TITLE -- LESSON’S
IN LIVING FROM ECCLESIASTES
Unlike the animals,
who seem quite content to simply be themselves, we humans are always looking
for ways to be more than or other than what we find ourselves to be. We explore
the countryside for excitement, search our souls for meaning, shop the world
for pleasure. We try this. Then we try that. The usual fields of endeavor are
money, sex, power, adventure, and knowledge.
Everything
we try is so promising at first! But nothing ever seems to amount to very much.
We intensify our efforts—but the harder we work at
it, the less we get out of it. Some people give up early and settle for a
humdrum life. Others never seem to learn, and so they flail away through a lifetime,
becoming less and less human by the year, until by the time they die there is
hardly enough humanity left to compose a corpse.
Ecclesiastes
is a famous maybe the world’s most famous witness to this experience of
futility. The acerbic wit catches our attention. The stark honesty compels
notice. And people do notice oh, how they notice! Nonreligious and religious
alike notice. Unbelievers and believers notice. More than a few of them are
surprised to find this kind of thing in the Bible.
But
it is most emphatically and necessarily in the Bible in order to call a
halt to our various and futile attempts to make something of our lives, so that
we can give our full attention to God—who God is and
what he does to make something of us. Ecclesiastes actually doesn’t
say that much about God; the author leaves that to the other sixty-five books
of the Bible. His task is to expose our total incapacity to find the meaning
and completion of our lives on our own.
It
is our propensity to go off on our own, trying to be human by our own devices
and desires, that makes Ecclesiastes necessary reading. Ecclesiastes sweeps our
souls clean of all “lifestyle” spiritualities so that we can be
ready for God’s visitation revealed in Jesus Christ. Ecclesiastes is a
John-the-Baptist kind of book. It functions not as a meal but as a bath. It is
not nourishment; it is cleansing. It is repentance. It is purging. We read
Ecclesiastes to get scrubbed clean from illusion and sentiment, from ideas that
are idolatrous and feelings that cloy. It is an exposé and rejection of every
arrogant and ignorant expectation that we can live our lives by ourselves on
our own terms.
Ecclesiastes
challenges the naive optimism that sets a goal that appeals to us and then goes
after it with gusto, expecting the result to be a good life. The author’s
cool skepticism, a refreshing negation to the lush and seductive suggestions
swirling around us, promising everything but delivering nothing, clears the
air. And once the air is cleared, we are ready for reality—for
God.