Wising Up

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

August 1, 2010

Text: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23 and Luke 12: 13-21

CLEARING THE DECKS

The message of Ecclesiastes is a smack in the face! He does not mince words! My paraphrase:

“You see all of things I have acquired by working my fingers to the bone? Houses, vineyards, gardens, parks, lakes, slaves, herds of livestock and flocks of turkeys, lots of silver and gold; people to entertain me. “I did not refuse myself anything I wanted; I did not deny myself any pleasure.” I enjoyed my work, and for my labor, these things were my reward.

“But when I thought about all of this, all my labor and toil, I realized: “it was futility and a chasing after wind, of no profit under the sun.” (Revised English Bible)

“Then I thought about how wise I was, able to spot foolishness, and distinguish between the two. But then I realized that both the wise and the foolish would die.

“And I realized that all I have made with my wisdom and my toil----someone else would have when I die, someone who did not work as hard as I to attain it. He or she will have control over all of this, not me.

“This, too is vanity, a chasing after the wind, “smoke,” (The Message translation) like a breath which disappears.”

We may write scripts for our lives, but life is not predictable.

Alyce Ramsey, Professor at Perkins School of Theology, writes that the old preacher (my name for the author), if he attended a seminar in which someone was saying that happiness can be attained by doing 5 wise things, “would roll his eyes and shake his head: foolishness, he would say: the events of life are not under our control.) The old Preacher’s seminar titles might sound like this:

“Your Limitations,: Live with Them.” “The God You’ll Never Know.” And “Life is Unpredictable, Except for Death.” Deal with it!”

She also writes that the preacher delivered his gloomy sermon at a time much like ours in many respects.

“His world was unpredictable, full of opportunity but also of risk. It was a world of money, commerce, and investment, but also of loans, mortgages and foreclosures. For the smallholder [middle class], the homesteader, and the worker, there was much room for anxiety and little room for certainty….” “They were “helplessly caught in the tides of swift political and economic changes.” “There were people willing to do anything in order to get ahead, and the rich were circumventing the law at the expense of others.” (Page 150, Wisdom in an Age of Self-Help)

Thank goodness the preacher does not end there!

After clearing to decks of all illusions about our mortality, the emptiness of working so hard for all of the things of life, he offers this consolation:

“To eat and drink and experience pleasure in return for our labors, this does not come from any good in a person: it comes from God.” (2:24, REB)

Toiling, working your fingers to the bone? Do it so you can enjoy life. Live fully in the time you are given.

“A well-lived life is not measured by life-span or number of achievements, but by the grateful reception of joy in one’s life.”

God? God’s ways are inscrutable, unknowable. Who knows what God is up to? Just receive what comes from God and eat, drink and be merry! (

WHY HERE, WHY NOW?

So-------------- here we are in the middle of summer, and why bother with this gloomy message?

(Lots of biblical scholars have wondered why it was even included in the Bible.)

William Long, says that, “Sometimes we just need to hear that negative word.

It can clear the mental decks; help lead toward reorientation of life; make us slow down long enough to ask ourselves on what we are basing our life anyway….

(William Long) ”http://www.drbilllong.com/LectionaryII/Eccles12.html)

“Quoleth rubs our noses in the fact that not all limits can be exceeded by the exertion of our will and optimism.

We are all limited in time, energy, lifespan, control of certain circumstances and the knowledge of God.” (Ramsey, page 158)

Sam Keen, in his autobiography which he titles "Beginnings Without End," succinctly reminds us that in any flight from reality he who runs fastest gets nowhere first.

So, nurture the “stubborn stem of joy sprouting up through the concrete of life’s challenges.” (page 159) “Joy in our own plot of life, page 161

Enjoy the God-given gift of life’s little pleasures as they come rather than neglect them in hope of gaining some kind of profit from toil. (page 162)

The preacher’s God is inscrutable. Now this is a partial view of God’s nature. But it shakes us out of our illusion that we are in control of all events.

SANCTIFIED REALISM

Jesus has a little of Ecclesiastes in him, we discover.

The occasion of Luke 12: 13-21? “Jesus, settle a dispute between me and my brother; make him give me what is now mine. Mediate, please, like a good Rabbi. Not me, Jesus says.”

And Jesus knows a teachable moments when he sees one.

His parable: A farmer has a windfall crop. He is well on his way to being rich. Larger granaries is the answer! He will put up his excess produce for himself.

There is nothing wrong with storing up for lean times. Read Genesis, Chapter 41. Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dream as meaning there were coming 7 years of good crops in Egypt, and then 7 years of drought.

So he advises the King to store up the excess for a rainy day, for his people, so they will not starve. Joseph, elevated to the role of prime minister, shows himself to be a wise and considerate steward of a windfall, for the sake of the resident and, ultimately, of his brothers and his father..

But the famer in Jesus’ parable, in contrast, thinks to himself, talked to himself, complements himself, and then goes the step further:

“Soul,” signifies “the essence of the self that survives beyond or in spite of our material wealth, who we really are and what we value ultimately.” (James Weldon Chamley, Word and Witness, August 3, 1986)

He speaks not a word about his family, friends, community, country. He will pile up treasures for himself--- and, presumably, his opportunity to sell the grain at a handy personal profit when such a product becomes precious. (Joseph does something similar, but not just for himself!)

In the tradition of the preacher, God reminds the farmer of his mortality, his limitation when it comes to writing his own script. “Who knows who will get your barns full of grain?”

God asks something like this:

“Is this behavior what you want to be remembered for? Don’t you know that this windfall is a gift to be used as a wise and generous steward? Do you not remember that you are to love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength---?”

Be rich toward God, not a pauper before God. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. If your heart is with your full barns, there your heart will be. And when the barn is empty, what then? In Psalm 135: 13-18, there is this warning:

God, your name is eternal,

God, you'll never be out-of-date.

God stands up for his people,

God holds the hands of his people.

The gods of the godless nations are mere trinkets,

made for quick sale in the markets:

Chiseled mouths that can't talk,

painted eyes that can't see,

Carved ears that can't hear—

dead wood! cold metal!

Those who make and trust them become like them.

(The Message,The Bible in Contemporary Language, Eugene Peterson, Nave Press, 2003, 2006)

If your heart is with God, you are linked to the One who is the Eternal. Since the farmer is obsessed with his barns, he will begin to be like them---full of grain!

“For what do I toil and save?” I am challenged to “place [my] trust in something more durable than the volatile fluctuations of the global economy.” This parable causes us to ask, “What is our true purpose in life?” (Especially when we cannot know how much longer we will live. And, “For what does this congregation toil and save? What does it mean for us to be a people who are rich toward God? (Patricia Lull, Feasting on the Word, Sundays after Pentecost, Year C, pages 310-314) Are we dedicated to the love of God and neighbor? Do we get diverted into the path of more is always better, that our accumulation of people and money is more important than effective and faithful service and witness?

Life is a crooked road, not a straight path, and we should have no illusions about the tenuousness of life and wealth. In our stressful and wonderful lives, can we resist running after the wind?

Jesus announced from day one of his ministry that the presence of God’s new day of redemption was in their midst. Forgiveness is given to all who will turn and receive it. And yet so many are listening but not hearing! Security comes from God’s grace, not from all the things mortals can accumulate for their own self. “The Lord is our Shepherd, we shall not want….” This is realism deeper than the Preacher’s view.

H.H. Farmer, quoted in the little treasure trove of wisdom, The Diary of Reading by John Baillie, Day 184, wrote:

“What if things are after all exactly what they seem so often to be and there is not at the heart of the universe only as great hole through which all the sacrifice, all the loving and loyalty, all the yearning of the race pours age to age and is lost.

“Well, I knew that there is not a great hole at the heart of things, but God, and he calls his disciples to share that knowledge, calls them to have that steadiness that comes from knowing that not only are there harvests but that, despite all appearance, they are eternally preserved. If Christ has grappled our hearts to Himself at all, then it were surely wise to trust His certainties and not our own doubts, however persistent….”

(Wonderful resources on Ecclesiastes and other biblical texts is Day 1.org, and the book by Alyce McKenzie, Preaching Biblical Wisdom in a Self-Help Society (Abingdon Press, 2002).