A Good Longing

September 19 2021

Ecclesiastes 1

         As many of you know, Jennifer and I have a son named Matthew. Now, we have always known that Matt is a little unique, I mean after all, he was the kid who at four years of age announced from his high chair that he was going to count to one hundred by elevens. Yup, off he went, eleven, twenty-two, all the way to ninety-nine which was close enough for me. He was also the one who, in the aftermath of having a tree smash our house leaving me a wreck told me, “Its just a house Dad.” That was a pretty profound and quite right statement coming from a fifteen year old kid. Just a couple of weeks ago, we had the kids over for lunch since we don’t see them very often as they have all flown the nest. As we were eating, in the midst of our catching up, we found ourselves on the topic of people getting upset, which seems to be pretty prevalent these days. Matt, like usual, understood, perhaps better than most just what was the source of people being upset. He said people get upset when their expectations don’t line up with reality. People want the world to be a certain way, they expect certain things to happen but then they come face-to face with reality and the reality they are living in doesn’t match up with what they were expecting. That’s kind of deep when you think about it. His answer is to just not have any expectations and just learn to accept the reality that you find yourself in, that way you will never find yourself frustrated when the people and things of life fail to live up to your expectations.

         Now, Matt and the way that he thinks about life would be at home in the company of the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes because the writer of Ecclesiastes also has done a lot of thinking as to why is life so frustrating.  For many people though, what is frustrating is trying to read the book of Ecclesiastes because it can be a rather obscure and hard to follow book. The author seems to be a real downer because he writes continually about everything is vanity. This translation of the word which is a central part of what he is speaking about doesn’t help either. I mean, if you are like me, a vanity is that sink with a mirror where you brush your teeth every morning. So, before we can even think about getting into what the whole point of what the writer is attempting to speak about we have to first figure out just what is this idea that has been translated as “vanity”. 

         Even so, though, the book of Ecclesiastes has some great quotes that have been plucked out of its manuscript. If you are of a certain age you will remember that a band called The Byrds had a hit in 1965, called Turn, Turn, Turn which was nothing more than the first eight verses of the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, so there’s that. There are also verses from the fifth chapter that are sometimes used at weddings because they state that two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil. A threefold cord, which can be thought of as a husband and wife and God, we are told is not easily broken. So, yes, there are bits and pieces we can take out of Ecclesiastes which are beautiful and profound but the real power and purpose of this writing unfortunately doesn’t get understood when we do so. This is why I thought we should take the next several weeks and have a look at just what is this strange book really all about.

         Well, first, we might want to start with the strange name that this book has, Ecclesiastes. As a person who has been trying to spell this correctly I can assure you that I wish they had called it something else. The word, “Ecclesiastes”, is a Greek word which has its roots in another Greek word, “ecclesia,” This is a word that means to call out or to call together and it was the name for when a town meeting was to be held the town crier would call out for people to come together in the town square. The early church was often called the ecclesia because they were people whom God had called together into an assembly. So, Ecclesiastes then is the one who is speaking to those who have been called together; he is the speaker to the assembly. This would be much like in school where you find out that on a certain day you were going to have an assembly because of a speaker who was going to address the student body. The speaker who was going to talk to you in Greek would be called Ecclesiastes. Now, what is interesting is that in the case of Ecclesiastes, the person who wrote it is actually writing about the speaker, it isn’t the speaker himself. So, it’s a second hand account kind of like you had to write about the speaker who came to speak to the student assembly.

         One more thing about the book of Ecclesiastes is that it is part of the Bible’s wisdom literature. What is fascinating is that although the Bible has several books classified as being about wisdom, they all take different approaches to that subject. The best known book of wisdom,Proverbs for example, takes the approach that everything that is wise is written down within its pages so that if a person desires to be wise all they need to do is to study the book of Proverbs, learn the right way of living that is found there and voila, you will be a wise person. Ecclesiastes though, differs from the book of Proverbs because what this book is about is one person’s quest to figure out why the world is messed up and then through study and observation figure out the solution to what plagues the world. Ecclesiastes then is quite scientific in its approach because it involves a lot of study and questioning and then forming a conclusion from all that has been learned in the search. The writer of Ecclesiastes though does not just want his listeners to accept his findings but he rather wants those who listen to him to be people who do their own people watching, do their discovery and pondering and then agree with what he has found. The wisdom of Ecclesiastes then, is not about rote learning, reading a book, memorizing answers and then applying them; no, Ecclesiastes is about developing a wisdom mindset, about discovering just what it means to be wise from everyday living in the real world. We might say that it is learning to be wise from attending the school of hard knocks.

         So, as we begin Ecclesiastes, it seems as if the speaker is a bit over dramatic and pretty much a downer. He sounds like a guy you would hate to have to ride in an elevator with. Then there’s that word, “vanity”. The best way to figure out just what is meant by this word is to go back to the original Hebrew where we find that the word is hevel. Its roots mean breath or wind and the idea is trying to catch the wind. Have you ever tried to run and take hold of the wind? With that image in mind it is pretty easy to understand that hevel can be understood as being futile, utterly futile, nonsensical, or senseless absurdity. This word absurdity is perhaps the closest to capturing what the speaker is getting at because in its original use it meant to be deaf to the voice of reason. When people don’t do what seems reasonable or rational, then, we call them absurd. So, when the speaker of Ecclesiastes states that all is absurd he is saying in no uncertain terms that the whole world seems to be deaf to the voice of reason. He has looked around, observed people in their comings and going and what he notices is that everything people are doing is pretty nonsensical.  A famous phrase plucked from this first chapter of Ecclesiastes is that there is nothing new under the sun. Every day it’s the age old, same old. Jennifer has been working hard at eating right but the other day I couldn’t help but laugh when as she was packing her lunch she said under her breath, “Salad, again.” This is what our speaker is getting at, everyday, it’s salad, again. There is a weariness to life, what has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done. A generation goes and a generation comes, right, and you find that the only two sections of the paper you really want to read are the obituaries and the funnies. One helps you remember the truth about life and the other helps you to forget it. This what I like about the speaker is that even though he is a bit of a downer he at the same time, is honest about the way life is. What the Bible teaches us is not that we have to go around with a smile on our faces acting as if nothing is wrong but it rather says that its okay to be honest and state that you know, life has a lot of moments that are mundane and boring, where life seems a bit nonsensical and its okay to feel like we are just running to make the wheel go around.

         Yet in spite of our dreary state of affairs all is not lost because what the speaker also has pointed out is the fact that we are aware of our state of being. We are aware that there is a God and he has given to us a life to be busy in. We know the passing of our days and we also are aware that these days we have been given should have meaning, that our days should make sense. You know, a dog or cat is never disappointed to eat the same kibble day in or day out. They treat every day as a brand new day never worrying about what happened yesterday or fussing over what’s going to happen tomorrow. But we are different and there is no place that this difference is so keenly felt than in this nagging feeling that there ought to be more to life than this, that life has to be about more than eating and being busy and going to bed just to get up and do it all over again because that’s basically how the dog and the cat live their life. Our frustrations are the alarm bell that is trying to wake us up to the reality that God has created us to be different, to live different. This difference is that life is supposed to make sense, this is what wisdom is all about. Life is supposed to be reasonable; life is supposed to have meaning. The writer of Ecclesiastes understands this and he is wondering just why is it that life is not as its supposed to be, why is life so frustrating? This is where his search begins with his questioning of the status quo, and this is where our search begins as well.

         You see, God wants us to have a longing for more. Listen to what Jesus tells us in his first sermon as found in the fifth chapter of Matthew, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” This hunger and thirst for things to be right, this is, I believe what the speaker of Ecclesiastes is experiencing. You know, when people get to a certain level of hunger they often become irritable, what people know as being hangry. I think something similar happens when we are hungry and thirsting for the world to be right. When we live in a world is as the speaker of Ecclesiastes tells us, exceedingly futile, hopelessly absurd, our hunger for life to be reasonable and meaningful can make us frustrated. As my son Matt has already figured out, you are just going to be frustrated if you have expectations because more often than not, your expectations will not match the reality you’re living in. Yet, I wonder if it is just so easy as just having no expectations? When Jesus states that it is alright for us to be hungry and thirsty for the world to be made right he is telling us that we are not to give up on our expectations that the world should be a certain way. We aren’t just to say that it is no use expecting that people will act in a righteous manner, but rather Jesus instead says, its ok to be hungry, to keep expecting even if your pretty sure you’re going to be disappointed in the end. So, how are we to live with this endless craving for our world to be made right? The answer Jesus gives is a promise, “You will be satisfied.” What this promise of Jesus forces us to do is to put our hope of satisfaction somewhere in the future not in the here and now. The speaker of Ecclesiastes must have had some inkling that the hope he was searching for lay not in the everyday life where there is nothing new under the sun but instead the hope he desired resided where God was. In chapter three, the speaker writes again about the work that we all busy ourselves with saying, “What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given his children to be busy with.” These are the same words he has spoken that are found in the first chapter about the unhappy business of life. But here in the third chapter the speaker goes on to say, “He has made all things beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to end. I perceived that there is nothing better than for them to be joyful and to do good as long as they live.” This is an amazing observation that the speaker of Ecclesiastes has discovered that when God was forming us, he created us in such a way that all of us have an awareness of eternity. This awareness of eternity can be thought of in many ways but perhaps the best way to understand what is meant here is that all of us have an awareness of God. The Jewish people hold that where humans differ from animals is that as human beings we are aware that God is speaking to us. It is God who is eternal because as the people of Israel knew so well, the one constant, age after age, was God. God is ever present, never changing , always faithful; this is what it means to be eternal. Jesus confirms this in his last prayer with his disciples when they heard Jesus say to his Heavenly Father, “Father glorify your Son, that the Son might glorify you since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. This is eternal life, that they know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” This is what Jesus has done, he has taken this awareness of eternity and he has made known the one who is eternal because this is the life God created us for. It is here, in this life of knowing God, here is where we find satisfaction for the hunger and thirsting for righteousness because only God is wholly righteous. You see, it is the frustration with the futility and absurdity of this life under the sun, the life marked off day by day and year by year, this is what makes us long for more. The more that we are longing for awakens within us something God created us with when he knit us together, an awareness that the more that we are longing for is a reality and this reality is the eternal reality of God.

         So, it is God who makes so that in our frustration we are not driven to despair in our longing for this world to be set right. It is because of God that we can, as the speaker of Ecclesiastes tells us we can experience joy even in a world that is so frustratingly futile, so overwhelmingly absurd. We can know our hungering and thirsting doesn’t allow us to let our frustration be an excuse to not keep on doing good as long as we live. Yet in spite of what we have so far figured out the speaker is not satisfied that there is a way for us to live with a world where reason seems to fall on deaf ears. The speaker of Ecclesiastes wants to know just why it is that this world is so messed up because he knows that this is what wisdom is supposed to do, to be that which brings order out of chaos.  This is why the speaker declares that he has applied his heart to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. He applied his heart to know everything, wisdom and madness and folly, the good, the bad and the ugly of it all. What he found disturbed him a great deal but as we go through what he discovers we too will come to find some answers as to just why things are the way that they are. For now though, we hold fast to the promise of Jesus that we will be satisfied. We know that his promise to be true because he is always been faithful to us, even being faithful to die for us that we might be set free to know the eternal God who loves us and who invites us to come and enjoy his righteous life. So, let us keep on being hungry and thirsty for this world to be right because one day, we will find our blessed satisfaction in the grace of Jesus Christ. Amen.