The Order of Grace

 October 24 2021

Ecclesiastes 11

         One of the things that I really enjoy is finding something on social media that will give me some food for thought because, as most people know there is a lot of mindless nonsense which abounds there. So, needless to say, I was thrilled to find this Facebook page called Mockingbird which has weekly articles about Christian spiritual matters. Now, these articles are not your ordinary fare of Christian reading and, case in point, is an article that they ran this past week. What got my heart racing is that it began by elaborating on the Second Law of Thermodynamics; like I said not your usual stuff. I got excited when I began to read this because I am a big physics nerd; it was one of my favorite classes in school. So, I know what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is all about but what I couldn’t figure out is how it had anything to do with you and I following Jesus. You see, the Second Law of Thermodynamics simply states that unless some outside source intervenes everything goes from order to disorder which explains my house to a ‘T’. As the author of the article stated if you see two pictures one of a beach full of sand and one with a picture of a sandcastle you know the picture of the beach is the before picture and the picture of the sandcastle is the one after someone took time and effort to take the sand and mold and shape the sand into a castle. And once that person leaves the beach that sand castle will eventually go back to being just a big pile of sand. That’s just the way the world works. Order in whatever form takes energy from an outside source to take all of the disorder and make something out of it which when you think about it, explains just why we as people can not get better without some power from the outside, the power that is personal, the power we know as Jesus. Isn’t that interesting that the laws that we depend on to make sense of the world seem to apply to spiritual matters as well. It makes sense when you stop and consider that the whole earth, everything the physical, the spiritual, the seen and the unseen is full of the glory of God. So, just as we know that a pile of Lego’s will just sit there and be a pile of Lego’s until somebody begins to put them together and build something with them so too who we are to be will not happen until we allow God to take us into his hands and let him take the chaos of our life and bring his order into our life.

         Once we understand that on our own we will just continue to bring more chaos into the world without the intervention of God, then we can begin to wonder just what is this order that God is trying to bring about in our life? If we don’t understand just what God is trying to make out of the mess of our life then we might not fully trust him as he seeks to build according to his plan. The author C.S. Lewis once wrote to imagine ourselves as living houses. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first perhaps you can understand what he is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof. But presently He starts knocking the house in a way that hurts. It doesn’t make sense; what on earth is he up to? The explanation, Lewis goes on to tell us, is that God is building something quite different than you thought of. God is building a palace that He intends to come in and live in Himself.  So, C.S. Lewis, is saying what we have been thinking about that it is God who is needed to come into our life and bring order out of our chaos, out of our mess and what he is making is something beyond our imagination because he is building something that he can inhabit, something that goes along with what he is up to in the world.

         So, all of this, I’m sure your thinking, is great but what about Ecclesiastes; are we ever going to get around to our scripture for today? The tie in that this idea that God is the power we need to bring order out of the chaos of our life has with the book of Ecclesiastes is that, as we might recall, Ecclesiastes is a book about wisdom. Wisdom has as its bedrock idea that the world makes sense and if we can figure out how the world is ordered then we can make choices with understanding and knowledge. So, yes, as the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us, there is nothing new under the sun, and this is a good thing because once we figure out the order that God is bringing about then we don’t have to fear that tomorrow something is going to pop up that we can’t make sense of.  This order is what the writer of Ecclesiastes is trying to figure out because everywhere he looked people were involved in a bunch of non-sensical ways of living. They were filling their lives with what amounted to nothing more than trying to grab the wind and stuff it in their pockets. What the writer of Ecclesiastes keeps coming back to time and time again is the experience which he had at the harvest festivals that God required of his people. There, in what was known as the Festival of Booths, God commanded his people to rejoice for seven days because of  the harvest that they had gathered in. They were to rest and feast, eating and drinking recognizing that all that they had gathered in was theirs because of the love of God who makes the sun shine on the evil and the good, who makes the rains come upon both the just and the unjust. God commanded his people in this moment to be people who were overflowing with joy because there in their rest from their labors they were to recognize that all that they had been blessed with was because of the grace of God, God’s favor upon his people that was theirs not because of who they were or what they had done but his grace was simply the very way of God. So, when the writer of Ecclesiastes, writes again and again that the best that people could expect in this life was to eat, drink and rejoice it is not hard to understand that there very possibly was a connection to the celebration of this harvest festival where God’s people experienced the very best that life had to offer.

         As the writer of Ecclesiastes, continued in his journey to figure out the purpose of life, he comes to understand that there in that experience of great joy, something unexpected was also experienced, a life beyond fear. The experience of death is a constant theme that the writer of Ecclesiastes focuses on but he senses that there is something beyond  that end which comes to everyone. In the experience of joy that the writer of Ecclesiastes states is so very important, there he begins to understand that what God desires is for his people to experience in perhaps just a moment, a life beyond fear because this is the existence of God. So, where wisdom literature like the book of Proverbs states that wisdom begins with the fear of God, the writer of Ecclesiastes writes that this is only the beginning of wisdom; the journey of wisdom goes on past this fear and is found in the joy experienced in the favor and welcome of God which is what God’s grace is all about.

         It is this experience of God’s grace, his making his face to shine upon us, this experience empowers us to live in the present moment because it is there in every present moment that our God is present with us. All of this understanding that the writer of Ecclesiastes has figured out is important to what he comes to know is true wisdom. You see, what might not be  evident about the importance of basing our life upon God being present with us in every present moment is that only as we live in the present can we love in the present. This is where God always wants to brings his people to the place where the past is truly past, and where we know that the future is what it has always been, a place that does not yet exist so that we can at last live in the present because only as we live in the present can we be present to one another as God is present with us. This is where God’s grace is supposed to bring us to, to the place where we can live without fear before the presence of God. This is the relationship grace was always meant to have with faith not as some means necessary to achieve personal salvation but rather grace is given to us by God in order to cast out all of our fears so that we might perfectly love as God first perfectly loved us.

         When we unravel all of the ramifications of that simple advice to eat, drink and enjoy, it should come as no surprise that as the writer of Ecclesiastes comes to the end of his writing he states that we are to cast our bread upon the waters, for we will find it after many days. Now, to me this sounds like we are to feed the ducks but the writer of Ecclesiastes, I believe, is stating something more profound because  this saying is firmly connected with the next statement which tells us that we are to give a portion to seven or even to eight, for you do not know what disaster may come upon the earth. What most of us know about giving to others is that it is a lot like tossing bread unto the surface of a pond; once you throw that bread out there good luck trying to get it back.  Bread is used as a representation of a person’s livelihood and when a person gives to someone else they in many ways are giving their very livelihood to them. To the watching world when people give to others it just doesn’t make any sense because, hey, once you give that gift is gone forever; or is it? The writer of Ecclesiastes goes on to tell us that after many days, that bread we watched turn to a soggy mess upon the surface of the pond will be found once again. How in the world can that be so? Well, this line corresponds to the line where the writer states that we do not know what disaster may happen on the earth. What the writer of Ecclesiastes is getting at is life within the order that God is bringing about. The order God seeks for us to live in is an order of grace, that unmerited favor given to us by God. Grace is a gift, a gift not of God’s livelihood but a gift of life itself. God gives his grace so that he might create a world where the life of everyone is ordered by grace. So, yes, we take our livelihood, our daily bread, and we give it away, throwing it out there like throwing bread on the surface of a lake knowing that we may never see it again. But then disaster happens and we find ourselves in need, perhaps even secretly wishing that we now had that bread we so foolishly had given away yet all is not lost because along comes someone else who takes their bread and he gives his bread to you knowing full well he might as well take that loaf in his hand and chuck it in the river as to ever think he will ever get that bread back. This is life that is ordered by grace, a life ordered by giving and showing favor and welcome without concerns of whether that person we give to is worthy to receive our gift. We order our lives by grace because this is the way God has ordered his world, giving life to us not because we ever gave God any reason to believe that we were worth the giving to us any gift at all.And if the world is ordered by grace then a life lived under such an order must be a life of wisdom.

         Now, if we have doubts about such an interpretation we need only to look at a parable Jesus told which is found at the beginning of the sixteenth chapter of the gospel of Luke. There we hear Jesus tell his disciples about a rich man who had a manager  and charges were brought to this rich man that his manager was wasting his possessions. So, the rich man sent for the manager and he asked him, “what is this I hear about you? Turn in your account of your management, for you can no longer be my manager. Upon hearing this the manager said to himself, “What am I going to do? I am not strong enough to dig and I am too ashamed to beg. What I will do then when I am removed from management is to make so people will receive me into their homes. So, summoning his masters debtors, the manager spoke to each, one by one,. He asked the first debtor, “How much do you owe? The debtor said,”A hundred measures of oil.” The manager told him to sit down quickly and write fifty measures of oil instead. Then the manager asked another debtor how much did he owe. The debtor told him that he owed one hundred bushels of wheat. The manager told him to write eighty bushels instead. The rich man, Jesus said, commended the manager for his wisdom. So, what is the point of this rather confusing story? Well, first we cannot forget that Jesus tells this story directly after having told the story of the Prodigal Son. In that story we hear of the grace of the Father who welcomes home a son who did not deserve the gift of hospitality that his Father offers to him. The prodigal son’s brother upon discovering out about this gift his Father has offered his wayward brother refuses to obey his Father’s command to come into the house and celebrate and the Father offers grace to the older brother just as he had done to the younger brother. So, Jesus here is speaking to the reality that God orders his world by grace. Jesus then follows the story of the gracious Father with this story of what is often called the dishonest manager however this title comes out of a misunderstanding as to how business was conducted in the Middle East. The manager in the story was the middle man who represented the rich man. The rich man owned a great deal of land of which people would give a portion of their harvest to the rich man in order to farm his land. The manager would take the amount that was owed to the rich man and to that number he would add his amount for his work as the go between. So, what has happened is that the manager has been found to have squandered his wealth. This is exactly how Jesus described what had happened to the younger son in his story of the prodigal son and it tells us that these two stories are connected. So, just as the youngest son when he had squandered his money decided to trust in the grace of his Heavenly Father so now the manager when he has been found to have squandered his money also decided to put his hope in grace. He decides to bet his future upon the favor or welcome of others, that they might share their livelihood with him. How does he hope to make such a thing happen? The manager decided to first be gracious to those who owed money to the rich man. When the manager told the first debtor to go and erase the hundred barrels of oil and in its place write fifty barrels instead what he is revealing is that what was owed to the rich man was fifty barrels of oil; the other fifty barrels is what the manager would usually take as his cut. The same thing happened when he met with the second debtor when the manager told him that instead of the usual bill of one hundred bushels of wheat he instead was to write eighty bushels. Eighty bushels is what was owed to the rich man and the manager added twenty bushels as his own shipping and handling fee. You see, what the manager was doing was giving up what was his rightful money he needed to live on today so that through his gracious gift to the debtors he might have friends for the future. This is a life ordered by grace. The manager offered a gift first in hopes that his gift might affect the hearts of those he had given the gift to so that when he found himself homeless they would welcome him into their homes. His gracious gift to the debtors could be seen much like the writer of Ecclesiastes described it as throwing bread upon the water because there was no certainty that those who had received his gift would respond in like manner. The eldest son in the story of the prodigal son remained unmoved by his Fathers favor and welcome even though the eldest son in his defiance of his Father deserved to be punished. Even so, Jesus tells us this story of the gracious manager to give us a picture of the wisdom of a life ordered by grace. This is the wisdom that the writer of Ecclesiastes also at last had come to, this is when life at last makes sense. As Jesus goes on to conclude his parable of the gracious manager, Jesus tells us that we are to use our unrighteous wealth, wealth we so easily worship, and use that which God has so graciously given us to make friends. This makes sense because what God has done was to take that which was the richest gift, the gift of his own dear Son and he gave this gift so that we who were his enemies might be transformed into his friends. This is the wisdom of the cross; this is the wisdom of grace. To God be the glory! Amen!