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When All Is Vanity
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 26, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Ecclesiastes 12:1-8 I Thessalonians 5:1-11
If you have not yet read the article on Mother Teresa’s prolonged crisis of faith in Time Magazine this week, I commend it to you. There you will find a preliminary analysis of her letters written to confessors over a period of sixty-six years, letters that have been gathered into a book entitled Come Be My Light. Teresa had ordered the letters destroyed. Instead the church mercifully chose to reveal the depth of her doubt to a world that is presently in love with religious certitude. As it turns out, this public saint bore little relation to the lost and lonely child of God that Teresa knew herself to be. When she traveled to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, she spoke to the world of “Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and the smile that we receive.” But three months earlier, Teresa had written of the searing absence of God to a spiritual confidant: “As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see--Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak….” According to the editor of her correspondence, Teresa had had no sense of God’s presence at all, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist,” for over fifty years. In fact, the onset of her emptiness seemed to coincide with the beginning of her mission. After five years in Calcutta, she wrote of “the terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.’” Grateful for even these few details of her struggle and aching doubt, I cannot help but think Mother Teresa was equally grateful for the inclusion of Ecclesiastes in the canon. Indeed, without the voice of Qoheleth, the Preacher who sought God’s purposes in vain, without his relentless insistence that all is vanity, a significant part of our human existence would be less addressed by God's word. Therefore with Teresa’s letters as our lens, we turn together, though many of you already have turned separately, to Qoheleth. “A product of an age of melancholy and questioning,” according to Old Testament professor William Brown, Qoheleth, in the first place, despairs at ever finding God out. Now at the end of a life of seeking, he can only conclude that God either has no purpose in creation or has so hidden the purpose from human seeking that life is without discernable shape or direction or order. Consequently all is vanity: all is empty, worthless, useless, a mirage. "When I applied my mind to know wisdom," he writes, "and to see the business that is done on earth…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." “No One,” Teresa writes. “Alone…Where is my faith—even deep down right in there is nothing but emptiness and darkness.” We know this absence as well, you and I: know the dry seasons when the work of our hands seems pointless (“What do I labor for?” Teresa asks. “If there be no God…”); know the long stretches when it feels as though we are going through the motions of being alive (“empty—no faith—no love—no zeal” she writes); know the anxious fear that our existence will be inconsequential (“Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call…?” she wonders); know the endless nights when prayer is not possible (“I utter words of Community prayers,” she says, “but my prayer of union is not there any longer—I no longer pray”). Anything but an armchair philosopher, Qoheleth had sought God in the daily humdrum of our human existence—in our work and our play, our sleeping and our wakefulness, our keeping and throwing away, our tearing and sewing, our loving and hating. Nothing much mattered or was at stake, he concluded, without a sense of God’s presence and purpose. 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 an end to it all: if there is no clue that 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 mere appearance, on a par, ultimately pointless. Our lives may look purposeful to the world (Outwardly, as Teresa put it, “The smile is a mask…a cloak that covers everything”), but inwardly we know ourselves to be going nowhere. "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. As Qoheleth considers human existence lived without a sense of God’s presence in the first place, so in the second place, he bears witness to the faith of a fatalist. “Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful, but time and chance happen to them all….Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them.” Fate, by definition, “is all that threatens and befalls us. It comes upon us from without, often strange and uninvited, always at enmity with personal being.” [Glenn Tinder] No doubt the social context of Qoheleth’s time (likely the 4th or 3rd century B.C.) sharpened his fated worldview. “A new market-driven economy of global proportions was emerging. Yet such rapid growth did not benefit all people equally. Those who already had extensive capital outlays possessed unprecedented opportunity for cultivating greater assets. Those of lesser means, however, were at a distinct disadvantage. As a result, a shrinking middle class felt overwhelmed with the plethora of economic opportunities and risks. A person,” says Brown, “could reap profit one day and find himself or herself in the dumps the next day, so volatile was this economy.” There would seem to be nothing new under the sun!: terrorism at every turn, a global economy tottering on credit, sweeping natural disasters as well as unprecedented and “unwilled pleasures, conveniences, opportunities….Distant and uncontrollable powers determine how we shall live and how we shall die,” observes philosopher Glenn Tinder of our social context. “Our lives, whether terrible or agreeable, are decided upon elsewhere.” Given such a world, Qoheleth asks after the point of financial gain, in one breath, and counsels hedonism in the next. And why not! In either case, says Qoheleth, we are re-actors in a drama whose malevolent plot is not in our hands. So in the second place, fate is what Qoheleth has left to believe in when he cannot find God out. “We live today," concludes Tinder ominously, "in unusually fateful times." Finally, of course, we die. Or as Qoheleth put it, “The same fate comes to everyone.” By the time we arrive at our text for the morning, we are wise enough to put no stock in the future, sober enough to realize this day may be our last, astute enough to grasp the vanity of a life lived unmindful of its end. So Qoheleth says to his youthful target audience, “Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them.’” Lyrically he evokes the demise of the cosmos, the demise of households, the demise of commerce, the demise of nature until, alone, we are but dust returned to the earth and breath returned to God. “Vanity of vanities,” says Qoheleth in what is likely the last line of the original text, “all is vanity.” Can you begin to grasp why the inclusion of Ecclesiastes in the canon is so astonishing? And yet I am convinced that without Qoheleth’s voice shouted against religious certitude, God's entry into the human condition may not have been low enough, empty enough, honest enough. The metaphor which comes to mind is that of 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 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:
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.... |