Welcome to 2023. Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 8th January 2023), kicking off our new series VAPOUR?. This series will explore our search for meaning, journeying through the enigmatic book of Ecclesiastes.
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded )
‘Once we’re thrown of our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it’s only here that the new and the good begins’
Pierre, in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
THE POINTING OF POINTLESS
‘What’s the point?’
Have you ever found yourself asking this question? I know I have.
Sometimes I say it about things that have to be kept on top off. Like, when I have just vacuumed the carpet and my son’s friend comes in and tramples in mud. ‘What’s the point?’
Or, when I pick up litter from my front garden or the church car park, knowing that they’re both wind traps, and the very next day there’s fresh litter there. ‘What’s the point?’
Or, when we have finished washing the car and a bird flies over and… well, you know.
Sometimes, I say it when I see ridiculous repetitive patterns. For example, I know I said it when I walked into the supermarket this week, and the same ‘seasonal’ aisle that lured me in with discounted tasty Christmas treats last week is now offering me exercise equipment. Frustratingly, I know that this very same aisle will be offering me Easter chocolate in a matter of days (some shops already are) and that after Easter it will be offering me exercise equipment yet again. ‘What’s the point?’
I’ll be honest though, I do find myself saying it a lot at New Year. I know all of us see the shift from 2022 to 2023 differently. Some are excited by it and are setting intentions and resolutions. For some, it has no special significance—it’s the change between one calendar day of the week to another. Others haven’t even the entered the 2020’s—our heads are still in the 2010’s and we just want time to slow down a touch to let us catch up.
For myself, New Year creates a moment where I ask, ‘What’s the point?’ With the Christmas break over, my eyes turn back to the normal ‘mechanical’ rhythms of routine life. As they do, it feels like I have to take a deep breath in and brace myself to “start” again.
For a moment—a sobering moment which could be brief or linger for days—we glimpse how ‘wearisome’ it can all be.
I’m saying we, because I know, here today, that I am not the only one who experiences this sensation. It doesn’t solely happen at New Year—it happens whenever any of us are thrown off or tossed around on the mechanical habit-filled pathways in life.
All of us, before we climb back onto or steady ourselves upon those pathways, we have this realisation, this epiphany, of how wearisome life can be.
It is hard moment. Like running into a brick wall it is a disorientating slap to our senses. It’s a moment we will all face at some point, and maybe some of us do our best to avoid ever encountering this moment. Yet, it’s a unique moment pregnant with unique revolutionary potential.
Back in the 1940’s, during the Nazi occupation of France, a French-Algerian philosopher called Albert Camus wrote a famous essay called The Myth of Sisyphus. The essay speaks of this sensation and employs the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus to explain it.
Sisyphus, in the myth, cheats death a few times when he shouldn’t and, as punishment, is condemned to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity. It’s a pointless and wearisome existence, because whenever Sisyphus gets to the top of the hill, the boulder rolls down again, and he has to do this over and over and over again.
Camus makes the point that our ‘mechanical’ routine lives can feel the same. But he also makes the point that there is an important opportunity in those moments when our “boulders” roll down the hill and we feel the weariness of it all. He writes:
‘Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness’[i]
Essentially, what he was saying was that our experience of weariness, our disorientation with life, also fires up the impulse to seek, to think, to wrestle, and to confront, honestly, our desire for more than the mechanical life, some real meaning in life; without self-deception caused by our daily habits.
In other words, we are gifted with the opportunity ask and explore the most important question of all, ‘What is the point?’
Is there any meaning to life?
It’s a truly human question. As one author puts it, ‘The capacity to step back from our lives and to ponder our existence at a [distance] is unique to human beings. It is a quality that sets us apart from all other living creatures. We alone have the capacity to ask: Is there value and meaning to what I do? What is the point of it all? Is this all there is to living?’[ii]
What’s extraordinary is that we all ask this same question. It doesn’t matter where we come from, how old we are, our skin colour and culture, social status, or what time in history we have lived. This question is universal in humanity.
We all long for there to be meaning.[iii] We’re all searching for an answer.
And you have to wonder, where does this burning question come from and why is it always present in all of us? Surely, its presence has to be evidence for something. To reference a biblical writer that we will turn to in a moment, it’s like someone has placed eternity in our hearts (Ecc. 3:11).
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said, ‘Meaning is not accidental to the human condition because we are the meaning-seeking animal.’[iv]
We don’t merely seek meaning, we need it.
With this in mind, we’re going to start this new year by exploring meaning, and our insistence of scratching around for it in the soil of life.
To guide us in this journey, we will be spending some weeks journeying through an often overlooked, provocative, inciting and irritating (in the right sense) Old Testament book known as Ecclesiastes.
READ: ECCLESIASTES 1:1-11 (NRSV)
QOHELET
It hardly screams Happy New Year!
Admittedly, during my past 24 years as a Christian, I have never known a church to do a series on Ecclesiastes. So this is either inspiration or insanity (or a mix of both). And yeah, journeying through a book that states ‘it’s all meaningless’ may seem like the wrong place to begin when talking about meaning.
You may now be wondering, ‘what’s the point?’ Well, I’ll come back to that.
Firstly though, it’s only right to say a few things about this book we call Ecclesiastes.
This book is part of the ‘Wisdom Literature’ of the Bible, along with Job and Proverbs. Unlike much of the Old Testament, these books don’t concern themselves with Israel’s History (like the Exodus), or God’s covenant with the Hebrews, or conversations about exile and the expected Messiah.
This does not mean they leave out God—but they are focused very much our everyday experience of the world, what we can glean from observing the patterns in nature, ‘What can we learn by simply focusing on what you can see now?’[v] In this sense, they are books full of musings and the big questions.
Proverbs is insightful and ‘fun’ read (I’m not being irreverent when I say that), and it offers line after line of practical everyday wisdom. Job is a harder read, and wrestles deeply with the problem of suffering and exposes the ridiculous and cliché explanations we often give for it; it’s a fascinating and complex book.
And then there’s Ecclesiastes …
Even though it is part of the same wisdom family as the other two, it’s not like them.
If you had these three at a school disco, I’d imagine we’d all be hanging around with Proverbs, the life of the party. And because there’s always tears at a school disco, some of us may be patting Job on his back, saying ‘there there’—we would likely and wrongly be imitating Job’s friends with our bad advice.
None of us, I suspect, would be gathered around Ecclesiastes—it bites and it comes across like it has huge chip on its shoulder. It’s raw and wild and blunt, and it does tend to disagree with the kind of wisdom Proverbs puts forward.
Proverbs studies the patterns in the world and says, ‘look, the cup is half full.’ The very optimistic Psalmist in Psalm 23:5 says that his cup is overflowing. Ecclesiastes, however, looks at the same patterns and says its empty—‘utterly empty’.
The Hebrew name for this book is Qohelet (or Qoheleth / Koheleth), and it comes from the central voice and character of this book who is given this description—a description we translate to The Teacher (or The Preacher). A Qohelet is someone who assembles people together to teach, which is why the ancient Greek translation (LXX) of the Hebrew gave this book the title Ecclesiastes (from the Greek word for assembly, Ekklesia).
We don’t actually know who Qohelet is. Tradition says Solomon, but the prose-style of this book and some of its original language is borrowed from a Persian culture after Solomon’s time. It could be there’s a truth in both, but I’ll leave that discussion to people brighter than me.[vi]
I’m going to follow the book’s own example and use the description, Qohelet as a name.
Whoever he is, Qohelet purposely avoids using their real name and identity because they want us (as the reader) to know that they identify as one of us.[vii] ‘His sympathies are squarely cast with his fellow [humans] who thirst for meaning’ and who feel the weariness of it all.[viii]
Although he may come across as negative, the best way to think of Qohelet is not as a cynincal grump, or a pessimist, or, if you like philosophical terms, they’re not part of the Existentialism (like Satre) or Absurdism schools (like Camus).
Whoever Qohelet is, this piece of writing is a journal of the human cry for meaning.
Most of the book’s length is spent on Qohelet looking in all directions, groping for meaning, reaching dead ends, proposing solutions, and coming up empty as he contemplates the circular and repetitive nature of human existence, its brevity, and the absurd amount of effort it requires, particularly given death’s certainty.
So, as one of us, ‘Koheleth [reflects] on what―if anything―has lasting value, and how―if at all―God interacts with humankind.’[ix]
We’re are going to find him frustrating. He’s going to say things that shock us; things that we would not expect the Bible to say, things we’d expect maybe an atheist would say.
But Qohelet is no atheist. His questions are the questions of a believer with an honest faith. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: Faith is not the absence of questions.
Qohelet believes in the existence and sovereignty God, on one hand (of course, we have to ask what he understands of God as we go through it). But, in the other hand, he’s not blind to the injustice and unfairness in the world, and the fragility and limitations of human life. His knowledge of God and his experience of life are difficult to hold together.
He’s not unique in having this difficulty, by the way. The Psalms also express the tension between God and experience, and our need to make sense out of that tension.
As the American pastor and author, Erwin McManus, ‘We are all on a journey to make sense out of life, and when it doesn’t make sense, it’s maddening to our souls’[x]
For Qohelet his searching leads him to this maddening conclusion: ‘Everything is meaningless, utterly meaningless.’ (Ecc. 1:2)
We’ll come to this in a moment.
EVERYTHING IS VAPOUR?
It’s important to note that there are two speakers in this book. There’s Qohelet, and there’s also another speaker—someone who I will call, The Narrator.
The Narrator chips in right at the end of this book (Ecc. 12:9-14) to put his own conclusion to it all. But here, in the first eleven verses, The Narrator provides us with Qohelet’s maddening conclusion. To paraphrase, the Narrator addresses us and says:
‘This is what Qohelet says: At the end of the day, life is frustratingly absurd. The cycles of nature are screaming that message to you. You live. You exert a lot of energy, but nothing new happens. Just like the sun, wind and rivers. Then you die. And one other thing: after you die, you will be forgotten.’[xi]
It doesn’t seem a very tactful approach, does it? It’s hardly a doctor’s bedside manner and there is no comforting warning shot. It’s not like the Narrator gently eases us in—they bluntly slap us with it. Nevertheless, it’s a manoeuvre that works.
It has two affects: Firstly, we’re enticed; we’re now asking how has Qohelet come to this conclusion, and so we’re willing to enter into the journey Qoholet takes from verse 12 onwards. Secondly, if we’re honest, the bluntness of this conclusion stimulates empathy in us; we may not have said it as bluntly, but we get it! We have all looked at life and asked, ‘What is the point?’ We understand that his journey is our journey, too.
There’s also something else in this introduction that is vital. It introduces us to a word that not only stains every page of this journal but that also provides the clue to this book’s intent and overall affect.
It’s the word we translate as meaningless, or vanity, or absurdity, or futility.[xii]
In Hebrew, the word is Hevel. It literally means breath. When you exhale on a cold winter day, Hevel is the mist you see. It’s there for a fleeting moment, looking like it has substance and form, but then it quickly disappears.
To put it another way, Hevel is the void and empty waste product of a shallow breath. [xiii] It’s vapour. [xiv]
This is how Qohelet describes human existence. Everything is vapour.
We may want to dismiss Qohelet’s “insight”. It may cause a reaction is us—it should cause a reaction in us. But the use of word Hevel is a huge clue.
What I mean by this is that there is an opposite to Hevel in the Hebrew language. In the wider story of the scriptures, it’s opposite is the word Rûah.[xv]
Unlike the momentary, frail, shallow, waste product of Hevel, Rûah is a power-filled, live-giving, animating blast of wind. Rûah is the word that is often used for the Spirit of God.
It’s Rûah that moves upon the face of the deep, over the void and meaningless mess at the start of the creation story (Gen 1:2).
It’s Rûah that Ezekiel is instructed to pray for in his vision of a valley of dry bones (Ez. 37:10). The Rûah in his vision comes and transforms what are dry, inanimate carcasses, from waste and litter, into living, animate people.
It’s Rûah (the Spirit) that the New Testament writers refer to when they used the Greek word pneuma—where we get the word pneumatic. It is the energetic, energising, meaning-filling Divine Breath.
I am saying this because I want us to see that Qohelet’s conclusion is born out the recognition of a vacuum, a void, an emptiness that needs to be filled. Our human Hevel cries out for the Divine Rûah.
Qohelet himself doesn’t make that point; he doesn’t lead us to that conclusion. But his conclusion irritates us, it dissatisfies us. We can’t except his conclusion, because we suspect that there has to be more. Like seeing our “boulders” rolling down the hills, like the affect New Year has on me, Ecclesiastes awakens us to the weariness of life, it stimulates the question ‘What’s the point?’, and it intentionally leaves us with a lingering thirst and a cavernous awareness that we need to be engulfed by something.
That’s the beautiful contribution of this book in the conversation of the Scriptures: it generates hunger.
THE SENSATION OF HUNGER
I am not going to tame the rawness, wildness and blunt honesty of Qohelet, or brush aside the tensions of this book as we go through this series over the coming weeks. But I’m aware, that after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we look on the same world that Qohelet looks at but from a different horizon.
We still live in a frustrating world, marred with injustice, unfairness, death—we cannot and should not try and cover that up.
But after his resurrection, Jesus, God with us, breathes on his disciples and says, ‘receive the Holy Spirit’ (Jn. 20:22).
It’s the same world, populated with finite and limited human life.
But when the disciples gathered in the upper room (Acts 2) the Spirit of God poured down like a mighty wind, fulfilling the words of the Old Testament prophet, Joel, that God would pour out his Spirit on all people.
We do not live in a world absent of Rûah.
What Jesus breathes on his disciples, his followers are to inhale. What is poured out in the upper room, is to be bathed in. And the tap is still turned on! So, to play my cards on the table, as we travel through this book, we are going to point to Jesus, because our Hevel cries out for Rûah.
What I’m not going to do, though, is try to squeeze Jesus into Ecclesiastes, or try to uncover him within its passages. That’s not how this book works. The book creates hunger, and even though we don’t read Christ in this book, it generates (points towards) a craving only Jesus satisfies and that Jesus is the climax of.[xvi]
In that sense, I’m reminded of what is written Deuteronomy 8:3, as Moses reminds the Israelites about their experience in the empty wilderness when they groped around for food to sustain them. Jesus also quoted this verse when he was in the wilderness being tempted (Mt. 4:4, Lk. 4.4). The verses reads:
“So [God] humbled you by making you hungry and then feeding you with unfamiliar manna. He did this to teach you that humankind cannot live by bread alone, but also by everything that comes from the Lord’s mouth.” – Deuteronomy 8:3 (NET)
Consider closely this verse again: It suggests that this humility—this desire for something beyond our self, for breath that is not our empty breath—was not solely created by hunger, but also by feeding them with unfamiliar bread.
In a similar way, Ecclesiastes acknowledges our hunger and feeds us with an unfamiliar bread, in order to help us realise that life comes by feeding on every utterance, every breath of God, the one who is the real bread of life (Jn. 6:35)
‘You search the Scriptures because you believe they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!’
Jesus, John 5:39 (NLT)
[i] Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (1955). The fuller quote is, ‘Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening.’ (https://amzn.eu/jafjVvE)
[ii] Julie Ann Duncan, Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries: Ecclesiastes (Abingdon Press, Nashville, 2017), p. 19. I am also indebted to Duncan for her conversation with the reflections of Camus in this commentary.
[iii] You may have already concluded that life is meaningless. To quote something that Erwin McManus wrote when replying to such a perspective, ‘You may never make the connection, but the cynicism, bitterness, despair and emptiness eating away at you have everything to do with your need to believe in something or someone. As antiquated as it may sound, it’s not that some people choose to live by faith, but that all human beings must live by faith, even if it’s faith in reason. We all live by faith. If we were all just a little more honest or maybe a little humbler about this, it would be easier on all of us. Certainly it would be better for all of us. It’s not that we’re copping out; it’s that we don’t have any other option. Anyone who is not all-knowing has faith in their future. Some people take leaps of faith; others go there kicking and screaming. In either case, we all find ourselves in the same place. We have to make choices, draw conclusions, embrace beliefs, that in the end are acts of faith. Even if you choose not to believe, that in itself is a HUGE leap of faith.’ Erwin Raphael McManus, Soul Cravings, Meaning, Entry 4 (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2006).
[iv] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning
[v] John Goldingay, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs for Everyone (SPCK, London, 2014), p.178.
[vi] On that note, I will be delving into a number of sources during this series that can also help you explore this question. Along with others, I will be leaning heavily into the following: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs for Everyone, by John Goldingay. Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries, Ecclesiastes, by Julie Ann Duncan; The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary, Ecclesiastes, by Peter Enns; and NSBT Five Festal Garments, Christian Reflections on The Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther, By Barry G. Webb.
[vii] The title Qohelet does not signify the one who assembles as being above others, in some ivory tower transcending the assembly; Qohelet is also part of the company of the assembled of people.
[viii] Ibid II, p.9.
[ix] From the synopsis of Michael V Fox, JPS commentary: Ecclesiastes
[x] Erwin Raphael McManus, Soul Cravings, Meaning, Entry 4 (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2006).
[xi] Peter Enns, The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary: Ecclesiastes (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2011), p. 31.
[xii] By the way, the word vanity is not what we mean today when using the word to describe self-admiration. When the translators of the King James Version (KJV) translated from the Latin (back in the day), the old English word they adopted meant the same as its Latin counterpart—it meant ‘worthless’.
[xiii] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks describes the word as follows, ‘In Hebrew all words relating to the soul, the spirit, the life force, have to do with the act of breathing. So does the word hevel. It means a short, shallow breath. That is Kohelet’s fundamental insight. Life is vulnerable, fragile, brief. It is a mere fleeting breath, yet it is all we have.’ Jonathan Sacks, Happiness is to be found in being, not in having
[xiv] On the use of Vapour for Hevel, see Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, The Writings (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, New York, 2019), p. 675.
[xv] Robert Alter points out that this word is the opposite of Hevel, Ibid.
[xvi] As per Peter Enns, this is the difference between a Christotelic reading and a Christocentric reading. See Ibid X. This is not to suggest that we must choose between a Christotelic or a Christocentric reading of the Old Testament. Rather, one must infuse the other. A Christocentric reading that neglects that Jesus is the fulfillment and climax of (the telos, Christotelic) of what the Old Testament yearns and strains for will wrongly attempt to shoehorn Jesus into every verse and passage. Whereas, a Christotelic interpretation, which neglects that the story of the Old Testament must be shaped around who Jesus is and what he did (how he and the New Testament writers read the Old Testament in light of him), could wrongly create a discontinuity that suggests that God (who Jesus is the visible image of) has been disengaged with humanity prior to the incarnation; that humanity has been void of any Divine revelation.
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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