Ecclesiastes 5:8-6:2 "Abundant Nothing" Scott Hoezee

Since a friend put me onto it a year or so ago, one of my favorite parts of The New York Times is the section titled "Metropolitan Diary." Each Sunday this column features six to eight brief letters sent in by readers who relate real-life experiences in the Big Apple. Many of these anecdotes are examples of kindness and warmth in the midst of a city reputed to be cold and uncaring. Some are laugh-out-loud funny tales about the quirks of people: after all, in a city of 8 million folks, you are bound to see just about everything at least once! But many other anecdotes center on the outrageous wealth that many people in New York City possess as well as the sometimes startling things people do with that wealth.

A recent letter is a good example. A couple from the Midwest was visiting New York during January last year. But as they walked up Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, a bitterly cold wind came up, causing the woman's ears to get painfully cold. They decided to duck into a boutique to purchase a hat for her. The woman rather quickly found a lovely cashmere knit hat and was about to buy it when her husband noticed the price tag dangling from the cap: $350. They put it back and quickly fled the store. As they came back out onto the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue, however, they saw a woman passing by carrying her little poodle dog--and the dog was wearing the very same cashmere knit hat!

"Only in New York" you might be tempted to say, but the truth is that in a wealthy country such as ours such examples of money's extremes can easily be multiplied. Some years back when the country was obsessed with the O.J. Simpson trial, a particularly astute newspaper columnist noticed something about the people who were testifying at that trial: they were all high-end folks who were so accustomed to the trappings of a wealthy lifestyle that they had no difficulty casually mentioning their ability to spy such things. So the limo driver maybe wasn't sure if it was O.J. he'd seen skulking in the darkness but he knew right away that he was carrying a Gucci bag. Others knew at a glance that on the night in question so-and-so was wearing an Armani suitcoat. And it didn't take long for witnesses to identify the bloody footprints as made not by any old shoe but the expensive Bruno Mali brand.

We seem obsessed by money and the brand names it can buy. Last summer my wife and I were in the Charlevoix-Petoskey area one weekend. One evening we decided to go to a new restaurant where an acquaintance of mine is the head chef. The restaurant is located in that really expensive new development on Lake Michigan, and upon arriving there we knew instantly that we did not fit in with this crowd at all--the place was packed with stock market whiz kids whose fortunes had soared in the 90s along with the Nasdaq.

At one point after we had finished eating I paid a visit to the restroom which required traversing through the center part of the restaurant, through the bar area, up the stairs, and past still more clusters of people sipping cocktails as they waited for a table. You may think I'm exaggerating but I am not: every single cluster I passed was talking about money. It was like something out of a Tom Wolfe novel: every knot of people I passed was discussing raises, bottom lines, promotions, stock options, expensive boats, and the like. It was surreal.

Yet it was reality. What a field day the Teacher of Ecclesiastes would have had there! I can just see him: glass of wine in hand, surveying the buzzing horde of greedy humanity, and shaking his head. "What they've got," he'd say with a wry grin, "is an abundance of nothing! What they've got," he'd go on after another slug of wine, "are lives stuffed to the gills with stuff but that's it. If you start tossing out the stuff, one layer at a time, in the end you'll get to the point where there is nothing left. It's like peeling an onion," he'd say after glancing into the kitchen. "If you ever succeed in peeling every single layer of the onion, what you have left is precisely nothing. No core. No seed in the middle. No heart."

This evening's section of Ecclesiastes is filled with such observations. I've mentioned in the last two sermons in this series that Ecclesiastes is part of the Bible's wisdom tradition, and that is clearly on display in this fifth chapter as many of these verses look quite similar to what you read in the Book of Proverbs. The Teacher spools off a list of aphorisms and proverbial wisdom on several topics related to money and possessions. There is nothing subtle about these words. The Teacher is so incisive in detailing the futility of wealth that you could almost think this hardly needs to be elaborated on in a sermon.

But as is typical, what the Teacher takes away with his right hand he seems to give back with his left hand. After ripping into the greedy and decrying the "Phhht," empty nature of possessions, he then suddenly pivots in the other direction in verses 18-20, saying that the wealth of this life is a gift from God and isn't it nice that God lets us enjoy it. No sooner does he say that, however, and chapter 6 opens with yet another slam against those whom God punishes by giving them neat stuff but then preventing them from enjoying it.

At first glance this looks like just an anti-greed diatribe. But there are cross-currents as well. So let's review the deadly sin of greed. What does it do to a person and what is it about the avaricious lifestyle that keeps people from enjoying the very goods they spend their lives accumulating? Following that let's wonder about the more balanced perspective on life and possessions to which the Teacher alludes at the end of Ecclesiastes 5.

To begin, notice that the thesis of verses 8-17 is that those who love money will never have enough of it. Have you ever noticed that this world's true corporate climbers never seem to have a defineable goal in mind? When was the last time you heard some CEO or some newly graduated MBA just entering the business world say, "What I'd like is to get to a level where I earn x number of dollars per year and then that will be enough. If I reach a comfortable income of $70,000 a year, that's when I'll stop angling for more promotions, better raises, and the like. Once I hit my target income, then I'll be content with just cost-of-living raises to keep pace with inflation for the rest of my life."

When was the last time you heard the Donald Trump and Bill Gates types of people say, "You know, there is finally just enough now. I'm finished." The spectacularly wealthy may well begin to give more away by establishing charitable foundations, but there's a difference between doing that and concluding finally that there is an upper limit, a point of "enough" when it comes to having ever-more money flowing into the coffers.

So there is a restlessness to the truly greedy. The drive for more is incessant. You can see this in the way successful businesses spread themselves out. It ought to be enough for the folks at Starbucks to make and sell a good cup of coffee. It's not, though: now they sell t-shirts, mugs, candy, ice cream, and an array of items whose only connection to coffee is that it has the word "Starbucks" emblazoned on it. Selling books is a noble enterprise for the folks at Amazon.com but it did not take long for them to branch out. When I visited Amazon online last week, I discovered that they now offer also music, videos, toys, cameras, software, tools & hardware, lawn & patio, kitchen goods, wireless phones, and new cars.

What leads coffee people to sell wall sconces and book sellers to hawk screwdrivers? More profits. Diversify your offerings and you pad the bottom line. But there really is no such thing as the bottom line: greed has neither a bottom nor a top. It is the bottomless line that drives us most of the time. "The sky's the limit," we say--unless, of course, we can figure out a way to make a profit in outer space. Maybe calling the sky our limit is too restrictive after all.

But it's not just the restless quality of greed that nettles the Teacher of Ecclesiastes. What also bothers him is the classic sign of avarice: possessing for the sake of possessing, building up bigger numbers in the bank account not because the money is useful but because it gives you something to count. You can see this whenever people buy products less because they are useful or can get the job done and more as a status symbol.

Some classic examples come from the Bobos of our current cultural climate. These so-called "bourgeois bohemians" buy thousands of dollars worth of All-Clad pots and pans not because they use them much (especially since most of their dinners are at high-profile restaurants where they can be seen by other up-and-comers) but instead it's just that the pans look so good hanging from hooks in their $50,000 kitchens.

Similarly, they buy rare wines not because they ever intend to drink them but because displaying these bottles secures their status as conossieurs. They're not wine snobs, they're label snobs. While I was thinking about this sermon last week, I saw a report on channel 8 of a local wine and liquor store which proudly displays a $2,500 bottle of French cognac. At a New York restaurant I once saw on the wine list an entire page devoted to a single bottle of Château Rothschild from 1875 and priced at $12,000. Neither the local wine dealer with the expensive cognac nor the restaurant with the rare wine expect ever to sell those things. They are not really there to be consumed. So why have them? Because marketing experts will tell you that having such items raises the status of everything else you have. Gluttons get smashed by drinking wine. The greedy get intoxicated by having it and not drinking it!

The most basic problem with greed, the Teacher proclaims, is that it leaves you no life. Greed dehumanizes, reduces all people to mere objects. It's the old King Midas syndrome: King Midas asked for the golden touch so that all he touched would turn pure gold. It worked. Of course, he also touched his daughter one day. In the end all he had was gold. But in the very, very end, all he had was gold. When we define ourselves by what we have and not by who we are, we day by day whittle away at our very humanity. We end up overstuffed and undernourished, hour by hour reducing ourselves down to the mere outline of a human being: the outside looks fine, but the core has vanished.

So what is the solution? What is the antidote to the deadly poison of greed? Should we relinquish all possessions, give away all money except for the bare minimum of what would be required to purchase a little bread and soup each day? Such extreme renunciation of all goods has not generally been the church's answer to greed over the centuries and it is clearly not the Teacher's proposed solution, either. Throughout Ecclessiastes it is pretty obvious that Qoheleth enjoys a good meal, a good drink, and a comfortable place in which to live and go to sleep each night. The Teacher is no Buddhist who renounces all pleasure, no Stoic whose goal is a life shorn of anything that might give some enjoyment.

Instead he urges us to see what we have as a gift from God. But anytime anyone gives a gift, the giver generally speaking has some intention behind the gift. So if I give you a book for Christmas, I do so because I think it's worth reading and so will provide you with some joy. If you receive the gift, say thank you, but then never read it, I'll have to wonder what went wrong. If I give you the gift of some food but you never eat it, instead letting it go bad before throwing it out, I'll be insulted and hurt. That is not why I gave that to you! Sometimes parents have this frustration: have you ever given your child a toy hammer only to see him whacking another kid with it? Have you ever given the kids a game only to have them fight over it? You start regretting the gift, or at the very least you let the children know in no uncertain terms that this was not what you had in mind!

The Teacher's view on possessions, money, and the work we do to secure those things is similar: God gives it and he's got something in mind in so doing. Apparently what God has in mind is that we have a life with sufficient margins that we are able to enjoy what he's given. A "margin" is the white space along the sides, top, and bottom of a printed page. The margin defines the page, makes it neat by limiting the space where the words will be.

Computers now allow you to set your own margins before typing up a document. The total number of words on the page will be in large part determined by how wide your margins are. So when I make sermons I always make sure to pre-set the program so that I will have one-inch margins on the sides and top and a one-and-a-half inch margin on the bottom. I determined a long time ago that those margins limit my word-space on each page so that I can read my sermon with ease and so that, when I reach my overall page limit, I know that all of my sermons will be about the same length.

Life has margins. You can pre-set your life's margins to be about a quarter-inch wide so that every page of your life is covered with the scrawl of work, work, work with scarcely any space leftover to enjoy the things your earnings afford you. Or you can set some decently wide margins for yourself so that the good things with which God gifts you can be consumed and enjoyed and shared in just the way God, the gift-Giver, intends.

The truly greedy have lives with virtually no margins. They stay too busy to have many, if any, moments when they can sigh in gratitude and satisfaction and so really enjoy the life they've been given. They are more interested in things than people, in having than in giving away. They are more interested in what's next than in what currently is, in keeping and increasing what they've got than in being grateful for just having enough.

The challenge of Ecclesiastes 5, therefore, is to gain a heart of wisdom in also this sector of life. Because, of course, someone could take what I just said as an excuse to make the margins of their lives so wide as to qualify for hedonism and sheer self-indulgence. But if it is a tragedy never to enjoy life, then it is also a tragedy to engage in nothing but self-centered indulgence. Instead the Teacher would surely say that everything has its place. The page of life needs good margins, yes, but life is not just margin space. As we saw in Ecclesiastes 3 two weeks ago, there is a time and season for everything: work and vacation, earning and enjoying what you've earned. There is also a time for others, to serve the poor, to give away and to give back.

The wise life is marked by balance and soberness. The wise life has God as the center of everything. In lives where that is the case, the value of people and the desire to be loving and merciful above all will always be on prominent display. Where love and compassion, empathy and selfless service are absent, you can be well assured that God is absent, too.

On Thanksgiving Day a few years ago I related something with which I will close also this evening. I once read an article by a man who said that he is highly interested in business and economics. As part of that interest, he has in the past subscribed to any number of magazines dealing with money, finances, and the markets. Recently, though, this man cancelled the subscription to at least one of those magazines. It seems that the editors hired an expert on Asian stock markets to write regular articles which could provide tips to investors, thus helping them capitalize on also this opportunity to make big money.

One of this new reporter's first articles was a long piece in which this financial guru went on at some length about the ins and outs of how the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 had such a disastrous effect on the Hong Kong stock exchange. He had all his facts and figures straight; had crunched the numbers with great effeciency. But in the course of the entire article never once did this writer mention the disastrous effect Tiananmen Square had had on the lives of the people who had been killed or maimed there. Such a perspective on life where money means more than people is, to quote the Teacher from Ecclesiastes 6:2, "meaningless and a grievous evil." Well put, good Teacher. Well put. Amen.