fulfillment God on the other – a God who will fix things the way we want them to be and make everything turn out right – at least the way we think is right.
But Ecclesiastes is more than just an antidote to our negative tendencies of a) thinking we can figure it all out on our own, or b) assuming if we get our prayers and righteousness just right we will live in a magic bubble of protection. Ecclesiastes also gives us glimpses of what is good and true and right. What is good and true and right, according to Ecclesiastes is that
God is Other and beyond what we want God to be.
In our verses for today, we hear Qoheleth talking about the otherness of God when he says,
God has made everything suitable for its time; moreover God has put a sense of past and future into the minds of human beings, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end….. Even today, the best theoretical physicists in the world acknowledge that the more they figure out, the greater becomes or remains the mystery of all that is unknown.
Also, Qoheleth says, “I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him.
God is other and God is rightly to be feared. It is right that we should stand in awe before our Creator.
In the closing verses of the book we read,
“The end of the matter after all has been heard. Fear God, and keep God’s commandments, for that is the whole duty of everyone.”
And so I find myself wondering, based on knowing that God is Other and beyond what I want God to be and based on knowing that I should be in awe of God and keep God’s commandments, how exactly does knowledge of Ecclesiastes’ message inform how I should live – especially in light of endings and beginnings, obstacles, uncertainties and unpredictability.
In order to answer that question, I’ll revisit the image of the Tornado and its aftermath for a moment. After the Tornado, life actually wasn’t horrible, in fact we had numerous new opportunities to live out community, love of neighbour, and love of God in some pretty concrete ways. God continued to grant us and our neighbours opportunities to eat and drink and find pleasure in our labour despite seriously altered circumstances; the fruit of which is that the members of my family are still close friends with the members of our neighbour’s family who lost so much in that Tornado so many years ago.
On a lighter note I want to revisit the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for a moment, the movie whose optimistic proprietor says, ‘Everything will be alright in the end.’ So if it’s not alright, it is not yet the end.
Part of the beauty of the movie was watching how each of the characters in it responded to some serious discomforts, uncertainties and unpredictability.
The discomfort, uncertainties and unpredictability did nothing to dampen the ability of some of the hotel guests from seeing and appreciating and participating in the colour and exotic beauty of India. For those who could open themselves to the intersection between all that India had to offer and their own inner journey, pain was not avoided but neither were opportunities for beauty and pleasure. Beauty and pleasure are also a gift from our Other and awesome God.
And so if we return to the endings and beginnings that this transition in the life of our congregation marks,
the end of the summer,
the end of this series
and the end of Jonathan and Maureen’s ministry among us and beyond that to all the beginnings yet to come; let us hear t
he message of this book.
God is profoundly Other and we are invited to stand in awe. God gives good gifts among which are the gifts of eating and drinking and taking pleasure in all our toil.
And the endings that have been and the beginnings yet to come – all that we cannot see – all that we cannot know – are contained somehow in God. Let us be in awe and keep God’s commandments.