Ecclesiastes 1 "Nothing New Here?" Scott Hoezee

A curmudgeon is defined as a crusty, ill-tempered old person who hates hypocrisy and is not afraid to point it out. The adjectives frequently used to describe curmudgeons include cantankerous, irascible, irreverent, and grouchy. According to those who have studied such curiously crotchety figures, a curmudgeon is like a sumo wrestler: it takes a long time and a lot of abuse to create one. Among those considered truly world-class curmudgeons, past and present, are Truman Capote, H.L. Mencken, Oscar Wilde, William F. Buckley, Friedrich Nietzsche, W.C. Fields, Gore Vidal, Calvin Trillin, Woody Allen, and Peter DeVries. If you want to see a contemporary curmudgeon in action, turn on the last five or so minutes of 60 Minutes when you get home this evening so as to catch the weekly sneer by Andy Rooney.

Now I don't know about you, but the list I just gave does not exactly strike me as a Who's Who of faithful church attenders. In fact, nearly to a person curmudgeons aim a fair amount of surly fire at the church and all things religious. But it's not just religion, of course: when you're a curmudgeon you are cynical about everything. So Robert Frost once summed up work this way: "By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day." Although not a regular curmudgeon, Mahatma Gandhi had his moments. Someone once asked Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization, and Gandhi replied, "I think it would be a good idea." Earlier this century Clarence Darrow once said, "When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; and I'm beginning to believe it." Robert Oppenheimer once opined that "The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it." Similarly Don Marquis:"An optimist is a man who has never had much experience."

That last quote is a lead-in for the Book of Ecclesiastes. But that ought to unsettle you right from the get-go. With few exceptions there are not too many utterances of this world's curmudgeons which Christians would want to adopt as their own view. A curmudgeonly preacher would have a short career. The reason for that is because we look to God's Word as a source of comfort and hope, not as a font of cynicism and despair. Christians may or may not be optimists, but we're surely not pessimists in the sense of seeing no good in anything. Preachers who base their sermons on God's Word, therefore, had better not come off sounding like irascible and cantankerous critics each week!

Unless the part of God's Word on which a sermon is based is Ecclesiastes. If this biblical book does not unhinge you a bit, you didn't read it right. If the only thing you take away from Ecclesiastes are those final few verses from chapter 12 about serving God as the whole duty of man, you didn't read it right. And if you conclude that all things considered this book fits comfortably alongside of all the other biblical books, you didn't read it right.

On the children's television show Sesame Street there is a running segment designed to help children see patterns. The segment always features something like six people, five of whom are carrying polka-dotted umbrellas and one of whom has a striped umbrella. The song that goes along with this is titled "One of These Things Is Not Like the Others." The child's job is to pick out the one that does not fit the pattern. If you look at the Bible's Table of Contents and see the list of all 66 biblical books, you could easily sing "One of These Things Is Not Like the Others" and point your finger at that queer book with the equally queer title of "Ecclesiastes." This is the only book in the whole Bible that can make even the Book of Job look relatively light-hearted!

So what do we do with this book? What do we make of the appearance of a world-class curmudgeon on the biblical stage? After all, the Teacher spares no thing and no one. On the human plane of existence the Teacher reduces everything to one grim concept expressed in the little Hebrew word hevel. It's a puny word that barely exists: hevel. It sounds less like a word and more like a clearing of your throat. You can translate it several ways, but no translation is terribly pretty as a summary assessment of life: Meaninglessness! Vanity! Emptiness! Futility! Vapor! Breath! Hevel. Maybe you could just translate it as "Phhht."

So dark is much of this book's reflections that you could well question the sanity of my choice to start preaching on this book during January, a month which is plenty bleak all on its own! But, of course, there is something else going on in Ecclesiastes and it will be our task tonight, and in four subsequent sermons, to see if we can parse what that "something else" is. Let's begin with a broad overview of the book and also a look at chapter 1.

Apropos of a book whose content is confusing, so also the larger Book of Ecclesiastes has long been a puzzle to historians and biblical commentators. For starters no one is sure who wrote this book, though it most certainly was not King Solomon, as had once been widely theorized. For one thing Solomon died around 930 B.C., which was about 600 years before Ecclesiastes was composed. So we don't really know who the author is.

He identifies himself, however, as "the Teacher," from the Hebrew word Qoheleth, which is also the Hebrew title of the book. The NIV translates this as "Teacher," though no one is completely certain that is right. A person designated qoheleth may have been a preacher, may have been a teacher, may have been some kind of public speaker or philosopher, or may have been an advisor for Israel's king. At one time it was thought that a qoheleth was a person who delivered speeches in a public gathering, which is why the Greek translation of this Hebrew book opted for the title ekklesiastes, from the Greek word ekklesia, which means "gathering" (and which is the same word used in the New Testament for "church" as the gathering of God's people).

Whoever this Teacher was, the dates for his having composed this curious book range from the time of Malachi in 450 B.C. all the way down to about 200 B.C. Biblical scholars who make their living trying to figure out how biblical books were written have had a field day with Ecclesiastes. Some have claimed that the reason this book seems so strange is because in actuality we've somehow lost about half of the original pages somewhere along the line. Others claim that this was originally a poem and that some of our confusion in reading it today is because someone foolishly turned poetry into prose. Still others have atomized the text into umpteen different fragments, claiming that what we today call the Book of Ecclesiastes is a patchwork quilt of up to 37 divergent streams of thought in Israel.

There is, of course, no end to that kind of speculation. But the fact of the matter is that however this book came into existence, it somehow got included in the sacred canon of Holy Scripture. If it was ultimately the Holy Spirit who helped the church to come up with a canon of divinely inspired holy books, then it must perforce be part of our confession that even Ecclesiastes somehow bears the imprint of inspired words--words and thoughts, therefore, from which we are to learn something about God, ourselves, and life in general.

And if we believe that, then we approach Ecclesiastes in a different way. If we accept that somehow the Holy Spirit worked through a writer or an editor to get this book into what we now accept as its final form, then we will look for some kind of overall unity and coherence. If we approach this book that way, then we will likely come to see that despite its various twists and hair-pin curves, somehow Ecclesiastes does hang together. How so? Let's take a look at the opening chapter to see what the author's self-stated thesis is.

Actually, we've already seen that thesis: all of life is hevel, phhht. Yet despite this stark thesis Ecclesiastes is clearly part of the larger Old Testament wisdom tradition. These are the late-in-life reflections of sage, of a wise person. Earlier I quoted the curmudgeonly line that an optimist is someone who does not have much experience in life. Well, that cannot be said of the Teacher. Naive he isn't. Experience in life is precisely what he has had a lot of and he's writing this book to share what he has learned.

But that is just generally a hallmark of the wisdom tradition: wisdom is what a person gains through the school of hard knocks. The wise one observes how life goes and then reports on what he has seen. The Book of Proverbs, which immediately preceeds Ecclesiastes, is loaded with just such observations. "Here's what works well in life, here's what could get you hurt. If you want to be wise, pursue course A and avoid course B." As part of wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes is a kind of extended field report of a sage who has had a lot of experience in several different arenas from youth to old age.

The conclusion? The more things change the more they stay the same. Novelty is a fiction. There is nothing new under the sun. Someone else thought of it before, did it before, and someone else will think it or do it again one day. You can work your whole life and think you've really accomplished something new only to die and be forgotten with someone else taking over your job and doing most of the same tasks all over again. You start out life believing that education makes a difference but then later in life you are passed over for a promotion in favor of a nit-wit with nary an intelligent or creative thought in his head.

You think that there is some benefit in the long run of being a kind and considerate person only to discover that it's the squeaky and miserable wheels in life who get all the grease. You seek your whole life to do the right thing only to see this world's cheats and scoundrels come out on top again and again. Worse yet, as the Teacher says at the end of Ecclesiastes 1, not only does more wisdom and knowledge not guarantee success in life, the more you know, the more aware you are of how many foolish people have gotten ahead. Ignorance is bliss indeed, as the old adage has it. You could live a lot happier if you were not intelligent enough to realize how many dunderheads earn more money than you do, work in elected office, and can afford better vacations than you ever could!

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is not uplifting material. The Teacher is most definitely not someone you'd want to hang out with on New Year's Eve. But honestly: this is not really news to anyone here tonight, is it? It's unsettling and all, but it's nothing we have not ourselves thought at one time or another, is it? Faith in God need not blind us to the less savory features to life. In that sense there may be something liberating about Ecclesiastes. Because one thing I have not yet mentioned but which is consistently clear throughout this book is that the Teacher is a believer. He is a person of faith. But faith need not exclude honesty in observation, and for some of us that may be liberating news indeed.

You see, it's tempting to look at Ecclesiastes and then downplay the darker parts in order to elevate those few places which sound quite pious. But that approach guts Ecclesiastes of its real power. The statements of faith here mean something only when seen against the backdrop of all that is grim and despairing. And it's not just that the light of faith shines brighter against a black background. Instead the very poignancy of faith is deepened when we recognize that faith is held in creative tension with an honest assessment of life. Faith should seem more real precisely by being able to embrace the real.

Faith needs to exist in the face of life's enigmas. Faith needs to be held even after we've come to terms with the limits of our existence. For now we do not understand everything and if we're honest, then we must admit that there is also plenty in life which we do understand but don't like! But what we can grasp is not the whole story. For now we just have to accept our rather lowly position in this ever-spinning and unimagineably vast universe, and do our best to serve God even still. Even when life does not make particular sense to us, it is our duty to plug on anyway in the belief that somehow, somewhere in God's infinite wisdom it will make sense, it will add up to something.

But not easily and, for now anyway, not neatly or quickly. We resist that. Counted-cross-stitch faith where all of life's answers can be lifted out of the Bible and transferred onto a framed and matted wall hanging is more appealing because it looks more complete. Precious Moments figurines emblazoned with pithy aphorisms of hope, joy, or comfort are nicer to see on the mantle than whatever kind of a bust you might sculpt of the Teacher's face from Ecclesiastes! Who would want to decorate the den with the face of a man with a furrowed brow, a downwardly turned mouth, and emblazoned with the slogan "Phhht"?!

Still, there is no denying it: the preacher's faith, though real, is nestled painfully among the thistles and thorns of life. If there is to be faith at all, the Teacher seems to be saying, then it must be held in the teeth of a whole lot of confusing, jarring, and just generally unhappy garbage within the limits of a life which ends in death. Life's loose ends will not be tied off neatly if, in this life, they are tied off at all. The harder questions ought not receive pat answers. They need to be wrestled with.

In this sense maybe we can come to see the Book of Ecclesiastes as a kind of preview of the cross. After all, when God ultimately tackled the very questions and conundrums which the preacher raises, the result was a confusingly terrifying event on a garbage heap called Skull Hill. As we saw also this morning, whereas John the Baptist looked for glitz and fire, Jesus came with humility and vulnerability. In the end it was the silence of the lamb that somehow began to answer life's deeper mysteries. But if the death of the beloved Son does not strike you as at least as outrageous as anything in Ecclesiastes, then you may be missing the central surprise and scandal of the gospel. How perilously confusing and dicey is life in this crazy world? The cross is the Christian answer. It's that difficult, that prolix, that difficult to deal with, even for God himself!

You see, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes lamented that there was nothing new under the sun. On the strictly human level he may well be right about that. But had this Teacher been able to see the Son of God hanging on a cross--and had he been able to recognize in that spectacle God's engagement with the very difficulties the Teacher lists and laments--you would have to believe that the Teacher would conclude that this was new after all. This had never before been seen under the sun--few if any could have ever even imagined it. But because it happened we now have the firm hope that everything else under the sun has been slowly but surely turning around. The cosmos has turned a corner. Meaninglessness is headed back to the original deep meaning God intended in the beginning. There may well be no denying the "Phhht" nature of this life. Our only comfort in life and in death, however, is that the now-pierced hands of the Savior are sensitive enough to pick up even that "Phhht" and preserve it into the eternal now which Jesus himself has prepared.

These gospel beliefs will not erase the kinds of thoughts the Teacher expresses in this startling book. The gospel does not make everything easy and smooth and straightforward after all. But it is our bright hope. Many days that simply has to be enough--it has to be enough in a world which, as the Teacher so adroitly points out, has seldom found enough of anything to satisfy very long. Give thanks to God for giving us enough. Amen.