Finding the Center: Ecclesiastes part 1

Introduction

The book of Ecclesiastes is almost like nothing else in the Scriptures. It takes on the whole of the human experience, tests it and then provides a very strange but maybe not so unfamiliar outcome.

The book is said to be written by Solomon as the teacher. Throughout the book he tackles almost any human experience between birth and death, and he spends a lot of time on death! (we will get there, no worries)

He deals with issues of work and play, of friendship and family. He deals with making money and not making money. Of joy and depression. He deals with justice and injustice. He looks at pleasure and pain.

And you hear that and it sounds just like your last Tuesday.

He hits close to the human experience and while he brings up example after example he comes to a few conclusions that we will explore over the next few weeks. But the most prevalent one is found in the opening verses

Ecclesiastes 1:2–3 ESV

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?

Everything is vanity! Or an image you hear sometimes used for this word, all is vapor or smoke.

This is the wall we have to get through in this book. That the teacher thinks that all that we do and say, everything under the sun is vanity. It is vapor and smoke.

This is provocative. It is meant to provoke. Meant to poke you a little, wake you up.

See everything that you do? Its vanity. It’s smoke, it’s vapor.

Ecclesiastes asks big questions and expect big answers.

People are asking big questions these days. You may be here because of that. And the church, the church of all places, should be the location that answers them.

The church can be the center of the question, and the center of the answer. Wisdom is helping people navigate life through proper observation and application. A church should have a proper understanding of wisdom. A Christian should have a propoer understanding of wisdom. And strangely, it begins here.

So let’s look at the vanity of life and see what we can learn in Ecclesiastes.

This week we will look at Wisdom as finding the Center

Next week we will look at Wisdom as seeing life as a gift

And 2 weeks from now we will look at the beginning of wisdom being the fear of the Lord and what that means.

But why do we need to look at the vanity of life?

It’s because we never stop searching for meaning. And turn over every rock to find it.

Oops (a disruption): We never stop searching for meaning. All is Vanity!

100 years ago this year one of the greatest novels ever written came into production. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the The Great Gatsby and it became one of the great American novels. It represents wealth and love and power. But more clearly it shows the disillusionment and sometimes destruction of unbridled pursuit of meaning through accumulation.

It is a tragedy of the American dream. It is a perfect cover for Ecclesiastes

The story is told of Jay Gatsby. Celebrated soldier in WW1 who comes home and mysteriously makes a fortune. He buys a mansion on Long Island and begins throwing lavish parties that last all night.

He befriends his neighbor, the narrator of the story, and Nick is puzzled at the amount of lavish luxury that Gatsby lives in. No expense is ever spared in food or vice or entertainment.

Nick and Gatsby become friends and Nick is caught up into Gatsby’s world. We find out that Gatsby is ultimately in love with Daisy, a woman he cannot have. He builds a fortune, wealth, reputation, business acumen, but we find that it is all meaningless to him if he can’t have Daisy.

We find out that Gatsby stares out into the water of the bay in long island and on the other side is a blinking green light, symbolizing a dock or something like that. It turns out that the green light belongs to Daisy’s house. It becomes something always in the distance, always out of reach

The book, in it’s closing lines shows that wanting and desire never realized that is symbolized in the green light, the “future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (Fitzgerald 2018).

Gatsby is shot and killed at the end of the book and is found floating in his pool, the location of his lavish parties. No matter what he was given, no matter what he had, it was never enough.

And we might say to ourselves, forget a mansion on Long Island, I’ll take a Cape Cod in Attleboro! But Gatsby reveals the truth in all of us. You can have it all and it will not be enough. You and I cannot outrun our desires. They are baked in and they are often overwhelming.

We will always “run faster, stretch our arms farther.” And we will always find ourselves beating against the current trying to make meaning. So what do we do? How do we respond?

The author tells us this pursuit, the pursuit we are all locked in on, is vanity, a striving after the wind. Look at the opening passages of the book

Ecclesiastes 1:3–5 ESV

What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.

Ecclesiastes 1:11 ESV

There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after.

We will be outlived, outran, outlasted by multitudes of things. 

All of Creation and the world around you will last longer than you. “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” There is no remembrance of the things that have come before. They are forgotten. 

At this point you might be wondering why you even showed up this morning. But what the teacher is showing is that meaning no matter what you have is hard to come by. And maybe we need others to help us beyond ourselves. That to say all is vanity is to say that we can’t figure it out on our own. We are dependent on something else.

Ugh: Analyzing the disruption: We cannot truly find meaning on our own. All is vanity! 

Gatsby tries to find meaning through wealth and parties and Daisy. But it all falls apart. In his mansion and ultimately his death.

The teacher gains everything anyone could ever want. Tries every experience, attempts every kind of pleasure. He keeps locating himself in the middle of whatever he thinks will bring him the most amount of satisfaction. Ecc 2:1-6

Ecclesiastes 2:1–6 ESV

I said in my heart, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself.” But behold, this also was vanity. I said of laughter, “It is mad,” and of pleasure, “What use is it?” I searched with my heart how to cheer my body with wine—my heart still guiding me with wisdom—and how to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was good for the children of man to do under heaven during the few days of their life. I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees.

Ecclesiastes 2:9–11 ESV

So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me. And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.

We gather and accumulate and hope this time, the satisfaction will stick. Maybe this relationship, maybe this hobby, maybe this job, maybe this church. Maybe this addiction, maybe this meal.

And sometimes, if the thing isn’t destructive, there is some short pleasure in it. Some kind of satisfaction. And we will look at that next week. But we need to see that the way we make and find meaning is always short circuited. We never get out of it what we think we deserve.

All is vanity.  

But we begin to see something I think is clever in this idea of vanity.

What this word means is not that life is meaningless, but that meaning is hard to grasp. Like trying to hold onto smoke or vapor, meaning is hard to understand. It is before us, it is real, but we cannot master or control it. It is like, fog, a little murky and blurry. But it is there. It is enigmatic but present (Bartholomew 2014, 105).

What is meaningful is real but a mystery. It is present but enigmatic.

It’s necessary to mention at this point that the teacher is attempting to find meaning on his own, in his own strength, by his own observation. “In this sense, Qohelet is creative but he uses human means” (Ellul 2020, 134). When we go about it on our own, we only end up with half pictures.

And this is the case of many of the pursuits in our lives. It is not that they are not meaningful, it is that what we are trying to get out of them is a bit mysterious. It is incomplete. We are missing part of it.

One of the great gifts of Ecclesiastes is to show us that we are not the center of the world. That even in all of our pursuits, all of our aquisitions and additions to our lives, we cannot get it all. We are not in the center. If we are subject to murky vanity then we cannot possibly be in the center of everything, not in not in the center of the world, not in the center of my circle of relationships, not in the “center of history, action, or culture” (Ellul 2021, 115).

Meaning is not something we can just add or make. It is something given. Meaning that we are not at the center. Something else is.

This may be easy to say but likely few of us are living like it.

The teacher wants us to know that everything we are pursuing is murky at best. And we will need something that is more central to help us.

Aha (Ignition, looking toward a solution): We are Dependent People.

Vanity is our reminder we are connected to other things. That we depend on other things for life and for value and for survival even.

We are contingent. Dependent on something else for fulfillment

We have “batteries” that make us tired or hungry. We need to eat or we need to sleep. We often see these areas of dependency as bad but wisdom sees them different. That our limitations need to be understood and even celebrated. We all have them. If you wear glasses you recognize you are contingent on something else.

We have limits: Thank God!

It is good to find our boundaries. It is a grace to find our limitations.

It is necessary to explore our finitude

Every year Microsoft puts out a “Work Trend Index” where they review the ways that individuals work through the year. They do it for research but because they want to sell products as well.

This past year they put out an article on the “infinite workday.” In it they say that the workday begins before you wake up and ends after you go to sleep. Because of our digital dependency we have come to believe we have no limitations.

And while MS sees the infinite work day as a “barrier to transformation” (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/breaking-down-infinite-workday), it does not entertain the human thought of limitation. It does not suggest we find our barriers and learn how to live within our own limitations.

They suggest they let AI do the work for us. All is vanity, indeed!

We can’t ultimately escape our limitations. We will collapse before we reach whatever solution we have been trying to find.

We have to find your limits before your limits find us.

Whee (The Gospel):In our search for meaning everywhere, Christ has come to us as the Source of all Meaning

In this kind of culture where limitations are just barriers to be overcome, where we are the masters of our own meaning, where we are running arms outstretched, where we think we are center and central, we lose what actually is central because we mistake our own stuff for it.

This is part of why the teacher cannot find meaning. He is seeking it as if he were God Himself (Bartholomew 2014).

But when we recognize our limitations and recognize we need another. It is good to need another, we recognize that Christ has come to us. That God has not waited for us to get this whole vanity thing right (we can’t). He came to us in the person of Christ.

The wisest thing we can do in our limitation is see that Christ is present to restore everything that we have broken in our vanity. Our sin that propels our pursuits toward meaning, keep us located in the “infinite workday.”

Christ is incarnated and revealed. His is the source we can be contingent upon, that we can depend upon. He meets us in our limitations and doesn’t tell us to run faster. He fixes what keeps us running toward vanity in the first place.

1 Corinthians 1:24–25 ESV

but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

Christ meets us in our vanity and we recognize that Christ Himself is the wisdom of God. So we live in our limitations and embrace Christ as the middle of everything, HE takes the place we thought we were.

Yeah (Life in the Gospel): Admit your Vanity by Clinging to Christ

Disrupt your pursuit of meaning this week. Take a break from it. Confess your limitations, invite someone else into it. Shout out all is vanity.

Everytime we embrace our vanity, we don’t see life as something to chase and tackle, we see it as a gift. We see life as something created by God and that there is joy in that.

Ecclesiastes 3:12–14 ESV

I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man. I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him.

We can begin to see Christ when we embrace our own limitations and dependencies.

embrace vanity by seeing Christ as center and you as not.

If there is someone who you have been praying for to know the goodness of the God who came to us, then maybe one of the best ways you can show them what God is like is to embrace their pursuit of vanity. Invite someone to a meal to embrace your and their own search for vanity. Send someone a card, or invite someone to coffee. Take a hike in the woods, and push your relentless pursuit aside for a bit. It will come roaring back, but remind it that your dependency is in the One who is Center and who holds all things together.

Bartholomew, Craig G. 2014. Ecclesiastes. Paperback edition. Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms. Baker Academic.

Ellul, Jacques. 2021. Reason for Being: A Meditation on Ecclesiastes. Wipf & Stock,.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 2018. The Great Gatsby. Scribner, James L.W. West III editor.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/breaking-down-infinite-workday