Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 8th January 2023), continuing our new series VAPOUR?. This series explores 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 )
RESTLESS
‘In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
From the mountains of faith
To the river so deep
I must be looking for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And it’s too hard to crossEven though I know the river is wide
I walk down every evening and I stand on the shore
I try to cross to the opposite side
So I can finally find out what I’ve been looking for’[i]
Some of us recognise these words; they’re not mine, and nor are they words from Ecclesiastes. These are the words of the brilliant singer songwriter, Billy Joel, from his hit record The River of Dreams.
(If you know the song, the tune will now be playing in your head—you can thank me later.)
Even though these words are not from Ecclesiastes, they are a nice companion to what we’ll read today, as we continue exploring the biblical book of Ecclesiastes; a journal of questioning, perplexity, and our craving for meaning.
In The River of Dreams, Billy Joel expresses this nagging feeling that he is missing something ‘sacred [he] lost’. He isn’t claiming to believe in God—as he says in a later verse, ‘God knows I’ve never been a spiritual man.’ Yet, every night, as the song poetically puts it, he has this realisation that he must be involved in a frustrating search for something intrinsic to and meaningful for his identity.
It’s a feeling common in each of us—an ache for something. But Billy Joel says it with more honesty than most, because, as he admits, he’s not sure what he’s missing. As the last line indicates, it’s not merely that he wants to find what he’s looking for; he wants to find out what he’s been looking for.’
In what we’re about to read, Qohelet (the central character of this book) will express this same frustration in similar way: ‘What is not there can’t be counted.’ (Ecc. 1:15)
For both Billy Joel and Qohelet, there’s an awareness of a nagging hole, of a void, but what fills it, they’re not sure. They can’t quantify it, calculate it or measure it. There’s this secret ingredient to life that they want to know—and they both feel it is there duty, their quest, their task to uncover it.
But this task brings more frustration for Billy Joel, because it’s an impossible task due to a blockade he always encounters: A wide river he cannot cross.
It’s just a metaphor—don’t try to overthink it. But it’s a metaphor Ecclesiastes would like, I think. Because even though Qohelet devotes himself to this quest—he gives his heart to this task (1:13a)—he too thinks it is impossible.[ii] He doesn’t use the picture of a river, instead, he says this task is, ‘like chasing/herding the wind.’ (Ecc. 1:14)
As he will describe it, in 1:13, this impossible task of comprehending meaning in the world and in life, is a ‘heavy burden’ (NIV, NKJV), ‘a bothersome task’ (CJB), ‘an unhappy business’ (NRSV), ‘a tragic existence to the human race’ (NLT).
More to the point, he says, in a negative, almost angry way, God is to blame for imposing this maddening, pointless search on us—‘God has laid this heavy burden on people.’
As I said last week, Qohelet believes in God—his questions, annoyance and lament are born of an honest faith that is trying to hold together tensions between his knowledge of God and his experience of life. Although he believes in God, you’ll get the sense in what we will read that he’s not a fan of how he perceives God to work.
For him, to use someone else’s words, ‘If God gave human beings this instinct to try and discover the answer to [the secret of life, to the secret of who we are], then it was a joke that God was playing on us.’[iii]
Why does he think this? Let’s read …
READ: ECCLESIASTES 1:12—2:26 (CJB)
RESIGNATION & EXPIRY DATES
‘Life is short, buy the shoes, drink the wine, and order the dessert.’
I saw these words on a sign last Saturday. I’m not going to criticise these words, because, life is short. So, on Sunday evening when I was out with the Steph and the lads, I ordered the dessert. Of course, the advice has limits—it’s not suggesting I should eat dessert as every course in every meal, every day.
Life would be very short if this was the case. And the quality of that very short life would be unpleasant (despite the presence of cake).
Regardless, I think we all understand the wisdom of ‘seizing the day’. For example, some great people have died these past twelve months. And whenever we lose someone, there’s a fresh appreciation for the time we do have with each other, here and now. Time is precious: enjoy the good things you have (responsibly) while you can enjoy them.
In the words of Charlie Mackesy’s Mole, in The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse, ‘Don’t put off till tomorrow the cake you could eat today.’
It may be tempting, as we read those last few verses of Ecclesiastes Two, to think we have reached such a positive reflection, a seize-the-day-style encouragement from Qohelet.
But there’s no appreciation in his voice. There’s still “wisdom” in his words, but his advice that ‘There’s nothing better to do …’ is tinged with bitterness and a tone of deep resignation.
It’s like a teenager who’s been sent to his room and who is not allowed on the Xbox or any Television until he does at least an hour of revision, and who turns around and says, ‘Fine, only because there’s nothing better to do.’
He’s bitter because, Qohelet, after his search for meaning, is confused, annoyed, and feels defeated and deflated by the pointless-ness of life.
To add to this, just like in verse 1:13, God is to blame. Ecclesiastes 2:24b, where he says, ‘this is also from God’s hand’, is not a positive note of thanks to God.
Just like the heavy burden to search for meaning is placed on us by God, this meaningless is dealt to us by God—in Qohelet’s opinion—in order that we will resign our search, except our lot in life and just be thankful.
Contributing to this sting, Qohelet also points out that this so-called “life” is also unfair: we should be able to enjoy what vaporous life we have, but it’s marred by pain and grief and sleepless nights (Ecc. 2:23), and mixed into this is God’s own bias (Ecc. 2:26). [iv]
Of course, you could read these last verses in the opposite light: that God knows how hard life is and, as such, graciously gives us some joyous respite in it all. But even if you see that way, Qohelet’s conclusion is still the same: ‘Even this is meaningless, like chasing the wind.’ (Ecc 2:26, NLT).
According to Qohelet, everything we do is vapour.
Why does he feel this way? Well, the answer occurs over and over in his search: Death.
Death casts its shadow over all that could prove profitable and meaningful for a human to do and to achieve. Because of death, everything has an expiry date.
And Qohelet’s tried everything!
We’re not going to explore in depth this extensive list, but it would be wrong to say he’s only tried the “worldly” or “material” things—if we are tempted to give such distinctions. He’s tried the “godly” stuff, too. He pursued wisdom, after all, as Proverbs 4:7 encourages people to do. And even though he would say wisdom is good—it’s better to have light over darkness (2:13-14)—wisdom won’t ward off death. And so it doesn’t eliminate the meaningless of it all.
Qohelet observes that a single fate comes to all of us, and it’s inescapable. As one commentator put’s it, Qohelet’s message could be summed up as: ‘Life is difficult, and then you die.’[v]
Like Billy Joel’s River, it’s death that is Qohelet’s adversary, the big obstruction that makes his quest for meaning impossible and pointless.
And, I suppose, we could go further than that: Because he blames God for this existence, because he knows God is sovereign, Death is also laid in God’s court. And so, we could say, he sees the limits God has set on the human life-span as preventing him from amounting to anything, achieving anything, and leaving any sort of legacy.
He’s not the only writer in the Bible to express their frustration about this to God:
A songwriter called Ethan, in Psalm 89 writes:
Remember how short my life is,
how empty and futile this human existence!
No one can live forever; all will die.
No one can escape the power of the grave. [Interlude]
Lord, where is your unfailing love?
Psalm 89:47-49a (NLT)
In the very next Psalm, Psalm 90, Moses vents a similar lament:
From beginning to end, you are God.
You turn people back to dust, saying,
“Return to dust, you mortals!”
Seventy years are given to us!
Some even live to eighty.
But even the best years are filled with pain and trouble;
soon they disappear, and we are gone.
Psalm 90:2b-3,10. NLT
DEATH & MORTAL INSCRIPTIONS
As I mentioned last week, we may want to understandably jump in and respond to Qohelet, to disagree with him, or balance his answer with something else from the Scriptures, or even dangle the eternal-life carrot in front of him. But we need to hear what he is saying—Qohelet is trying to hit us with some reality in order to awaken something with us.
For a start, he’s right to remind us of death.
To cut down weeks of a bible-study into a pithy statement: Death is the biblical problem—the problem that Jesus is the solution to.
But on this side of the general resurrection and all the Apostle Paul looks forward to in Romans 8, death remains a fact of life.
At some point in life, we learn that all living things die. We know it. But acknowledging that I will die, that I am mortal, that my breath will cease, well, that’s hard to come to terms with.
I think the comedian and writer, Woody Allen expressed it best, when he said, ‘I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’[vi]
Our generation, like most generations, is uncomfortable with death. We can’t even accept aging these days, let alone death.
Our discomfort means we develop ways to distance ourselves from it. According to one commentator, we generalise it (it happens to others, not me), and we keep it hidden in hospitals, hospices, and funeral parlours. However, our two main tactics are that we distract ourselves from it with frantic amusement, or (maybe and) we attempt to immortalize ourselves by displacing our identity onto something other than ourselves, In other words, we try to live on in our name, our achievements, our possessions, and our descendants.[vii]
Qohelet is writing here to slap us with the memory that all this is pointless. And the way he gets this across is creatively brilliant.
In the Ancient Near East, it was popular for ancient rulers to leave royal inscriptions in stone or precious metals—things they thought would last—to boast of all they achieved, all they built, all the wars they won and all their wisdom and wealth. It was their way of blowing their own trumpet, of preserving their “impressive” reputations in history.
Qohelet, in Ecclesiastes Two, mimics these inscriptions, this means of self-promotion and self-pre-occupation.
‘I built myself palaces … I owned cattle and herds, more than anyone before me … I amassed silver and gold, the wealth of many kings … I surpassed all who went before me.’
Nowhere else in the whole of the Bible are the words I and myself used so frequently. They dominate this passage.
It’s not, as some suggest, that he’s selfish, and that the answer to this passage is that he should have lived for others and found meaning there. That’s a good thing, sure, but he will turn his gaze to others in the rest of this book, and his conclusion won’t change.
His heavy use of I and myself imitates the wording of these royal inscriptions. In order to wake us up, he parodies this ancient (and modern) method of trying to survive in one’s colossal achievements and undermines it all by saying it’s all a colossal failure.
How many ‘great’ names of history do you remember?
Do you ever consider how many you have forgotten, how many we don’t know? How many have been erased with the passing of time, how many have been erased by the next set of conquerors?
We had forgotten Tutankhamun for thousands of years until we dug up his tomb a hundred years ago (in 1922). And even though we now know his name, how many of us admire him and his achievements? How many of today’s school children are growing up wanting to be like Tutankhamun?
It is not uncommon for even our modern ‘celebrities’ to change overnight. In my youth, there were some names around on everyone’s lips; names that have now been forgotten or have disappeared from popular culture.
We do not survive, Qohelet says, in our accomplishments, our name, our possessions etc. And if the big-players in the world, the movers and shakers of history, the mighty and the wealthy, those with the means to do it, can’t do it, than none of us can.[viii]
It’s a brilliant observation.
Qohelet’s not happy with it, but he won’t tolerate delusion, either. Death is a problem. We should feel Qohelet’s angst. His frustration can be summed up, again, by how Woody Allen put it: ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.’[ix]
If we are honest with ourselves, we get this. Don’t we?
Central to Qohelet’s angst (our angst) and his repetitive use of I, is the question, ‘Who Am I?’Qohelet, like all of us, knows he is made for something, but if nothing lasts, then what is he made for?[x]
SEEKING CORRESPONDENCE
As always, Qohelet doesn’t lead us to an answer—he intentionally leaves us with an awareness of our hunger. Nevertheless, the clues are there in his language about God.
He’s wrong to think God is to blame, or that God has come between him and the secret of life. But Qohelet is right that this search for meaning is a God-sized problem.
Years ago, C. S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia books, wrote a brilliant little book called Mere Christianity. Within it, he talks about there being proof for God in something called his ‘Argument from Desire.’ In a nutshell, he says that humans only have desires that correspond to something that actually exists that satisfies that desire. For example, we get hungry and thirsty because there is food and water to satisfy us, and those feelings of hunger and thirst motivate us to search for those things.
In a similar way, Lewis suggests, we all crave something more than here and now, something intrinsic to our humanity, but that is not of our humanity, and that is not of the here and now. To return to Billy Joel’s words, we are searching for something sacred. Our longing for something that cannot be satisfied by creation, regardless of how beautiful, breathtaking and delightful creation is (and it is), is proof that there is something beyond creation that satisfies our need.
That something is the Creator.
As the African theologian, St. Augustine famously put it, in contemplating his own Ecclesiastes-like journey, ‘Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.’[xi]
I’m not suggesting anything new. I’m merely echoing the pulse of what thinkers from C. S. Lewis to St. Augustine, reaching all the way back to Qohelet, have diagnosed.
You’re craving, and it’s God your longing for.
When we don’t acknowledge this then, like Qohelet, we attempt to fill the void with other things. And I’m not suggesting ‘bad’ things, per se, but even the ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ things of life. But when we do, they fail to satisfy and we’re using them wrongly, expecting them to do what only God can do in our lives.
God is life; our soul’s satisfaction is in him, and him alone. And he is freely giving out, freely offering himself to us. As Jesus put it, ‘I have come to give life in all its fullness’ (John 10:10)
As the writer of Revelation puts it, ‘If you are thirsty, come! If you want life-giving water, come and take it. It’s free!’ (Rev. 22:17, CEV)
God’s not the blockade in the way of discovering this, and neither is God to blame for death—which was not God’s intention. Although, we could say, I suppose, that God does take what was intended for evil and uses it for our good; in that our realisation of dying prompts this quest to search.[xii]
But God’s not getting in the way, like Billy Joel’s river. He is the answer we’re trying our best to avoid. Perhaps, instead of trying to cross over God, we need to do what Billy Joel does later in his song, and wade out into the river, into God’s passion for us.
MEMOIRS
I’m currently travelling through another personal journey for meaning, reading a highly anticipated and recently released memoir. No, not that one.[xiii]
I’m a big Friends fan, so I’ve been reading Matthew Perry’s autobiography—he played Chandler Bing in the show. It’s a raw biography, in which he talks honestly about his desire for fame and his long-term crippling-experience of addiction.
Like Qohelet, Perry achieved all he could dream of achieving, ‘I had it all,’ he writes, but ‘they just weren’t the answer’[xiv] Like Qohelet, he has a ‘nagging agony’ within him, ‘Why am I alive?’, ‘Why are we all here?, What’s the meaning of all this? What’s the point?’[xv] Like Qohelet, it’s a ‘endlessly growing hole’, a ‘spiritual hole’ that, Matthew admits, ‘I was always trying to fill with a material thing.’[xvi]
Later on in the book, when his alcohol and drug addiction hit its peak, at the lowest point in his life, he finds himself at a crisis point. He starts to pray, and has a powerful turning point. He writes:
‘“God, please help me,” I whispered. “Show me that you are here. God, please help me.”…
I started to cry. I mean, I really started to cry – that shoulder-shaking kind of uncontrollable weeping. I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I was crying because for the first time in my life, I felt okay. I felt safe, taken care of. Decades of struggling with God, and wrestling with life and sadness, all was being washed away, like a river of pain gone into oblivion.
‘I had been in the presence of God. I was certain of it. And this time I had prayed for the right thing: help.
‘Eventually the weeping subsided. But everything was different now.… I stayed sober for two years based solely on that moment. God had shown me a sliver of what life could be. He’d saved me that day, and for all days, no matter what. He had turned me into a seeker, not only of sobriety, and truth, but also of him.”[xvii]
We can often be suspicious of the seriousness of such stories, but I’ve no reason to question Perry’s sincerity. We’re all on this journey. Also, I think Perry hit’s the nail on the head. What are we here for?: To seek God, to find God (although, God’s not hiding at all), to know God, and to allow God’s love for us—the love he has shown to us in Jesus Christ—to wash over us, clean us and fill us up.
Sometimes we do not realise this intrinsic need. This is why we need writers like Qohelet, who expose our longings and make us feel uncomfortable for long enough, so that we are open to letting God do what only God can and desires to do within us.[xviii]
‘No one can live forever; all will die.
No one can escape the power of the grave.
Lord, where is your unfailing love?’
Psalm 89:48-49a. NLT
‘God showed [his unfailing love to] us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.’
1 John 4:9-10
[i] Billy Joel, The River of Dreams, from the album River of Dreams (1993)
[ii] As Peter Enns points out, Ecc. 1:13 indicates the seriousness and sincerity of this search with the Hebrew, wĕnātatti `et-libbi (I gave my heart). This phrase recurs throughout Qohelet’s journey (1:17; 7:2, 21; 8:9, 16; 9:1). Peter Enns, The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary: Ecclesiastes (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2011), p. 38.
[iii]John Goldingay, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs for Everyone (SPCK, London, 2014), p.181
[iv] As a number of commentators note, Ecc. 2:26 is also an additional sigh of resignation and an expression of vexation aimed at God. The terms ‘pleasing to God’ and ‘sinner’ are not denoting moralistic categories. Qohelet uses these terms to describe his perception of God’s whimsical favour. In other words, for Qohelet, God either likes you or he doesn’t; you’re pleasing to God, or you’re not; and Humans will not, and can never, understand God’s reasons and rationale for his choices. See: Peter Enns, The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary: Ecclesiastes (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2011), p. 50; John Goldingay, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs for Everyone (SPCK, London, 2014), p.186; Julie Ann Duncan, Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries: Ecclesiastes (Abingdon Press, Nashville, 2017), p. 34-35.
[v] Tremper Longman III, Reading Ecclesiastes from a New Testament Perspective
[vi] Woody Allen, from his single-act play Death, published in Without Feathers (1975)
[vii] Adapted from Julie Ann Duncan, Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries: Ecclesiastes (Abingdon Press, Nashville, 2017), p. 36.
[viii] There’s also another punch that Qohelet throws within this list of achievements. In Ecc. 2:11 he uses a rhythm of phrases that should stand out to anyone with some knowledge of the narrative of the Bible, ‘Then I looked at all my hands had accomplished … and I saw that it was hevel (meaningless).’ Remind you of anything? Qohelet’s intention is that they should. Genesis chapter one also uses this rhythm when describing God’s work and God’s review of Divine accomplishments. In Genesis, however, God’s work is not hevel (vapour, see last week’s sermon notes), but tov (good). Unlike Divine workmanship, human workmanship is transient, Qohelet is indicating. Again, with everything else I will go onto to say, this use of refrain provides a clue to what (or who’s work) is lacking that brings significance, sanctity and meaning to the life of humanity.
[ix] Woody Allen, The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader (Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1994)
[x] As Julie Ann Duncan remarks, engaging with the work of Henry Thielicke’s Living with Death, ‘The paradox of death awareness is that even as it inspires dread, it affords an opportunity that is ours through this route alone. The realization of the personal nature of dying—I die—offers me a chance to meet myself: to confront the question of my identity—who I am apart from the possessions, endeavours, ambitions, and accomplishments that so readily and subtly become synonymous with who I am.’ Ibid VII, p.37.
[xi] St Augustine of Hippo (c. AD 354 – 430), Confessions 1.1
[xii] In this sense, there is an echo in the story of Adam in Genesis 2. In this story, God gives Adam the task of naming the animals. It’s not a pointless task, it’s a task that awakens within Adam his desire and longing for someone like his self: another human. In this sense then, could it be that God, usurping death’s intent, enthrals it to create the longing in our hearts for eternal life and its source? I’m also reminded of the Apostle Paul’s words in Acts 17:26-31.
[xiii] In the week of sharing this, Harry’s biography, Spare was creating headlines and available to buy.
[xiv] Matthew Perry, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (Headline Publishing Group, An Hachette Company, London, 2022), p.3.
[xv] Ibid, pp.13, 46
[xvi] Ibid, pp.51, 63
[xvii] Ibid, pp. 159-160
[xviii] Near the end of his memoir, Matthew Perry also reflects on this: ‘These days, I have faith in God, but too often that faith seems, well, blocked. … One of my big problems, the reason that I’ve had so much trouble getting sober over the years, is I’ve never let myself feel uncomfortable long enough to have a spiritual connection. So, I fix it with pills and alcohol before God can jump in and fix me.’ Ibid, p.224.
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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