Telling Like it Is

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 1; Philippians 3: 4-11

Sermon: Telling Like it Is

Topics: realism, necessity, danger, wisdom,

Preached: October 26, 2008

Rev. Mike Abma

Ecclesiastes 1

The words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. 

² Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,

   vanity of vanities! All is vanity. 

³ What do people gain from all the toil

   at which they toil under the sun? 

⁴ A generation goes, and a generation comes,

   but the earth remains for ever. 

⁵ The sun rises and the sun goes down,

   and hurries to the place where it rises. 

⁶ The wind blows to the south,

   and goes round to the north;

round and round goes the wind,

   and on its circuits the wind returns. 

⁷ All streams run to the sea,

   but the sea is not full;

to the place where the streams flow,

   there they continue to flow. 

⁸ All things are wearisome;

   more than one can express;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

   or the ear filled with hearing. 

⁹ What has been is what will be,

   and what has been done is what will be done;

   there is nothing new under the sun. 

¹⁰ Is there a thing of which it is said,

   ‘See, this is new’?

It has already been,

   in the ages before us. 

¹¹ The people of long ago are not remembered,

   nor will there be any remembrance

of people yet to come

   by those who come after them.

12 I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, ¹³applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. ¹⁴I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind. 

¹⁵ What is crooked cannot be made straight,

   and what is lacking cannot be counted.

16 I said to myself, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.’ ¹⁷And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind. 

¹⁸ For in much wisdom is much vexation,

and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.

Philippians 3: 4-11

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more:⁵circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee;⁶as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. ⁸More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. ¹⁰I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, ¹¹if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION

A while back, someone suggested that we preach a sermon series on the book of Ecclesiastes. I think if you were there at that exact moment, you would have seen our eyes open wide and our faces take on a certain grimace of terror.^[1]

One sermon from Ecclesiastes – okay.

But a whole series – 6 to 8 weeks of “vanity, vanity, all is vanity.”

We weren’t sure if we could handle it.

We weren’t sure if you could handle it.

We say this because Ecclesiastes is a necessary, but also a somewhat dangerous book.

NECESSARY

Ecclesiastes is a necessary book because it dares to ask the BIG Questions.

C.S. Lewis, being a good Brit who loved the Navy,

put it this way:

Imagine humanity is a fleet of ships.

That fleet of ships has three main challenges:

1. How to go forward without bumping into each other – you might call that social ethics (how to get along with others).

2. Each ship within that fleet also has the challenge of keeping in shipshape – you might call that personal ethics (how to be someone who embodies virtues and avoids vices).

So far in this sermon series,

the wisdom we’ve found in the Psalms.

and the wisdom we’ve found in the Proverbs

has a lot to do with answering these two questions.

But Lewis says there is a third question.

This third question is perhaps the most important of all:

Why is the fleet out to sea in the first place?

This is the Big Question.

This is the question of our purpose in life; the meaning of life.

This is an especially important question in our Wikipedia age.

The answers to our little questions are often just a click or two away.

We have more and more answers to the little questions, the trivial questions.

But we have less and less answers to the big questions, the fundamental questions.

Our world provides no clear answers to the big questions.

It says, “It’s all up to you.

You fill in the blanks.

Life has whatever meaning you assign it.

Life has whatever purpose you give it.”

Literally, “If it floats your boat, go for it.”

However, Ecclesiastes doesn’t settle for easy or glib answers.

The Teacher in Ecclesiastes is a searcher, a seeker.

Throughout this book, this seeker

questions the various answers people have given for “what floats their boat.”

Some say it is to be pious and virtuous.

Others say it is to be wealthy and powerful.

Yet others say it is to be happy and satisfied.

Ecclesiastes goes down each of these roads and finds that they are all dead-ends.

In the end, they are all meaningless.

But surely there is one answer: the purpose of life must be to be wise.

Isn’t that what the Psalms and the Proverbs tell us?

Wisdom is more precious than gold and silver.

Wisdom is to be sought more than power and might.

Isn’t that what made Solomon so special?

He didn’t ask for wealth, or power, or even a long life.

He asked for wisdom.

He asked for understanding.

Surely being wise is the proper goal of life?

But in Ecclesiastes, even wisdom isn’t enough.

By the end of the first chapter

even wisdom is simply a chasing after the wind.

The more wisdom, the more heartache.

The more understanding, the more sorrow.

What does a person gain from wisdom?

A generation comes. A generation goes.

We flourish like flowers in the spring.

Then the autumn winds blow over it,

a cold snap comes,

it withers, and is gone, and its place knows it no more (Psalm 103: 15-16).

That is the way it was.

That is the way it is.

That is the way it always will be.

There is nothing new under the sun.

DANGEROUS

Ecclesiastes is necessary because it asks the big questions

and refuses to be satisfied with easy answers.

But Ecclesiastes is also a dangerous book because death hangs over this book like a dark and sometimes suffocating cloud.

What advantage do the wise have over the fools?

Not much. They both will die (6:8).

What is the big difference between people and animals? Not much.

They are all dust and to dust they will all return (3:19-20).

Even the heroes of this world are short-lived.

Chapter 9 tells the story of a city being besieged and about to surrender.

Then a poor but wise man delivers the city. He’s a bona-fide hero.

But that was a long time ago. And now no one remembers.

It all comes to nothing.

So, play hockey like Wayne Gretsky, or play it like me, an amateur on the ice;

make money like Warren Buffet, or lose it like the rest of us;

be able to think about space and time with the insights of a Jack Kuiper,

or simply be confused like a Philosophy 101 freshman,

in the end, it all comes to nothing.

In the end, it is all pointless, meaningless, vanity.

Actually, the wiser you are, the more pointless you realize human existence is.^[2]

Can you see how Ecclesiastes is a necessary but dangerous book?

Imagine if we called this institution “Ecclesiastes College”?

Do students need any more reasons to procrastinate on writing their term papers?

Do they need any more reasons to delay studying for exams?

Imagine if we were called the “Ecclesiastes Christian Reformed Church?”

How many people would we have on a cold, dark Sunday morning

in late October when it doesn’t take much to simply pull those covers back

over our heads and go back to sleep.

Last month TIME magazine wrote a tribute article to the novelist, David Wallace Foster.^[3]

Foster was someone who seemed to have it all.

In high school he was a star tennis player.

In college he was a philosophy major who excelled at ended up in Graduate School at Harvard.

By age 24 he had written and published his first novel.

By age 34 he had written the novel Infinte Jest to huge acclaim.

In fact, in 2005, when TIME magazine listed the 100 top novels published between 1923-2005, Infinite Jest was on that list.

Here is a book that is terribly funny yet terribly sad.

It is Ecclesiastes in novel form.

David Wallace Foster was a genius and a literary star.

And yet, darkness crept up on him to the point where he did not feel that life

was worth living anymore. At age 46, my age in fact, he ended it all.

That is the real danger of Ecclesiastes.

That nothing is worth it anymore.

Work is not worth doing.

Money is not worth saving.

Papers are not worth writing.

Degrees are not worth completing.

And even sermons are not worth preaching.

Let me tell you that the sermons in October have been tough to preach.

It started with my mother passing away rather suddenly in September.

Death has a way of draining energy from you without you even realizing it.

Then, to make things a little harder, we had an old college friend visit us.

She and her husband are very involved in their church.

They attend every week.

Then she said, somewhat nonchalantly, “O my husband, he always goes to church but he never listens to the sermons.”

And to top it all off, in Peter and my sermon schedule, I just happened to get the

sermon on Ecclesiastes! Talk about a bummer!

I think my ship is sunk!

A DEEPER WISDOM

If Ecclesiastes were the only book of the Bible, we would be sunk.

But Ecclesiastes is a place to start, not a place to end.

Ecclesiastes is a place to courageously ask the Big Questions,

but not the place to get the final answers.

The reason is because Ecclesiastes assumes that what has been, will always be;

and what has been done, will always be done.

Ecclesiastes assumes there is nothing new under the sun.

Nothing.

But we are here because we confess there is something new under the sun.

Something incredibly new.

Wisdom has become flesh;

Light has entered our darkness;

And someone full of grace and truth has come into our crooked world.

Here is someone who really can make the crooked straight.

Here is someone who really can make up for what is lacking in each of us.

Here is someone he can face death and not be swallowed by its darkness.

By all appearances,

his humble life of poverty

and the last moments of his life struggling on the cross

were all folly and foolishness.

But his seemingly foolish death is wiser than our wisdom.

His weakness is stronger than our strength.

In his resurrection we see a glimpse of the glory of God,

and the glorious future God has in store for all those who believe and trust in him.

CONCLUSION — PAUL’s Skubala

In his letter to the Philippians,

Paul does something similar to what Ecclesiastes does.

He lays everything that may have some meaning on the table,

all his credentials,

everything that might make life worth living.

He lays out his Jewish identity,

the fact that he was a Pharisee, a law-keeper,

the fact that he was zealous and passionate for the law,

that he was righteous, blameless,

that he had taken the Proverbs-path in life.

But then Paul says an absolutely startling thing.

Paul writes that he considered all of that “skubala” apart from Jesus Christ.

Skubala – in our Bibles it’s translated as rubbish.

In the King James Version, it is translated as dung.

Eugene Peterson translates it dog dung

In our vernacular, we would say that apart from Jesus Christ,

It is all – merde is what they would say in French.

Ecclesiastes would say “meaningless.”

It is all meaningless.

People of God,

survey with wonder the cross.

Believe with conviction the power of his resurrection.

And resolutely seek his kingdom and his righteousness.

For apart from the deep wisdom of Jesus Christ,

we are only left with Ecclesiastes.

1. I write “we” because at the time I was pastoring with a partner, Rev. Peter Jonker ↑

2. Scholars believe that the Jewish community argued long and hard about whether the book of Ecclesiastes should be included in the Old Testament – that is how dangerous they regarded it. ↑

3. Lev Grossman, “The Death of a Genius” TIME September 29, 2008. ↑