|
Who
Dares Stand Idle? Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 31, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Ecclesiastes 3:1-15 II Thessalonians 3:6-13
Before we turn our lives toward toil and put our shoulders to the grindstone, I want us to inhabit the mind of one who has dared stand idle long enough to ask after the point of doing anything at all: the mind of Koheleth, the Preacher. I have always found it curious when his musings are requested for the funeral of one much loved. The passage chosen, of course, is the one popularized in the sixties: For everything [turn, turn, turn] there is a season [turn, turn, turn], and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die. Therein lies the relevance of the passage to a funeral, I suppose, along with a mention of all the other times: a time to kill and heal, weep and laugh, mourn and dance, love and hate, a time to keep and a time to throw away (Is this what we're doing at the edge of an open grave?). The problem, theologically, is all these times are ticked off by Koheleth, the Preacher, as though they were on a par: all, says he, is vanity. So then, taking this book of wisdom at its word, we are left with the futility of it all, the purposelessness of human existence…left to say, as has been said of Koheleth's philosophy: life is just one inconsequential thing after another, and then you die. I do not like to read Ecclesiastes at funerals. Rather, I read Ecclesiastes, in all honesty, in the midst of life's doldrums when I do not feel like doing much of anything: in the middle of summer when I have escaped the pressure of productivity, in the muddle of gray skies and too much rain, before the mundane task which harries my fear of being inconsequential. On the days when I have had it with running the human race and would just as soon retire to the solitude of my own idle thoughts, I open the Bible to Ecclesiastes. Louise Erdrich says as much, though with an edge, "Ecclesiastes speaks to people in tough binds, people with vendettas, a bone to pick, no dog to kick, the sour-grapers, the hurt, those who've never shucked off their adolescent angst." It speaks to people for whom life is not fair…and it is never their fault. It speaks to people for whom life is empty…and it is never their responsibility. It speaks, in one way or another, at one time or another, to us all. Though that fact does not stop me from wondering how the book of Ecclesiastes ever made it into the canon: this is both a mystery and a miracle. These verses seem blind to God's purposes revealed in the very pages on either side of its complaint. Yet without the angst of Ecclesiastes included in the biblical witness, a part of our humanity--the bored or the bummed-out part, to put it in Erdrich's words--would be less addressed by God's written word. With it, there is not a part of our human cry that escapes God's understanding. For in these verses, we hear ourselves as contrary, plaintive, parsimonious in our gratitude, proudly arrogant in our conclusion that human existence is no more than a throwaway prize, joined in our opinion that life is simply unfair. But we are given to hear more. For hearing the hollow ring of our idle complaints in these verses, slowly we find ourselves turned to confess the mess we have made of the human condition we inhabit: the condition Christ came to redeem. In the first place, given its insistence on life's vanity, Ecclesiastes presents us with a perspective on human existence that presciently foreshadows the flatness of our secular culture even as it needles our religious resolve when the days seem pointless and we are at loose ends. Verse after verse, we are reminded of the coincidence between belief in a God who is up to something in human history, and our being given reason enough to get up in the morning…the coincidence between being bored, and believing in nothing much beyond our small selves. For Koheleth, God either has no purpose in creation, or has so hidden the purpose from human seeking that life has no shape, no direction, no order: "When I applied my mind to know wisdom," he writes in the first chapter, "and to see the business that is done on earth, how one's eyes see sleep neither day nor night, then I saw all the work of God, that no one can find out what is happening under the sun. However much they may toil in seeking, they will not find it out; even though those who are wise claim to know, they cannot find it out." He is saying that he sees no hint of God's hand in human life. He is saying, for all of his diligent efforts to find God out, he has been met with silence. Therefore, without a greater purpose revealed in the little details of our days--our work and our play, our sleeping and our wakefulness, our keeping and throwing away, our tearing and sewing, our loving and hating--without a greater purpose revealed in and through these little details, none of it matters. So you weep and laugh, so you mourn and dance, so you embrace and refrain from embracing. So you stay married or get divorced, so you have an abortion or carry a child, so you endure the pain or put a plastic bag over your head: if there is no hint God is up to something in human history, then any order or direction or purpose we may devise for ourselves, any action we may take or refrain from taking, is vanity. Appearance. Our lives may look purposeful to the world, but we are going nowhere…our hours may appear to be productive, but emptiness overtakes us in the end. Because, you see, we've made it all up, these lives of ours. Without the gift of truth and purpose given from outside our made-up lives, we are finally left with only idle pursuits to occupy our time. Bored is barely adequate to describe the experience of living in the world without a relationship to the One who put us here in the first place. "We are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass," Moby Dick's Ahab laments, "and Fate is the handspike." Fate is the handspike. If in the first place, Koheleth presents us with a perspective on human existence lived without purpose, Koheleth, in the second place, presents us with a perspective on human existence which bears witness to the faith of a fatalist: life lived at the mercy of nothing much, subject to the indifference of the universe, victims of circumstances beyond our control. These times, you see, simply come upon us and we are not responsible: a time to kill or heal, to weep or laugh, to mourn or dance. These times come upon us from without, often strange and uninvited, and we are re-actors in a drama going nowhere. Fate is what Koheleth has left to believe in, if God has no purpose in giving us life, or if God's purpose is so hidden as to seem hideous at a distance, or if God is not. Thus when the skies are more gray than blue, and life has taken a turn not to my liking, and the road ahead is obscured the fog in my mind, I turn to Ecclesiastes for company, for a companion with whom to rail against my fate…against all that is not my fault…against, as one philosopher put it, "the impersonal and the anti-personal, pervading time and space--determining events, and shaping society so comprehensively that there is no escape. We live today," he concludes, "in unusually fateful times." We live, I would say, in times that find us powerlessly concluding that, "What will be will be"…when the values by which we appear to live are like cut-flowers in relation to the saving story they once believed they disclosed…when actions taken are easily blamed on circumstances beyond our control or are blithely justified by the lies we have decided to believe. We live in a time when the time to be born and the time to die have no coincidence with life's dignity…when a time to weep and laugh are regulated by the media's blitz…when a time for war and a time for peace turn on virtual facts. Vanity, all is vanity! Hence, I tell you, the more we recognize our own fateful times in these verses, the more we understand the human condition Christ came to redeem, the more we see the world in which we now live for what it has become, and the more we confess our desperate need of a Savior. So turn Koheleth's perspective, for a moment, inside out and upside down, God become human. Koheleth's angst, spread across these holy pages, must have made it into the canon because, in the middle of our idle speculations, lest we miss the point, God is determined to address us as we really are. Without Ecclesiastes inserting our gaping yawns or our adolescent angst into the story of our redemption, God's entry into the human condition may not have been low enough, empty enough, honest enough. The metaphor that comes to mind is the one offered by Reynolds Price, who reflects on being forced, after becoming a quadriplegic, to move at the height of a seated man. "Upright as I'd been for five decades," he muses, "I'd been able to share King Lear's neglect of the rawbone human misery that huddles beneath us. Reduced to its eye level now as the homeless lay and crouched on sidewalks--and meeting their fuming gaze as a standing walker seldom does--I comprehended, more than before, Lear's insight on the storm-swept heath:
Ecclesiastes is the earnest that God in Christ has exposed himself to feel what purposeless, idle wretches feel (for our wretchedness is splayed across these pages), that God in Christ has addressed those who bide the pelting of this pitiless storm (for our whining complaint is heard throughout these verses), that God in Christ has come to defend us from the time we thought was merely on our hands. Into the pointlessness of such days, Christ comes to shed light on God's purposes. No doubt, the light of revelation, far from blinding us with its brightness, seems barely sufficient. Nevertheless, its truth requires us to adjust our sight (at once both downward and Godward) toward every intimation of meaning in time. To wit: given the intimations of meaning let loose in his birth, no longer can we speak of an impersonal fate playing with our inconsequential days, for we are addressed by God-in-person reduced to eye level and meeting our fuming gaze with a promised Kingdom. Given the intimation of meaning let loose in his death and rising, no more can our vendetta be against God because we must die, but can only be against ourselves for refusing, really, to live. He is God's word to those who dare stand idle, as well as to people in tough binds, to people with vendettas, a bone to pick, no dog to kick, the sour-grapers, the hurt, those who've never shucked off their adolescent angst. He takes it all in and returns it to us redeemed by a greater purpose than we could ever invent. For through him we are given to see not fate but a destiny that is ours to deny in him…given to hear not silence but the sound of judgment against our petty complaints. In him we are met with a purpose that will not be denied its claim upon our little lives. "Although Koheleth seems a basically sour sort of fellow," concludes Erdrich, "he comes to hard-won affirmation. He takes what he can get…In his youth…he piles up wealth, beautiful lands, orchards, buildings, hits the bottle, eats a lot of darkness. His wisdom increases through grief, and he acknowledges the frustrating enigma that most of our deepest learning occurs when we are humbled by suffering." His words ought not to be saved for our funerals, my friends, but read in the midst of our angst and our idle seasons, lest we doubt that God, at the height of our own futility, meets our fuming gaze with a grace which we do not deserve, with a destiny we could never intimate without his light, with evidence of a Savior given for seasons such as the one we are about to enter. Thanks be to God. Amen. |